Sunbathing in Siberia (27 page)

Siberians don't spend their entire time outside when they are wearing all these clothes. They do all the same things that people do everywhere else, like visiting shopping centres, friends' apartments, cinemas and cafés. And, just like our apartment, all of these places have the heating on permanently. As you can imagine, in a hot building with four or five layers, Siberians sweat heavily unless they are in a place where they can strip off a few items. There are several consequences of sweating so much. The worst of these is something I'm sad to say I have experienced. With thermals, pants, trousers and long coats on, the part of the body that heats up the most is the groin. I think this problem may be worse for men although I can't say for certain. You must remember that the man rocket area was specifically designed to hang loose outside the body, because man rockets and their accompanying parts are supposed to be a few degrees cooler than the rest of the body. When they are forced to live in an environment that is too warm for them, they can become slightly unfriendly to the nasal senses. There must be some kind of medical term for this but the only name I know is one given by the Americans: jock itch. It may sound funny but during the increasingly harsh winter, I noticed that when I got home and stripped down, there was an odour of the unwanted variety. On closer inspection in the bathroom mirror I was alarmed to see that the skin around my man parts looked slightly distressed. After a quick Google search I discovered that this particular problem was common among athletes and men who work in warm places, like steel factories and bakeries. People have long debated the best way forward in curing it, E45 cream and hydrocortisone are both popular, but what I found to be the most effective way in making sure my man parts are happy is by putting on some big shorts in the evening that allow everything to hang loose. I later learned that Siberian men avoid this situation by wearing baggy thermal trousers. I had been wearing skintight thermals. Not long after I went to the shop and invested in a pair of the lovely baggy thermals – one of the best investments I've ever made.

The Italian Way

I was impressed by how unfazed my dad had been by Siberian life. He hadn't felt any of the fear I had known on my first visit. At times, he seemed to actually prefer the Russian way of life to his own. Though while Nastya was on a nightshift and we had time to talk, he expressed annoyance at being told to not speak English. ‘What's the worst that could happen?' and ‘Why isn't Russia more like Spain or Italy?' were questions I heard all too often. In fact Nastya and I both became quietly irritated as my father increasingly asked why things weren't more Spanish or Italian. I think he had some kind of dual culture shock due to the fact he had been on holiday in Spain just two weeks before arriving in Russia. As for the Italian fixation, that had more to do with the fact his best mate from Cardiff, in fact the one he had gone to Spain with, was an Italian fella. My dad has never been to Italy. Regardless of this fact, he relentlessly kept comparing everything he ate with Italian food. As Siberia was considered an alien place to his friends back in Cardiff, he had been asked to keep a diary, which he did every day. By the end of his stay he was nearing five thousand words. This was later reduced down into article shape and subsequently published by
The
Siberian Times
. In this article, my dad listed his favourite things, such as the traffic system (all traffic lights run on a digital timer, so every driver and pedestrian knows how long they have to wait), the lack of Americanisation and culture of litigation currently ravaging the UK, and he dedicated a whole paragraph to Russian kitchen designs. There was no mention of Italy or Spain, and no mention of our apartment door either, which I think was an oversight because my dad complimented our front door nearly every time we left or entered the apartment.

In the third week of my father's stay we were woken up at about 5 a.m. by the sound of grinding and cutting equipment in the floor above us. It went on for about an hour with much cursing, screaming, and the general sounds of someone who is extremely pissed off. How this person had locked themselves out is unfathomable, seeing as you have to have a key in your hand to lock the door anyway. I can only assume they lost their key while out on the tiles and needed to remove their apartment door and frame to get to the spare. We had to explain to Nastya that it wouldn't happen in the UK as most front doors have glass in them, are made of plastic or wood or have pick-able locks. I don't think she believed us. It's impossible for someone who has spent almost all of her life in such a security conscious country to imagine a world with wooden or plastic front doors. Although dachas usually have wooden doors, it's uncommon for people to leave any valuables in them. During the winter people half expect them to be broken into, but don't worry about it as there's little left to steal; televisions, karaoke machines and microwave ovens are ferried back and forth every year without fail.

After my dad's first week in Krasnoyarsk, we had covered the basics and more. We had visited my favourite museum, attended a party at Lilya's, eaten in cafés every other day, visited the city centre several times and made sure we had wine and beer in the apartment every evening. The only problem was that we didn't have an everlasting pile of cash. I had brought a few hundred quid from Wales but there wasn't much left after the first week. For the remaining three weeks we had less to live on that we had spent in the first week. Although my dad had brought his own money and plenty of it, we didn't want to be poor hosts. Nastya and I discussed it one evening in bed and decided we would have to introduce my dad to the Siberian way of living. I wasn't sure how my dad was going to make this transition without feeling some sort of major culture shock so I did my best to make meals my dad wouldn't find too different. We had a stock of deer meat in the freezer, which I used to make meatballs to accompany spaghetti, and I crushed tomatoes and garlic to make pasta sauces. Occasionally we went to eat at Nastya's parents' place. We got by but after the first week of tourist attractions, mountains and daily outings I was afraid my dad would get bored. We didn't have a television and there was literally no place my dad could hang out comfortably other than the kitchen. I went through my books and selected a few of the English-language novels I had brought from the UK. My dad chose Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's
The First Circle
. He finished it within two weeks. As I was on the lookout for a job, Benya arranged a meeting with the CEO of the company she worked for. Benya's boss had a reasonably decent grasp of English and knew a few language teachers who might be able to set me up with something. We arranged a meeting in a café close to Nastya's office on a freezing cold morning. My dad and the CEO seemed to make some sort of romantic bond straight away. They flirted like hell. I was a bit embarrassed at first, but then I realised it was a mutual attraction and let them get on with it. They started going on day trips together although I had to escort my dad to the rendezvous point. Nastya and I felt a bit guilty about not being able to show my dad around ourselves, but those day trips took the pressure off us and we were finally able to spend some time at home alone.

The downside to this was that while my dad was out with his new lady friend, she began falling for him. This wasn't good because my dad hasn't had a serious relationship since my parents divorced in 1997, and I know him well enough to say he will never get married or settle down ever again. His lady friend didn't know this and I suspected, if she was anything like Nastya, that the day trips with my dad would have some huge romantic significance. Friendships in Siberia tend to be male with male, or female with female; rarely do men have female friends. They have female colleagues and distant cousins who they can hang out with but the concept of a male/female friendship for friendship's sake isn't widely understood in Krasnoyarsk, or at least as far as I can see. As a result of these two very different cultural attitudes, my dad's Siberian lady friend became quite offended when he didn't reciprocate her advances. I knew it would happen and tried warning my dad about it, but being his usual stubborn self he said ‘It's just a casual meet up like. If they don't know casual here yet they're gonna have to learn it sometime, and it might as well be from me.'

Stamps, Stamps, Stamps and More Stamps

The only problem we had experienced with regard to my immigration was with the Certificate of No Criminal Record, in that I had obtained the wrong one earlier in the year. But now I had a new certificate that wasn't only issued in the UK from the British Police authority but was recommended to me by the British High Commission. It couldn't fail. One morning when Nastya had finished a nightshift, she made a special trip at 8 a.m., straight after work, to pick up the certificate and its translation from the office we'd left it at in the city centre. I didn't know of this of course, until I received a phone call from Nastya at the immigration office tearfully telling me I had brought the wrong certificate again. At the bottom of my new certificate it stated that it cannot say whether I am a person of good character but that I definitely did not have a criminal record. Apparently this wasn't good enough. They needed something that said I was of good character. I argued that it was bullshit and if the immigration service looked at the British Foreign Office website they would see that the UK doesn't give certificates of good character or good behaviour because they mean absolutely nothing. I stressed that according to Russian law, an immigrant must provide proof they do not have any criminal convictions in their native country, and I had indeed provided solid proof of that. Certificates stating someone is not an arsehole are not a legal requirement. Thankfully, they did have a look on the website and saw I was right.

A few days before my dad was due to leave, Boris collected Nastya and me to take us to the immigration office. We didn't need an appointment because I had a letter that said I had been granted residency. We took every certificate, copies of every certificate, our passports, notarised copies of my brain scan, written consent of everyone currently living in Russia, written consent of everyone living outside of Russia, a chest X-ray certificate, a leprosy certificate, a bubonic plague certificate and a pear tree. We arrived early which was just as well as all of the would-be assassins we had seen at the HIV clinic were already there. There were pear trees everywhere. When our turn came, we went into the little interview booth and handed over the pile of documents that was now about as tall as I was. They took my passport and inspected it closely. Thankfully, the picture of me inside looked enough like me to pass scrutiny. Then they began inspecting the pile of documents. Weeks went by. I grew a lengthy beard that made me look like one of the guys from ZZ Top, though thankfully I'd had the foresight to take an electric razor with me. Crammed into the little booth with our pear tree it was a bit of a tight squeeze. Branches were sticking out of the door, which meant it couldn't be locked. People kept opening the door and trying to get in because they were dying of old age too. When my documents had been inspected, a very senior looking official came out to inspect my pear tree. It was fine, slightly bent, but fine. However, I had forgotten the bloody partridge. Nastya ran outside and told Boris who had one spare in the glove compartment of his car. We were saved. They took the partridge, stamped it and put it in my file. After this process had been repeated with everyone in the waiting room, a tiny slip of a woman in six-inch heels came out from behind the booths and unlocked a door in the little waiting room. Behind that door was a 4 ft tall fingerprinting machine. Everyone had to have their fingerprints, palm prints and thumb prints recorded eighteen thousand times. It took twelve years to process everyone. When it came to my turn, the tiny woman, who could have only been two inches wide at the waist, gave me back my passport. Nastya opened it – on the middle page it had the stamp we had been waiting so long for. It had taken five trips to Russia, nineteen flights, and hundreds of hours of anguish to obtain. We went back to the car where Boris had waited the whole time. On the drive home I couldn't help grinning because I was now a legal resident of Russia. Only I wasn't. Nastya told me that I needed a stamp to validate the stamp, and in order to obtain the second stamp I would need to go to local immigration office within the next seven days. Plus I would need to take Nastya and all of her family with me, as well as all of her dead ancestors going back fifty years. I held my head in my hands and sighed.

By this time the temperature was beginning to level off at -35 ˚C. During the night it could get as low as -39 ˚C. It hadn't yet bottomed out at -40 ˚C but it would soon. It was now hard to distinguish roads from pavements. All the snow from the roads that had been swept towards the verges now formed large solid snow banks. The only time we knew we were crossing a highway is because it had two banks either side, otherwise they were white with occasional tyre tracks that snow would quickly cover over. Outdoor staircases now looked like ski slopes. Only well-traversed stairs would be swept every day. Emergency stairways coming from office blocks were now ice slides. On days when Nastya was working, my dad and I would stay home and talk. When Nastya's shift finished my dad and I would leave the apartment at 7.20 p.m. exactly. This gave us forty minutes to reach Nastya's office. In the extreme cold of -35 ˚C, when we exited the building we had to take a few seconds for our bodies to adjust. In such temperatures the body finds it hard to breathe, it feels as though the chest is under pressure. Icicles form on the nose hairs and frosty eyelashes begin to seal the eyes closed. Hands must be gloved up and at least three pairs of socks worn. The shapka should have the side whiskers lowered to cover the ears, or they will freeze and fall off.