Sunbathing in Siberia (28 page)

My father and I are both reasonably fit people. Back when I was twenty-five (not all that long ago), we would walk up Pen y Fan every Sunday afternoon. We were so fit at one point we could walk up to the top and get back down to the car within an hour and thirty minutes. In Krasnoyarsk, in winter, walking to an office forty minutes away, it felt as though we were both eighty. Within five minutes of walking our pace decreased to a slow dragging, and by the time we reached the office we were both knackered. A walk like that is nothing to my father-in-law. Those regular treks to the office really gave my father and me some perspective about what shape our bodies were in. I think my dad realised he wasn't the
Rambo
type he thought he was. This made me sad. I didn't like hearing my dad admit how the cold affected him. I think this is because I found comfort in him being a kind of hard-man. I had only experienced this once before. Back in 2008 when I was planning a cycle ride from Brecon to Cardiff in winter, after it had snowed, my dad turned down the opportunity of riding with me. He said that he didn't think he could make it. Faced with Boris's prowess and exceptional level of fitness I think my dad began to feel old in Siberia, and I began to see him that way too. On nights when Nastya was doing an 8 till 8 nightshift, I would lie in bed and listen to the radiator. We have two radiators in our bedroom and one of them makes a low humming sound, like the sound of machinery in the distance. I associate this sound with the Soviet Union – the general hum of factories that never stop working. Some nights I would lay awake and contemplate what would happen if the humming stopped and the heating ceased. In those moments I worried about my dad more than ever. There was no way the heating would shut down however there was no longer
any
way I could ignore the cold hard truth that the
Rambo
of Cardiff was getting old.

The Abominable Snowman

Two nights before my dad was due to leave, Nastya and I had arranged a party of sorts. We hadn't any money for alcohol but thought it would be nice to attempt to cook a traditional Sunday roast and have a dinner party for the three of us. On hearing about this, Nataliya Petrovna, Boris and Dima somehow invited themselves over. Although, true to form we only got one of Nastya's parents; Boris came without Nataliya Petrovna because they had been bickering over his hunting equipment lying around their apartment. The chicken dinner I prepared worked out quite well, regardless of the fact I only had three hobs to work with. The gravy was a bit of an experiment. I made a base from onions and procured some beef stock from a shop near Nastya's work. It came together better than I thought it would. Boris seemed to love it. For a man who tends to be choosy in what he eats he ate quite a lot. He brought a bottle of red wine with him. It was the first time I ever saw Boris drink. Dima arrived later, but the wine had gone by then.

After everything had been consumed, and the plates close to licked clean, Boris and Dima engaged in some sort of debate, which lasted for two hours. Dima was trying to convince his father that there was an afterlife as well as some sort of mystic theory he was working on. According to Dima, astral projection was something that could be attained through practice. Boris was having none of it, as I expected. Boris very calmly gave a counter argument that the world we see is the world we have, that rivers flow towards the sea, gravity pulls things downwards, time spent thinking about astral worlds, and life after death was time wasted. I was surprised however, when Boris told everyone that he believed in Big Foot. This was very unusual behaviour for a man who refutes any and everything remotely sensational or spiritual. He gestured with his hands that he had seen a footprint the size of a man's upper body. As a non-believer, I must have pulled a face that conveyed my feelings. I have one of those faces that always says what I'm thinking even if I keep my mouth shut. Seeing this, Boris thought for a moment, then rationalised aloud that the footprint he saw could have been a bear's. But I knew he was saying this to save face in front of me and my dad. What he had initially said could not be unsaid. Even Boris, the most straight thinking, down-to-earth, rational man I had ever met couldn't help but be influenced by all the mystical talk that goes on in Siberia. Little did I know that this was only the tip of the ice yeti. There was more to come.

The following night we had another dinner party. This time Nastya cooked. My dad had given us a Boney M wall clock and 5000 roubles (£100) as a Christmas present so I could buy some decent snow boots. We spent 500 roubles on wine for that final evening. Boris and Dima invited themselves over again, this time bringing Nataliya Petrovna with them. As it was a special occasion Nastya's parents put their petty arguments aside and made an effort to be civil. The night was very much similar to the one prior. Nataliya Petrovna brought some stewed cabbage, and boiled horsemeat with potato. It was a lot of food and a lot of wine. It didn't take long for our conversations to wind down the path of mysticism once more. This time we came upon the topic of apocalypse. This subject is quite a common one in Russia. There are television programmes about the impending end of the world at least once a week, and the idea is that in the event of a global disaster, Siberia would be the only place on Earth left unscathed. It sounds like madness, but millions of people actually believe it, including Nastya. The one person I hadn't expected to believe a word of it was Boris. There had been a lot of hype in the media, more than usual in fact, because of the Mayan calendar theory. The world was due to end on the 21
st
of
December. Exactly two weeks away. Nataliya Petrovna and Boris told us that they were planning to spend the end of the world in the dacha, and stay there for at least three or four nights. To try to convince us that they hadn't gone totally bonkers they explained that with so many people believing in the end of the world, there would likely be some panic in the city and so it was best to stay well away. Boris had bought extra supplies of nearly everything needed to survive an apocalypse: vegetables, salt, medicines and bullets. He had actually gone all over the city looking for extra supplies of bullets because people had begun to panic-buy them, as well as guns of every kind. I kind of saw their rationale for leaving the city. I didn't like the sound of all the bullets and guns being sold out. Who knows who would be carrying what? As a final measure Boris was planning a hunting trip one week before apocalypse day; they needed a whole deer just in case the apocalypse lasted more than one week. With all this talk of the end of the world, I was expecting Nastya or Dima to invite themselves along to the dacha, but they didn't. They both had to work that day, and Nastya even had a nightshift on the 21
st
. Regardless of the impending end of everything, they would make sure the good people of Siberia were able to get online right up to and including the moment the four horsemen made their appearance.

If we survived the end of the world, Dima told us he would still be spending January on his own at his dacha, as he had done every year since he could remember. The -40 ˚C to -45 ˚C temperatures predicted weren't going to put him off. I felt like asking him if this was also a way of escaping the family, especially seeing as Marina had moved most of her family in with them, but I didn't. He would have denied it anyway and it would have probably been an insensitive thing to do. I wondered whether being at the dacha in sub-zero temperatures made him feel closer to his father in some way. With Boris forever going back and forth to the taiga, he comes across as being a man's man. Dima however, with his white-collar job and shiny office shoes, has become hunched from hours sitting at desks and pushing pens. I got the impression that although they loved each other, they weren't that close. It was possible that Dima's month-long session in the dacha during the coldest period may have been a way of bolstering his father's respect. Whatever his reason, it wasn't my place to question. Apocalypses and freezing evenings spent in dachas aside, it was an enjoyable evening, though all the talk of the end of the world on what was essentially the last evening I would spend with my dad made me feel a greater sense of finality; it really felt like the end of an era.

HIRAETH AND THE APOCALYPSE

Being a resident of Cardiff most of my life I had visited Cardiff Castle more than a thousand times and had a permit which allowed me to get in for free. I even had my first date there. On summer days, I would buy a Brie and bacon baguette from the small café opposite the castle gates on the corner and take it to the castle, together with a coffee from the market. I would stand on top of the castle, eat my lunch, and look at all of South Wales as if it were mine. It was mine. Mine to enjoy whenever I felt like it. The museum, the barrage, the Bay, Bute Park, the peacocks of the castle, the nightclubs, the Nos Da backpackers' bar next to the river, these things were mine. Now they were out of reach. Over the course of two or three years, I had struggled with my sense of national identity. I always felt like a tourist in Cardiff, partly because I had lived in Abertridwr during my teens and Pentyrch during my early twenties. At those crucial times when I should have been discovering my own city, I had gone off to discover other places in Wales. In addition, because I had failed my Welsh A-level, and cannot speak Welsh fluently, I felt like I did not belong, like there was something missing from my life that could only be found outside of Wales. It was on that first day of being a Siberian resident that I realised I was not only a half Russian-half Brit… I was not merely an expat, an immigrant, or an honorary Siberian; I was a Welshman. A Welshman in Krasnoyarsk, and even though I had left my homeland far behind, I could still wake up every morning and thank the Lord that I was Welsh.

According to Russian superstitions if you clean your house within three days of a guest leaving they will have a bad journey home, or they will die, or devils will come, big Russian-speaking devils that want to force-feed you kittens. I didn't want this to happen but it was difficult after my dad had left to leave the kitchen the way it was. The floor hadn't been cleaned in a month, and as the sofa bed was a sofa once again, we found dust-bunnies so big there was a danger of them turning into dust-bears or tigers. I had to clean, just a little bit. Three days after my dad had left, we Skyped each other. He had panicked in Yemelyanovo Airport just as I had thought. He had even asked people what was going on only to be looked upon as a crazy person. Nobody understood him and he couldn't understand anybody else. When they started boarding the plane, he showed his plane ticket to an airport assistant who waved him towards the plane. He had worried about following the 7 ft giant man, as it seemed he wasn't leaving the departure lounge café. Only at the very last call did the fella board the plane. They did leave nearly an hour late and got to Moscow at the time I had seen on the flight radar. His connecting flight had left Moscow on time. It had failed to show up on radar until 10.50 a.m. because it had to be covered in de-icer. Boarding of the plane had finished on time at 10 a.m. sharp. When he was stood in the X-ray machine with his belt and shoes off they had announced the final call. When he was cleared to enter the departure lounge, he'd had to run to his gate and made it with only a few seconds to spare. As he sat down on the plane, he had worried about his luggage. Had they had time to transfer the bags? When he arrived in Heathrow he found his answer. His luggage had extended its holiday. While talking to my dad I didn't tell him that I had cleaned the kitchen a bit after he left. He's not the superstitious type, but I felt a bit guilty. Perhaps my clearing of dust-bunnies had caused some kind of demonic force to hold on to my dad's suitcase for amusement.

Apocalypse Day came and went without even a hint of the four horsemen. Boris stayed in the mountains, Nataliya Petrovna went about her business and nobody in Russia was hurt. There were no riots, no panic, no fireballs from the sky, and no bullets being fired in the street. The day before the apocalypse was due; I had been summoned to an immigration office to the east of the city near the biggest war memorial. I had to go and collect the new visa that would allow me to leave the country in future. This time there were no would-be-assassins, just a large room with no furniture, and a security guard sat on a windowsill. My visa had already been prepared. The three-month private visa I had entered on was stamped to make it useless, and I was handed a small green booklet with my picture on each page. It looked like an old World War II identity card. I wasn't even charged anything. We left the office and found that the bus we had taken to get there had finished its route in that part of the city, turned around and would be taking us back home. To avoid being asked to give up our seats by babushkas we sat at the back where they never go. The windows of the bus were covered with tiny crystals of ice, so that when car headlights shone through it gave the impression that we were inside a giant Christmas bauble. Sat there, watching the city go by through frosted glass I felt a strange sensation. For days leading up to that moment I had been trying to figure out what I was feeling. I thought it might have been fear. Fear of the cold, or fear of not seeing my family in Wales again for an awfully long time. But I was too relaxed – so it couldn't have been fear. Sat on the back of the bus it felt like I had bunked off school. It was early afternoon and I wasn't normally in the east of the city at that time of day. It reminded me of the time I was in junior school in Ely, and had been picked by a television company to be involved in a few hours' filming for a documentary. I was nine or ten years old. The camera crew took three others and me to Cardiff market, where they wanted us to walk around with clipboards and look like we were carrying out some kind of junior survey. That was the first time I had seen Cardiff Market. It had felt like an adventure, seeing the market salespeople calling out prices of strawberries and people bartering. I had felt wonderfully free, being away from school and having a taste of adult life. Sat in the giant bauble with my passport and visa in my pocket and Nastya by my side, watching the rays of crystalline light swirl around, I had the sensation that even though I had reached my destination, even though I now had one place to be and would likely be there for years to come, I was at the beginning of my adventure.