Sunbathing in Siberia, page 14
Unable to be far away from her family, Nastya had bought us an apartment just down the road from her parents’ place. Our building didn’t look as modern as theirs from the outside, and was ten storeys tall as opposed to their five. It was made with large grey bricks and had much smaller balconies. It sat in close proximity to another building of similar design, with a mishmash of square concrete slabs and messy sections of grass separating the two, plus a single rusty old children’s swing from the Soviet years.
The design of the building meant that our apartment was west facing, with a balcony that looked across to the neighbouring building and down onto the communal square. We had been spoilt by the view of mountains over Semka’s school back at Nastya’s parents’ place. Another difference was that there were two entrances: one east, one west. We were on the western side, where it was easier to park cars. Nastya opened the main door with her magnetic key, and it was clear that it wasn’t any kind of palace. It looked like it should have been condemned a decade earlier. The foyer floor was a soup of cigarette butts and empty bottles. The walls were grey through years of abuse and from grubby hand prints. Despite all this I managed to see a bright side; our building did have one plus point, a lift – a 4 ft by 4 ft box, with heavy steel buttons, dulled from decades of jabbing fingers. There were more bottles and cigarette butts here too and some kind of fluid – a mix of blood and spilled beer – giving it an exceptionally grubby feel, which wasn’t helped by the strip lights that blinked off and on. It reminded me of scenes from horror films, where the ghost of a small girl would appear every time the light went off. God only knows what had taken place in that lift over the years. It was a tight squeeze stuffing ourselves in there with my suitcase, but we managed and Nastya pressed the fifth button. The lift’s one redeeming feature was its speed. The doors closed as soon as Nastya touched the button, which meant it was good in emergencies. At this point, I could imagine many scenarios where I might want to exit this building and fast.
On the fifth floor Nastya led Boris and me into a long corridor. Ours was the last door on the right, and boasted a front door that was built with love. It was built to stop tanks, armies and even Godzilla should it decide to try breaking in. I made a tremendous noise as I approached. On the ground were six subfloor access panels between our front door and the foyer – flat steel squares sat on square holes in the floor. Nastya and Boris had obviously made a note of where they were and avoided them, even though the hallway was only lit by one small bulb.
Once inside the apartment, we had a cup of English tea with milk. By request I had brought a variety of teas from Marks & Spencer, and Nastya had already bought a pouch of milk before coming to collect me. I say a pouch because not all milk in Russia comes in cartons. To save money, milk can be bought in plastic pouches; these are then plopped into a plastic pouch holder that looks like a funny sort of beaker with a large handle. We didn’t have a beaker, so we simply leant our milk pouch against something else in the fridge to stop it from spilling everywhere. Calmed by a nice cuppa I decided our apartment was quite homely. Though it was a great deal smaller than what we had been used to it seemed lighter. Just off our hallway complete with little coat hooks was the kitchen with a new fridge-freezer, and a small balcony connected to it, which, though it had closed blinds, filled our kitchen with natural light. Our bedroom on the other side of the wall was the length of the kitchen and hallway combined. It had red satin curtains that bunched up against the floor because they were too long. Nastya had borrowed them from a friend of hers, as we couldn’t afford our own yet. They added to the feeling of homeliness because they were very similar to the red velvet curtains my parents used to hang in the living room when I was a boy. My mum and dad had fought over them so many times. Mum wanted them open but dad wanted them closed. He had grown quite paranoid over the years. Often I would come home from school to find him stood at the curtains, open just a fraction so he could peer out and see who was lurking nearby. We had a gulley next to the house and sometimes people would hide there. When nobody was looking, they would come out and siphon the petrol out of my dad’s van. No one ever caught them at it and my dad must have wasted hundreds of hours over the years peering through the little slit. When children were walking home from school my dad would stand there and watch them go, just in case one of them threw stones at his vehicle, which had happened only once before. The absence of light in the living room made it quite a depressing place to be, especially in my teenage years. Countless times I can remember coming home from a gig in my late teens only to trip over my parents’ feet as they slept on the floor. It was worse after the divorce. Long after everyone had left except my dad, I would go to visit him on Saturdays. The split had a terribly negative effect on him and for several years he insisted on a complete absence of light, even going as far as to nail the curtains closed permanently. It took years of visits and coaxing him out before he finally let the light back in. My dad and Boris were actually alike in many ways. While my dad hated putting old bills in the bin in case someone stole his identity, Boris was afraid of the internet, saying ‘It’s a military invention.’ Though I found both their attitudes humorous to begin with, I can’t say that either of them was wrong. Coming from the USSR, Boris was unusually paranoid about people he or his family had contact with. If Nastya had any sort of interaction with someone Boris would ask, ‘Who are they? Why do they want to know you? What is their agenda?’ Occasionally his suspicious nature rubbed off on me and I had to be careful not to be overly inquisitive of every new person who entered my life.
Unfortunately, with another identical building just across the square with balconies and bedrooms that looked over at ours, our curtains had to remain closed most of the time. This made me feel that no matter how far from my family I lived, I would never be able to escape certain patterns of behaviours, and I would need to be careful not to fall into the same trap my father had.
During the first two weeks back in Siberia there wasn’t any time to get settled in. Nastya had a fortnight off work, and we thought it best to get all the immigration stuff out of the way as soon as possible. Firstly, we had to register my visa. As it was my first private visa I thought it would need to be registered at the Federal Migration Service (UFMS), but the post office didn’t question us when we went there and registered me anyway. It was the usual headache: forms had to be completed perfectly; we had to give photocopies of my passport pages, immigration card, copies of Nastya’s residence papers, copies of the declaration of human rights (handwritten), forty-nine thousand copies of my finger prints, prints of my arse, and a brain scan. As usual, Nastya made a small mistake on one of the forms so we had to go to the photocopy shop to make more, fill these in, and go back. Like most previous occasions, registering took more than an hour of fussing about, queuing and going from place to place. This was the easy part.
Obtaining the chest X-ray certificate should have been simple – we just needed to make an appointment by phone and go to the hospital at the right time. Only the hospital was indistinguishable from every other building and it took ages to find. Eventually inside we registered, paid and then headed to the basement to wait for the nurse to show up. We were the only people there waiting for this service. Once the nurse came I had to get my shirt off, stand inside a machine, wait a second, and then it was all over. The nurse wrote something on a piece of paper, which we took and handed into one of the previous desks to get my certificate. It was only when I had it in my hand that I saw I didn’t have TB; for some reason the nurse couldn’t tell me beforehand, which was a bit nerve wracking. I was quite relieved. Not that I had any symptoms of any sort, it’s just that when I have to be tested for something I have a tendency to think ‘Oh no, what if I’ve had it all this time?’
The HIV test was an intimidating experience. Once my name was down on the clipboard we had to leave the clinic and come back at 4 p.m. for the test. We decided to go and have some more form-filling fun and went to get my drugs test. This was in another clinic, in a different part of the city. Again, the building looked like any other. It could just as well have been an office block. Inside we had to register and pay, hopping from desk to desk to desk, then queue up in a tight corridor full of people all waiting for the same thing. We stood and waited for about thirty minutes. When it came to my turn to go in to the little office people had been disappearing into, I had to put stretchy blue plastic covers on my shoes. This was the measure they took to prevent the spread of disease, however, doctors were coming and going, seemingly from lunch break to lunch break, and they never wore the blue things. Having the test involved sitting on a chair, similar to a dentist’s chair, while blood was taken from my arm. The results and much needed certificate would be available a week later.
We made it back to the HIV test clinic in plenty of time. The waiting room was packed. What made it worse was that it wasn’t so much of a room but a hallway at the bottom of a staircase, now used as a torture chamber for immigrants. There were at least fifty people, so many that some waited on the stairs. This annoyed nurses going back and forth. At 4 p.m. a miserable-as-fuck security guard, with huge shadows under his eyes came to the room’s double doors. He locked the left one closed with a top bolt and blocked the way through on the right with his body using a wooden stand with clipboards on as a kind of barrier. At first I thought this was unusual – why a barrier? When he began calling names out, everyone else in the room got up and surged forward, pressing against the barrier and blocking the way. This pissed some of the nurses off even more when they needed to get through. It was unnecessary as everyone’s names were on a list and were being read out in order. The other ‘immigrants’ were a bit different from me. They had dark hair and dark eyes like Nastya; most were from Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan or Georgia. Nastya could tell by the way that they spoke. I’m sure that most of them were nice people, looking to make a new peaceful life for themselves in Russia, yet a few of them looked seriously dangerous. They were lean, muscular, and wiry with mad staring eyes and they tended to wear thin combat-style clothing. They pushed and jostled each other like people in a bar fight. I was afraid of them, and so was Nastya who kept pulling on me slightly when one of them got too close.
The security man called out names, one by one by one, slowly. At first he shouted the names to carry over the noise made by the would-be-assassins, but he quickly tired of this and later called names in a normal voice. I think he’d been in control of would-be-assassins for too long; his patience was sorely tested. It was hard to hear my name being called out because it was said quietly and mispronounced as Meekul. When I was summoned, Nastya grabbed me and pulled me through the crowd. This was only the beginning. We had to go back to the front of the building, hand over my passport and copy of its translation for inspection, and obtain a piece of paper. We then had to get to a small booth where an old lady collected the fees and stamped the bits of paper. This paper then had to be handed over to a nurse who was taking everyone’s blood. When my turn came, Nastya asked the nurse if she was using a fresh needle, which pissed her off greatly. I put on the plastic shoe covers and sat on a regular old wooden chair. She took some blood from my left arm while trading curses with Nastya, and then we were free to go. To obtain my certificate we would have to return the next day and live the same ritual all over. The following Groundhog Day we stood in the same room with the same mad-staring-eyed hard men, heard names shouted out, got jostled, queued, ferried bits of paper from one room to another, until we left with the right piece of paper – an ‘I don’t have Aids’ certificate. My favourite certificate so far. I was well pleased because my last test had been in 2007 and I had had a few dodgy encounters with late night women since then. It also meant Nastya and I could finally have some fun without condoms, which we both hated.
After all the stress of queuing and clinics and forms and tests we took a few days off to splash about in fountains and eat ice cream. The experience of the HIV clinic had drained us and we weren’t quite ready to start Round Two. Thankfully, when we were, we found that the syphilis, chlamydia and leprosy tests were all done in the same clinic and appeared on one certificate. It was a similar experience to before: indistinguishable hospital, rammed full of would-be-assassins waiting for tests and doctors/nurses walking around on permanent lunch breaks. A blood test was all that was required to be tested for syphilis and leprosy, but for the chlamydia test they wanted some piss. I had totally forgotten what STI tests were like and had already had an enjoyably long morning piss, as I do every morning, just before we left our apartment. When it came to sharing some with the nurses, I was out of piss. There were many of us queuing in the corridor, each in turn being handed a little cup to pee in, which had to be done alone in a stinky little room with a thousand-year-old toilet. When it was my turn to piss, Nastya came with me into the pee-room because she didn’t like being in the corridor without me, and I think she wanted to see what the pee-room was like. The nurse, whose job it was to make sure nobody cheated, queried why Nastya and I were going into the pee-room together; she thought Nastya was the immigrant, and I was peeing in Nastya’s cup to cheat the system. It was a bit embarrassing, but when she saw I couldn’t speak Russian she realised I was the immigrant and let us both into the pee-room. Although I’m not at all sure why she gave Nastya permission to come in with me solely on the basis that I couldn’t speak Russian. There were no instructions on the cup and, even if there were, it was quite obvious what I needed to do. This was the moment it hit me I was out of piss. Bone dry. I did my best to squeeze out a few tiny drops but it just wasn’t enough. I was supposed to fill it by half at the very least, and it was a tiny cup, no bigger than a shot glass. When we exited the pee-room, I had to suffer further embarrassment because Nastya had to explain the situation and the nurse who then had to speak to another nurse, and I had to hold up my little cup with three drops of pee in it for everyone in the corridor to see. They said it might be okay, but would depend on the test. Once everyone had a cup of pee, we had to queue again at a pee-testing station: a woman with some litmus paper behind a window with iron bars. She had rubber gloves on, which was good because it was her job to dip the litmus paper into the pee cups, one by one. When it came to mine she left the paper in a while, but it was successful. I didn’t have chlamydia. After going to several different offices in the same building to have my passport inspected, stamps put on papers and so on, we got the certificate. A few days later we went back to the other clinic to pick up my drugs test certificate, which said my blood was clean. This was no surprise to me. The only big task left was to fill out the temporary residency forms, but first we had to obtain them.
The centre for immigration is located on the north east of the city. It’s a long bus journey from our district, and quite a difficult place to find. The district of the immigration office had taken a beating during the winter. It looked like World War III had been and gone already, with broken panels hanging off and bits missing at the bottoms of the buildings; everything has a kind of collapsed look. The ground around it is uneven to the point that cars driving past totally avoid the middle of the road, driving in a zigzag fashion. Inside the immigration centre there is a large waiting room with a number of private interview booths on one side. We made several trips to this place at the end of June. Once to obtain the residency forms, another to query sections of the forms, and again to hand all the documents in. We were told during our first visit there that once we had everything ready we had to make an appointment by phone and appointments can only be made at the end of a month for the beginning of the month following. In the last week of June Nastya was so frustrated at never being able to get through on the phone that she sent them a complaint fax from her office, saying their service was shit and that they should be ashamed of themselves. It worked. We were given an appointment in the first week of July.
On the day of the appointment our bus failed to show on time. Traffic was building up, which is unusual in the middle of the day and so when our bus came, we didn’t get anywhere in a hurry. We made it as far as the west of the city centre, and got off the bus near Revolution Square with a giant statue of Lenin. Traffic was at a standstill. Our best bet was to run across to the eastern side and get a taxi. This took thirty minutes, leaving us only forty minutes before my appointment. We asked many taxis what their fare would be, and many of them took advantage of the situation by quoting 500 roubles for a 250-rouble journey; all taxis in Krasnoyarsk operate on a fixed fare basis. Finally, we found one who would drive us at a decent rate. When we told the driver our destination and explained that we were late, he put his foot down; he had also immigrated to Russia earlier in the year and appreciated how hard it was to get an appointment at the immigration office. We got there ten minutes early.
When our time came, and we stood inside the booth, the official locked the door after us using a switch underneath her desk. This was essential, as there were at least thirty other people waiting, some with just small queries, who pulled at the door in frustration. We laid out our forms, certificates and photographs and the official went through a checklist in a very matter-of-fact way. We didn’t get very far down the checklist as there was a problem with my certificate of no criminal record, in that it was the wrong one. I had had a funny feeling about this certificate before I had left the UK. When I sent it to the foreign office to obtain an Apostille, it had been refused because it was issued by a ‘foreign government organisation’. The certificate did say I did not have any criminal record, both in English and Russian, however it did not state in which country. It referred to any possible criminal record in Russia, not Britain. I had the wrong bloody certificate. We were told that my application for residency could not be accepted and we had to leave. Nastya burst into tears and pleaded with the official, who demonstrated that she did after all have a heart, and a smile. We were told that if we went back to their website, we could apply online and our application would be registered from that day. After five months, if my application was successful we could use all the certificates we had struggled so hard to obtain except the HIV certificate. In the meantime, I was told I could obtain the correct criminal records certificate during those five months and return at wintertime on another private visa.
