Sunbathing in Siberia, page 5
In Siberia, if you don’t work, or grow your own food, or you’re not an oligarch, you face extreme poverty, unless helped by another. You’d think in a place like Siberia where the weather systems are lethal, the danger of being killed by a number of deadly creatures is very real, and the economic climate is so severe, that only the tough would survive. This is true in a way, because Siberian people are tough, but the conditions set by the weather and the government only strengthen their resolve and their sense of humanity further. Like the people of Ely, Siberians seem to have a greater empathy for those who have it hard. For example: when I was waiting for a bus one day I noticed a babushka crossing the road where there was no designated crossing area. She got halfway across and then stopped because traffic was heavy in both directions. I thought she was going to get killed, but then a large, white off-road car stopped right next to her. The driver parked his vehicle in such a way as to stop the flow of traffic in the two lanes behind him. He got out and walked the woman across to the pavement safely. Then got back in his car and went on his way. It’s the little kindnesses that count and Krasnoyarsk is the world’s capital of little kindnesses.
Knowing Where to Walk
During that first month in Russia I felt afraid, I was visibly scared of everything and it was noticeable. Though I was never in any danger, the outside world felt so alien, so completely different from what I was used to in Wales, that I interpreted it as being hostile. The apartment blocks, tall and grey, sometimes had balconies that looked as if they were going to fall off and there were many wild dogs that although thin, were agile and obviously hungry. People spoke a language I couldn’t understand, and sometimes in very harsh tones, and I didn’t know the Cyrillic alphabet. I couldn’t even translate the simplest warnings on the buses, or anywhere else. Plus, the fonts used on some of the signs looked decidedly military. Although these things aren’t necessarily intimidating, the lack of control I felt was. I had no way of communicating with anyone other than Nastya and I had no control over what I ate either. Nastya did the cooking because I didn’t know any of their cooking methods, and as I didn’t have a lot of money I couldn’t buy my own food. Not only that but it would have been offensive to cook my own meals. At times when we went to a supermarket, Nastya would scorn me for choosing something she said was unhealthy, but at the same time, she would buy a lot of candies. This lack of control over nearly every aspect of my life, at times, drove me further into myself.
With no spoken Russian at all, I had to be accompanied by Nastya at all times. She was my guide, translator and wife, and the three roles were occasionally too much for her. When she had to work a twelve-hour night shift, I was stuck in the apartment on my own. At times I felt a bit like a prisoner, although I was a prisoner of my own making. Some nights Nataliya Petrovna would come over to cook for me when Nastya was working, but this only made things worse. As we couldn’t communicate, I resigned myself to staying in our bedroom with the door closed. When it was time to eat, Nataliya Petrovna would knock on the door and motion me towards the kitchen. Though it was very kind of her to do this, I would rather have been left to my own devices and cooked something myself; there are only so many meatballs one can eat, and as they were home-made, I often found myself crunching teeth against pieces of bone. Even when I was alone at night, it was very difficult to prepare a meal. Many of the food stuffs in the fridge were out of date, and I couldn’t tell what a lot of it was. If something had mould on it, they kept it for use in some soup or stew. I was from a culture of ‘If it’s got green on it, don’t risk it’, living among a people whose ethos was the opposite.
Alone at night, it was also hard for me to sleep. A massive electricity station stood just across from the apartment on the side of our bedroom and it gave off an electric hum that couldn’t be stopped, even with the window closed. Sometimes in the dead of night, this substation released what can only be described as massive explosions, caused by surges in power. These never failed to startle me from sleep, and when several explosions went off in a single night, I had the impression of being alive in a war zone.
On days when Nastya was free we would take walks along the Yenisei or visit whatever attractions were available. There are two Ferris wheels on the north side of the river, one in the park opposite the office where Nastya works and one in the central city park opposite Revolution Square. These wheels never stop turning all year round, except for the holidays around New Year.
About 20ft from each Ferris wheel was the ticket office, where a woman sat inside from morning till night. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her, or for the hundreds of other people like her in similar roles. Spread all over the city there are tiny little shops, some no bigger than ice cream vans. There is no access inside them except for a backdoor which is always locked. These kiosks are product specific. They either sell magazines, ice cream or cigarettes. There are more cigarette kiosks than any other. Each stall has just one person inside. Outside of these you tend to see two or three Coca-Cola-branded fridges of the type you find in British corner shops. The difference in Russia is that these fridges stand in the street and can only be opened by the stall keeper who, once she has taken your money, pushes a button that remotely releases the magnetic lock on the fridge door. She then watches as you take exactly what you paid for.
I thought it ironic that the ice cream kiosks were full of electrically operated freezers, even though it was below freezing outside. The person inside each had an electric heater too. It’s a great shame that they don’t stand outside in winter and store their ice creams in the snow, they would probably save a fortune on electricity, but I guess it would be a really uncomfortable way to make a living. Still people do it. Along the roadsides between our home and Nastya’s office there were many people sat on stools. They had little trays in front of them, some of which had a few potatoes, some a few berries. These people, who were no doubt officially retired, would spend their whole days sitting there in the cold, trying to sell a few items they had grown at their dachas, in order to top up their small pensions. Near our apartment stood a row of shops, and outside these shops it was normal to see rusty cars parked up with the boot open. Inside the boot lay a range of red meats I could only assume was deer, laid down on pieces of torn carpet. Sometimes they even presented their stock on the bonnet. The people stood next to these cars never approached anyone or called out their prices. They just hung around, cold, wrapped up in several tattered coats, waiting for someone to ignore the shops perhaps and inquire after cheaper meats.
Apart from the street sellers and kiosks there are several larger shops that range in size and quality. Firstly, there are small convenient stores that are attached to residential blocks, taking up the space where a ground floor flat would be. These shops are unique in that you can’t simply walk in and pick up the things you want, when you enter the store you walk into what can only be described as a large cage. In these shops you have to know what you want, ask for it, pay for it through a small square opening in the bars and take your goods from the same place. Awkward if you have a long list of things you want or if you can’t speak Russian.
The supermarkets are a different affair altogether. They are very similar to their UK cousins; however, when you enter, if you have any bags with you, you must lock them away in one of the many lockers provided near the till points. They have most of the same products you can find in the West; however they do range greatly in quality and cost. Some sell much better meat products than others, but what they all have in common is that many products are out of date. This makes shopping even more tiresome because it becomes a quest to find the products you want that are the least past their use by date. My theory is that while many people in Russia grow food on their own plots of land, having become dependent on these plots after the fall of the Soviet Union, supermarkets have no choice but to keep selling out-of-date stock because people just don’t buy it fast enough.
When it was just the two of us, we had to do some kind of supermarket shopping to avoid using the out-of-date products in the fridge. One evening, while in the middle of cooking, we decided to go to a supermarket near Nastya’s office. It was a Friday evening and the streets were full of drunken Russian men. We weren’t accosted or spoken to on our way there as all the drunken people were either too busy enjoying themselves to notice us or they had fallen asleep on the street.
Once we had our goods, Nastya led me to another main road that could also take us home. Not only would it have made our journey shorter but there would likely be fewer drunken people. When we approached the road it was pitch dark. Because of the lack of shops of any kind it hadn’t been fitted with street lamps. Halfway down we could see a police car with two militia sat there quietly. Nastya began to walk back, appearing as if she had taken a wrong turning. She explained that though they could be decent people, and I had my passport in my pocket, complete with immigration card and registration, they could stop us if they wanted to, ignore the fact I had my papers in order and attempt to get a bribe. It was safer to go back the way we came.
Khrushchev’s Permanent Thaw
Russian apartments are noticeably different from those I have known in the UK in that they are usually confined to one floor and are made with the same love and care that the buildings are made with. Instead of skirting boards, many floors have lino, which is cut in such a way that it rides up the wall three inches on all sides and bunches up in the corners. Paint is used sparingly – many ceilings in Russia are covered in those horrible polystyrene tiles with coving made of the same material, and the wallpaper is badly fitted. Nearly every joint of paper overlaps the other. In places where a wall meets a cupboard and there is a gap that would normally be disguised with a wooden panel in the UK, they simply apply a badly cut strip of wallpaper over it. These often peel slightly and so small holes are usually visible around cupboards, and there are many cupboards. Any void above a doorway is usually turned into a cupboard. In this way Russian apartments are similar to submarines – every inch of space counts.
To counter the poor standard of decoration, Nataliya Petrovna had hung pictures wherever she could, only none of the frames matched or seemed in keeping with the colour of the walls. Some pictures were even without frames and were simply pinned to the wall. There was also little evidence of personal possessions. Nobody seemed to own much of anything. Looking at other peoples apartments, it became clear that this was typical of most Russians. With the exception of a few fridge magnets and pictures on walls there is very little of anything in any apartment to give an indication as to who lives there. I got the impression that people primarily concerned themselves with objects that were of use. My mother would have cried. As the world’s most finicky and house-proud woman, she would have had a fit had she seen it. None of the furniture matched or the walls and curtains. It may sound silly, but as a twenty-eight-year-old man, who has lived in countless rented rooms, and has never really given much thought to furniture or wallpaper, it even jarred with me. Because my dad’s a builder we had had to suffer stacks of tools and various ‘might come in handy later’ bits-n-bobs, but still, my mother hoovered every day and would never let a guest enter if the house wasn’t perfect. I think I have inherited her genes. Either that or I have inherited my father’s; my father who is known for being a perfectionist in his building work, and therefore a real pain to work for. When laying new wooden floors my dad always insisted on using scrim cloths before varnishing. I remember speaking to a working eighty-four-year-old builder mate of my dad in one of the buildings they were fixing. When I had asked him about working for my dad, he said ‘Your dad uses scrim cloths. Scrim cloths to dust surfaces after they’ve been brushed with a duster. Nobody uses them anymore; even I never even used ’em when I was twenty.’ So as the son of Wales’s fussiest builder, and a hoover-crazy mother, Nastya’s parents’ apartment was a slight shock to the system.
However, like the house I grew up in, all the cupboards above the doors, and the balcony leading off from the living room were filled with Boris’s things: spare car parts, old shoes with worn soles, and jars of ‘might come in handy one day’. In the living room, against the left wall, stood a large, brown laminated unit typical of the 1960s, that spanned the whole length. Through the glass panels I could see at least fifty books. Other sections without a glass front were filled with more of Boris’s gear and spare parts, and one glass-fronted section had its glass covered with silver foil to prevent anyone seeing the piles of spare machinery parts inside. I later learned this is something Nataliya Petrovna had forced Boris to do as she felt ashamed at guests seeing so many of Boris’s dirty tools. The only item that truly reflected Nataliya Petrovna’s personality was a large black Enisei piano that stood against the wall opposite from the one with the large brown unit. She’d had musical training and had come from relatively good beginnings.
Towards the last two weeks of my visit, Nastya’s parents kept appearing unexpectedly and would often stay the night. They slept in the living room, which is where they had slept most nights since Baba Ira moved in roughly fifteen years earlier. This may sound strange to some people but it was something I was used to before coming to Russia. Growing up with three sisters in a two-bedroom house, my parents actually slept in the living room until their divorce. As a teenager, this was something that had annoyed me as I couldn’t stay up late and watch TV, or walk through the living room to the kitchen without waking up my parents. Similarly, in Krasnoyarsk, I couldn’t walk to the balcony at night for a smoke, which was the only place permitted; but it felt cosy, like it had when I was a small boy. One of my fondest memories is coming home from a school trip at the age of seven. We had been to the dinosaur exhibition in Cardiff Museum, and I had bought a plastic woolly mammoth. As the trip finished at about midday, when I got home, my parents, who had decided to have a lie-in, were still in their blankets on the living-room floor. I woke them up and showed them my new toy. It was quite lovely being able to walk through the front door and find them sleeping. I suppose Nastya would have similar memories, only in hers she would have gone to the Krasnoyarsk Museum, which had an actual woolly mammoth in it.
Occasionally the sky was so bleak and snow-laden it was as if it contained all the Sundays of my teenage years. Although it was spring, it was still fairly cold, and we couldn’t stay out for too long in the evenings without catching a chill. To pass the time, Nastya and I spent any night she wasn’t working watching British sitcoms in the permanent warmth of home. Usually, after about four hours of The IT Crowd, we were so bored that we would go to sit in the kitchen for a change of atmosphere. With Nastya’s help I sometimes plucked up the courage to ask Nataliya Petrovna about the family’s history.
When the USSR collapsed in 1991, hyperinflation left many starving to death. People famously queued down the street for a loaf of bread or some milk. Nataliya Petrovna and Boris, who both worked for the energy company, had to continue working for three years without pay until the economy began to recover. They continued working without pay as the company still paid for their apartment, the utility bills and Nastya’s and Dima’s musical tuition. This was normal under the Soviet remuneration system and continued until the country stabilised once more. Had they stopped working, they would have lost their pensions, the apartment and dacha; all of which were crucial to their survival. During this period of instability, at least two of Nataliya Petrovna’s friends and work colleagues drank themselves to death. The Semenov family would have starved if it weren’t for Boris’s hunting skills.
It was clear from the start that Boris and his wife were very different from each other. Boris, who had originated from a small hunting village in the Evenkiyskiy district a few hundred miles west of Krasnoyarsk, came to the city as an engineer and worked at the same energy plant for his entire career until retirement. Although he was a member of modern civilised society Boris never left his hunting roots behind. At any and every opportunity he goes hunting or spends his time preparing for hunting trips. Boris has a vast amount of equipment that is spread throughout the apartment, dacha and a garage he owns. Because of the way he has lived his life, and the mountains he climbs regularly, his physique is something to be in awe of. He put me to shame. In fact he would put most people to shame, including a large percentage of athletes.
