Sunbathing in Siberia, page 8
In the middle of the afternoon Ira would make her daily trip to the balcony, to sit and watch the world go by. To get there, to get anywhere, Ira, hunched and frail, would lean on a small wooden stool and inch it forward. Every journey she made was equivalent to a long mountain trek for someone in the prime of their life. The sound of that stool scraping across the floor haunted me, especially at night. Ira – silent and solitary – was a kind of ghost. She existed and yet she wasn’t present in our lives. When she was younger, she had been a highly celebrated Soviet scientist and engineer. Having studied at the Yekaterinburg polytechnic at PhD level, she went on to become a leading specialist in platinum and other rich metals. However, she never managed to finish her PhD as her tutor passed away, and there was nobody to replace him at the time. Ira went on to marry Pyotr Karbovski, and had three children, two of whom are now dead. When her husband passed away, it was felt that the best place for her was with her one surviving daughter.
Regardless of Ira’s failing health, she still managed to maintain a normal dignified appearance. Before I woke in the morning, she would already be dressed in a long flowing gown and wore a red beret to mask her thinning hair. She made regular trips to the bathroom, sat on her stool and washed as best she could. She even cooked all her own meals and did the washing up if we left any dirty dishes by the sink. I was impressed by her stamina and will to continue living as normal a life as possible but sad that she spent so much time alone. To remedy the loneliness of senior citizens, Russian social services provide retired soviet comrades with state of the art mobile phones. Ira had one; I heard her talking on it quite often, though I don’t think she knew what any of the other applications were for.
With my brother-in-law Dima and his wife, Marina, working every day, their son Semka would normally spend his weekday evenings with his grandparents. Although they were hardly at the apartment in summer, when they were, Semka would pretend to be afraid of Ira, and nicknamed her Baba Yaga. In Russia Baba Yaga is a fairy-tale witch that chases people around in her dacha, which has a pair of legs of its own. Ira, who we would normally refer to as Baba Ira, as Baba is short for grandmother in Russian, was called Baba Yaga so many times by Semka that I made the mistake of referring to her by that name also. Thankfully Nastya always managed to put her hand over my mouth at the right moment when her mother was around, as she would have been upset by it.
Superstitions
Some people believe in the strangest things. My mother believes her grandmother, my great Nana-Collie was a witch who could make people fall in love with others, or make people ill, by planting certain roots in the back garden with a bit of that person’s hair. My mother still practises some of this stuff and reads tarot cards for my sisters and me once a year. Though I don’t quite share my mother’s views, I can forgive her mystic beliefs as they are, for the most part, quite unobtrusive. The same can’t be said for Russian superstitions. For although they are charming in their own way, I have occasionally been really annoyed by either being told not to walk around something, or to say hello a hundred times in the street. It isn’t simply a case of not walking under ladders or stepping on the cracks. Russian superstitions are extremely common and practised by almost every Siberian I know; if they are not carefully observed at all times it’s possible to cause a great deal of offence. During my earlier visit I had witnessed occasional references to certain mystical beliefs, but it wasn’t until summer that I fully understood the extent of them.
Nataliya Petrovna, who occasionally suffers from high blood pressure, would sometimes use very archaic methods to get this pressure down to an acceptable level. While we watched TV, she would sit with a jar of leeches bought earlier in the day, and attach two behind each ear. They were horrible to look at, and even worse when they were all fat with blood. They wriggled and writhed like the eels that were put into Commander Chekov’s ear in the Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. When she had the leeches on the ear, I felt compelled to watch them grow bigger. With each passing minute they evolved from slithers into full grown monsters. It was during one of these evenings that Nataliya Petrovna, complete with ‘eels’ behind the ear, sat down with Nastya and me to discuss superstitions.
Before leaving for a long journey, travellers, and all those saying goodbye are supposed to sit for a moment in silence before the travellers depart. This allows time to sit and think of anything you may have forgotten but it’s also supposed to bring you some luck. When I left Siberia at the end of spring, we had to begin our travels at 5.30 a.m. I hadn’t slept and therefore was a bit irksome. I had taken the time to pack the night before and so after a shower and a cuppa I was ready on time. I have always made a point of being exactly on time in everything that I do. Nastya it seems is the exact opposite. She woke up late, insisted on breakfast, and took half an hour in the shower. Boris, whose job it was to take us to the airport, woke up even later. When I was really quite pissed off, and full of anxiety over the possibility of missing the flight, Nataliya Petrovna insisted on us sitting for a few minutes in silence. While this apparently brought a sense of calm to everyone else, it made me want to scream. But this is another major cultural difference. In Siberia, there is an attitude of ‘We’ll get there when we get there’. Nastya for example is always late for work. And if Boris says he’ll take you somewhere at say 4:30 p.m., you always know you have time to see a movie before he is actually ready three hours later. It’s not just my Siberian family. Nearly every Siberian I know is relaxed when it comes to schedules. I don’t know whether it’s a British thing, or a Welsh thing, or whether it’s just me but I’ve worn the same watch on my wrist for twenty years as a means to be punctual and not upset people. It’s hard for me to understand why other people don’t do the same.
There are many more Siberian superstitions. Apparently it is forbidden to demonstrate something bad that happened to you or someone else in the past using your own or someone else’s body. For instance, if you’re talking about a broken arm you had as a kid or a time when you saw someone with a broken arm, you couldn’t point towards your own arm and say ‘it was like this’, because, according to Siberian superstition, your own arm would soon become broken. If you do point to yourself without thinking while in the midst of conversation you then have to ‘grab’ the bad energy you just put into yourself and throw it into the air, then blow on your hands to clean them also. This one has brought me no end of irritation. When talking to Nastya, I often use hand gestures to emphasise certain words or point to a limb of mine when talking about previous accidents of others. No sooner have I pointed to the limb, I am always stopped mid-sentence and brushed down. Even if we are in the middle of the street Nastya will do this unashamedly, which was a little bit embarrassing for me at first but I got used to it after the hundredth time.
Returning home for forgotten things is especially bad. It rouses all kinds of demons and Slavic monsters from wherever they live. If you have forgotten something it’s considered wise to leave it behind, but if you absolutely have to go back and get it you should look in the mirror with your tongue hanging out before leaving again. There were times when I left my gloves at home by mistake in the spring, which left me no choice but to go back for them. When I did, Nastya pleaded with me to poke my tongue out in front of the mirror and wiggle it about for a second. This was horrendously funny to me, but to Nastya it was a very serious issue. I couldn’t help laughing, and when faced with Nastya’s scornful expression it just made it all the funnier.
If a bird lands outside your window you have to tap the glass to get it to bugger off. Although if a bird accidentally flies into the glass or taps on it, beware, because this will rouse the Slavic bird monsters. If a bird flies through an open window and spends some time inside, this is considered the worst of all. This means someone in your family will die soon or accidentally be squashed by evils. This one was already familiar to me as my mother used to say ‘If you see a white owl on the windowsill you will die’. As a young boy, I took this quite seriously and as a test I spent a number of hours at the window to see if I could spot one. I never did though. There aren’t many white owls in Cardiff apparently.
People walking down the street together must never walk on opposite sides of any given obstacle; they must choose one side or the other, even if they end up walking in single file. Again, while walking with Nastya, she often pulled me around bollards or other people as a means to keep us together. Observing this ritual makes it almost impossible to get somewhere in a hurry. If we did end up walking around something separately, she insisted on us saying ‘Hello’ to each other. We’re supposed to say it a hundred times, but I tend to stop after two.
Birthday parties must never be celebrated before the actual date. If you wish someone a happy birthday before the day, they might suffer some sort of bad luck or devils will come. Talking about future success, whistling in the apartment, putting an empty bottle back on the table, shaking hands across the threshold of a doorway, and not draining your glass before you put it down, all bring bad luck or raise devils. I’m sorry to say that I have been guilty of all of these at some point or another and with so many superstition rules broken it is likely that I’ve raised enough devils to cause quite a commotion. So if I have inadvertently instigated some sort of future apocalypse, I apologise. The only Siberian rule that I do observe and quite agree with is that if you have alcohol, it must be drunk until it’s gone.
Water is also a big deal in Russia. I suffer from psoriasis, one of the ugliest of skin diseases. This autoimmune disorder is incurable, although cortisones and creams with a high steroid content can keep it at bay. During the winter of 2010, my psoriasis erupted, and turned from a small patch of blisters on my chest to a patch of red that covered 90 per cent of me. With my skin peeling from my face, I looked more like a burns victim. In fact, many of my friends asked if I had been in a fire. Before the arrival of summer in 2011, I had managed to soften most of the effects using steroid creams, although this is only a short-term fix. The closest thing to a cure is a high dosage of – or a prolonged exposure to – UV rays.
In February 2011, I was referred to a specialist in the NHS who recommended I volunteer myself for what is known as ‘light therapy’. This involves being zapped by a shockingly powerful sunbed several times a week over a three-month period. Light therapy is an extreme measure and so one is only allowed a relatively low number of five-minute exposures in a lifetime. Having had psoriasis since I was twenty-three, and knowing that the sun is one giant source of UV, I decided to opt out of my hospital treatment and go sunbathing instead. Controlled and regulated sunbathing is a method I had used before in the UK, only with my condition so bad I needed a warmer climate. This is why I chose to spend as much of July as I could sunbathing at the dacha. Nastya however didn’t believe any of this, and thought the only possible way for me to be cured would be a trip to some ‘magic lake’ with healing minerals. Either this or rubbing my skin with some kind of oily cloth; the oil would be magic of course. While rubbing oil or moisturiser into dry psoriasis skin can rejuvenate it for a day, it is no cure. As a compromise, I alternated sunbathing on the lawn outside the dacha with swimming in a lake close by. The sun did its job and burned off the majority of my psoriasis skin, leaving me slightly pink and a little tanned. Although Nastya saw the effects of my methods, she still insisted on knowing better. Having had my disease for many years, and having tried every possible cure going, from NHS-recommended creams to the very ridiculous series of magnets worn on the wrist, there was nobody who knew how to deal with psoriasis better than me. Being told everything I knew was somehow wrong and that I could be ‘cured’ by magic was rather hurtful.
In some parts of Russia there is still a belief that natural cures are more powerful than modern medicine. I know that most modern pain relievers and anaesthetics are synthetic versions of real herbs designed to emulate the effect of natural healing qualities found in plants. I can’t argue against those who believe in natural remedies – I was, after all, temporarily healed by the sun – however, I think that relying purely on alternative medicine can be detrimental to one’s health. For instance, early in July Nastya was taken to hospital suffering abdominal pain, and was informed that she had a small kidney stone that needed to be operated on. Instead of accepting this and having the small operation required, Nastya, who is highly influenced by Boris, decided to take her problem to a Chinese herbalist who prescribed all sorts of fluids and pills created from natural herbs. Regardless of continued discomfort, she was adamant that the herbs she had ingested would work over a long period of time, when in fact we had no proof that they were doing anything at all.
Several years before, while out looking for deer, Boris was bitten by a Siberian grass tick and consequently spent a month in hospital. Since his release, Boris has suffered from occasional erratic behaviour, and mood swings, which are all attributed to tick-borne encephalitis. As a result he became quite paranoid with regard to his and everyone else’s health. As well as seeing a trained doctor, Boris also visits a Chinese herbalist at least once a month and each time he returns he is convinced that he has a new family of worms inside him. Nastya and I both agree that the damage caused by the bug bite is allowing him to be exploited, and yet she herself refused to see a trained medical professional with her kidney stone.
Nastya is so highly influenced by what I refer to as ‘mumbo jumbo’ it occasionally puts a strain on our relationship. While out walking somewhere, Nastya is convinced that we pick up ‘microbes’ (pronounced meek-robes). These microbes are apparently evil and stick to your shoes and your trousers when you’re out and about. When I came home, if I wore the same trousers while sitting down on a chair or the bed, Nastya would shout ‘Now you have infected that with meekrobes.’ I don’t see the logic in it. If I take off my jeans and hang them on the back of the chair, the chair is then infected, which will infect the floor, anything that walks on the floor, and eventually the bed. There was a similar instance in Paris where Nastya said she couldn’t sit on the stone wall next to the Seine with me because ‘If a woman sits on stone she gets ill in her ladyparts.’ I’m not sure if that is true or not, but there were several other couples sat on that stone wall in Paris that seemed to be just fine. Though Nastya loves romance, her weird and wonderful belief system can often kill the moment.
Domovoi
Another thing we should have probably discussed before getting married was Nastya’s belief in little men, or little, invisible, bearded men to be more precise. The domovoi is a small man who Nastya and many other Russians believe lives in one’s apartment or dacha. Although it is said to be a house spirit of sorts, Nastya, among others, claims to have ‘seen him.’ Apparently domovoi are always male, about a foot tall, have long beards or are totally covered in hair, like Dougal from The Magic Roundabout; though I prefer to think of domovoi as being like the goblins from Jim Henson’s film Labyrinth. Partly because I love David Bowie, and if domovoi are real, I’d like them to be like Hoggle, the dwarf who led Sarah into the labyrinth; even though Sarah was a girl, when I was young I very much wanted to be in her shoes so I could get to see David Bowie dance his Magic Dance.
Traditionally, every home is said to have its domovoi, although according to Nastya, domovoi only live in good houses or apartments. To quote Nastya directly: ‘He turns off taps if you leave them on when you go out, and if he doesn’t turn off the tap he will do something by magic which makes you remember, like send you a cosmic mental signal. Many relatives have seen him. He is white, very hairy, and has a long nose.’
Domovoi are often held responsible for items in the home being mislaid or lost. Some believe he simply likes to play tricks on people, while others believe that he is angered by messiness and/or foul language. This would explain why only Nastya’s things go missing. She often leaves unwashed dishes in the bedroom and has a habit of carpeting the floor every morning with clothes from the wardrobe. Nastya also has a terrible habit of losing earrings. With the exception of a pair we bought in Paris, she seems incapable of owning a complete pair for more than a day. Usually after looking for the missing earring for five minutes, Nastya would blame its absence on domovoi. If you suspect that your stuff has been stolen by domovoi it is said that if you ask for it back aloud, he will magically return what you’ve been looking for, usually in a place you’ve already looked. According to Nastya, it helps if you leave out a bowl of something sweet. Nastya very much believes in this. In fact, many Siberians I’ve spoken to believe that domovoi are as real as the words you see before you. Some say he likes to do the washing up when everyone is asleep, while others say he lives behind the oven or at the back of the wardrobe, and comes out at night to see you’ve swept the floor properly. One person even told me that they had woken one night to find a domovoi sat on their chest and no matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t lift their arms to push him away. I’ve actually heard other stories similar to that one, which is disturbing. If I woke to find some malevolent bearded goblin sat on my chest, and I had lost all strength in my arms, I’d probably leave Russia at the first available opportunity.
While this all sounds like complete and utter madness, you must remember that to many Russians the domovoi are part of real life. Though some laugh at the idea of house spirits, my mother-in-law being one of them, they still attribute the safe return of some item (that may have been lost) to a supernatural power; if not domovoi, then something equally magic. After all, missing keys don’t return themselves. While I am not entirely convinced by the existence of domovoi, my love for Jim Henson films and the fact I went to see The Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring in the cinema six times (seven if you count The Lord of the Rings cinema marathon in 2003) makes it an easier superstition to accept, and even enjoy. There is sweetness to it, and though it may be totally bonkers to believe in little men who live in the wardrobe and who love to wash the dishes, people have believed in way more far-fetched ideas. For instance, some people believe a bearded man in the sky decided to make the earth in seven days, apparently for no good reason at all. Perhaps when he was casting humans in his big holy Plaster of Paris moulds, he made a few domovoi as practice runs. Who knows?
