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.