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.
We went home shattered and slightly demoralised. Nastya filled in the form online and submitted it; this took several attempts as my photograph needed to be scanned and attached to the form with the focus perfect and lighting just so. In addition, the photograph we had taken by a professional photographer had a light blue background, and it needed to be grey. It was all very annoying and Nastya cursed a tremendous amount. Meanwhile I contacted the British embassy in Moscow who replied the next day. The certificate I needed had to be obtained from my local police station in Cardiff and would be issued forty days exactly after I paid £10 and made an official request. Both those trips to London had been unnecessary. It was the first and only mistake I made with regard to visas and immigration stuff. Not bad really, considering how many Hula-Hoops I had to jump through.
ii. Propaganda
Sitting in the new apartment I felt relief at being able to stay in one place for three months. When in the UK I usually had to travel a lot for work; not only that, but I had rented rooms since the age of twenty and had to leave the house I had been living in for five years after I left my bank job in 2007. Since then, and before meeting Nastya, I had spent years trying to make my way in the world of literature while sleeping here there and everywhere. I didn’t make the transition to my parents’ houses immediately, at first I sofa-surfed. In one year I slept in over two hundred different places, including one night on a large inflatable crocodillo. Many see the life of a poet as debauched, full of women, drink and dossing around for the fun of it. In reality, a poet’s life is full of study with the constant worry of where to spend the night. Drink just eases the destitution a fraction. Now we had an apartment of our own, a bed, walls, a door, and a new fridge – I had never had a new fridge before – the sensation of beginning a fresh life was exaggerated because everything was shiny. We had to buy forks and spoons and things like measuring jugs. We only had two plates; we needed more. It had taken many years of trying different careers, travelling around, sleeping in odd places, and a few failed relationships, but looking around at our very own place of tranquillity I could see that life was finally shaping out just like I wished it.
As Nastya was the breadwinner, I took it upon myself to clean the apartment and do the cooking. Vacuum cleaners do exist in Russia, although I have never seen one, or know of anybody who has one. Instead, Russians use a broomstick, like the type that witches are supposed to fly about on, but with a slightly shorter handle. When Nastya was in work I would sweep away, and then do the mopping. I became a perfectly house-proud househusband. Washing machines in Russia are also a bit different. They look like normal machines front-on but they are not very deep. This is because there simply isn’t the room in most Russian apartments to house a full-size machine. It is a waste of space. Washing machines can be anything from 8,000 roubles (about £160); we didn’t have that sort of money lying spare so I carried our washing to Nastya’s parents’ apartment and used theirs every two weeks or as needed. When we only had a few small things to wash like pants and socks, I did them in the bath by hand. At first I was pissed off by the situation – because I had grown up in a world of washing machines – but it also served as a reminder about my childhood. When I was a boy we had had a humungous machine that took up half the kitchen, and when it died my dad put it in the back garden to rot. It wasn’t completely useless as it turned out to be the perfect place for my sisters and I to store our Plaster of Paris sculptures of soldiers we made from a kit we had been given by an aunt. We never painted them, and so when the machine was later taken by the council to the scrapyard it had in its drum a ball of white powdery soldiers, bound together by fungus. During that time my mum had to wash the clothes in the bath. I must have been about five or six but I remember with absolute clarity how hard she worked. Her hands were red, blistered, and cold to the touch because the hot water was too expensive to use. Rinsing my pants in unlimited hot water, I thought of her and all the pains she had gone through to raise four kids. It was hard enough for me just to wash the clothes of two, let alone a family of six.
Sometimes, when I didn’t want to visit Nastya’s parents or wash clothes in the bath, I was given a helping hand by one of our neighbours. Directly across from our apartment, on the eastern side of the building lives Benya, an old school friend of Nastya’s. She lent us many things over the summer and let us use her washing machine from time to time. As a thank you for her help, we often invited her to our apartment for weekend drinks. For some reason we were never invited to her apartment. It was clear that Benya obsessed over her body and self-image, to the point of looking like Lolo Ferrari, but Nastya suspected she took less care of her apartment, which was rumoured to look like a cross between a Barbie house and an overflowing skip. Even so, with Benya’s generosity we were able to get by quite easily until we could afford all the kitchen utensils and furniture we needed, and her constant pouting also provided us with hours of entertainment on weekends.
It was a tremendously hot summer, much worse than 2011. The temperature rose to 38°C in June and lingered around that point until mid-August. If we had lived with Nastya’s parents I would have walked around in what is known as a home-shirt. This is a very Russian thing; it’s a standard length, thick, checkered shirt that is made of a cheap material so it’s okay to get it dirty. It was so hot that I couldn’t bother with my home-shirt at all; I didn’t bother with any shirt for that matter. In the privacy of our own home Nastya and I walked around in our birthday suits. This was still too many clothes. Sat at the kitchen table, which fast became my favourite place to write, a pool of sweat would appear at my feet and fill my home shoes. This perspiration was constant, even if I didn’t wear anything. To cool off we would both take cold showers every hour, without bothering to dry ourselves as we would be soaking again within five minutes anyway. Our balcony became our cooling-off place. After cold showers we would stand for a few minutes on the balcony with the blinds completely closed and the windows open all the way. The balcony windows are very tall and are of the sliding frame variety, fully open they let in a lovely cool breeze; at night-time, we occasionally put a mattress down on the balcony floor and slept there, even though we were eaten by mosquitoes.