Other than Benya, we didn’t get to know our other neighbours very well. We did however get to learn a bit about our neighbour in the apartment above us. Almost every night he played loud trance music and had people over who would dance until 3 a.m. It was worst on weekends, there were more people and we would sometimes see them hanging out of the balcony window above us, smoking cigarettes and dribbling mucus. We determined that our music-loving neighbour was in his early twenties. Although we never knew his name, due to his late night partying he came to be known as ‘that bastard’. At around 3 to 4 a.m. his parties would end and it quietened down enough to get some decent sleep. This affected Nastya more than it did me, as I wasn’t working and I’ve had insomnia since 2005. Also I grew up in Ely, where late-night parties on any night are the norm.
I know how important it is for a young man to look after and nurture his ‘man-image’; young men always do their utmost to dress well and must be seen to listen to the most popular tunes of the time, though everyone has their secret guilty pleasures. When I was sixteen and listening to the likes of the Manics and Joy Division, my guilty pleasure was ABBA – The Movie. So it came as no surprise to me when at 8:30 a.m. after the party hard-man had been asleep just a few hours, I would be woken by his alarm; in place of a normal ringing sound or the radio coming on, I was woken by Bucks Fizz ‘The Land of Make Believe’ at full volume. It’s amazing what guilty pop pleasures some people have, most but not all of which are entirely forgivable.
On days when Nastya was working, after I had cleaned the apartment I could either sit in the kitchen and write or lean out the balcony window and watch the world go by. I could have left the apartment if I’d wanted to, and I did want to, but I was still afraid. Not knowing the language crippled me. Plus I was intimidated by the streets and the people who walked along them. It wasn’t like Paris where I could scrape by on the pigeon French I had been forced to learn in high school. In Russia I had no means of communication and the architecture, the pavements, even the birds of prey circling outside the balcony helped cement my view that I was in a hostile country. If I stepped out of the front door and locked it behind me, I couldn’t guarantee my safe return.
Across from our building was a small scrap of grass, partly covered in litter and dog shit. Over the summer I watched as a babushka came out of her apartment, cleaned the area, dug the ground, fenced it off and planted a small herb garden. She came out every day in the early morning and late afternoon to water her plants. Her little garden was never vandalised, the young people seemed to have an ingrained sense of respect for the babushkas and the efforts they made. It wasn’t just one little garden opposite us, everywhere in Krasnoyarsk I saw the elderly tidying the areas outside their dilapidated apartment buildings. They made a great effort and it made an astonishing difference to the suburban areas of the city. Whether in summer or winter, the most common sight in Krasnoyarsk is seeing the many babushkas walking around with food shopping. My mother-in-law is one of them. She may be in her sixties but the rule is that anyone with grandchildren, regardless of age, is a babushka. Though Nataliya Petrovna once broke her neck in a serious accident that almost killed her when she was younger, she still managed to accomplish everything she needed to and more. She looked after Semka during weekdays and some weekends, took him to school, took him to his karate class, took him shopping – there was nothing that was too much for her. During the summer months she always helps Boris plant the crops at the dacha and waters them every day. At the apartment she has to climb the four flights of concrete stairs many times a day. She shifts furniture, barrels of water, logs for the fire, anything. To look at the way she moves and the way she lives, she puts Nastya and me to shame. It may sound strange and probably a bit patronising for me to praise her this way, because she is after all only in her sixties, and this is still quite a young age, but there is a huge difference between pensioners in Siberia and pensioners in Britain. By retirement age a Siberian has not only lived through sixty winters, but sixty Siberian winters. The weather, the painful and life-threatening cold takes its toll on people’s bodies, to the point that I would say a Siberian winter is worth two or three British winters. Compared with my grandparents in the UK, Nataliya Petrovna is a superwoman, though in Russia she is no different from the millions of other babushkas. When I see them doing their daily shopping, with hunched backs and short legs, they look like small armoured vehicles. There is no weight that is too much, no distance too far, and no weather system too harsh; babushkas are the backbone of Russia, and without them the country would come to a standstill.
Something else I noticed during the summer was the repair of the roads. In my poem ‘There are no problems in Russia’ I state that there are many roads with potholes that drivers need to swerve constantly in order to avoid. This is true but not all year round. The winter ice is often several inches if not several feet thick, and this ice lifts paving slabs, wreaking havoc with flat surfaces. In the summer of 2012, I witnessed a major effort to replace thousands of paving and kerb stones. A small army of construction workers laboured away all summer laying new paving and filling the potholes created by the winter ice. I was wrong to give the impression that the roads in Russia are broken and the problem ignored. Seeing the huge workforce made me realise what an unimaginably expensive affair it must be to keep the roads in constant good repair. Russia is big enough to swallow central Europe several times over, it’s hard to conceive how many roads there are, the quantity of materials needed and the manpower required to keep it all working smoothly. Another line in my poem insinuates the militia is corrupt and only ever intervenes in crimes where it can squeeze a bribe out of someone. I have never seen this in real life. I have actually enjoyed a slice of cake and a cup of coffee in a café while sat at a table next to some militia on their lunch break. They did not ask to see my papers even though I was clearly speaking English. Similarly I have never been harassed or stopped in the street, though I stand out like an amateur among poets. Shamefully I have to admit that this poem is largely influenced by anti-Russian propaganda, and a few articles in newspapers, and as time passes a lot of my early beliefs and impressions have been altered by my own Siberian experiences.
iii. Line of Sight
In the middle of July, on one of the hottest days, Nastya took me to a place called Orbit; this is a concrete platform near a branch of the Siberian Federal University, on the north west side of the riverbank. It’s quite high above sea level and offers a view of riverside dachas below as well as the city centre to the east. It’s a favourite place for lovers to go in summer because of its remoteness. There is also the best view of Krasnoyarsk Railway Bridge anywhere in the city; this bridge is famous for carrying part of the Trans-Siberian Railway across the Yenisei. It is one of the most romantic bridges in the world and I was glad to see it from such a great viewpoint. Near Orbit is a small suburban area named Akademgorodok, or the Academia City. It’s not so much a city, more a little cul-de-sac where the students live in relatively smart looking apartments. A few hundred metres west of this is another suburban area with twenty or so buildings. These are some of the poorest looking apartments in the city and a stark contrast to the student buildings.