As Nastya was stuck in her office whole nights and I’d now spent three months without work, my sleeping pattern became erratic. I would stay up all night when I was alone, and sleep in the day with Nastya when she returned at 9 a.m. Those were strange nights. Usually after eating, washing, doing the dishes and sweeping the floor with the broomstick, I settled down at the kitchen table to write. I sat in the corner next to the radiator, as far from the fridge as possible, because if I sat close to the fridge I would be visible to the residents in the opposite block. We started leaving the blinds open when the balcony windows were open, because if the blinds were shut they would rattle in the wind and be loud enough to annoy our neighbours and alert the world that our apartment was wide open. Between midnight and sunrise I wrote by the light of my laptop, keeping the lamp off so as not to be seen. I became quite paranoid during those nights. I think this had a lot to do with total isolation, having only Nastya to speak to online, and the continuous explosions coming from the nearby electricity sub-station, which made me feel that I was alive in some Solzhenitsyn novel where the KGB bugged all the rooms and had fake neighbours positioned in the apartments with a view of ours. When I wanted to make tea, I would walk very slowly over to the counter even though it was only a few feet away, because the floor boards would creak when I stepped on them.
I didn’t want to make a sound at night, and I didn’t want to be seen either. Sat in the darkness I often had the feeling of being watched. I suspected other nocturnal people existed in the opposite building. Sometimes I could see a shadow moving on one of the balconies; sometimes a cigarette would be lit. I was always careful to light my cigarette with my hands covering the lighter, but it was no use, I could always be seen no matter how careful I was. When I saw someone stood in the darkness on their balcony, often staring, watching for any movement, I had the distinct impression that they were watching me; I could feel their eyes on me. Regardless of how careful I was, I couldn’t blend into the darkness as well as my Siberian neighbours. They were experts. I might as well have turned on all the lights and worn sparkly clothes because I was about as good at discretion as a blazing bonfire. This ability to see without being seen is a skill I assume most people learned during the Soviet years. Everyone was naturally suspicious of everyone else; your neighbour could be an informer, or worse, your neighbour could be KGB. Why were you awake so late? Were you writing? What were you writing? I had seen for myself how people still shy away from each other in the street; that fear of saying the wrong thing or speaking to the wrong person still exists. It is safer not to speak, not to write, but if you do have to write, as I do, it’s important to learn how to be a shadow. You never know who is watching.
There would sometimes be a ring at the door when I was home alone. When the bell rung, I froze; very few people answer the door to strangers, or even the militia, choosing instead to communicate through closed doors. With my limited Russian I couldn’t even do that. Instead I turned off any music and pretended I wasn’t there. I couldn’t open the peep-hole at the centre of the door as it would have let light out and made it obvious I was there, plus the fact that our floor creaks like hell. If the bell rang before midnight it was sometimes Benya who had run out of sugar or coffee; though she normally phoned Nastya who would then call me from her office. Sometimes the bell rang in the early hours, while I was writing or sleeping. We had bought the apartment from a middle-aged single mum with a teenage son; logic dictated some of the daytime calls were possibly his friends or family members who didn’t know they had moved. The night-time calls could not be explained. Despite our steel-plated front door, every time the bell rang it scared the hell out of me as I also knew that there are keys available on the black market that are specifically designed for opening Russian doors; they have several malleable segments at the tip and make armoured doors as useful as paper shutters. Though someone with such a key probably wouldn’t have rung the bell if they’d wanted to get in. Those late night calls were likely caused by a drunken neighbour pressing the wrong button outside the door at the end of the corridor, but it was impossible to know at the time. The fact was we lived in a decrepit old building and had some very dubious looking neighbours; when I took the lift in the morning to get cigarettes, there were occasional pools of blood on the floor mixed with other human juices. Although I really loved our new apartment, and having time alone to write, those solitary nights were some of the most terrifying I’ve ever had.
vi. Krasnoyarsk 26, the Secret City
Not all of my time alone during those all-nighters was spent writing. Much time was also spent pissing about on the internet, talking to Nastya on Facebook Chat and looking up odd facts about Russia, in between tiptoeing to the kitchen to make tea.
While looking into the history of Krasnoyarsk, I kept coming across the phrase ‘Krasnoyarsk nuclear contamination’. I found dozens of articles giving sketchy details of Krasnoyarsk’s nuclear facilities and an apparent environmental disaster. In my sleep-deprived state of delirium, reading reports of contamination, radiation sicknesses and pollution of the Yenisei, my heart raced with caffeinated panic at the thought that I might be living in a nuclear-contaminated city. While some articles referred to Krasnoyarsk, others referred to Krasnoyarsk 26 (K26) and Krasnoyarsk 45 (K45). I typed these names into Google maps hoping to distinguish one from the other. I had no such luck; the map led straight to the centre of Krasnoyarsk city. This is because K26 and K45 were no longer known by these names, but were now Zheleznogorsk and Zelenogorsk respectively. With further research I discovered that K26 and K45 were ‘secret cities’, created during the cold war to produce weapons-grade plutonium and enriched uranium. The reason I couldn’t find them on the map was that under the Soviet Union, secret cities were given names of PO Boxes inside well-established cities. K45 is the number of a post office located in Krasnoyarsk, while K26, I am told, is a PO Box number that probably refers to a village just a few miles out from Krasnoyarsk city.
Since the collapse of the USSR, the existence of forty-two secret cities, now known as closed cities, has been disclosed to the public, while there are rumours that at least another fifteen or more have not yet been revealed. Until 1992 these closed cities didn’t exist on any maps. There were no road signs to or from them and their names didn’t appear on train timetables. To gain access people were subject to document checks and were required to obtain special permission from the KGB. Closed cities were often protected by a perimeter fence, barbed wire and security checkpoints. Although they looked like giant prison camps, the residents, of which there were normally more than fifty thousand per city, were able to come and go, as long as they didn’t give any reference to where they had come from. Their very homes were deemed ‘classified information’. K26 was established in 1950 for the production of plutonium. Also known as ‘Atom Town’ and the ‘Iron City’, much of K26 was built underground at huge expense to protect it from nuclear attack. Defence complexes including nuclear fuel production reactors, bomb production and radioactive waste removal plants were built within caverns inside the granite mountain on the northern edge of the city. This was an ideal place as compared with most other types of rock, granite has been known to contain a higher amount of naturally occurring radioactive elements such as radium, uranium and thorium, which meant any foreign technology with the ability to detect radioactive particles would overlook this site.
Throughout my late night investigation into K26, I was confused by many of the articles I read including a BBC article from 1998 which came complete with a map of Russia with a little radiation sign over Krasnoyarsk; this is because some articles referred to Krasnoyarsk, when in fact they were discussing facilities at K26 and K45. Occasionally articles mentioned Krasnoyarsk when they were referring to the entire region rather than the city. This inaccurate information led to me working myself into a state the following day; I decided to conduct my own tests. I emailed many of my friends in the UK who I knew to have careers in science or who worked for a university and could therefore approach someone who knew about radiation and nuclear contamination. I also needed a Geiger counter. Boris, who has hunted all over Siberia has a Geiger counter that he uses to ensure the ground he hunts on, the berries he picks and the deer he catches aren’t radioactive. After a quick word with Nastya, Boris came over to our flat the morning following my night of research. With his help, we tested all the food in the fridge, the water, every room of the apartment and nearly every household object. It turned out that the most radioactive item was the laptop I had brought with me from the UK. Panic over. However, Boris did explain to me through Nastya that while most things in Krasnoyarsk were safe, there were items sold in shops that were contaminated with radiation from K26, as well as areas in Krasnoyarsk south of the river that while not entirely radioactive, were contaminated through pollution from the metal factories. From that day on, we were very careful about what we bought in the supermarkets, questioning the origin of each product. Some shop staff were surprised and even smirked when we told them we didn’t want chicken from cities known to be radioactive. They were either totally unaware such food contamination existed or were amused by our concern, because they believed the notion of radioactive chicken was far-fetched.