Outside our apartment there is an old chest of drawers that has long been abandoned. Inside there is a variety of junk, including old calendars. When Boris visited he normally had a rummage around in the chest to see if there was anything of value. He took one of the calendars home as the paper was quite thick and could be used to wrap food in his hunting kit. Nastya told me that Boris once salvaged a pile of left over material and animal fur from the rubbish dump outside his apartment, which pleased Nataliya Petrovna no end. Boris didn’t care; he washed the material several times and after a period of weeks had fashioned himself a very smart fur waistcoat. At the dacha I watched as he took an old square piece of wood that I thought was junk, and made a new seat for the boat he uses to go hunting. He spent hours every evening with the wood on his lap, carving away with his chisels until he had a seat with intricate carving that looked professionally made. It just goes to show that one Western man’s rubbish is another Siberian man’s hunting accessory.
When I wasn’t learning the art of growing veg or ploughing the land in summer, Nastya and I would walk through the forest in between rows of old dachas to get to one of the nearby lakes. Sometimes we would go for a swim but more often than not we would just sit and watch the world go by. Seeing the perfectly sculpted bodies of the young men in the lake made me too self-conscious to get my kit off and reveal my well-fed poet’s physique. To get to our favourite lake we walked along a path that led halfway to Pugachevo train station. This route was littered with giant concrete blocks with old twisted steel spikes protruding at all angles. No one could explain why they were there. I assumed they were once protection or housing for the many rusting fuel tanks found littering Pugachevo. These beasts are ex-cargo railway wagons, roughly 50 ft long and at least 20 ft high; I assumed that before Pugachevo was a dacha territory it must have had another purpose, unless those tanks were used for water before the wells were dug and the piping laid from the lakes to the dachas.
There are many Soviet ruins throughout Krasnoyarsk and the neighbouring dacha territories that are all gradually eroding; disused factories are crumbling to the ground, leaving twisted steel bars reaching out from the rubble like the fingers of some terrible machine buried alive. Any parts of the Soviet machine that are of use have been salvaged: factory walls and roofs have become dacha walls and vegetable dividers. It’s as if Russia is a giant recycling plant, only in the process of separating the useful from the rubbish its task is to reconstruct itself at the same time.
When we were tired of the lake we sometimes walked the twenty-minute path to Pugachevo train station on the very edge of the dacha territory. There isn’t an actual station, just a small shop next to the tracks. This became one of my favourite pastimes. With the platform at ground level, people using the trains had to climb up and down using a handrail; when I watched them clambering aboard it reminded me of my own journey on the Trans-Siberian – when the train stopped in remote places, like Pugachevo, where if there wasn’t a little shop there was nothing at all. On our journey the train sometimes rested in what seemed like the middle of nowhere. In these obscure and remote locations I felt like I was in the middle of some great adventure where anything could happen and everything was possible. Pugachevo train station evoked these feelings in me without my even possessing a train ticket; although, as it was summer, it looked more like a scene from an old spaghetti western than the white winter voyage I had experienced in 2011. Nastya grew tired of my romantic train obsession and I eventually began walking to the station on my own. Sitting on one of the benches just a few feet from the tracks I became addicted to the rush of adrenalin as cargo trains hurtled past. They had strange Russian symbols on them and company logos that were alien to me. Mostly the wagons carried timber to the west, but occasionally I saw rows of Japanese car transports, nuclear waste containers, tanks, helicopters and various other military hardware en route to Moscow. When they careered down the line and out of view, I would wait for the afternoon passenger trains, because these drew people from miles around. I watched as humans in the distance advanced along the tracks, over the hills and through the forests, while carrying with them sacks of vegetables, pets, or dragging their tired children behind them. It was such a colourful and unusual daily spectacle that even when I wasn’t there, if I heard a train in the distance from the dacha I couldn’t help but stop and picture it. When I was a boy I had been given a train set by my parents for Christmas, however with our house two sizes too small I never got to set it up properly. It became a dream to see it all fully functioning one day, with my dad forever promising to buy me a large board to set it up on. After my teenage years I lost most of it through moving here and there. The engines were boxed up, the wagons misplaced and the little plastic people never even got to travel to the other side of my bedroom. This inability to see my toy trains move is probably partly to blame for my love of Pugachevo train station. I don’t care for train serial numbers or wagon listings, but I am in love with the buzz of life the station attracts and the continual sense of movement.
Evenings at the dacha were often filled with watching episodes of Friends and Desperate Housewives with Nastya, on a small television linked to a karaoke machine that doubled as a DVD player. As I become more of a dachaman, or dachnik, Nastya increasingly liked to watch awful American TV serials as a way of escape; she may have been born Siberian but for some reason Nastya never fell in love with the old ways of living, preferring instead the metropolitan life of Krasnoyarsk city. Nastya has never gotten to grips with life without a hot shower or soft expensive mattresses, and as punishment for my insistence on us living at the dacha made me watch TV programmes full of people living the American dream. Often I escaped from this nightmare by writing poetry in a dark corner or reading one of the several translated volumes of Yevtushenko I had brought with me from the UK.
I also spent many evenings outside Dima’s dacha, sitting at the table and eating shashliks. Marina and Dima usually brought back some chicken or pork with them on their way home from work but it’s not unusual in Russia to eat several other types of meat. The rule of thumb seemed to be that if it has more than two legs there is room for it on the barbeque; although we never barbequed horsemeat we did eat it from tins. I thought it strange that a man such as myself, who has spent a considerable chunk of his life in Pentyrch stables tending to the needs of horses, should find himself eating horsemeat in Siberia.
Over the summer, Marina’s mother Luda had decided to stay with them. By day she looked out for Semka while Dima and Marina were working, and in the evening they helped prepare food. I didn’t fully understand why Luda was staying at Dima’s dacha, nor where she had come from but I was thankful because she was quite light-hearted and fun to be around. However, even though Luda was one of the easiest people to be around, as Marina’s mother it was clear to see where Marina got her hardness from. Luda gave the impression she was a woman never to be crossed; she had a physical frame a Siberian lynx would be proud of, and I’m sure she had all the same killing abilities to boot.