There are many more Siberian superstitions. Apparently it is forbidden to demonstrate something bad that happened to you or someone else in the past using your own or someone else’s body. For instance, if you’re talking about a broken arm you had as a kid or a time when you saw someone with a broken arm, you couldn’t point towards your own arm and say ‘it was like this’, because, according to Siberian superstition, your own arm would soon become broken. If you do point to yourself without thinking while in the midst of conversation you then have to ‘grab’ the bad energy you just put into yourself and throw it into the air, then blow on your hands to clean them also. This one has brought me no end of irritation. When talking to Nastya, I often use hand gestures to emphasise certain words or point to a limb of mine when talking about previous accidents of others. No sooner have I pointed to the limb, I am always stopped mid-sentence and brushed down. Even if we are in the middle of the street Nastya will do this unashamedly, which was a little bit embarrassing for me at first but I got used to it after the hundredth time.
Returning home for forgotten things is especially bad. It rouses all kinds of demons and Slavic monsters from wherever they live. If you have forgotten something it’s considered wise to leave it behind, but if you absolutely have to go back and get it you should look in the mirror with your tongue hanging out before leaving again. There were times when I left my gloves at home by mistake in the spring, which left me no choice but to go back for them. When I did, Nastya pleaded with me to poke my tongue out in front of the mirror and wiggle it about for a second. This was horrendously funny to me, but to Nastya it was a very serious issue. I couldn’t help laughing, and when faced with Nastya’s scornful expression it just made it all the funnier.
If a bird lands outside your window you have to tap the glass to get it to bugger off. Although if a bird accidentally flies into the glass or taps on it, beware, because this will rouse the Slavic bird monsters. If a bird flies through an open window and spends some time inside, this is considered the worst of all. This means someone in your family will die soon or accidentally be squashed by evils. This one was already familiar to me as my mother used to say ‘If you see a white owl on the windowsill you will die’. As a young boy, I took this quite seriously and as a test I spent a number of hours at the window to see if I could spot one. I never did though. There aren’t many white owls in Cardiff apparently.
People walking down the street together must never walk on opposite sides of any given obstacle; they must choose one side or the other, even if they end up walking in single file. Again, while walking with Nastya, she often pulled me around bollards or other people as a means to keep us together. Observing this ritual makes it almost impossible to get somewhere in a hurry. If we did end up walking around something separately, she insisted on us saying ‘Hello’ to each other. We’re supposed to say it a hundred times, but I tend to stop after two.
Birthday parties must never be celebrated before the actual date. If you wish someone a happy birthday before the day, they might suffer some sort of bad luck or devils will come. Talking about future success, whistling in the apartment, putting an empty bottle back on the table, shaking hands across the threshold of a doorway, and not draining your glass before you put it down, all bring bad luck or raise devils. I’m sorry to say that I have been guilty of all of these at some point or another and with so many superstition rules broken it is likely that I’ve raised enough devils to cause quite a commotion. So if I have inadvertently instigated some sort of future apocalypse, I apologise. The only Siberian rule that I do observe and quite agree with is that if you have alcohol, it must be drunk until it’s gone.
Water is also a big deal in Russia. I suffer from psoriasis, one of the ugliest of skin diseases. This autoimmune disorder is incurable, although cortisones and creams with a high steroid content can keep it at bay. During the winter of 2010, my psoriasis erupted, and turned from a small patch of blisters on my chest to a patch of red that covered 90 per cent of me. With my skin peeling from my face, I looked more like a burns victim. In fact, many of my friends asked if I had been in a fire. Before the arrival of summer in 2011, I had managed to soften most of the effects using steroid creams, although this is only a short-term fix. The closest thing to a cure is a high dosage of – or a prolonged exposure to – UV rays.
In February 2011, I was referred to a specialist in the NHS who recommended I volunteer myself for what is known as ‘light therapy’. This involves being zapped by a shockingly powerful sunbed several times a week over a three-month period. Light therapy is an extreme measure and so one is only allowed a relatively low number of five-minute exposures in a lifetime. Having had psoriasis since I was twenty-three, and knowing that the sun is one giant source of UV, I decided to opt out of my hospital treatment and go sunbathing instead. Controlled and regulated sunbathing is a method I had used before in the UK, only with my condition so bad I needed a warmer climate. This is why I chose to spend as much of July as I could sunbathing at the dacha. Nastya however didn’t believe any of this, and thought the only possible way for me to be cured would be a trip to some ‘magic lake’ with healing minerals. Either this or rubbing my skin with some kind of oily cloth; the oil would be magic of course. While rubbing oil or moisturiser into dry psoriasis skin can rejuvenate it for a day, it is no cure. As a compromise, I alternated sunbathing on the lawn outside the dacha with swimming in a lake close by. The sun did its job and burned off the majority of my psoriasis skin, leaving me slightly pink and a little tanned. Although Nastya saw the effects of my methods, she still insisted on knowing better. Having had my disease for many years, and having tried every possible cure going, from NHS-recommended creams to the very ridiculous series of magnets worn on the wrist, there was nobody who knew how to deal with psoriasis better than me. Being told everything I knew was somehow wrong and that I could be ‘cured’ by magic was rather hurtful.
In some parts of Russia there is still a belief that natural cures are more powerful than modern medicine. I know that most modern pain relievers and anaesthetics are synthetic versions of real herbs designed to emulate the effect of natural healing qualities found in plants. I can’t argue against those who believe in natural remedies – I was, after all, temporarily healed by the sun – however, I think that relying purely on alternative medicine can be detrimental to one’s health. For instance, early in July Nastya was taken to hospital suffering abdominal pain, and was informed that she had a small kidney stone that needed to be operated on. Instead of accepting this and having the small operation required, Nastya, who is highly influenced by Boris, decided to take her problem to a Chinese herbalist who prescribed all sorts of fluids and pills created from natural herbs. Regardless of continued discomfort, she was adamant that the herbs she had ingested would work over a long period of time, when in fact we had no proof that they were doing anything at all.