When I started at the bank in 2002, the boss who was forever kissing my arse for some reason, called me Chairman Mao, as M.A.O. were the initials I signed letters with. It stuck. I didn’t hate my birth name, Michael is after all the name of some archangel, and a keyring I bought when I was on a school trip at the age of five had said ‘Michaeclass="underline" who is like the lord’, but having the same name as my father had left me feeling as though I didn’t have an identity of my own and without this I struggled to live as a human being separate from him. However, sat on that plane, my birth name, printed on my ticket was one of the few things I had to identify myself as myself.
My sister Mab, who was born Michelle Anastasia Oliver, had suffered the same identity crisis as me; she was after all another M.A.O. After running through every stage of the education system with flying colours she had gone to live in Japan in 2001, to make a living teaching English while learning the fine art of karaoke.
In March 2006, after years of drudgery, self-loathing, boredom and despair caused by working in a bank, I received a phone call from the pub next to work. It was Mab. I left the office early and told my boss I would have a very long lunch. My sister looked confident; she had brighter eyes and was a shadow of the self-doubting person I had known in previous years. After a few pints she pronounced she was going to be a famous writer and poet, and asked if I would care to be her warm up act. Soon after that I quit my job and started writing full time, taking on a few menial jobs to keep the wolves from the door. Three years later, Mab prepared a show named D-Day and invited me to take part in it, alongside a small army of other poets and writers. As an anti-nationalist she had the idea that we would read to a bilingual Welsh/English audience on St David’s Day while ridiculing nationalism. Many years earlier, while explaining to a friend of a friend my frustration at having failed my Welsh A-level, and how hard it was to integrate with the fluent Welsh-speaking society, she had joked that I may as well have learned Russian; in preparing for the D-Day show I remembered her words and considered them further. I decided to deliver my entire performance in Russian.
Using a series of social networking sites I was able to identify many people who had the words ‘Russian translator’ as part of their history or interests. After looking at a few candidates and not having the slightest clue who to go for, I thought best to choose one entirely at random. After a brief introduction and some begging, Anastasia Semenova, a telecommunications engineer with a background in literature and translation agreed to translate my poem for free. Not only had I found a translator but I had also found my future wife.
Every day after work I would switch on my computer just to speak to Anastasia (Nastya to her friends) on Facebook Chat. Nastya, being in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, was seven hours ahead; when it was 5 p.m. for me it was midnight for her. We never had much time to talk but we cherished every minute. At first we found friendship in the fact we had both recently come out of difficult relationships. I had dated a woman from 2006 to 2008, and this union had ended badly. Nastya had lived through a similar relationship, in almost the same time frame. So we confided in each other about how we felt, which felt easier than talking to our other friends because of the very fact that we were two people who hardly knew each other. We were entirely different from one another – perfect opposites – however our friendship strengthened as we were both heartbroken, very lonely, and yet very determined in a pact to steer ourselves away from our past lives and live as independently as we could. This seemed like a fine idea, only the more we talked of independence the more we drew together; and the more we designed our own way in the world the more our desires collided. Although neither of us wanted to be romantically involved with someone else, we couldn’t help but forge a romantic bond. Exchanges of personal philosophies led to an exchange of photographs. Exchanges of photos led to exchanges of feelings. At twenty four, Nastya looked very much like a young Sophie Marceau, and although I was four years older, I still had a brilliant head of Dirty Harry hair to speak for me. Plus I was a cyclist with a cyclist’s frame. Though we had few things in common, besides our ruined love affairs, our fondness for one another grew to the point we couldn’t pass a day without a phone call. By Christmas time, we were in love, although I had also become unemployed, couch-surfing the living rooms and kindnesses of friends and relatives.
We had known each other for nearly a year and yet we hadn’t actually met face-to-face. In November, to pay for our first meeting I took a part-time job working early hours in a supermarket. Nastya decided that our first encounter would be in Paris in the New Year, on January 7th, which just happened to be Russian Christmas Day. As it was winter and a particularly harsh one at that, the snow and ice had limited the Eurostar travel to only two trains a day. News coverage reported hourly how so many hundreds of people were stranded in St Pancras, London, and it was advised not to travel if you didn’t have to. On the morning of the 7th, I left Cardiff for London on the National Express. An hour after we had crossed the Severn Bridge, it was closed due to falling ice. When I arrived at St Pancras, it was heaving, the queue of people went from the ticket office, through ten bendy queue-dividers, right down to the end of the building. I waited for hours and was the last-but-one to board the only train that afternoon.
I arrived in Gare Du Nord at about 8 p.m. Paris time. My French was terrible (still is), and I couldn’t find Nastya anywhere. When I asked a police officer where the main exit was he simply shrugged his shoulders and mumbled something French. Nastya and I phoned each other in desperation, each claiming the other was by the exit of the building, which of course wasn’t true; I was by a small, little-used exit for smokers. After much panic Nastya found me and gave me a huge hug, her big brown eyes full of tears. She had arrived in Paris a few hours earlier and had already studied the underground system. She led me to Line 4 where we took the train all the way to Porte d’Orléans, Montrouge, at the end of the line on the South Bank. She had booked us a double bed for the weekend at the hotel Ibis. Needless to say we didn’t see much of Paris, although we did venture out once or twice to see the Eiffel tower; because it was winter, and an unusually cold one, there was snow everywhere which made it more romantic. It was as if Nastya had brought Siberia with her.
Paris became our meeting point throughout 2010 as Nastya couldn’t enter Britain by any means. In order to obtain even a simple British tourist visa Nastya would have needed to make the equivalent of 30,000 roubles (around £600) a month. At this time she made around 17,500 roubles (£350) a month. I on the other hand was prepared to visit Russia but didn’t have the money. It is ironic that while Nastya held a well-respected job as an IT technician, was reasonably well paid where Russia is concerned, was qualified as a translator and engineer and was a trained pianist, her movements were restricted by global politics and the economics of the day. Whereas I, a poorly-trained unofficial nobody and self-appointed poet, could travel anywhere, provided I had some dosh. Even a full-time, minimum-wage job would have afforded me enough money to visit Russia. However, in 2010, the hotel Ibis in Montrouge, Paris, was our second home on occasional weekends. By our next romantic getaway in Paris we even had our own favourite restaurant, which although we don’t remember its name can be found by taking the underground to Boulevard St Michel and walking two streets in from the river in the direction of the Eiffel tower. At the point you are completely lost, the restaurant is on the left.