Visiting the toilet is also something that needs to be done outside. Most dachas have a small outhouse at the end of the garden – a wooden seat, on a wooden plinth, with basic shelter. All the offerings to nature fall through the hole in the seat, into a specially dug chamber in the ground. This pit of poops can be a bit pongy in the summer and attracts more than a few flies, which in turn attract spiders. I tried avoiding this place at first, which was of course impossible.
To get water, someone has either to fill up bottles at the apartment and drive them to the dacha, or go to the fresh water generator near the local lake. Though our dacha had a large square tank filled with lake water, we obviously couldn’t drink it. Without many responsibilities, I often volunteered to fetch the water from the generator using a little wooden cart with bicycle wheels Boris had made specially. To get there I had to drag this contraption along dacha roads, which are so full of potholes that it caused my cart to lean precariously, sometimes next to parked cars. Another obstacle: the pipes on the roads. These pipes were the very ones that carried lake water to our steel box in the garden. Whoever laid them hadn’t bothered with attempting to bury them, which meant they were driven over by cars and carts every day.
At the generator, to get the water out I had to place my plastic containers beneath a makeshift hose, and then plug the generator into an outside electric socket built into a concrete wall. It always began by making a horrible whirring sound, before water came gushing out. This water is free and anyone can have as much as they can carry. In some districts, where there is no fresh water generator, they have old-fashioned hand pumps that are plumbed into natural sources of water underground. These are not as common and much less convenient as not only do you have to physically exert yourself to get the water out, but the water can run dry in summer. Our generator also stopped sometimes. It’s not that it broke, it was simply that there was no fresh water available. This kind of thing had happened a few times at the apartment; the water would be switched off without reason or warning. This could be very annoying if you were in the shower, covered in bubbles. It was even more annoying if you were in the middle of the shower and only the cold or hot water was switched off, leaving you burnt or frozen on the spot. Sometimes this lack of water at the apartment could last for several days. I am not sure why it happened and nobody else seemed to know either. I put it down to a need for regular maintenance as the result of pipes bursting in winter, or pipes being laid without much thought as they were throughout the dacha territories.
There are two ways of washing at the dacha. Russians are very fond of sitting in a sauna or banya. Although Dima has one built apart from his dacha, during the summer of 2011 I was too afraid to use it. In Boris’s dacha there is an indoor washing area that can also be used as a sauna. It never is though as Nataliya Petrovna is worried the constant steam will warp the wood or make it soft. Instead, to get clean, Boris set up some steel poles in the garden with a shower curtain wrapped round them. This is where I washed. I would take two buckets of cold water and pour them over me, one pre-soap, one to rinse; because it was so hot, there was no need to heat any water. This method has a real lack of privacy to it. Although it was strange at first, I eventually got used to seeing more of people’s flesh than I normally would; either someone is walking semi-naked from the banya to the dacha, or Boris is digging in a small pair of shorts, or Nastya and Marina are sunbathing in the garden with nearly everything on show. I was at first very self-conscious of my body, because it is pale and I have psoriasis, but it was too hot to really care too much about this, and I really needed to heal my skin.
When going to sleep in the dacha there was a similar lack of privacy that I had to get accustomed to. Nastya and I slept in a double bed, behind the stove in the original section of the dacha; and because the stove and chimney don’t make a complete wall, a curtain was strung up as a divider. At night I could not only hear the grunts and snoring of Boris, whose favourite bed was the single one on the other side of the curtain, but I suspected that he could hear Nastya and I if we had some boinka-boinka. I was a little weirded-out by this, but Boris either politely ignored it, or was too fast asleep to notice. At the dacha during the night, it’s possible to hear what people would normally get up to behind closed doors, but it’s okay; like anywhere people engage in natural things, they have their bodies on show when it’s sunny, and occasionally have sex at night. This isn’t to say that people regularly take their kit off in front of everyone and get busy on the lawn. On the contrary, Nastya’s parents seemed quite prudish. If they did the boinka-boinka, we never heard them, and Nastya was always worried about them hearing us.
The most popular food in Russia throughout summer is shashliks, otherwise known as shish kebab. Russians love shashliks and spend a lot of time preparing them. The meat is usually marinated overnight in vinegar, or wine, with a range of herbs and spices, before being arranged on skewers. These are roasted on a trough or barbeque and are the highlight of Russian dacha time. To cook them, we had to first let Semka build the fire. He insisted on bringing the wood and making the fire himself. He would have cooked the shashliks too if it weren’t for the fact the barbeque trough was taller than he was.
Across from Boris’s dacha is another belonging to Dima and Marina and next to this is Marina’s flower patch: a small circle of flora and fauna with sunflowers at the centre. The sunflowers aren’t merely for show. Every member of my Siberian family loves nothing more than to sit for hours eating sunflower seeds. After putting whole shells in their mouths, they have the ability to crunch out the seed, swallow it, and then spit out the bits of shell into a cup. No matter how many times I tried, I couldn’t master this without eating the shells.
A small veranda at the front of Dima’s dacha acted as the usual meeting place for everyone during summer. We often ate shashliks there. This was a pain at times, because both Nastya and her mother didn’t really see eye-to-eye with Marina, and Marina didn’t much like them either. But the trough for cooking shashliks had been permanently located at the front of Dima’s dacha, so if we wanted to cook, we had no other choice but to go there. Though everyone tried to get along for the sake of Dima, who is a very calm and sober fellow, there were occasional heated exchanges between Nastya and Marina. These were normally preceded by two things. Either Marina had had a drop too much, which she was fond of doing at the weekend, or we had overstayed our welcome on their veranda. The smallest thing could lead to the most ferocious verbal battle, so I began spending less time at Dima’s just to keep the peace.
At the end of July, Boris celebrated his sixty-third birthday. Although he doesn’t drink or smoke, he didn’t hold back from enjoying himself, albeit with fruit juices instead of alcohol. Besides the immediate family, Boris had invited a few guests – all regular folk except for one, a mathematician who had the same face and voice as Leonard Nimoy from the original Star Trek series. Although I wasn’t able to communicate much with him, I spent a little too much time looking at his face, because it’s not often you find yourself in the middle of Siberia drinking vodka with Spock.
Marina who had brought five bottles of Cognac, and who normally wouldn’t attempt to speak English, plucked up the courage to say ‘Michael, Cognac?’ to which I would reply in my very awkward and basic Russian, ‘Da’ (yes). This led to my drinking at least one whole bottle of Cognac, and was likely the cause of my throwing up at 4 a.m. Nataliya Petrovna was a little disappointed by this as earlier in the evening she had said ‘We have had English here before. They were sick.’