v. The Italian Way
I was impressed by how unfazed my dad had been by Siberian life. He hadn’t felt any of the fear I had known on my first visit. At times, he seemed to actually prefer the Russian way of life to his own. Though while Nastya was on a nightshift and we had time to talk, he expressed annoyance at being told to not speak English. ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’ and ‘Why isn’t Russia more like Spain or Italy?’ were questions I heard all too often. In fact Nastya and I both became quietly irritated as my father increasingly asked why things weren’t more Spanish or Italian. I think he had some kind of dual culture shock due to the fact he had been on holiday in Spain just two weeks before arriving in Russia. As for the Italian fixation, that had more to do with the fact his best mate from Cardiff, in fact the one he had gone to Spain with, was an Italian fella. My dad has never been to Italy. Regardless of this fact, he relentlessly kept comparing everything he ate with Italian food. As Siberia was considered an alien place to his friends back in Cardiff, he had been asked to keep a diary, which he did every day. By the end of his stay he was nearing five thousand words. This was later reduced down into article shape and subsequently published by The Siberian Times. In this article, my dad listed his favourite things, such as the traffic system (all traffic lights run on a digital timer, so every driver and pedestrian knows how long they have to wait), the lack of Americanisation and culture of litigation currently ravaging the UK, and he dedicated a whole paragraph to Russian kitchen designs. There was no mention of Italy or Spain, and no mention of our apartment door either, which I think was an oversight because my dad complimented our front door nearly every time we left or entered the apartment.
In the third week of my father’s stay we were woken up at about 5 a.m. by the sound of grinding and cutting equipment in the floor above us. It went on for about an hour with much cursing, screaming, and the general sounds of someone who is extremely pissed off. How this person had locked themselves out is unfathomable, seeing as you have to have a key in your hand to lock the door anyway. I can only assume they lost their key while out on the tiles and needed to remove their apartment door and frame to get to the spare. We had to explain to Nastya that it wouldn’t happen in the UK as most front doors have glass in them, are made of plastic or wood or have pick-able locks. I don’t think she believed us. It’s impossible for someone who has spent almost all of her life in such a security conscious country to imagine a world with wooden or plastic front doors. Although dachas usually have wooden doors, it’s uncommon for people to leave any valuables in them. During the winter people half expect them to be broken into, but don’t worry about it as there’s little left to steal; televisions, karaoke machines and microwave ovens are ferried back and forth every year without fail.
After my dad’s first week in Krasnoyarsk, we had covered the basics and more. We had visited my favourite museum, attended a party at Lilya’s, eaten in cafés every other day, visited the city centre several times and made sure we had wine and beer in the apartment every evening. The only problem was that we didn’t have an everlasting pile of cash. I had brought a few hundred quid from Wales but there wasn’t much left after the first week. For the remaining three weeks we had less to live on that we had spent in the first week. Although my dad had brought his own money and plenty of it, we didn’t want to be poor hosts. Nastya and I discussed it one evening in bed and decided we would have to introduce my dad to the Siberian way of living. I wasn’t sure how my dad was going to make this transition without feeling some sort of major culture shock so I did my best to make meals my dad wouldn’t find too different. We had a stock of deer meat in the freezer, which I used to make meatballs to accompany spaghetti, and I crushed tomatoes and garlic to make pasta sauces. Occasionally we went to eat at Nastya’s parents’ place. We got by but after the first week of tourist attractions, mountains and daily outings I was afraid my dad would get bored. We didn’t have a television and there was literally no place my dad could hang out comfortably other than the kitchen. I went through my books and selected a few of the English-language novels I had brought from the UK. My dad chose Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle. He finished it within two weeks. As I was on the lookout for a job, Benya arranged a meeting with the CEO of the company she worked for. Benya’s boss had a reasonably decent grasp of English and knew a few language teachers who might be able to set me up with something. We arranged a meeting in a café close to Nastya’s office on a freezing cold morning. My dad and the CEO seemed to make some sort of romantic bond straight away. They flirted like hell. I was a bit embarrassed at first, but then I realised it was a mutual attraction and let them get on with it. They started going on day trips together although I had to escort my dad to the rendezvous point. Nastya and I felt a bit guilty about not being able to show my dad around ourselves, but those day trips took the pressure off us and we were finally able to spend some time at home alone.
The downside to this was that while my dad was out with his new lady friend, she began falling for him. This wasn’t good because my dad hasn’t had a serious relationship since my parents divorced in 1997, and I know him well enough to say he will never get married or settle down ever again. His lady friend didn’t know this and I suspected, if she was anything like Nastya, that the day trips with my dad would have some huge romantic significance. Friendships in Siberia tend to be male with male, or female with female; rarely do men have female friends. They have female colleagues and distant cousins who they can hang out with but the concept of a male/female friendship for friendship’s sake isn’t widely understood in Krasnoyarsk, or at least as far as I can see. As a result of these two very different cultural attitudes, my dad’s Siberian lady friend became quite offended when he didn’t reciprocate her advances. I knew it would happen and tried warning my dad about it, but being his usual stubborn self he said ‘It’s just a casual meet up like. If they don’t know casual here yet they’re gonna have to learn it sometime, and it might as well be from me.’
vi. Stamps, Stamps, Stamps and More Stamps
The only problem we had experienced with regard to my immigration was with the Certificate of No Criminal Record, in that I had obtained the wrong one earlier in the year. But now I had a new certificate that wasn’t only issued in the UK from the British Police authority but was recommended to me by the British High Commission. It couldn’t fail. One morning when Nastya had finished a nightshift, she made a special trip at 8 a.m., straight after work, to pick up the certificate and its translation from the office we’d left it at in the city centre. I didn’t know of this of course, until I received a phone call from Nastya at the immigration office tearfully telling me I had brought the wrong certificate again. At the bottom of my new certificate it stated that it cannot say whether I am a person of good character but that I definitely did not have a criminal record. Apparently this wasn’t good enough. They needed something that said I was of good character. I argued that it was bullshit and if the immigration service looked at the British Foreign Office website they would see that the UK doesn’t give certificates of good character or good behaviour because they mean absolutely nothing. I stressed that according to Russian law, an immigrant must provide proof they do not have any criminal convictions in their native country, and I had indeed provided solid proof of that. Certificates stating someone is not an arsehole are not a legal requirement. Thankfully, they did have a look on the website and saw I was right.