A few days before my dad was due to leave, Boris collected Nastya and me to take us to the immigration office. We didn’t need an appointment because I had a letter that said I had been granted residency. We took every certificate, copies of every certificate, our passports, notarised copies of my brain scan, written consent of everyone currently living in Russia, written consent of everyone living outside of Russia, a chest X-ray certificate, a leprosy certificate, a bubonic plague certificate and a pear tree. We arrived early which was just as well as all of the would-be assassins we had seen at the HIV clinic were already there. There were pear trees everywhere. When our turn came, we went into the little interview booth and handed over the pile of documents that was now about as tall as I was. They took my passport and inspected it closely. Thankfully, the picture of me inside looked enough like me to pass scrutiny. Then they began inspecting the pile of documents. Weeks went by. I grew a lengthy beard that made me look like one of the guys from ZZ Top, though thankfully I’d had the foresight to take an electric razor with me. Crammed into the little booth with our pear tree it was a bit of a tight squeeze. Branches were sticking out of the door, which meant it couldn’t be locked. People kept opening the door and trying to get in because they were dying of old age too. When my documents had been inspected, a very senior looking official came out to inspect my pear tree. It was fine, slightly bent, but fine. However, I had forgotten the bloody partridge. Nastya ran outside and told Boris who had one spare in the glove compartment of his car. We were saved. They took the partridge, stamped it and put it in my file. After this process had been repeated with everyone in the waiting room, a tiny slip of a woman in six-inch heels came out from behind the booths and unlocked a door in the little waiting room. Behind that door was a 4 ft tall fingerprinting machine. Everyone had to have their fingerprints, palm prints and thumb prints recorded eighteen thousand times. It took twelve years to process everyone. When it came to my turn, the tiny woman, who could have only been two inches wide at the waist, gave me back my passport. Nastya opened it – on the middle page it had the stamp we had been waiting so long for. It had taken five trips to Russia, nineteen flights, and hundreds of hours of anguish to obtain. We went back to the car where Boris had waited the whole time. On the drive home I couldn’t help grinning because I was now a legal resident of Russia. Only I wasn’t. Nastya told me that I needed a stamp to validate the stamp, and in order to obtain the second stamp I would need to go to local immigration office within the next seven days. Plus I would need to take Nastya and all of her family with me, as well as all of her dead ancestors going back fifty years. I held my head in my hands and sighed.
By this time the temperature was beginning to level off at -35°C. During the night it could get as low as -39°C. It hadn’t yet bottomed out at -40°C but it would soon. It was now hard to distinguish roads from pavements. All the snow from the roads that had been swept towards the verges now formed large solid snow banks. The only time we knew we were crossing a highway is because it had two banks either side, otherwise they were white with occasional tyre tracks that snow would quickly cover over. Outdoor staircases now looked like ski slopes. Only well-traversed stairs would be swept every day. Emergency stairways coming from office blocks were now ice slides. On days when Nastya was working, my dad and I would stay home and talk. When Nastya’s shift finished my dad and I would leave the apartment at 7.20 p.m. exactly. This gave us forty minutes to reach Nastya’s office. In the extreme cold of -35°C, when we exited the building we had to take a few seconds for our bodies to adjust. In such temperatures the body finds it hard to breathe, it feels as though the chest is under pressure. Icicles form on the nose hairs and frosty eyelashes begin to seal the eyes closed. Hands must be gloved up and at least three pairs of socks worn. The shapka should have the side whiskers lowered to cover the ears, or they will freeze and fall off.
My father and I are both reasonably fit people. Back when I was twenty-five (not all that long ago), we would walk up Pen y Fan every Sunday afternoon. We were so fit at one point we could walk up to the top and get back down to the car within an hour and thirty minutes. In Krasnoyarsk, in winter, walking to an office forty minutes away, it felt as though we were both eighty. Within five minutes of walking our pace decreased to a slow dragging, and by the time we reached the office we were both knackered. A walk like that is nothing to my father-in-law. Those regular treks to the office really gave my father and me some perspective about what shape our bodies were in. I think my dad realised he wasn’t the Rambo type he thought he was. This made me sad. I didn’t like hearing my dad admit how the cold affected him. I think this is because I found comfort in him being a kind of hard-man. I had only experienced this once before. Back in 2008 when I was planning a cycle ride from Brecon to Cardiff in winter, after it had snowed, my dad turned down the opportunity of riding with me. He said that he didn’t think he could make it. Faced with Boris’s prowess and exceptional level of fitness I think my dad began to feel old in Siberia, and I began to see him that way too. On nights when Nastya was doing an 8 till 8 nightshift, I would lie in bed and listen to the radiator. We have two radiators in our bedroom and one of them makes a low humming sound, like the sound of machinery in the distance. I associate this sound with the Soviet Union – the general hum of factories that never stop working. Some nights I would lay awake and contemplate what would happen if the humming stopped and the heating ceased. In those moments I worried about my dad more than ever. There was no way the heating would shut down however there was no longer any way I could ignore the cold hard truth that the Rambo of Cardiff was getting old.
vii. The Abominable Snowman
Two nights before my dad was due to leave, Nastya and I had arranged a party of sorts. We hadn’t any money for alcohol but thought it would be nice to attempt to cook a traditional Sunday roast and have a dinner party for the three of us. On hearing about this, Nataliya Petrovna, Boris and Dima somehow invited themselves over. Although, true to form we only got one of Nastya’s parents; Boris came without Nataliya Petrovna because they had been bickering over his hunting equipment lying around their apartment. The chicken dinner I prepared worked out quite well, regardless of the fact I only had three hobs to work with. The gravy was a bit of an experiment. I made a base from onions and procured some beef stock from a shop near Nastya’s work. It came together better than I thought it would. Boris seemed to love it. For a man who tends to be choosy in what he eats he ate quite a lot. He brought a bottle of red wine with him. It was the first time I ever saw Boris drink. Dima arrived later, but the wine had gone by then.