Apocalypse Day came and went without even a hint of the four horsemen. Boris stayed in the mountains, Nataliya Petrovna went about her business and nobody in Russia was hurt. There were no riots, no panic, no fireballs from the sky, and no bullets being fired in the street. The day before the apocalypse was due; I had been summoned to an immigration office to the east of the city near the biggest war memorial. I had to go and collect the new visa that would allow me to leave the country in future. This time there were no would-be-assassins, just a large room with no furniture, and a security guard sat on a windowsill. My visa had already been prepared. The three-month private visa I had entered on was stamped to make it useless, and I was handed a small green booklet with my picture on each page. It looked like an old World War II identity card. I wasn’t even charged anything. We left the office and found that the bus we had taken to get there had finished its route in that part of the city, turned around and would be taking us back home. To avoid being asked to give up our seats by babushkas we sat at the back where they never go. The windows of the bus were covered with tiny crystals of ice, so that when car headlights shone through it gave the impression that we were inside a giant Christmas bauble. Sat there, watching the city go by through frosted glass I felt a strange sensation. For days leading up to that moment I had been trying to figure out what I was feeling. I thought it might have been fear. Fear of the cold, or fear of not seeing my family in Wales again for an awfully long time. But I was too relaxed – so it couldn’t have been fear. Sat on the back of the bus it felt like I had bunked off school. It was early afternoon and I wasn’t normally in the east of the city at that time of day. It reminded me of the time I was in junior school in Ely, and had been picked by a television company to be involved in a few hours’ filming for a documentary. I was nine or ten years old. The camera crew took three others and me to Cardiff market, where they wanted us to walk around with clipboards and look like we were carrying out some kind of junior survey. That was the first time I had seen Cardiff Market. It had felt like an adventure, seeing the market salespeople calling out prices of strawberries and people bartering. I had felt wonderfully free, being away from school and having a taste of adult life. Sat in the giant bauble with my passport and visa in my pocket and Nastya by my side, watching the rays of crystalline light swirl around, I had the sensation that even though I had reached my destination, even though I now had one place to be and would likely be there for years to come, I was at the beginning of my adventure.
EPILOGUE – ONE YEAR IN SIBERIA & COUNTING
Aeroflot Flight SU1483N. December 25th 2013. Krasnoyarsk – Moscow
Nastya and I both felt excited to leave. Though we had met in Paris, and flown to Moscow together a few times, we had never actually enjoyed a holiday or trip of any kind together as a couple. Thanks to a friend of mine, we had been bumped up to comfort class on Aeroflot’s new Boeing 777. Reclining in seats we would never normally be able to afford I looked down on the clouds stretching out into the sunrise. Barely a month had passed since I had celebrated my first full year in Siberia. To mark the occasion I had arranged a small party in a café that doubled as a gig venue and nightclub. I had recently become an English teacher/cultural advisor and so one of my colleagues and several of my students joined us. Without any decent command of the Russian language, it became obvious that teaching would be the only option available to me. It’s the perfect job really, as it gives me access to many different people, all of whom are eager to tell their story. It also provides a great deal of insight into the differences that have long existed between the British and Russian ways of life. For instance, while discussing music with one female student in her late thirties, we started on cultural shifts that had happened since the sixties. I talked about all of the music I had grown up with and the famous clash between the mods and the rockers. When I asked her if they had ever experienced any similar kind of musical rivalry in Russia she replied ‘No, we had communism.’
Though I couldn’t wait to travel, in the back of my mind I had been slightly concerned about flying again. My previous flight had been with my dad over a year earlier, and I distinctly remember a minute where the plane had started falling from the sky after take-off. As was the case a year earlier, the pros outweighed the cons, so I took my fear and placed it beneath my nervous excitement. Something I had become really good at. The days of being too afraid to step out of the apartment or walk down the street alone are long gone too, although I have done away with the soundtrack in my mind so I can listen for people walking too close to me. Regardless of such new vigilance, I still managed to get side blinded by a pack of wild dogs on my way to class in early December. I had been in the middle of the city, in broad daylight at 3 p.m., when a small dog started barking in front of me. As he was only the size of my shoe I thought nothing of it and continued along my way. I failed to notice the two much larger dogs under a fur tree to my right who decided I had walked into their territory. The largest locked its jaws over my right arm. I shook it off and ran. Fortunately, it didn’t cause me any harm though my brand new winter coat needed some stitching.
Other than a pack of large furry beasts trying to eat me, as years go it’s been mostly pleasant. The summer, though chilly, was full of boat trips up the Yenisei River and festivals on the islands in the city centre, and I even managed to lose my rugby match virginity. Who’d have thought that after thirty years in Wales I would see my first live rugby match in Siberia? While I sat watching players tackle each other, I felt a pang of regret over having never experienced such a thing before, though I was too caught up in the moment for my negative feelings to last. I have little time for regrets these days. I spent most of my twenties looking back at things I didn’t do or hadn’t done yet. It has taken me so long to realise that I am alive, now, and I can only use the time I have once. I’m not sure when or why this realisation occurred, but it did, and I am now unmistakably different. A year has changed me much. When I’m not working, I attend Russian and German classes. Nastya has queried my decision to learn German several times saying ‘It’s pointless to learn a language you have no plan to use’; each time I explain how I had wanted to learn languages when I was twenty. I bought phrase books and did nothing with them, because everything I did then was half-hearted. I don’t have time for half-hearted attempts anymore. Either I make a decision to do something or I forget about it. I’m not sure whether this is something to do with living in Siberia or whether it comes with age.