The Tale of the Four Ivans

I’m so sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. My last post was heartfelt, effusive and cutesy. It made me feel all gooey inside after I wrote it, like a melty marshmallow. But if I learned anything at Tiffin Boys’ School (and I really don’t think I did), it’s that such feelings should be crushed at all costs, preferably with a healthy dose of work. So I’ve concocted the perfect antidote. Here’s a post about how weird Russian customs can be. Enjoy.

The next morning, I decided to try taking a different bus – the 91. It takes a similar route and gets me to exactly the same stop. When it screeched to a halt, the doors opened to reveal a solid wall of people. One of them yelped as the pneumatic door slammed into their arm, but they had no room to move, so just waited for the door to close again, wincing with pain. I had already run up to the bus doors as it stopped, but took an involuntary step back on seeing how full it was. I guess I must have pulled a horrified face too, because the ticket woman (who was about half my height), seeing me hesitate, detached herself from the front of the crowd, stepped off the bus, lifted me up, and deposited me just inside the doors, where there was an available floorspace roughly the size of a fifty pence coin. She did the same for an old man behind me, which made me feel a little bit feeble. It turns out I was also stood right in the path of the closing doors, which meant that I got a firm Siberian handshake to the face from a sign that said ‘mind the closing doors’ every time the bus arrived at a stop. Once I was on, the ticket woman yelled ‘If anyone wants to get out, just give me a holler and I’ll help’. At the next stop, a frightened looking man timidly raised his hand, and the ticket inspector somehow slipped through the forest of passengers, grabbed his shirt, and barged her way back through to the doors with her prey in tow. By some sorcery, the bus managed to get even fuller as we got closer to town, and I was soon driven to the middle of the vehicle, where a veritable ocean of people kept me pinned in one spot. Fortunately, this bus also had a TV screen, and my suffering was alleviated no end by a bit of light entertainment. At a time when Brexit is at its most terrifying, Hong Kong protests are raging, and presumably some other pretty important shiz is going down somewhere in the world, the bus company, naturally, decided to keep its commuters in the loop by showing some good old horoscopes. My sign is Taurus, and I was delighted when the TV screen informed me that ‘minimum effort will get you maximum reward this week.’ Horoscopes are something of a hang-up here in Russia, from what I gather. My first ever Russian conversation teacher made a point of teaching me how to say ‘Gemini’ before I could say useless stuff like, oh I don’t know… 'food'.

At work, I looked out across the main square, and for the first time here, I saw people wearing big bulky coats with fur-trimmed hoods. The sky was a clear, pale blue, with an orange band on the horizon, and when I walked outside, there was a definite chill in the air. The cold is coming, and people here keep on assuring me that it will turn all my warm affection for Krasnoyarsk into an icy resentment. I’m not so sure. Frankly, I’m a bit of a weirdo, and I love extremes. When I sailed across the Atlantic, I was praying for a storm – my logic being that it may as well have just been a very long Channel crossing if it wasn’t distinguished by a dramatic event of some description, and a very long Channel crossing wasn’t what I signed up for. Here too, part of me wants a cataclysmic snowfall which will make my trip to Siberia something to remember. So I guess I’m in no place to be poking fun at Russians for their weird cultural quirks.

It's beginning to feel a little bit chilly

But anyway, back to poking fun at Russians for their weird cultural quirks. This was the day that the modern art exhibition opened. I went to see it in the early evening. When I got to the reception, a guy from the museum approached me and told me where to go. ‘Greetings young person…’ he began. Young person? That the best he could do? That got me thinking. There are a whole lot of Russianisms which seem hilariously weird at first, but become completely normal once you get used to being in Russia. One thing which I remember finding particularly funny when I arrived was the address used by people making announcements in shops or on transport. They always begin with ‘Respected customers’, or ‘respected passengers’. I wonder what a crappy and indifferent profiteering company would have to do – is there any option for those who don’t respect their customers? Take South Western Railway for example: if they had had the misfortune of being a Russian company, would they have to start every announcement with ‘disrespected passengers’? Or could they get away with just ‘passengers’? Another Russianism that always gets me is when you’re ordering food. Maybe this is more of a problem of me being English, but Russians don’t do the niceties when they order. If I wanted an ice cream, I’d go up to the ice cream seller and say ‘give me ice cream’, or ‘I will ice cream’, which I think makes you sound a bit like you’re holding up an ice cream parlour, and maybe issuing a somewhat chilling threat (if you’ll pardon the pun) into the deal.

The first room of the exhibition was full of tiny little see-through people stuck to the floor, who all looked like they had been made with a huge amount of care and delicacy. I hated myself for the perverse impulse to tread on them. I also think this raised some concerning questions about my relationships with other humans, and the way that I see myself when in positions of power. We’re just gonna go ahead and sweep all of that under the carpet though (why do I feel like another shoutout to Tiffin Boys’ School is necessary here?). In the second room, everything started to get a little bit gulag-ey. There was atmospheric music, statuettes of suffering people, pipes with their voices coming through them, pleading for help, and a huge projection of the words ‘My Country, what do you want from me?’ on the far wall. It was pretty unsettling. Why this was juxtaposed with a video of three men saying the Russian alphabet in funny voices beats me. The third room was the most striking, for me at least. It started with an explanatory paragraph pasted to the wall. The amount of driftwood washing up on the shores of Iceland increased dramatically in the mid C20. Researchers have used dendrochronology to trace this driftwood back to gulags near Krasnoyarsk, where logging was a form of forced labour. They reckon that rivers washed bits of the felled trees all the way up to the Arctic, whence they drifted into the Atlantic to end up in Iceland. In this installation, bits of the wood collected in Iceland had pictures of victims of the gulags stuck onto them, comparing the involuntary flow of people to Siberia under the gulag system to the involuntary flow of the wood across the Arctic.

Come on. Is it really just me who wants to tread on them?

There were paintings made using traditional methods from the Urals, there were huge Krasnoyarsk-related murals (hey, that rhymes!) and, naturally, there was a karaoke machine (that doesn’t rhyme, sorry). No, I didn’t have a go on the karaoke machine. I don’t think Krasnoyarsk is quite ready for my dulcet countertenor tones yet, and I’m not convinced that Eurovision is a suitable accompaniment to an exhibition largely inspired by the sufferings of gulag convicts.

At the end of the modern art exhibition, there were tons more exhibitions. I popped into one which focused on (surprise surprise) gulags and exile in Siberia. There was a little section dedicated to Lenin’s famous exile to a town called Shushenskoye in Krasnoyarsk region, a few hours’ drive upriver from the city. Here’s a quote I picked out, written by the big man himself, ya boi Lenin: ‘there is no backwater further than Shusha. Behind Shusha are the Sayans. Behind the Sayans is the world’s end.’ Really L-dawg? Is that so? Well if you knew that then WHY DID YOU SEND SO MANY MORE PEOPLE OUT THERE HUH?? Jerk move by Lenin imo.

Lenin in Shushenskoye

The previous day, a guy called Ivan (Russians like the name Ivan) had turned up at the office and asked if anyone wanted to help with a ‘performance’ which was to take place as part of the opening of the exhibition the next evening. I was cheerfully volunteered by my colleagues, and agreed in the hope that it would make people like me more (always a good motive for doing things guys, take note). And so it was that when I left the exhibition, I found myself being briefed on my duties in the upcoming performance by a group of very fast-talking Russian students. Here was the plan. I would stand on the roof of the museum with a guy called (surprise surprise) Ivan. On the roof of the concert hall opposite, a dude called (go on, have a guess) Ivan would be standing alongside a girl called something that wasn’t Ivan(!?). A crowd of spectators would be standing in the square below the museum, along with two more students (Ivan and Ivan) who were manning two projectors, one pointing at each building. Ivan and Ivan would project a word or phrase (which would be decided by the spectators) onto the building below Ivan, and then Ivan, seeing the word on the opposite building, would try to communicate its meaning to Ivan using only his body language. Then Ivan and I would guess the word, I would send a text with our guess down to Ivan and Ivan, and they would tell the spectators whether or not we were correct. At the end of this cycle, the process would be reversed, so that Ivan projected a word or phrase onto the building below Ivan, Ivan tried to act it out, and Ivan and not-Ivan had to guess its meaning. After the very clear briefing, Ivan and I headed up to the roof of the museum. I was a big fan of Ivan – he was into arts, had a good sense of fun, and was willing to talk to me in Russian, which made me feel clever. When we got to what we assumed was the roof, we walked through a heavy metal door and found ourselves in the middle of the preparations for a launch party for the exhibition. It was certainly a part of the roof, but it was the half that looked out over the river, and it was spectacular. There was a live band warming up, mood-lit bar tables, and the word ‘Freedom’ projected onto the wall behind. I felt like I’d stumbled into a spy film, and insisted on taking a couple of hundred photos before Ivan dragged me back into the museum. Then we found the door to the other half of the roof, which was probably even more impressive. True, there was no live band, but the view of the concert hall and the bridge beyond was made all the more extraordinary by the fact that they were both lit up like Christmas trees, with the colour scheme and pattern changing every few minutes. We plugged in some lights, which we pointed at Ivan. Then we put a harness on him, and he climbed onto a big, slightly wobbly plywood box, so that the spectators below could see him clearly. The first text arrived, saying that the performance was beginning, and Ivan on the opposite building linked his hands together, pushed his elbows out, and started making an exaggerated swinging motion with his arms. ‘Cricket!’ I shouted. Then ‘Hammer throwing! Ooh, ooh! Centrifugal force!’ Ivan ignored me and said ‘it’s mum. Text mum.’ So I sent a text down saying мама, and a smattering of applause drifted up to the roof. Huh. They got harder from then on, though. The next one (which the Ivan on the roof with me had to mime out) was 'alarm clock', then ‘swimming in milk’, then ‘dad’s started drinking’, and finally ‘bee hive’. We didn’t get many of them, but it was great fun, and I really did feel like king of the world up there on the roof of the museum.

The rooftop opening party

Views from the roof

'Performance'

The idea of the performance was to demonstrate that language was a flawed system, but that body language was universal. It was a valiant effort, but I’m gonna stick with language, even if it means that I snicker every time I have to order ice cream in Russian.