THE LAKE EXPERIMENT

Meet my grandfather and meet my uncle. Bigger than life and a massive pain in my grandmother’s backside, both of them were. ‘Brains unchained’, one might say. They went through life like tsunami and there was no force in the universe which could slow them down, except of my granny perhaps. She would suffer through the arguments, experiments, chaos, drama, accidents, visits to the hospital and police, but at some point she would decide that enough is enough and put her foot down. That would ensure a period of peace and safety for a while. Then it’d be all over again. A phone call from the border police (we used to live near the Chinese border), asking would she kindly come and neutralise both of them, as they are trying to smuggle a group of drunk Chinese fishermen into the restaurant on the Amur river embankment. Or she’d be asked to extract them from the ‘House of Culture’, where they’d staged a public protest against the ‘Philharmonia’ concert policy. Just for the hell of it.

Once they went fishing. They didn’t know much about the area, so they decided to look around for a good fishing spot. They walked and they walked. Then they climbed over some kind of fence. My gran had to collect both of them from the military police HQ as they were caught and arrested for trespassing the secret military ‘research facility’.

At one occasion I had to spend an hour being stuck on a tree with my dear uncle. A local fisherman told us how to get safely to the good fishing spot. You’d think it would be a good idea to listen to the someone’s advice, especially if you are going into Taiga. There is a saying in our part of the world, ‘S Taigoi ne shutjat’ (You don’t joke with Taiga). Taiga is a Russian equivalent of the rainforest. Hundreds of thousands of miles of dense vegetation, trees, bushes, logs, bogs and marshes which can swallow a horse in 15 seconds. Tiger, elk, wolf, fox, deer, bear, wolverine, links, boar and many more other God’s creatures who wouldn’t be too happy sharing their space with humans. Especially with those who don’t understand Taiga. You don’t just go there. You have to learn how to walk, how to listen, what to wear, where you can step or where you cannot, when you should run and when you should walk. You should take time to learn, to respect Taiga and to understand that you are a guest and not a crown of creation. Otherwise something will eat you up. Regardless.

My uncle fancied himself an old ‘Taezhnik’ (someone who knows Taiga well). So when he was advised to take a longer route in order to avoid a ‘drinking’ path, he said, ‘Phhhh!’.

Yes we took a shortcut, yes we met the boar pack, yes they were not happy and yes, if you encounter a wild boar, you’re in a world of hurt. The ‘Daddy’ boar – ‘Seckatch’, is one of the most unpleasant animals on the planet. Also he is grumpy, dumb, aggressive and very fast. I remember our friend fisherman saying, ‘You see ‘Secatch’…. don’t run, he’ll be onto you in a second. He’ll open you up like a sardine can.’.

We were lucky we managed to climb the tree.

Did it teach my uncle Kolya anything? Nope. Next winter he took our dog Amur and went hunting. After not getting anything to shoot at, he decided to make a campfire under the huge pine tree. Now, we know that fire produces hot air which tends to go up and if there is a hundred kilogram of snow sitting on tree branches, it’ll start melting and at some point it will come down. Without warning and all at once. Dry snow is nice, soft and fluffy, but wet snow is heavy and hard like a stone. Kolya is only alive because one of two of them had brains. Amur dug a trench around his head and made sure Kolya can breathe. Then he ran to the village and made a racket. Someone followed Amur into taiga and got my uncle out.

Did it teach him anything? Nah…

In the early nineties, his band (my uncle is a virtuoso violinist and a band leader) was invited to perform at one of the festivals in UK, so he had to go and apply for a visa. Of course he brought his fishing gear with him to Moscow – being a devoted fisherman, he’d bring his rod absolutely everywhere. A ‘Moscow River’ was around the corner from the UK Embassy, and so were five or six locals, drinking beer and watching two or three optimistic characters trying to catch something which didn’t have three eyes or two tails (‘Moscow River’ was extremely polluted at the time). So, he went inside the embassy, looked at the queue, then looked at his watch, looked at the queue again, decided he had plenty of time, got out, walked to the river and started to claim over the ‘parapet’. Locals told him, ‘It’s getting warm’. They told him, ‘The ice is getting thin’. They said he should stop showing off and to fish from the embankment like everyone else.

What did he do? He lost his place in the queue and he didn’t get his visa. He was taken to the hospital after he crashed through the ice into the freezing water.

Or how about the time when my grandfather was invited to a Gypsy wedding, which was happening in the village few hundred miles away from our house… I wasn’t even seven years old then. My granny was highly skeptical about us going together, and rightly so. He had such a good time…. He came home happy and full of stories, but my granny said, ‘It’s all good and well, but where is Oleg..? Is he outside?’. I wasn’t outside. I was three hundred miles away, staying in a house of the local alcoholic. We had a glass of vodka every morning for breakfast and then I’d spend the rest of the day swimming in the lake and messing about with twenty or thirty Gypsy kids. My granny was furious. She sent my grandad back. He couldn’t find me, because I was moving from one house to another and having a time of my life. My grandad couldn’t find me, so my granny came. She found me straight away, but then my grandad went into hiding. Good for him, I’d say. We left him there and went back home.

But the most remarkable story about him and my uncle is this. It happened when I was two or three years old. My grandad heard somewhere that human bodies have neutral buoyancy, which means, if one completely relaxes in water, he’d be perfectly fine. He’d float. Which means people only drown if they panic. He said to my uncle, ‘If they don’t panic, they don’t drown. Simple’. Kolya immediately started to argue. They woke up my granny who told them to do something useful. She said, ‘Take Oleg to the lake’ (we were camping). Little did she know..

My two role models realised there was no need to argue anymore, as they can check the validity of their theory right there and right now. They went to the lake, they took a boat, they drove the boat to the middle of the lake and they chucked me into the water. Grandad said, ‘Kolya, let’s give him one minute. If he didn’t panic he’ll be perfectly fine’.

I didn’t know much about buoyancy, so I went down like a brick. Grandad kept saying, ‘Kolya, hold on, wait, we’ll see him in a minute’. He was still going on about buoyancy, but Kolya decided that their plan doesn’t work too well and jumped into the water, only to realise he couldn’t see anything. It was dark, murky and to make things more interesting, there was a bit of a current underneath. Kolya found me completely by accident as he grabbed something cold and slimy. And green. That was me. I turned up being non-buoyant after all.

It’s nearly 3am now, I have a student tomorrow at 11.30, so I’ll stop writing, go out to the garden, have my last cigarette and go to sleep.

Good night!