Winter's tale

It's cold enough to make your eyes water - and then freeze the teardrops on your face. So what made Jeremy Atiyah swap a London flat for an apartment in Siberia?

Jeremy Atiyah

The Guardian,            Tuesday 13 March 2001

Twenty people have so far frozen to death," the BBC World reporter was explaining, in a cloud of white steam, "and hospitals in Irkutsk, Siberia, are performing 60 amputations a week on frostbite victims." That was in January, and I only took notice because, funnily enough, I was just off there myself - to Siberia, that is - for some peace and quiet to write a book. What was more, I had chosen the little town of Irkutsk on the grounds that nothing from the real world could possibly disturb me out there. And now here it was, two days before my departure, in the news.

I wasn't going to Siberia to get a tan. But writing a book in a cosy flat when it was cold outside was one thing. Writing a book in a cosy flat when it was -45C and people were dying of frostbite outside was quite another. Not that I was going to change my plans. Cold snap or not, I had picked Irkutsk because of its remoteness. Even Moscow was five time zones and 5,000km away. The nearest major city was Ulan Bator in Outer Mongolia. I wanted to live in a place that was too insignificant for anyone even to care whether it counted as Europe or Asia.

Or so I tried to reassure myself, boarding my Tupolev in Moscow, bound for one of the coldest places on earth. In fact, I was dressed in an outfit that might have saved Scott of the Antarctic. But disembarking five hours later, I discovered that the temperature had risen to -30. In my long johns, ski-trousers, down jacket and rabbit-skin hat, I found this rather comfortable. Only the instantaneous freezing of the moisture in my nostrils and on my eyelashes was unpleasant (it is a feeling I have since grown used to).

Off I drove over impacted snow, passing men with their ear-flaps pulled down, in search of my very own Siberian apartment. I had already arranged this by email, through someone I met on holiday ("Is it heated?" I remember asking, anxiously. "Of course it is," had come the terse reply). To live here for a year would cost the same as to rent out my flat in London for a month.

Furthermore, all Russian apartment blocks are communally heated: no one worries here about gas bills. They do worry that the heating might break down when the temperature is -40.

I confess that my block, when I got there, did not look much like my block back home. To open the outer door, force was needed to break ice on the hinges. Up a dark and stinking stairwell, I found old ladies peering fearfully from doorways. Unseen dogs barked. My flat turned out to have a solid steel door with eight locks on it, which, I am assured, is very fortunate for me.

Apartments right across the former Soviet Union tend to share certain endearing features such as cosy kitchens and crockery labelled "Made in the GDR". But the best aspect of my new flat, I soon found, were the radiators, which blasted heat into every room 24 hours a day (and would continue to do so for seven or eight months of the year). By now, I had seen enough television pictures of people in the Yakutia and Primorsky regions, to the north and east of Irkutsk, shivering in flats with cold radiators.

Admittedly, the insides of my windows were coated with ice-sheets so thick that I could see nothing out of them at all. I recall celebrating my arrival by quietly opening a bottle of something called Russian champagne, which then exploded all over the walls and ceiling, leaving barely a thimbleful in the bottom of the bottle.

Out in the streets, though, I found a certain pleasure in the extreme cold. Every passer-by wore a vast hat and went about enveloped in a personal cloud of steam. Exotic tapestries of frost hung from trees, walls and balconies. As for the Siberian pavement ice, I fancied that it had a mineral permanence to it: when chipped with pickaxes, it had the appearance of marble, millions of years old.

Siberian children, too, I was soon pleased to see, got their kicks from sliding on ice and attacking each other with snowballs. In the centre of town, I found an ice-chute: the children (alongside their elegant mothers in long fur coats with waists and pleats and Duchess of Windsor hats) spent their Saturdays hurtling down it on their bums with their feet in the air.

A fortnight after my arrival, we were informed on the news about the imminent invasion of more outlandish temperatures. Minus 40 and below loomed. "Have you heard?" people kept asking me, in excitement. "Are you ready for it?" Now when I went to market I found women with their faces wrapped to the eyeballs, standing behind piles of congealed fish, bent and frozen stiff. Ice-cream was sold in unpackaged, naked blobs. For a few days we went around with hats and collars covered in hoar frost.

In these bitterest days, I heard no word in the tram-stations or the bus-stops, just the sound of crunching snow and silence. For a Siberian to admit to feeling cold is as difficult as for an Italian man to admit that he is no good with women. "What?" they would shout. "If you're cold, drink more vodka!"

But we all knew that Irkutsk, unlike Vladivostok, was not suffering from energy shortages. "If our flats are warm and we can make ourselves cups of tea," one woman said, "what do we have to worry about?"

Some people did worry. In the local theatre, I heard of a troupe having to practise their dance movements in giant felt boots. Buses drove about in pairs, in readiness for the extreme likelihood of one of them breaking down during the day. Schools closed. But one teacher told me she liked the cold: "It keeps the delinquents off the streets."

Otherwise, suffering went on in silence. Walking home through the town centre one night with the temperature at -38, I came across a cluster of old women attempting to sell sunflower seeds from little paper cups. They had built a fire from cardboard boxes, which had attracted a few squabbling down-and-outs. Some of these people could not have had a life expectancy of more than a few hours.

But stories of alcoholics found frozen to death on public benches arouse little sympathy in Russia. Daily survival here in wintertime is joyless. If the peace and quiet that I came to find in Siberia was turning out (for a few winos) to be the quiet of the grave, it was hard to find people who cared. I remember wandering home that same evening in my down jacket and ski trousers, admiring the glitter of the snow under brilliant stars.

And now? Here we are already well into March. Daytime temperatures sometimes reach zero degrees and the ice on my windows is gone. Outside, long fur coats are being replaced by short ones. The pavement snow is slowly turning grey and reverting to stones and grit, and I'm still sitting here writing my book. For those who have made it, another Siberian winter seems to be almost over.