'Reader, I Married Him'

Monday, June 20, 2005

­Moscow: Russians who marry foreigners should be stripped of their citizenship, according to a Bill drafted by an ultra-nationalist party. Nikolai Kuryanovich, an MP from the LDPR party, said the measure was needed because Russian women, "the most beautiful and best in the world", were going abroad. [Reuters]

Reading that item in The Times prompts me to share a little story with you. It’s a true story, I hasten to add, not one by Charlotte Bronte (today’s title may be misleading). So, are you sitting comfortably?

Over the years I have built several websites for various churches with which I have been associated. As a result, five or six years ago, I received an approach from a Russian church choir, who offered their services to put on a concert for our church. This sounded interesting, so I followed it up – only to find that they expected us to pay their air-fares from Russia to the UK, find them accommodation, etc, etc. The costs involved would have been considerably more than any money we could have hoped to raise from the concert. We decided not to take up their kind offer.

So when, a year or so ago, I was contacted (as web-master of another church website) by a Russian church choir, I swiftly responded to say that we weren’t interested, thank you very much. My Russian correspondent replied charmingly that they quite understood.

Now, I must explain here that I have long had an interest in Russia, and it is one of the places I intend to visit, one day (given that my main holidays are held outside the cricket season though, I feel that Russia may be too cold in the spring/autumn – so I have postponed trips there until I am too old to play cricket).

So when this Russian chap replied to me, I took the opportunity to respond, asking about his church, and life in Russia in general (his English, although broken, was clearly much better than my Russian, and so we could communicate).

For several weeks we corresponded by e-mail every other day. He told me that his parents were peasants (his father drove a tractor) but that he lived with his grandmother in the city (I’m not going to name names or places here – the internet being worldwide, people who know him might one day read this). He had been six years at university, which is where he had learned English.

His grandmother didn’t have a telephone, far less a computer, so he wrote to me from an internet café. My impression was that he wrote his letters in English at home, then came to the café to post them, at the same time printing off my e-mail, before taking it home to translate. This did mean that his messages bore no relation to the e-mail I had just sent – although any questions I asked might be answered on his next reply. Often though, he seemed to have his own agenda, and ignored the questions I had asked (or perhaps he just couldn’t understand what I was saying – his English certainly wasn’t perfect).

I had shared with him my plans to come to Russia one day, and he told me that he would love to come to Britain, to visit me.

Then one day he sent an e-mail with an attachment – a photo of himself. If you can remember how this blog entry started, you may be ahead of me here. Yes, ‘he’ was actually an attractive 29-year-old young lady. In my defence, ‘his’ name was Russian, and sounded to me like a man’s name. I’d just assumed that he was male, and nothing in our previous correspondence had caused me to rethink that idea. 

Things went downhill from there.

And perhaps one day I’ll finish this story…

Molotov Cocktail

Monday, June 27, 2005

OK, by popular demand, I’ll pick up the story from last Monday (and if you didn’t read it then, you really ought to go there first, before reading this). Let me remind you, that this story is completely true.

So, there I was, with an on-going friendly relationship, including promises to visit each other’s countries, with this 29 year-old Russian girl, who I had mistakenly assumed to be a man.

And no, despite requests, I’m not going to publish her picture. I don’t think that’s fair to her. This site isn’t a dating agency. I said I wouldn’t mention her name, or even the city she lives in. With 52,387,322 women between the ages of 15 and 64 in Russia, I think you’d find it hard to identify her from what I’ve said.

When you’re in a hole, stop digging. Sound advice. The thing is, I am interested in Russia, and I do want to visit it one day. So why not continue this correspondence? The girl in question is technically just young enough to be my daughter (my actual daughter is only in her early twenties, but you know what I mean) so I didn’t harbour any illusions that she might be interested in me in a romantic sense. I certainly wasn’t looking for a bride.

I’m not stupid (despite appearances) and I certainly was well aware that the likelihood was that she might be looking for a way out of Russia, to the affluent West. And although I’m not the wealthiest person in Britain, by a long chalk, still I probably look like quite a good catch, on paper. I am not planning to get married again, and I was very conscious what a sad person I would look if I did pursue her romantically – like those blokes who have young Filipino brides.

So, I realised that it was probably unwise to continue the correspondence – but I am interested in Russia, so I did write again, but deliberately downplaying any romantic ideas, and stressing my age, the fact that I have no intention of getting married again, thank you, that I have two grown-up children – oh and my devotion to cricket.

As I mentioned last time, with her having to translate my e-mails, after having sent hers, there was a considerable communication problem – i.e. she told me her feelings, I replied playing them down, but in the meantime she wrote even more passionately before she’d read my reply.

At first it was just telling me how much she enjoyed cooking – borsch (soup based on beetroots), pelmeni (boiled pasties) and pancakes with honey were all mentioned. They do say that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.

I really should have stopped things there – and to be fair, I did try to explain that I was only looking for a pen-friend, but she was by his time ignoring anything inconvenient that I said.

Declarations of everlasting love were now flowing from Russia to Norfolk, along with warnings not to visit her, as Russian men get very jealous of Westerners stealing their women (see introduction to my first entry on this subject). She then told me that she wanted to have two children by me.

Eventually I resorted to sending very blunt messages, pointing out that I have two children, thank you very much, and I certainly don’t want any more, nor do I want a new wife. She ignored me though, and got more and more passionate.

I must admit I was getting a bit desperate now. She had my church website details (remember, that’s how we’d first started corresponding) so through that could probably trace where I lived. I had visions that if I tried to stop our correspondence by just not replying to her, she might just turning up one day – or perhaps go to my church, and announce she was my fiancée.

So I had to end it. I’d tried being blunt. I’d tried being rude. Nothing seemed to get through.

I don’t know what you, gentle reader, would have done.

What I did was to kill myself.

Now, that may seem a bit extreme, but I was quite desperate at that stage. It also seems to me quite heartless, not to say cruel. But it seemed to me at the time that dying was the only sure way of ending our correspondence.

I didn’t actually die, of course.

But on the day my dog died, last October, I sent her an e-mail saying that I had died (the e-mail purportedly coming from my next-of-kin, going through the e-correspondence on my computer).

That was probably not the best way, morally, to end this matter, but I was getting desperate, and the death of my dog had left me a bit unhinged. Anyway, it worked.

Which is partly why I like to remain a bit anonymous on this blog. British readers particularly may be able to work out who I am, where I live and what I do, but I certainly haven’t spelled it out here. And if you happen to be a heart-broken Russian, and this story sounds familiar to you, please let me assure you that’s pure coincidence. It couldn’t be me. I’m dead.

And now, I suppose, you’d like me to write about my affair with Julie Reinger…