My fingerprints are somewhere in a police station in Siberia. Ten black stamps, afterwards I had been scrubbing endlessly to get the ink off my hands. It was July 2018, and I had signed up for a summer course at the University of Tomsk – the city that, according to some, is the geographical center of the Eurasian continent. From Tomsk we would drive to the Altai Mountains, on the border with Kazakhstan and Mongolia, to study the glaciers there. But when the bus left I was at the police station.
I will never fully understand why I had to go to the police station. It was a piece of paper, no bigger than a Fruittella wrapper, that I should have had but didn’t have. I showed my visa, passport and university admission letter, but the police commissioner shook his head. I was taken back to university, where I spent three days and nights in a room with no curtains. The midnight sun lit up the cockroaches crawling on the floor. One was bigger than the rest. I called him Zaza, after his kind Pick from the Petteflet. It was 72 hours with little sleep. Occasionally I would talk to Zaza. Finally the interpreter picked me up and explained that money was needed, converted 600 euros. Then I was allowed to leave. 22 hours in a taxi, in one go to the Altai.
Last night I lay in bed with a feverish body, for the first time a self-test had shown two lines instead of one. In my half-asleep the O of Omikron loomed like a gaping maw. Russian roulette.
I was thinking about the new law that comes into effect this week in Russia. This prescribes that foreigners living in the country must undergo a medical and psychological examination every three months. Sodium test, drug test, X-rays, fingerprints, for everyone from 7 years old. The rule should contribute to national public health, but causes frustration and misunderstanding. The studies are expensive and time-consuming, and no one wants a dose of X-rays every quarter. It could possibly be based on racist motives; many migrant workers come from Central Asia.
Suddenly I missed Zaza. Famed biologist EO Wilson, who passed away last week, wrote in the 2007 preface to the standard work: Cockroaches a beautiful ode to the cockroach. He confessed that he was initially disgusted by this ‘excrement-eating sewer inhabitant’, but came across a ‘delicate and butterfly-like’ cockroach in Suriname and closed the animal in his heart: “Let the lowly cockroach crawl up, or, better, fly up, to its rightful place in human esteem!” Then I slept and dreamed about a cockroach with a crown.
Gemma Venhuizen is a biology editor at NRC and writes a column here every Wednesday.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of December 29, 2021
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