Insomnia - Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia

Leaves it out! I am dreaming myself to sleep

Published: 22 October 2021 ~ Kaliningrad Leaves Autumn to the Leaf Suckers

I am not precisely sure when it was, but I know that I converted to the religion of insomnia many, many years ago, during which time, having lived in numerous, too numerous to recall, properties, I have lain awake at night, or, indeed, have woken during the night, listening to the sounds of the world on the other side of my window.

Naturally, every different place in which we find ourselves sleeping, or not, as the case may be, possesses its own external world of noise, its own audible signature, and Königsberg-Kaliningrad is no exception.

For the sake of brevity and the object of this article, let us hastily pass over tempting references to unthinking ‘dugs’ and thoughtless ‘dug’ owners, both doing what they do because they haven’t the sense to do otherwise, and focus instead on a noise, or noises, the type of which are pertinent to and typical to no other but Kaliningrad at night.

During the summer months, night noises in cities and towns, wherever these places may be, are plentiful and variegated, because universally the heat of the night invariably brings forth denizens, particularly young denizens, whose expression of the first flush of yoof is noise. ‘Hey, I’m alive! I must make a racket!”: Bum, de Bum, de Bum (In case you are wondering what that is, it is the world-over urban sound of a delinquent’s ignorant base-beater.).

But even in the summer months, against the backdrop of predictable noises, such as someone staggering home with a skinful or someone with a motorbike thrust between their legs, there are strange noises, weird noises that once having entered your consciousness refuse to let go or give up, until, to the best of your ability, you either solve their mystery or surrender to their influence and fall asleep in spite of them.

For a long period, and the night is long when sleep is in an elusive mood, I focussed my deductive powers on the source of a low-humming drone. And yet it was some time, successive early mornings later, before the identity of my preoccupations decided to make itself known to me. What I had been listening to was neither a space ship nor banshee, a hover car or a hole in a trumpet, it was in fact a road sweeper or, to be more precise, a lowly street cleansing vehicle: a truck that trundles about the city sloshing water around the street when normal people are sleeping.

Kaliningrad Leaves Autumn to the Leaf Suckers

It was yesterday, at 4am. I was thinking about the usual things, the ghosts of pub crawls past, QR-coded existence, all I was going to do in life, should have done, might still do, but might not have time to do them now ~ you know how the gospel goes for we insomniacs ~ when I heard what at first impressed me as the sound of a distant street slosher. I lay there for a good twenty minutes, using the constancy of this sound, its soothing continuity, to lull me into further thoughts, tranquil and obsessive, before it eventually dawned on me that this was the month of October and that the days of summer dust-damping had been succeeded by autumn leaves.

There was the clue I needed! Fellow insomniasts will understand when I say that we who need sleep, just as much as you do, but don’t get it, are no strangers to Eureka moments that fly phantom-like from out of the darkness and keep us awake even more! That long, that mid-range humming tone to which my thoughts were singing and which had occupied my mind as if it was a reference library, was not the sound of water on dust, it was nothing of the sort. It was the steady rhythmic lilt emanating from the suction hoses of the pre-dawn leaf-sucking lorries!

Have you taken leaves of your senses?

Cast your mind back, if you please, to a post I wrote in 2020. In that post I stated that Kaliningrad is a green city, a city full of trees. Yes, in the summer of 2020, I wrote, Kaliningrad is a green city, to which I should add, and now will, that in autumn it turns yellow, as well as orange, red, russet, purple and many shades of brown. This is because trees, unlike many of us, are not known for insomnia. In the autumn they get busy, shedding their leaves in the imminent countdown to winter, when all as one will sleep. And in places where there are lots of trees about to bed down for winter, there are also lots of fallen leaves.

Thus, for the past three weeks or so, gangs of Kaliningrad leaf shufflers have been marshalling piles of leaves, stacking them at the sides of streets and raking them up from lawns and verges. Both by day, but mainly by night, when you are asleep and we are awake, the leaf-sucking lorries and flat-bed trucks crawl stealthily out of their depots to ply their trade on Königsberg’s cobbles and Kaliningrad’s highways and byways.

If you cannot shut them worry not, it is truly a sight for sore eyes, and the distinctive hum is not so bad. Think of it as an autumn lullaby, played for you and for me by the Loyal Fill Those Trucks Up Orchestra.

And so it makes you think. And lying there in the dark, steals you away to a time so far away in your youth that it may never have really happened ~ if it was not because in the night, there, alone in the dark, you have to place your trust in something, so why not your mind and its memory?

When I was a young boy, and I was never anything else when young, growing up in a small English village at a time when Arsebook and PlayStation were but devious twinkles in the ‘me, myself, I’ of a neoliberal’s bank account, I found that I was fascinated by the tarmac gangs resurfacing the road; the dustbin men collecting the rubbish; the drain unblockers unblocking the drains; the road sweepers sweeping the roadsides; and last, but by no means least, the crème de la crème of them all, the men who rode around in a tanker into which they emptied the house latrines ~ the all-important ‘Bucket Men’!

In fact, I was so took up with this last profession that when my well-to-do auntie and uncle visited us at our family home, and I was asked in an imperious voice by an omnipotent-looking lady all done up in a large fur coat, “So, tell me Michael, when you grow up what do you want to be?” Instead of answering a doctor, lawyer or banker, which is what I suppose she wanted to hear, I replied, with childlike candour, “I want to be a bucket man!”

Granted, perhaps not the most salubrious or rewarding of vocations, but at that particular time, when connection to mains sewerage was far from universal in small villages, the necessity of the bucket man, even more than the leaf-sucking lads, commanded a certain respect. However, every ‘dug’ has its day (bang!) and the day of the bucket man (I think it was Tuesday?) came and inevitably went, driven eventually to extinction by the triumphant rise of the bucket-man-free self-propelling flush lavatory.

How fortuitous then that I eventually went into publishing, and also how lucky I was to have narrowly missed working on newspapers. Mind you, if I had gone in for news media, would it have been so very much different in terms of substance, stirring and shovelling to what would have been my lot had I found an opening in bucket toilets. Let me in hindsight be thankful for one and romance lament for the other.

With the humming still in my ears, I returned from the place where my auntie still stands to this day. She has taken root in my memory; her face all shocked and dumbfounded. Meanwhile, in my thoughtful unsleep, I offered a prayer of thanks to the nocturnal Kaliningrad leaf suckers* for autumnal services rendered when everyone else, except for us, are sound asleep in their beds zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.