How ordinary people saved my life

Of course, in the end I did not die. Some people arrived there at about 3 am with a car and invited me in. It had heating, Gott sei dank.

I was the first one to enter in the Chinese Consulate, picked up my visa, and went straight to the hotel to pack up my things and then to the airport (it was funny, it was there an international side very well equipped). Paid my ticket, checked in my luggage but when passing the police control and they checked my passport they stopped me. Your visa is overdue, they said (and funny, I assume, they thought). I explained to them what had happened in detail, but he added another argument; I had not sealed my visa in any place in Russia, every foreigner had to have his visa sealed in an office called Obir in Russia -or SU. I knew that, but as we stopped in Moscow just for about two days and flew to Sakhalin almost inmediately I had forgotten it.

I could not leave. My luggage, however, left for China with all my things, all my papers, clothes, including my shaving machine. Just the money was with me. The police told me to go to the local police station there and ask for a way out.

The local police made me write a declaration of my case, made me go to the bank to pay a reasonable fine and from that day on I would go round the airport all day waiting for my luggage to come back before using my ticket for China. It would not arrive next day nor some days after. My beard was growing long, and my state of mind started to become a little bit moved.

I would call to my wife in Moscow and to my family in Sakhalin. My parents in law send me some money and a big pot of caviar from Sakhalin with a friend. I would eat it with the spoon (and with bread too, of course).