Comintern-era housing complex was a collection of fivestorey, prefabricated slums on the very edge of town. Housing Department Office No. 27 seemed to have disappeared into thin air. Tired and angry, I repeatedly asked local people to help me, but no one knew where it was. Eventually a woman with a garbage pail volunteered to show me the way.
As if in deliberate mockery, the metal doors of the Housing Department Office, with a crookedly attached schedule of water outages for June, were locked with a large metal bar. And there were no encouraging notes such as “Back soon”.
The woman studied the schedule and the hollows under her eyes were instantly flooded with black melancholy. She looked at me reproachfully, as if I were to blame for the imminent outage. As she left, shaking her head, the garbage pail in her hand squeaked pitifully.
At that moment I realized that I now faced either a search for a cheap hotel or a night out on the street. In helpless despair I started pounding on the door, which rumbled like theatrical thunder.
A little old man in a taut singlet, with a tattoo on his skinnyshoulder and grey curls on his chest, stuck his head out of the closest window on the first floor. He swore at me amiably—so that I wouldn’t abuse him in return, and struck up a conversation.
I explained that I had just arrived from out of town, I needed to get into an apartment, otherwise I had a night on the street ahead of me, and the keys were in the housing department office.
The old man pondered for a moment and disappeared into the room. Just when I had already decided that he had satisfied his curiosity, he emerged from the entrance, tucking his singlet into a pair of tracksuit trousers with side stripes as he walked along.
“Wait here,” he said and set off, flapping his slippers briskly, towards the next high-rise. Ten minutes later the old man came back, and he was not alone. Plodding along behind him was a plump woman of about forty in a polka-dot dress with a black belt round her stomach. Her chubby calves were completely covered in terrible bites, so she occasionally stopped and scratched her legs fervently. She smiled at me coquettishly, displaying gold teeth that looked like grains of maize. “A sweet woman, look, even the mosquitoes love me…” Then she introduced herself as Antonina Petrovna.
Behind the steel door there was a set of prison-style bars through which I could see a small corridor covered with scuffed linoleum and a rusty barrel with the word “Sand” on it. Hanging on the wall at the entrance were a fire extinguisher and an old poster showing a shaggy-haired Valery Leontyev, the pop idol of the Eighties, looking like a spaniel.
The old man squirted a small gob of spit onto the poster and declared profoundly: “Has all the virtues of a man, apart from his faults.”
I put my passport, a stack of documents and the letter of attorney down on the desk, secretly hoping that my unshaven features did not provoke suspicion. To be on the safe side I explained: “I’ve come straight from the train. It took me three days to get here.”
Antonina Petrovna took a perfunctory look at the documents and the passport—my name was the same as my uncle’s, afterall—then opened the safe, rummaged inside it and pulled out a bunch of keys.
I said, “This is for the inconvenience”—and handed Antonina Petrovna the box of chocolates. I presented the bottle of vodka to the old man, who said, “There was no need for that”—and stuck it in the pocket of his trousers, which immediately slipped down under the weight of a litre of liquid.
I learned from Antonina Petrovna that no one had reported the death of the former owner of the apartment to the telephone exchange. She advised me that to keep the telephone line I should contact them and pay the outstanding charges as soon as possible.
The building in which my uncle used to live was a five-storey structure from the Khrushchev era, standing
As if in deliberate mockery, the metal doors of the Housing Department Office, with a crookedly attached schedule of water outages for June, were locked with a large metal bar. And there were no encouraging notes such as “Back soon”.
The woman studied the schedule and the hollows under her eyes were instantly flooded with black melancholy. She looked at me reproachfully, as if I were to blame for the imminent outage. As she left, shaking her head, the garbage pail in her hand squeaked pitifully.
At that moment I realized that I now faced either a search for a cheap hotel or a night out on the street. In helpless despair I started pounding on the door, which rumbled like theatrical thunder.
A little old man in a taut singlet, with a tattoo on his skinnyshoulder and grey curls on his chest, stuck his head out of the closest window on the first floor. He swore at me amiably—so that I wouldn’t abuse him in return, and struck up a conversation.
I explained that I had just arrived from out of town, I needed to get into an apartment, otherwise I had a night on the street ahead of me, and the keys were in the housing department office.
The old man pondered for a moment and disappeared into the room. Just when I had already decided that he had satisfied his curiosity, he emerged from the entrance, tucking his singlet into a pair of tracksuit trousers with side stripes as he walked along.
“Wait here,” he said and set off, flapping his slippers briskly, towards the next high-rise. Ten minutes later the old man came back, and he was not alone. Plodding along behind him was a plump woman of about forty in a polka-dot dress with a black belt round her stomach. Her chubby calves were completely covered in terrible bites, so she occasionally stopped and scratched her legs fervently. She smiled at me coquettishly, displaying gold teeth that looked like grains of maize. “A sweet woman, look, even the mosquitoes love me…” Then she introduced herself as Antonina Petrovna.
Behind the steel door there was a set of prison-style bars through which I could see a small corridor covered with scuffed linoleum and a rusty barrel with the word “Sand” on it. Hanging on the wall at the entrance were a fire extinguisher and an old poster showing a shaggy-haired Valery Leontyev, the pop idol of the Eighties, looking like a spaniel.
The old man squirted a small gob of spit onto the poster and declared profoundly: “Has all the virtues of a man, apart from his faults.”
I put my passport, a stack of documents and the letter of attorney down on the desk, secretly hoping that my unshaven features did not provoke suspicion. To be on the safe side I explained: “I’ve come straight from the train. It took me three days to get here.”
Antonina Petrovna took a perfunctory look at the documents and the passport—my name was the same as my uncle’s, afterall—then opened the safe, rummaged inside it and pulled out a bunch of keys.
I said, “This is for the inconvenience”—and handed Antonina Petrovna the box of chocolates. I presented the bottle of vodka to the old man, who said, “There was no need for that”—and stuck it in the pocket of his trousers, which immediately slipped down under the weight of a litre of liquid.
I learned from Antonina Petrovna that no one had reported the death of the former owner of the apartment to the telephone exchange. She advised me that to keep the telephone line I should contact them and pay the outstanding charges as soon as possible.
The building in which my uncle used to live was a five-storey structure from the Khrushchev era, standing
Similar Books
