The Librarian by Mikhail Elizarov Page B

on Shironin’s Guards Street, right on the edge of town, beside a flooded construction pit overgrown with sedge. If not for the poplars that had been planted there, the building would probably have slipped down the slope in a few years’ time. I was distressed when I figured out how much could be realized from selling an apartment in such a seedy spot.
    Led by Antonina Petrovna, I walked along the path past a couple engaged in conversation—a man and a woman, both middle-aged. I caught a scrap of their talk: “I’d tear that bastard Yeltsin apart with hooks myself.”
    “And not just him either,” the woman replied.
    The man was large and well-fleshed, with a bald patch that was on the offensive, and he was gesticulating militantly with a long paper bundle. The woman was clutching some sort of kitchen-garden implement—the metal head of it was wrapped in a rag. With her faded anorak and plaited hair, she looked as if she had just come back from her dacha. There was a bag standing by her feet, with a plastic bottle protruding from it.
    The pitiful grin of the doorway was flanked by two old women sitting opposite each other like a pair of rotten teeth. Anticipatingtheir curiosity, Antonina Pavlovna said, “This is the late Vyazintsev’s nephew.”
    It seemed to me that the chatting couple also noticed us—the woman glanced round, and the man was already looking in our direction anyway. He stopped talking for a moment, then carried on waving his bundle about even more vigorously, apparently devising further forms of execution for the retired president.
    We walked up to the top floor, the fifth. Antonina Pavlovna removed the plasticine seal with its thread. I signed a piece of paper, and Antonina Pavlovna wished me good luck and plodded off heavily down the stairs.
     
    First of all I locked myself in the toilet and relieved the pressure that had built up during the day. As I flushed, I thought that now I had marked the apartment as mine, like some wild animal. Then I took a stroll round my two-room estate.
    The telephone wasn’t working. The windows were still sealed with paper from the last winter. I immediately tore the paper off and flung the balcony door in the sitting room wide open to get rid of the musty smell.
    The horizon was already pink and the low sun had turned into a slow-moving egg yolk. A strong wind created an impression of flight, amplified by the high-rise buildings in the distance, somewhere beyond the quarry and the highway. My fifth floor seemed to be on the same level as them. Two wires for hanging washing out to dry stretched along the length of the balcony like musical strings, and the wooden clothes pegs hanging on them looked like small gudgeons. The dried-out railings were thickly entwined with Virginia creeper.
    All in all, I liked my uncle’s residence. The entrance hall was hung with the “brick-effect” wallpaper that had once been so fashionable. The sitting room contained a cumbersome sofa-bed, two armchairs, a standard lamp with a brass pole, a coffee table and a maroon wall unit that held tableware, crystal, books and a radiogram set in a deep glassy niche.
    I examined the drawers for any “treasures”. What I discovered was a heap of receipts, a box of gilded teaspoons, a stethoscope, an eye-pressure tonometer and a pile of crumpled cardboard boxes of medicine.
    In the bedroom, in addition to the bed, there was a writing desk, a set of shelves with books and a walnut wardrobe. To my surprise, among the clothes I discovered a motorcycle helmet, a whopping great hammer and several broad pieces of tyre tread, cut from the tyres of some massive truck—to be quite honest, I couldn’t figure out the function of these neat slabs of rubber.
     
    But in the narrow side cupboard, between the sheets and the towels, my uncle had hidden two pornographic magazines, both in some incomprehensible European language, perhaps Dutch or Swedish. My heart ached as I thought how lonely my Uncle