Part One – There (Eastern Hemisphere)
CHAPTER NINE – THE NEW APARTMENT
Needless to say, it really was a surprise, even for a seasoned sea dog like me. Parents have been saving money for a long time to add the lump sum to our small apartment in exchange for a bigger one. Now, finally, they were able to trade our old one-room apartment (studio) without amenities for a two-room (twenty and ten square meters) apartment, alas, also without amenities. Of course, the epithets old and new did not refer to the age of houses and apartments, but to the period of our residence in them.
The old woman, who lived in the two-room apartment and had a meager pension, after burying her mother, chose to move into our apartment. It was smaller than hers, but she got money as a compensation. I note that our new house was, in fact, very old and was located in the old part of the city, where there were no new houses at all. Before the revolution, the house belonged to a wealthy merchant and represented two floors of enfilades along the streets, intersecting at an acute angle. After the onset of public happiness, enfilades of the house were divided into communal apartments, and the repressed people were moved into the semi-basements.
As a result of the exchange of apartments, we ended up as if on the territory of an almshouse: three families shared a communal kitchen, a toilet and a balcony. First family consisted of two old women from a small ten square meter room. Second family was two old women from a large twenty square meter room. The third family was also presented by two old women from a “giant” two-room apartment, into which eventually father, mother and I moved in.
Behind the wall, though on another balcony, in a completely inhuman triangular room, more like a death cell, where only a camp bed, a table and a stool fit, lived Liza, a devout old Jewish woman. I think that the state of continuous calls to God would be natural for any old, weak, lonely person who received four (!) rubles a month from the state, regardless of religion confession, including even atheists. I don’t know how such poverty was possible in the Soviet country, proclaimed Brotherhood and Equality. But if not for the synagogue feeding Liza, her soul much earlier would have freed a miserable room, which is a sin to call living space, in favor of the neighbors from the balcony.
But later, reading Daniel Kharms’ stories like “Falling out Old Ladies” or “The Old Woman”, I perfectly imagined whom he copied his characters from.
I think it’s worth telling stories about many people who lived in our house.
The third floor was dominated by a WW2 hero, the former head of an armored train, who had taken the composition of requisitioned (read – looted) valuables from occupied Germany. He was a popular face at all sorts of local congresses, rallies and other patriotic events, where he liked to talk about the modesty of true communists. With his only son Radik, a good student, I had little contact during my school years, he was five years older than me, but I remember one story about him.
He fell in love with Lena – his classmate, the daughter of my father’s school friend Rima and my father’s friend – a military surgeon. He began to pester Lena and her family with endless phone calls, and when he was rebuffed, he became embittered and decided to “teach them a lesson”. So, he called and, since Lena was not allowed to pick up the phone, turned to Rima,
“You are being warned about the repair of pipes in the house. Please measure the distance from the kitchen to the toilet.”
Rima honestly ran and measured.
“How many did you get?”
“Two meters,” she reported.
“Great! Shove it up your ass!”
After that, he waited five–ten minutes and called back,
“This is from the police,” Radik said, “Have you been called by hooligans recently?”
“Yes, yes! Such a disgrace!”
“What did they ask? Measure the distance from the kitchen to the toilet?”
“Yes, yes. Quite right. And I measured it like a fool.”
“And how many meters did you get?”
“Two meters.”
“Wow! That’s a lot. But I’m sorry, it’s necessary for the record. What exactly did they require you to do?”
“They were talking all sorts of nasty things.”
“Of course they don’t say otherwise, but we need to know the exact words in each case.”
“I feel uncomfortable.”
“Of course. Who would be comfortable with that? They said…”
“Well, shove…”
“Bastards! Put two meters in… But where?”
“In the anus!”
“Did they say that? That doesn’t sound like bully talk! Maybe the call was from the plumbers?”
“No. Bully! I’m using a cultural expression.”
“But I have a protocol. You cannot change the words of the accused.”
“They told me to shove two meters up my ass!”
“Great! Go ahead, do it!”
The husband intervened. He called the prosecutor’s office, they put the phone on tap and wrote down the next wishes, and the subscriber’s number. In a word, the scandal was barely able to be extinguished through the council of war veterans, to which both fathers belonged. Radik was then punished…
In addition to the war hero, a policeman lived on the third floor with his wife and two children, whom I considered decent guys until they grew up and broke bad. A couple of old women adopted a girl from the Baltics, who… also did not justify their hopes…
On our floor, there lived a large Armenian family and a small Georgian one. In Armenian family, sons got married, started families, moved, then others got married and started… In a word, they worked like in an incubator. In Georgian family, they passed away. But in this family there was a beautiful girl of my age, Iya. She became my best friend in our house. Even then, we sat on the steps of the stairs, and weaving our thighs (oh, this soft flesh I loved so much!) we shared our children’s secrets.
As I mentioned, in addition to these families, a bunch of old women lived on our floor. Of these, my attention attracted Elena Georgievna, an honored teacher, who was awarded the Order of Lenin. I investigated her “sclerosis”, as Alzheimer’s was then called. Within thirty seconds, she lost the thread of the conversation, and after a minute or two she completely forgot everything that we discussed. I was bringing my classmates and girls from the neighborhood to watch my talk show.
“Elena Georgievna, you know, in Siberia scientists caught a mouse the size of a tiger,” I reported for starters.
“What are you saying?” the old teacher was surprised, “There are no such mice.”
“But this one was found. She bit the tiger to death!”
“Who killed whom?” Elena Georgievna asked.
“A huge mouse killed the tiger.”
“How is this possible?” The woman was genuinely surprised.
“She did it. She rushed and began to tear him to shreds with her claws and teeth.”
“Who to tear?”
“Well, the tiger.”
“Did the tiger sheered tears?”
“No. A huge mouse killed the tiger.”
“Where do these mice were found?”
“In Siberia. But they are not found. Only one has been detected so far. She was caught in the taiga.”
“Who got caught?” quite calmly, attentively listening to the interlocutor, Elena Georgievna asked again.
It seemed that she strings, leads you by the nose, dispassionately and skillfully plays.
“In Siberia, scientists caught a mouse the size of a tiger,” I completed the first round.
The game could be continued indefinitely until the audience’s patience ran out.
A similar test was arranged for Elena Georgievna by her hundred-year-old mother. On a holiday, she sent Elena to the store for a bottle of wine. Of course, the daughter either forgot the name of the wine, or she forgot which pocket the note with the name of the wine was in, or the very fact that she had a note and a task to buy wine. When her mother died, the daughter lived alone for some time. She was fed by Armenian neighbors from our floor, hoping to get her small ten square meter room. Well, one day their hopes came true: on a warm spring day, Elena Georgievna left the yard, got lost and did not return home. The nights were still cold, and her frozen, twisted body was found on the road outside the city, in the area of rich summer cottages…
One Jewish family lived in the courtyard (I will tell about it in more detail later), one childless Armenian family and mixed Kurdish family. Dad in a Kurdish family was a postman and in his spare time – a plasterer. Once he returned from a plaster work in a rich house and yelled at the whole yard,
“You won’t believe what I saw today! Come listen!”
Neighbors looked out of the apartments, went out onto the balconies.
“These people had two toilets in their bathroom!”
“To sit together?”
“I thought so at first, but then I realized – this was a pussy-washer!”
I burst out laughing (Then I was already a university student).
“Tell us Nick, you are a learned man, what was it?”
“It was a bidet.”
“Here it is! They told me so too. Well, I thought – okay. Bidet, so let it be bidet. And then I took a closer look and realized – this was a pussy-washer!”
Very poor people lived in the cellars.
One family was the descendants of the princes Orbeliani. They returned after Siberian exile. Their grandmother silently sat on a bench in the yard, all in black, and smoked cheap Prima cigarettes through a mouthpiece. The children were afraid of her because of her witchy appearance and a large hairy wart on her tongue. Her son was a worker and a bitter drunkard. The grandson was a bully prone to theft. They called him by the strange name of Chevali.
The other family is a laundress with two children. The eldest, Misha, was a thief and a drug addict. They called him a scary word “morphinist”, but he treated his neighbors with respect. Nobody saw his dad, but everyone knew the well-born family in which mom washed clothes. The younger, Kotik, the son of a German prisoner of war, grew up as a hooligan and a very bad pupil, but after serving in the army he improved, married at his place of service and brought a wife from Russia, who slept with anybody who came along, while the guy became a drank himself in a haze.
I remember a story about Kotik and Chevali. Once, in the fourth or fifth grade, I noticed that if the word ‘lots’ is repeated long and fast, then a completely different word clearly appears. I thought about this phenomenon and realized that when repeating, the beginning and the end of the word are lost, that is, the letters in it seem to change places. To test the theory, I decided to take some curse (worst one!) and change the order of the letters in it. I got ‘kfa’. I needed to try the phenomenon on a volunteer.
I looked out and noticed Kotik in the yard. He stretched the nipple from the baby food with a jet of water from the tap.
“Do you want me to show you a trick?” I asked.
“Go ahead!” he agreed.
“If you quickly repeat one word, you can hear another,” I said.
“How is that?” Kotik didn’t understand.
“Very simple. Repeat ‘kfa’ quickly and you’ll hear something familiar.”
“It can’t be like that,” Kotik said, “kfa, kfa, kfa! So what?”
“Don’t you hear? So it’s not enough. Come on and listen!”
Kotik, apparently impatient to hear something special, and he began to shout out with all his might and in every way:
“Kfa, kfa, kfa, kfa!”
“What are you, Kotik, drunk?” asked a woman neighbor from the third floor.
“Kfa, kfa, kfa, kfa!” was the answer to her.
When Chevali entered the courtyard and, amazed by the pensive face of Kotik and how he was cursing heartrendingly, he asked what the matter was. Kotik explained that he was trying to understand the meaning of these strange words.
“Don’t you know what ‘fuck’ is?” Chevali was surprised.
And only then Kotik had heard what Andrei Kruchenykh called a shift in poetry. Crimson with shame, he rushed to the offender, but I was already gone. Kotik and Chevali waited for me all day, having inflated to the size of melons their rubber feeding nipples with cold water. In the evening they cooled down from their just anger.
Another couple from the basements were workers in an asbestos factory. The husband was as strong as Samson, and Kotik and Chevali often told how he brutally bangs his Delilah at night. Their children were good athletes, strong like their father and slender like their mother. The girl died as a teenager from leukemia, and her father died from a lung tumor. It is now anyone, who watches TV, would easily diagnose him with mesothelioma. And then there were even no TVs. Mother and son received as a compensation an apartment in a new building and disappeared from the horizon of our yard.
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