At first I listened to her out of necessity, but then I got hooked. Life in the apartment building was so interesting that the soap opera Santa Barbara paled in comparison to the saga unfolding under my nose. However, after a month or two, after I had earned Polina Petrovna’s trust, I stopped visiting her in the evening. I had a new reason not to, and, to tell the truth, I grew tired of her stories. It was the same gossip as at the linen factory, only set in Moscow. The Nozhkins had their dacha broken into, but they are rich, it’s like buckshot to an elephant. Bessonov, the retired pilot, drank himself to delirium tremens and his wife shipped him off to a lunatic asylum. The young Kamarin made a ton of money on his paintings in Holland and bought his daddy, a People’s Artist of the USSR, a Japanese SUV. Daddy went to the dacha in Abramtsevo, but lost control of the thing, flew into a ditch, and is now in the Botkin hospital with multiple fractures. There were two Hari Krishnas in the building: the quiet one—the Armenian Pogosov, and the crazy one—the Jew Gorelik, who chased his mother around the apartment with an axe each time she secretly ate a cutlet. He put the poor old woman on a vegetarian diet and made her recite an incomprehensible prayer in a foreign language every night before bed. There was a show-business lesbian—“She’s got an expensive car, and all her girls are no older than twenty, but she’s nice, always brings me chocolates!” There were fags, epileptics, diabetics, a retarded kid, a grandpa who hooted at night like an owl, a circus acrobat who despised the internet but crouched nightly by his radio and was crazy about Morse code, and the Gypsy Syova from the Romen Theater, a lover/hero who often suffered the consequences of his own debauchery. In the middle of the night strange-looking couriers brought him cocaine. Syova was repeatedly robbed by the whores whom he sometimes beat mercilessly and at other times showered with flowers, as he did with Petrovna, to whom he presented the roses he received after his concerts. The police visited Syova regularly on the subject of his debauchery, but he always bought them off, and on more than one occasion the cops barely crawled out of his Gypsy lair. Generous with vodka, Syova could drink anyone halfway dead. There were also remains of the old intelligentsia, quiet people living hand-to-mouth, and people who still could not get used to the new order: former professors, Distinguished Artists and People’s Painters who were no longer commissioned to portray heroic pioneers. These sighed heavily at the elevators and complained to Petrovna about their lives, and she winked at them conspiratorially, as if to say, patience, everything is possible, just watch and wait until these democrats drown themselves in their own bullshit. Such camaraderie and affected rudeness were pleasing to these leftovers from the past—they felt at one with the people, lifted their chins and stepped into the elevator like Gagarin into his rocket. Petrovna was always good for a shoulder to cry on; she was the one people asked what to feed a sick dog or how to treat their daughter who had just aborted a child of the husband who loved her to death. There were foreigners in the building, too: they rented apartments for a month or up to a year. Mostly they were the politely smiling American students and the Indian businessmen whose white turbans, for some reason, instilled in Petrovna sacred trepidation. Once a real Swede appeared and then disappeared, with a pipe that exuded a divine aroma. Petrovna assured me that sometimes, right before she fell asleep, she could still catch a whiff of that tobacco, even though he’d been gone for three months. There was a Japanese cello player, a fifth-year conservatory student. She managed to flood, at three in the morning, the loony designer Tamara, who threatened to go to court but settled for two thousand dollars, although there couldn’t have been more than five hundred in damages. The Japanese girl had fallen asleep in the bathtub, where she lay meditating to rid herself of the strains of a Shostakovich string concerto that were haunting her. Petrovna collected the news, ranked it, sorted it, and apportioned it depending on the trust she had in her listener: the fresher and more scandalous for some, and completely outdated for others. One real good did come out of it, though: she offered me the job of washing the stairs.
“You’re not a princess, you can spend an hour or two mopping, and pocket three and a half grand. I used to do it myself, but I don’t have it in me anymore.”
I agreed on the spot.
In the evenings, I went out with a bucket, rags and mops, and washed the staircase and the landings. I didn’t have to work especially hard: the residents were all decent people; all I had to do was give the place one good scrub and then just maintain things. The residents got used to me, greeted me first, and several times asked me to tidy up their apartments after parties. Five or six hundred rubles was a solid extra, and it was a rare month when I didn’t add to my straight five hundred dollars another hundred or hundred and fifty. I had no trouble sleeping, of course, and fell asleep quickly. Mark Grigoriyevich bought a baby monitor for us. One transmitter, always on, stood next to Grandma’s bed. I sleep lightly, and if I heard anything awry, I got up and dashed to my charge.
Things would have continued in this fashion and I would have lived with the Grandma for as long as she had left, but then something happened I had not in the least expected.
. 5 .
At the end of our hallway was the door to apartment 84. Clearly unusual, it advertised its owner: its faux leather cover was torn and cotton padding hung from the rips, the glass number was broken, twisted upside down and held by a single screw. They must have changed the locks more than once; the holes left by the old locks were filled with construction foam—in the dark hallway the orange blobs attracted your eye like flashlights in a cave. There was no sign of a handle; they must have opened the door by pulling on the loose bits of faux leather. Everything about it indicated that the apartment owners were alcoholics. Imagine my surprise when one night while washing the floors I first ran into the girl—a flaming redhead, slim and tall, wearing fashionable red tennis shoes, jeans that showed off her toned legs, a dazzling white blouse and a leather tote over her shoulder. She exited the elevator, greeted me happily and walked lightly and noiselessly towards the unfortunate apartment at the end of the hallway.
I couldn’t help peeking at her: she pulled out her keys, a whole heavy ring of them, opened the door and shouted into the apartment, “Toshka!” Then the door closed. Clearly, the girl lived here.
Another time I saw her in the street: she was getting out of a small, red Volkswagen. In the passenger seat sat a young man who could be described as attractive—slim and tall, but wearing a dirty t-shirt, a rumpled pair of dirty jeans and a strange, out-of-season fur cap that he had pulled down over his eyes and ears. I remember I thought that the girl was too lazy to do his laundry. The boy was clearly sick, either nursing broken ribs or an upset stomach: he climbed out of the car slowly, hugging his midsection, and shuffled along behind his very fit girlfriend. He walked bent over, turning his head from side to side as if to see if he were being followed; a pair of murky eyes appraised me from under the cap. The girl grabbed him by the elbow and began to tell him something, laughing, but he was not listening. He was completely focused on the pain inside him and obviously wanted nothing more than to get to his bed. They were both in their early 20s. The girl said hello to me, and I smiled back.
On the same day, when I took out the trash, I noticed their window: it was about three feet above the overhang that shielded the back door to the building. A downspout ran next to the overhang. A dirty bed sheet that somebody had tied into knots hung from the window. Fedya the groundskeeper was sweeping the yard with his taciturn son. When he noticed that I was looking at the window he came up to me.
“Druggies live there. You didn’t know?”
“How would I know?”
“Their whole life is an adventure, isn’t it, son?”
The boy nodded silently and turned away.
The Bashkir shook his head.
“I pulled mine out, brought him here. I thought, it’s the capital, we can hide, and still I’m sweeping up syringes every day. If I don’t watch out, dummy here will get into it again. What�
��d you say, son?”
“I won’t, you know that,” the boy muttered through his teeth.
“You watch out, or you’ll turn into some kind of ape that no zoo would want,” Fedya smirked ruefully. “You see now who your neighbors are?”
“And the girl, too?”
“Oi-vey, you should have seen her when she came here—she’d be prettier if she’d fallen out of a dumpster. She had no clue whatsoever: ‘Anton, where’s Anton?’” He mimicked and added proudly, “I led her to him by the hand and right at the door he—wham!—gave her one in the eye, pulled her inside, and slammed the door. Never thanked me or nothing. His Dad took charge later and brought them around, more or less; they spent two months in a hospital, and now, you see, they’re at it again. He’s knotted himself a ladder and eloped; must be on the needle again.”
“How so?”
“Kolka, is he on the needle again?”
But Kolka pretended he did not hear and kept sweeping ferociously.
“You’re better off not knowing these things. My wife and I have been through it all. I didn’t take mine to the hospital—brought him here. I’m hiding him from the army: if they roll him in, he’ll start using again, and that’s it, the end, Mom and Dad can’t help him there.”
After that day, I looked at Fedya and his son with new eyes. He, too, having opened up to me, seemed to treat me kinder, and only the boy kept his distance, as he did from the rest of the world in which he lived, gloomy and unfriendly, like a robot whose life had ended before it had the chance to start. Petrovna, of course, eagerly supplied me with information: Anton Kolchin has lived on the second floor for about two years; his father, a photographer, had bought the apartment for him.
“You know him, he is that sharp man, like retired military, who lives on the ninth floor. As soon as Anton messes up, his Dad dumps him in the hospital; he makes short work of it. The boy is a confirmed addict and his mother won’t touch him, I’ve only seen her once. She seemed like a cultured woman, but she walked past me without saying hello. That was when they took Anton away the last time. The boy does have a heart of gold, always tried to help me when I was washing the floors—carry a bucket, say, or let me fill it in his apartment so that I wouldn’t have to go all the way down to the basement. I don’t know why he wants to destroy himself.”
“And the girl?”
“Yulka? If it wasn’t for her, Antoshka would have been done for. She nurses him like his own momma, because first he nursed her. Her Dad is some big general, but she does not live with him. Now they take turns getting high.”
I told her about the knotted sheet.
“I know, but what can you do—he’s paranoid, has nightmares. Maybe he’ll sneak back at night, or else he’ll be out there hiding until the police catch him.”
After this tale, I didn’t feel like coming back out to wash the floors that night. I put Grandma to bed and decided that I would wash everything tomorrow. I sat down in the armchair next to my patient, where it was warm in the glow of the lamp. A wave of sadness washed over me: I thought of Pavlik, Valerka, my family in Kharabali… the last letter I received from them came three months ago to Volochok; they did not know my woodland address. Grandma slept quietly, and I nodded off to sleep myself. Immediately I was plunged into an endless nightmare: somebody terrifying and faceless was after me, was breaking through a wall, screaming and beating on it with his fists. I came to my senses covered in a cold sweat, but the nightmare went on: someone was screaming outside the door and hammering on it in desperation. I ran to the door. It was the neighbor girl screaming; I recognized her voice.
“Open, for God’s sake, open, Vera! You must help me, you’re a nurse, aren’t you?”
I opened the door. She fell into my arms, gripping my robe. Her eyes were wide with fear and her nightgown was splattered with blood.
“Please help!”
“What happened?”
I did my best to say this calmly and coldly.
“Antoshka opened himself up, let’s run, do you have bandages and stuff?”
She instantly switched to the familiar “you” and all at once I realized that she was not just alarmed but also high, which aggravated her panic.
“All right, let’s go!”
I grabbed the nurse’s bag that I took everywhere and walked to apartment 84 as calmly as I could. Yulka instantly obeyed, feeling a bit calmer in the aura of my confidence.
. 6 .
We found anton in the bathroom. He was standing upright, completely naked, and everything around him was splattered with blood. In the bathtub lay the scalpel that he had used to cut his left wrist several times. Anton was deep in the throes of his psychosis: with the fingers of his right hand he was methodically squeezing blood from his cuts like a teen squeezing pimples. The process enraptured him and he moaned with pleasure rather than pain as he watched his blood trickle down his wrist and palm. Every so often he washed off the blood with the hot water from the tap, then squeezed again and moaned again. When he heard our steps behind his back he didn’t even turn around, thinking it was only Yulka.
“It’s coming, it’s coming out, bitch, I’d have burst if I hadn’t cut it,” he muttered under his breath.
“Tosha, I brought a doctor.”
He jerked around and shot me a wild look.
“Who are you?”
“Vera, your neighbor. Come on, let me see what you’ve got there,” I tried to speak calmly, as if I had seen all this a thousand times.
“You in?”
“Sure, I’m in. By the way, the human body contains seven liters of blood. How much have you drained already, Mr. Donor-Wanna-Be? Are you nauseous? Dry mouth? Stomach pain?”
I peppered him with symptoms as fast as I could think of them; I had to distract him from his mangled hand, scare him, make him latch onto something else.
“The pain!” he shouted. He forgot about the hand; the odds were stacking up in my favor. “I’m about to burst here! Do you even know what it’s like?”
“You’re filled with gas, like a balloon. And you think it’ll come out with the blood? F for effort, pal, only given how long you’ve been at this, you should know better. Is your head spinning?”
Yulka had time to tell me that Anton was shooting meth, which made him feel like the drugs were about to make his insides explode—this is why addicts slash their wrists, to release the tension. It was about time he started to feel lightheaded; he had lost quite a bit of blood.
“Seven liters?” His eyes darted around the bathroom. “It is spinning… does this mean I am dying?”
He suddenly shook with chills, dropped his arms and howled like a little child who had driven a splinter into his toe.
“Almost. Let me see!”
He extended his arms to me; his teeth were clattering and large tears rolled out of his eyes. He looked at me like a loyal dog.
“Good! Sit on the hamper!”
He obediently lowered himself onto the laundry hamper. The cuts were not deep and, thank God, not across the wrist arteries but spread all over: he had slashed skin and the fat underneath but missed the main blood vessels. He made multiple cuts—I counted forty-two. On top of that, he had messed with his arm trying to squeeze out the bottled up tension, as he called it. Naturally, the hot water he kept running over the wounds did not promote coagulation.
“This is going to hurt,” I warned him, breaking open a capsule of iodine.
“What is that?”
“Iodine.”
“The fuck for? It’s all sterile. No!”
“Sure, let’s play doctor now, like in kindergarten. Would you like it to go septic? The clock is ticking and the blood is running. Do you know what septic means?”
He did, and was scared enough to obey.
“Deal with it!”
I generously poured iodine over the cuts, padded them and put a tight bandage on top. He didn’t even seem to notice—he was already obsessing about something else.
“D
o you have it?”
“Have what?”
“You know what—Demerol. The pressure is terrible—my bones are cracking open. I need something to get it out.”
“Follow me,” I took him to the bedroom and made him get in bed. Yulka trailed behind, watching with interest, but, thank God, not offering advice. When I asked her, she brought me a chair from the kitchen and I used its back to rig an IV drip with haemodesum. He let me put a tourniquet on his arm and without further instructions made a fist, as he was used to doing to make the veins come up.
“Haven’t shot up for ages!”
He loosened up and was now smiling with anticipation. But his moods changed instantly, and the next moment his teeth were clattering again, goose bumps ran all over his skin and a new wave of fear washed over him. He whispered in a tragic, theatrical voice:
“Doctor, hurry, I beg you. I am dying, my feet are cold.”
I cracked four ampoules of relanium: it would take a horse’s dose to knock him out. Anton was now overexcited and anxious, chattered in a constant stream, but then would cut himself mid-word, bite his lip dramatically and watch my preparations with tear-filled eyes, then let loose again, ask one question after another, roll his head back and moan. The fear lodged firmly inside of him and did not budge.
Finally I caught the vein and connected the drip.
“What is it? Tell me!”
He watched the bubbles in the pouch fearfully.
“Right, I got nothing better to do but educate you here. Lie still, keep your strength, you’ll get warm now.”
Fish- a History of One Migration Page 22