I already liked the town because it was filled with festive sunshine, and I could smell the blossoming lilac’s intoxicating scent even through the windows of the trolleybus. Most of the buildings were pre-revolutionary, with large windows, ornate moulding work that had come away in places on the walls and wide front doorways. The atmosphere of modest merchant-class serenity was spoiled by numerous kiosks with clumsily daubed signs: “Pies”, “Ice Cream”, or “Irina Ltd”. I was delighted to see the Russian letter “y” at the end of so many Russian shop-name signs “Produkty” (“Groceries”), “Soki, Vody” (“Juices, Waters”), “Sigarety” (“Cigarettes”). In my native parts, where Ukrainian nezalezhnyst (“independence”) had been raging for almost nine years, this letter had disappeared completely.
The town centre was green and spacious. The intersection of Gagarin Prospect and Komsomol 50th Anniversary Prospect formed a small square, which had a bronze Lenin three metres high. Standing to the right of the statue was an armoured car of Civil War vintage, and to its left was a T-70 World War II tank, as if Lenin were being urged to choose more contemporary military technology but wasn’t taking the hint, stubbornly thrusting out his hand in an attempt to flag down a foreign automobile on the main avenue.
Right beside him was a cosy little park. A granite pedestal with a howitzer gun towered over the flower beds. Below the golden figures “1941–1945” lay wreaths and flowers, evidently left over from the Victory Day celebrations on 9 May. Rising up behind the little park was a cathedral with reddish, samovar-shaped domes and a bell tower with a steeple covered with a dull, mossy-emerald patina.
The trolleybus stopped beside an old brick wall surrounding the cathedral that had grass sprouting through it. I walked along a short little street smothered in lime trees and came out directly opposite the metal fence of the market, at the point where the fish stalls began and there was a smell of riverine scum.
I asked some women with stuffed shopping bags where the number eighteen bus stop was. They explained that it was at the other side of the market, but advised me against taking the bus— “it’s not reliable”—it was better to wait there for the route taxi, which also ran along Chkalov Street.
I found the Trust agency that I needed in the semi-basement of a sleek nine-storey building faced with tiles, between a delicatessen and a hairdresser’s.
The interior was a standard example of a modest “Eurostandard” renovation. The black imitation-leather furniture, white blinds and rambling pot plants inspired a distinct feeling of trust.
There was only one woman ahead of me in the queue, but I was mistaken to feel glad about this—she stayed in the notary’s office right up to the lunch break, so I was forced to spend the best part of another hour browsing through the local newspapers.
By the time the seals had been applied and I had spent more time in the queue to the little window in order to pay the required fee and handed in the receipt to the notary, the day was already declining into evening.
In the delicatessen I bought a bottle of Absolut vodka and a large gift box of chocolates. Who could tell which sex of bureaucratic individual I would encounter at my uncle’s local housing department? I needed gifts to accommodate both possibilities.
The 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 skinny shoulder 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, after all—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 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.”