I went to the address the captain had given me. In the nominal center of town there was a block of Stalinist houses; in Moscow they’re just a fragment of architectural history, one style among others, but here the Stalinist buildings comprised the only architecture there was. Wind, snow, and rain did not spare their excesses: the stucco moldings and decorative balconies were flaking, the white trim of the windows had vanished, and the wall paint had peeled; damp drafts filled the broad and high-ceiling lobbies, wind moved through vaulted arches, the concrete, lime, and brick crumbled, mold the color of pond scum covered the bottom of the walls, and moss spread in the cracks; rust dripped everywhere, and where the stone was broken the reinforcement rods stuck out, and in places you could see that the concrete was reinforced with tightly wrapped barbed wire instead of rods—they must have run out of metal.
That sight—a house built on barbed wire—gave me the feeling that the building was about to shudder, all poked through, riddled, and no surface would hold, no matter the brand of cement. The wire seemed to be breaking the house apart from inside, the way tree roots break through asphalt, and all the molding, the bas reliefs, the vases in niches were not enough to make me believe that this building was meant for living, for people. Animals have a good sense about this, and it was the case here: there wasn’t a cat or dog to be seen, a bird feeder dangled empty in the wind, and only rats rustled in the garbage cans.
There was something strange in this neighborhood, one detail—I couldn’t figure out exactly what—was disturbing me; something was missing from the sounds of the city, a note in the background noise was gone. I stopped, but the more closely I listened, the more I realized that hearing would not help; the answer was literally before my eyes. Here—the only place in town—the windows were not covered by light cotton curtains but thick, heavy brown or straw-colored drapes, probably weighted by dust, full of heavy folds like the skin beneath an old man’s eyes; the drapes covered the closed windows; no sound reached the street from the apartments.
The residents had shut themselves off from the air of the street, locked the wide entry doors; in their apartments, where the sunlight rarely fell, they tried to preserve the air of their dwindling days; in the diffused honey light at sunset, perhaps they dusted the lacquered furniture, enjoying the cognac-colored lacquer, the cut-glass crystal glasses in the sideboard, and the existence of well-crafted things took away the fear of their own impotence.
I remembered the other time I had heard this silence, only once, but I remembered it for its singularity; as a child, one morning in the paleontological museum in the dinosaur skeleton hall.
The museum was empty that morning; I beat my parents to the biggest hall with the tyrannosaurus and other carnivorous monsters, and I was amazed: usually I was afraid of this room, afraid of the fangs and claws the size of my head, afraid of the skeletons that looked like enlarged drawings—they revealed the natural-rational meaning of creation, and I did not know what to think of life, of nature, which creates with equal thoroughness both the tender jay and the predatory pterodactyl.
It was quiet, completely quiet; and what I saw in the gaping monstrous jaws was not the anger and wrath that had frightened me before but instead the distortion from suffering and death; I saw that the room with the skeletons, the entire museum, the entire sunny autumn day—everything, we were all inside invisible jaws that had not yet closed, but in some final sense it had already happened.
And here on the street of the northern town I recognized that silence—the silence of a museum where the vanished creatures of a different era, fierce and horrible, were diminished by the fleshless face of death and became just as harmless as a squashed frog drying in the heat.
In the lobby I was met by the same ocher, rhomboid tile as in the Moscow building where Grandfather II lived; tile, walls, railing, elevator—it was all the same. I was amazed: how many other cities were there where I could walk into a building whose interior would inevitably elicit memories that I considered profoundly personal; even the wires leading to the doorbell bent the same way as in the former building, and I thought that there was really only one building, like the statue of Lenin, and that the differences in the biographies of its residents in various cities was averaged out by this uniformity; that the memorial plaques you sometimes see on its walls are just a mockery because for each apartment many more were led out of it than those who live there now. I imagined what would happen if all those decomposed residents were to return—the house could not fit them all, they would stand on the staircases, in the courtyard, strangers to one another, but each would recognize the sand-colored rhomboid tiles, the doorbells, the little plaques with the apartment numbers … The ones who survived would stay inside their rooms, afraid to come out, afraid to open the door a crack, because through that crack would squeeze flimsy shadows with black spots, ink splotches for faces, blotted out by the censors’ ink.
I started up the stairs; for a second I thought there was no one left in the building, that stale funereal air came through the keyholes, that behind the doors all the mirrors were covered. I recognized the beginning of my third dream that started me on this path; not that it had taken place here, though it could have.
The air on the landings still held—as it holds the smells from your neighbors’ kitchens—the febrile, sweat-soaked, throat-rattling dreams of old men; they slept, turning under their eiderdowns, gritting their teeth so as not to speak in their sleep, not choke, like a drunk on vomit, on the unexpected words of a sleepwalker, and their bodies trembled and sweated, and the sweat reeked of death.
Fourth floor, apartment sixteen; the bell jangled, it seemed, behind every door at once, the sound flew down long corridors, striking the glass panes of wardrobes and scattering as bouncing beads on the parquet. There was quiet behind the door; I rang again and waited a few minutes. The lock clicked inside the apartment.
In the dark of the chain-length crack, I saw a face. A woman stood behind the door, a meter and half from me, but I could not say whether it was a person or an image; then I realized that her face was partially paralyzed, only the eyebrows moved, expressing surprise; I couldn’t see her features, it turns out a face lives in motion, in the barely perceptible movements of the facial muscles, and when it is motionless, there is nothing to be said about it; my gaze was attracted by the nostrils—two black dots, two entrances into the inner darkness of the body.
I imagined that a lizard or snake could crawl out of those black apertures, like holes in a stone wall or a cliff; that they did not belong to the face, they were openings, dangerous, evil; if I could, I would have shut the old woman’s nostrils, filled them with flesh.
To get out of that darkened moment, half inhaled into those nostrils, I spoke; I greeted her and asked for Semyon Vikentyevich. The old woman went back down the corridor, she left so noiselessly, as if she spent a lifetime trying not disturb someone’s sleep, sensitive, troubled, imbued with neuralgic pains; she returned just as noiselessly and unlocked the door. She had three dozen keys—probably to all the rooms, cupboards, closets, desk—and they did not make a sound, as if each key had been wrapped in cloth. There was something bizarre in that key ring, in that passion for keys, for their grooves and teeth, in the desire to keep all the keys together; there was a hint here, a key to the woman herself; she made an inviting gesture—come in—and immediately shut the door behind me. I had not noticed but I immediately felt it: the door was locked.