“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. Anticipating their 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 Maxim had been…
The bathroom made an even more painful impression on me. Lying there on the washbasin in front of the mirror, beside the toothbrush and the tube of toothpaste, was a safety razor with dried-out stubble on the blade—all that was left of Uncle Maxim…
The kitchen was small, with barely enough space for the cooker, the Northern refrigerator, the table, the stools and the cupboard hanging on the wall above the sink. There was a small portable television set standing on the wide window sill.
Although the apartment didn’t look a total wreck, it was definitely in need of renovation. Assessing my own strength and experience, I realized that I wouldn’t be able to manage the wallpaper and the tiles that had come away all on my own—I would have to hire workmen in order to get the apartment into marketable condition.
I scoured the bathtub thoroughly with baking soda and took a bath with a sliver of pink soap that I scraped off the washbasin. My uncle’s kitchen reserves yielded up macaroni, canned mackerel and a tin of peas. I relieved the tedium of my supper by watching some episode or other of the TV serial The Eternal Call.
I spent the night on the sofa-bed in the sitting room. Although I was worn out, I couldn’t get to sleep for a long time. I was obsessed by the thought that the phone line had been disconnected and without it the price of the apartment was sure to fall, and I was also haunted by dreams of a generous buyer showing up immediately and offering me six thousand dollars without even bargaining. Then I imagined a bad buyer, greedy and cunning, who wouldn’t give me more than three thousand and tried to swindle me. I tossed and turned, grinding my teeth.
First thing in the morning I drank some tea and ran off to the local post office, which I had spotted during my wanderings around the area the day before. I called home from the international phone there and reported to my father on the work that had been done so far.
I also enquired at the post office where the local telephone exchange was. I had primed myself unnecessarily for difficulties here. They gave me a bill that had to be paid at the savings bank (the accumulated debt amounted to an insignificant sum, even including the penalties) and promised to reconnect the phone within a week. Absolutely delighted by how easily the matter had been resolved, I immediately set off to visit my uncle at the cemetery.
There weren’t any graves in the crematorium section—only concrete walls in which the urns were immured. My uncle had been placed close to the ground, I had to squat down to read the words engraved on the brass plaque:
And in slightly smaller letters:
I put off the conversation with the administration of the cemetery until the sale of the apartment was settled.
THE BUYER
BUT AT HOME a surprise was waiting. A note, folded in four and wedged in the door, with a message for me from a certain Vadim Leonidovich Kolesov. He wrote that in Housing Department Office No. 27 he had heard from the manager, Mukhina, that I intended to sell the apartment and, as an extremely interested party, he wished to meet with me. His aged parents lived nearby, so the purchase of accommodation in this precise location would be ideal, and he asked permission to call round that evening at about ten.
The polite tone of the letter suggested a man of delicate manners. True, the thought did briefly flash through my mind that I hadn’t really told Antonina Petrovna anything much, but it was easier to convince myself that in my tired state I had simply not attached any significance in that situation to the question: “What are you thinking of doing with the apartment?”—and had replied automatically, without even realizing it.
Everything, of course, was suddenly going rather too well, but after a long sequence of setbacks in this worldly life, a minor indulgence from destiny seemed entirely justified.
A quick sale was the outcome that suited my plans to return home soon better than any other. I reread the message excitedly and put the sheet of paper in my pocket, promising myself that in the event of a successful deal I would give Antonina Petrovna a more substantial present than a box of sweets.
I still had half a day in reserve, so I put my feet up for a while and took a nap, and then tidied the apartment, washed the floors and slipped out for half an hour to the grocery shop. Outside I saw the couple from the previous day chatting to each other again—the bald man with the bundle and the dacha lady in the headscarf. On my way back, they had been joined by another two: a man with a moustache, who was clearly another vegetable gardener, clutching the handle of the spade on which he was leaning with strong, sinewy hands, and a floppy-haired young guy in a threadbare mechanic’s boiler suit, with a toolbox. The young guy was cracking simple-minded little jokes to the dacha lady, and the sinewy man with the spade was laughing loudly.