by Bibish
He was terribly nervous.
“What did you do, fall into the toilet? I’ve been waiting, you were gone for ages!”
I barely managed to calm him down so I could start trading.
Finally Alexander Ivanovich came out of the hospital and we began living together and getting on very well. He almost always corrected me if I spoke incorrectly, and he even got upset when I pronounced words badly.
The New Year 2001 arrived. Uncle Sasha went away to celebrate it with friends. Not long before he left we gave each other presents. And then we were on our own. At ten o’clock in the evening there was a ring at the door. We opened it and there were Ravil and his wife standing there. They’d come to celebrate the New Year with us. Well, all right. They sat and talked, and they drank (I don’t drink, after all).
When I moved to that town with my family, Ravil’s mother had given us five kilograms of dried apricots to pass on to him and she’d also warned us not to pester him with any questions about a place to live or about a job. She said:
“Don’t bother my son.”
We answered:
“All right, we get the hint. We’ll live a long way away from them, so as not to bother them unnecessarily.”
We’d only spoken to them on the phone once and told them that we’d brought those apricots. That time they’d invited us to visit them, and that was all, we hadn’t seen them after that. Now they’d probably found us through Aunty Nina, and so they’d come to celebrate the New Year.
It turned out that the mother of their son-in-law had come to see them from Voronezh. Since they still weren’t on good terms with their son-in-law, they didn’t want to celebrate the holiday with him, so they’d left them and come to us. They stayed until three in the morning and then said good-bye.
On January 2 they came again, and even brought their neighbors—a husband and wife—with them.
That time Uncle Sasha was sitting in his room. Ravil asked:
“Well then, are you all right here?”
“Yes, everything’s fine.”
Galya said:
“Ravil and I thought and thought a lot and we’ve decided we’re going to take you away from here.”
“Where to?”
“To us, you’re going to live beside us.”
“No, we’re fine here, the landlord’s a good man, the children’s school is close by, and nothing’s happened to them there. The children are already used to the school, and so we won’t move them anywhere else again.”
“Everything you earn goes on the rent for the apartment. If things go on like that, you’ll never be able to save up enough money for a place of your own.”
“You have enough family of your own at home, there’d be too many of us, what would you want that for?”
Galya explained:
“But you’re not going to live with us, only on our staircase. There’s an empty apartment there, three rooms. Actually, the work on it needs to be finished. The woman it belongs to is a friend of mine, she lives in Urengoi, in the north. She hardly ever comes here. I’ve got the key. She always used to send the money for the apartment by mail, and I paid it here. I’ll phone her, and if she says it’s all right, you’ll live right beside us, and you’ll only have to pay for one person, because there’s only one person registered there. You must agree, it’s a very good option for you.”
“But doesn’t she work, then, won’t she come herself?”
“No, she works an awful lot. Something terrible happened to her daughter. When her daughter was five, a drug addict stabbed her grandmother to death. The little girl was so frightened she ran out into the street, fell down on the snow, and then couldn’t get up again. She’s been paralyzed since she was five. Now she’s sixteen, she’s had eleven operations. Her operations are always done in Leningrad. Last year the woman who owns the apartment came and wanted to do European-style repairs, she ripped everything out of the apartment: she took up the linoleum, took away the bath, the sink, the toilet bowl. Then they phoned her from Urengoi to say her daughter was unwell, so she dropped everything and went away. Now we don’t know when she’ll come. If you have time, come tomorrow to take a look at the apartment. Think over our suggestion.”
And they went home. My husband and I wondered what we ought to do. We felt all right at Uncle Sasha’s place, there were no conflicts, only it was cramped—there were four of us in one room. One of my sons slept on a folding bed, because there was no room for a real bed.
In the morning we went to the building where Ravil and Galya lived. They opened the door into the empty apartment for us. There were three huge rooms, and you could simply get lost in the kitchen. We liked that it was so spacious, but there were repairs that needed to be done.
We said: “All right, we’ll move in here. Only first the repairs have to be finished off.” We bought everything that was needed and repaired the apartment.
We went to say good-bye to Uncle Sasha. He said:
“Well, what can I say, if you think it’s better there, it’s up to you. The most important thing is that you don’t have any grudges against me. If you’re not happy there, with your relatives—come back, I’ll take you in. You can rely on me.”
We began to live beside our relatives. When we were bored, we went to visit Uncle Sasha. We didn’t move the children to a different school, why traumatize them like that?
Ravil went to Moscow almost all the time on business trips, but Galya never worked.
We’d only lived in the new apartment for about a week when we started to have problems. Galya kept borrowing money from us, and she didn’t give it back for a long time. And we thought: Surely she must understand that we keep moving from one apartment to another with two children, we need money ourselves like the air we breathe. And they’d got along as man and wife for twenty years before we came. Had they really been waiting for us so they could borrow money?
We never refused Galya—however much money she asked for, we gave it to her, and Ravil didn’t know about it. Then she started asking us to lend money to her girlfriends as well as to her. We didn’t refuse them either, we gave it to them without saying anything. But then, her friends always paid the money back on time, not like Galya.
We always felt tense now, because Galya had begun creating scenes. One time she came and said:
“Turn the television down! The neighbors are complaining!”
And another time:
“Ravil came home and he scolded me: Go and talk to them, you’re related, after all!”
She didn’t know when to stop—she used to wake us up at six in the morning and in the middle of the night. She didn’t care that she was disturbing our peace. She knocked on the door and shouted:
“Save me, Ravil’s killing me!”
She played tricks like that quite often, and at the same time she never thought of paying back the money she owed us.
One time she came and asked me:
“If your husband swore at you or beat you all the time and drove you out of the house, what would you do?”
I said:
“We have enough problems without quarreling. If he swears at me, I keep quiet, because in a little while he calms down.”
“How can you put up with it? That’s the last thing you need. They put up with that in your parts, in the East, but this is Russia!”
“I can’t get divorced just because of a few insults and make my children orphans. Children need a father. No one can take the place of their father.”
In short, there was no way I could persuade her and calm her down. We agreed to differ. We lived in that house and were friends with the neighbors. It was only Galya who got on our nerves with her shouting and her tears and her quarrels with Ravil.
Nine months went by. In that time we were able to buy a color television on our savings. And that was all, nothing else.
The fall began. November. In the middle of the month Galya announced:
“Pack up your things, the owner of the f
lat’s coming. She wants to sell it.”
“When do we have to leave?” was all I asked.
“Tomorrow if you like. Look for a new place to live.”
“Winter’s coming on, while we’re looking, before we find a place . . . Can we wait another week?”
“No, the owner is coming. She phoned and said: ‘I want them to leave the flat urgently.’”
My husband and I were very upset. What could we do? We went to see Uncle Sasha, where we used to live. We explained the situation to him. He said:
“You really shouldn’t have left me. It’s always the same with relatives. It’s best to live as far away from them as you can. And I’ve already got other lodgers.”
“Oh no!”
“Oh yes! My friends found them for me, because I needed the money. They’ve been living with me for a few days already, a young couple with a little child, one year old. I can’t throw them out in the street, it’s winter already. How can they throw you out like that without any warning?”
“It just happened!”
“You have children too, they shouldn’t have treated you like that. And where are you going to go now?”
“Where? Out into the street, to look for an apartment. Maybe we’ll find one, maybe we won’t—we don’t know.”
We said good-bye to Uncle Sasha and went back home. Every day Galya turned up like an earthquake. She shouted at us. It was impossible to put up with it any longer. Recently she’d been acting like a madwoman. It wasn’t our fault that things weren’t good with her husband. And the neighbors said:
“We’re used to her scandals. We know the whole repertoire. We take no notice of her any longer. There’s never any end to their quarreling.”
And then there were two days left. She told us again: “Leave!”
We told the children to go to Aunty Lida after school, and we set out to look for an apartment. We went on looking until midnight. Nothing at all. I almost went mad.
In the morning I went to the migration center again. I went into the office. I was seen by the same man, the one who saw me before. There was a secretary sitting beside him, or a colleague, I don’t know. He asked:
“What did you want? What’s your question?”
I was so anxious I was shaking all over. I said to him:
“You see, I was here to see you before, and I’d like to know, if someone with children is left out on the street in winter in Russia, what do they do about it?”
“Where did you come from?”
“From Turkmenia.”
“And why did you come to our town? The whole place is already crammed with immigrants.”
“Then won’t you tell me where isn’t crammed?”
“Everywhere’s crammed, the whole of Russia’s crammed! What did you come to Russia for? Go back home!”
“We have a certificate from the Russian embassy that says I’m a Russian citizen and so are my children. It was for their sake that I came here to Russia. Where we come from in Turkmenia there’s a lot of drug addiction, and it’s very bad there now.”
“And you think things are good in Russia, do you? There’s nothing good here. There’s nothing we can do to help you, go back home.”
“I’ve already deregistered there, and I’m not going to go back. In Turkmenia my children will be nobody, they only speak Russian.”
While he was talking to someone on the telephone, I turned to that secretary, I cried and said:
“You know, we’ve already been in Russia for a year and a half. We live in other people’s apartments, we don’t even have the money to buy a room in a communal apartment. Now I’m quite literally out on the street, a tramp with children. I’d like to know, if someone with children ends up out on the street in the Russian state, what do they do about it? Put them in a hostel or at least a broken-down ruin, do they give them anything at all? Here, look at my documents, I’m a Russian citizen too!” And I took out all my documents.
She looked at everything and said:
“You have all the documents, but that’s not the point. Right now no one will do anything for you, they won’t give you a room in a hostel or anything at all.”
“How can that be? It’s winter, and my children will die!”
“I don’t know, it doesn’t depend on me. Go to an agency that rents out apartments. Perhaps they have something for money.”
“I’ve been round all the agencies in the town in the last year and a half. It’s always the same answer: We don’t take non-Russians, and especially not with children.”
Just then the boss put down the phone and turned to me:
“What were you thinking when you came to Russia? People come here to their relatives or friends, but who did you come to?”
I didn’t want to talk about that subject, because it was our relatives’ fault that we’d ended up on the street. I answered:
“We didn’t come to anyone, we came on our own.”
He said:
“Then go back!”
“But isn’t there anywhere we can stay in Russia?”
“Go to Siberia, to the taiga, and live there with the bears!” he answered.
“All right, thank you,” I said, and I went out into the street. And I thought: Then why did they set up this useless migration center, if they can’t do anything there? And they pay them wages too—what for? So that they can send illiterate people like me off to the bears, is that it? I can live anywhere at all, I’ve survived the desert, I spent all night in the forest until morning—I didn’t die. And now they send me off to the bears. I can live with the bears too! But the point is: Why make the children suffer, what for? That’s the way it is! The state is like an X-ray machine, it looks right through me. It looks straight through me and doesn’t even notice me.
And so I walked around the town and I said to myself:
Are we really going to be left out on the street today?
I went to the people I knew at the market.
“I need an apartment urgently,” I said. “We’ve literally been left out on the street.”
They were alarmed and they asked:
“But where are the children?”
“In school.”
They all started offering us places at once. One woman said:
“Come to us! Until you find an apartment, you can live with me. Of course, my son and I only have one room. We’ll sleep on the floor, or you can, we’ll fit in somehow. Come, all right? Here’s the address, take it.”
Another woman said:
“Come stay with us, my children will be glad.”
I answered:
“There are five of you, and four of us, no, no, thank you!”
“But where will you go? You’d better come, all right? Here’s the address.”
There was a woman standing nearby. She said:
“Listen, there’s an empty apartment in our building, the owner’s still a young man, forty years old, he’s divorced, he mostly lives with his father in the country.”
“But how can we find him?”
“I see him sometimes.”
“Sometimes is no good to me, I need him right now!”
“I understand, but how can I find him right now? I can’t do it until tomorrow.”
“All right, we’ll hold on until tomorrow. We’ll stay with friends until then. When you find him, tell me, please. If he complains because of the children, tell him that they aren’t noisy and they’re at school the whole day.”
“All right, tomorrow I’ll go to the collective farm market, he sometimes goes there, or I’ll call into the grocery store over that way, he used to work there as a porter. If they haven’t sacked him for drinking yet, we’ll arrange things tomorrow. Just don’t you be upset, everything will be fine.”
We spent the night with friends. In the morning the children went to school, and we went to the market. I found the woman there and I asked:
“Well, did you see the owner of that apartment?”
“I did,
I agreed with him that you’d stay at his place for a long time. I explained that you’d pay the money on time, but how much and for what, you can agree between yourselves.”
“Of course we’ll pay the money on time!” I said happily.
“Then go, he’s waiting for you at the apartment. You can work out all the details with him there.”
My husband and I went to agree to terms. We knocked at the door. It was broken. We went into the apartment—ugh! I’d never seen anything so horrible.
In the corridor a cobweb stuck right to my face. Two rooms were full of rubbish, and there was all sorts of lumber lying around everywhere. A broken divan, broken guitars, cobwebs hanging everywhere. I went into the kitchen—a heap of dirty dishes was standing in the sink. I saw the refrigerator and I thought: Strange, do they make black refrigerators, then? But that refrigerator was covered with black mold. I opened it and almost fell down. The owner of the flat, Yura, said:
“It works, it works.”
I went into the bathroom and saw a yellow bath. It was horrible, I’d never seen anything like it before. I can’t even tell you about the toilet. The whole apartment smelled of urine anyway.
We agreed terms with the owner. From his eyes alone you could see he was an alcoholic. But what else could we do. We had to!
“So this is my apartment,” he said. “You just tidy things up a little bit, and everything will be fine!”
And suddenly I noticed that it was even colder in the apartment than outside. It turned out that none of the windows in the kitchen or any of the rooms had any frames or glass in them. There was a terrible draft, after all it was November.
We walked around the rooms, and everywhere dust rose into the air from under our feet. And that alcoholic also announced:
“If you need the flat, first pay off the ten months of rent that I owe. Agreed?”
That was all we needed! But we had to pay his debts at the savings bank. I paid and brought back the receipt.
Straightaway my husband went to the market, made some frames, put them in, and put glass in them. Then it was a little warmer in the apartment. The same day we moved away from Ravil and Galya to the new place, the alcoholic’s apartment. The children still went to the same school, although it was quite far now, but they were used to it, and so I didn’t move them. What for? They’d only be picked on again, as new boys. Let them stay in a school they liked.
