Grisha didn’t notice how the town grew big outside the windows. At one moment there was only a monotonous desert but after the checkpoint, the rare scrubs of abandoned shacks started to force through the sand. Then these huts shot up, clothed into concrete armor, crowded together to confront the oppressive surroundings. And now the car was riding through the labyrinths of bedroom districts.

Faceless residential clones — there are millions of these slums in every post-soviet country. Grisha’s brain convulsively tried to put together the odd pieces into childhood sights. Gray panel houses, a twenty-four-hour kiosk, a drunkard sitting on a porch with a bundle and his head hung down. A sparse rowan tree, old women on a rickety bench next to a house entrance, a lonely kvass barrel surely with grubs at the bottom, it was common knowledge… All separate pieces were very much familiar but didn’t add up to the whole picture. Grisha felt a headache from such tension. There were too many dead empty windows in Atomgrad houses. And the old women’s eyes seemed to glow in the dark like their cats’. The shit you see when you’re tired! Grisha spat over his left shoulder and shuddered.

While they were driving through the town, it got dark. That was too fast, probably because of the local fucked up atmosphere. Or was there an ozone hole above them? Well, a shithole it was certainly. Quite a rare one. Everything around them drowned in blue shadows. Grisha rolled down the window and for the first time in that day felt something vaguely resembling a fresh breeze. It smelled like the end of summer: cooling pavement, nightly chillness, and a distant fire. At dacha, they would always light the Last Fire with Granpops before returning to the city, to school. They would gather the trash from the whole garden along with dry twigs and leaves. The fire was pioneer-like*, as Granpop called it, up to the very sky. Then they would bake new potatoes in coals with salt and butter from the neighbor who kept livestock. Food for the gods. After they would pick a bunch of flowers for school from Grandpop’s flower bed: dahlias puffy like lions, or pointed sword lilies. Their buds reminded Grisha of spearheads from the movies about Middle Ages. He started blinking very fast again. Wiped his face with his hand. Freaking wind blew some danged rubbish into his eyes.

Some windows filled up with misleadingly cozy orange light after all. Apparently, not all of them were abandoned. In the fairytale swamps, there are also a lot of inviting flickering but if you follow that glow, you’re fucked. The bog will slurp up above your stupid head and that’s it. Your bones will rot and turn into peat. Is that what happened to dinosaurs? Or only dumbasses who fall into swamps ended up like this?

Father turned off into the front yard. The car jumped on the rut and Grisha knocked his forehead against the door. For fuck’s sake! He hissed rubbing the hit spot and looked out of the window grimly. It seemed even the roads here were against people. Small potholes gathered together into a massive megapit which could easily swallow the whole car. But before it happened the car stopped. A huge nine-floor apartment building stretched to both sides before them. In the headlamp light a peeling sign Entrance to Inner Battle Front is on the other side was seen. Father killed the engine and the car submerged into darkness. Only the entrance bulb was convulsing and some apartment windows were glowing with greenish-blue light. Like phosphorescent toys which you charge from a lamp and then look at while they slowly die out in the pod of your hands.

The radio shut up and heavy silence hung in the air.

“Here we are. It hasn’t been half a year,” Mom’s tone was falsely cheerful. Grisha cringed at her pathetic efforts to smooth the general mood.

“Second floor, apartment 18. The key is under the rug. Make haste and start unloading the bags,” father’s voice ran over the ears like sanding paper.

Grisha was just waiting for this. The old man didn’t even finish talking when he grabbed his backpack and jumped out of the car. Anywhere but this damned tin can. He couldn’t breathe there any longer.

“Where are you going? Aren’t you going to help?” the words hit him like a brick.

“Sergey, let him go… He will only look around and come back down.”

“And you’re always defending him! You’ll grow a pathetic sissy out of him…

Grisha didn’t listen to the rest. He grabbed the door handle like a safety ring. The door squeaked and isolated him from his parents leaving him in complete darkness where he couldn’t see a thing. He breathed in the wet cold miasma of the entrance hall. It was the realm of cat smell with fine notes of old cigarette stubs. Grisha put his hands out and started groping. Why do lamps never work in panel houses? It must be that local spirits don’t like light.

Something squelched revoltingly under his feet. Sneakers bumped into the stairs and Grisha almost fell face down but at the last second, he managed to clutch the railing. He walked one flight up. There the anxious twinkle of a dying street light reached the window. Grisha saw the doors on the first floor lined with fabrikoid and rails. One of them was hastily boarded up with a cross of planks. Home, sweet home. There were charred twisted match corpses on the ceiling. Who stuck them there and — what is most important — why? Between the floors, he found an everlasting Nescafe can stacked with stubs. Its sharp crooked edges were blinking angrily in the nervous light. No, thank you, he was not going to touch that. He was good without lockjaw. Though he wondered if a person could die from lockjaw these days.

Grisha walked up to the second floor and looked around. From one door he heard the dull humming of a TV. If he closed his eyes, he could imagine he was still in Yekaterinburg. In a moment aunty Rina would come out the door in front of him with a tray full of freshly baked oatmeal cookies. She would drop in for a game of durak or bingo. They would drink tea under the lilac lamp shade in the kitchen and then he would fall asleep soothed by the ticking of Grandpop’s clock with pinecone weights…

He bit the point of his tongue. Opened his eyes. Another mediocre door with iron numbers 1 and 8 carelessly nailed to it. Here he was. Grisha picked the door rug up with his foot, something chinked under it. Reluctantly he sat down and with a grimace of aversion grabbed a set of three keys. It was as clear as the day that lockjaw was the least dangerous out of everything that was smeared over the floor here.

Grisha sighed and put one of the keys into the lock on the off-chance. Unwillingly it turned. It was obvious that nobody had been there for a long time. In the hallway, he was met by the musty smell of dust. The air seemed to stay inside the apartment not daring to cross the threshold. Apparently, nobody had breathed it for so long that it forgot what diffusion was. Grisha clicked on the light switch and came in not taking shoes off. Nobody mopped the floors before their arrival, so it was okay.

The apartment turned out to be somewhat tiny. He seemed to brush against the walls with his backpack. But to his surprise, it wasn’t empty at all. There was a three-mirrored vanity in the hallway with the leaves opened a bit. Grisha came up and looked into it. There he saw his own scared eye locked in the mirror labyrinth and sprang back. He went further into the apartment turning all the lights on. It was time to banish the shadows out of the corners!

In all rooms, he found basic furniture: a beaten table with stools and chairs in the kitchen, soviet cabinets with squeaking doors not shutting properly. A monstrous gas stove reminding of a crematorium. It was hard to understand who lived here before them: with equal success, it could have been a harmless old lady and a large Tatar family. The panel house magic brought everyone to a common denominator. Grisha looked out of the curtain-less kitchen window and jumped back like from a fire. Right under the windows stood their car shielded by a bushy tree. The last thing he needed was to get caught by his parents.

He poked his nose in the bathroom and saw a small window up under the ceiling leading to the kitchen. The same opening he found on the opposite wall. That one apparently led to the toilet room. Truly, the engineering genius knew no bounds. Why were they here, to help the family members with bonding? While one was taking a shit, another in the shower showed the first one the middle finger through the window?

Further down the corridor, there was a small narrow room. A single bed with a stripped mattress on a shabby rug, a bookcase and a chipboard desk along the wall, a scratched wooden chair. Grisha glanced at the shelves. Empty except for a thick layer of dust. Only at the very bottom, there was a run-down round-bellied TV. The cord with the plug hung down miserably. They left a TV, fancy, what else to say. Though who needed that ancient crap? It probably was radioactive. Grisha looked up. There were a couple of holes in the wall and the wallpaper beneath them was a bit lighter. Something had hanged here but he couldn’t figure out what. The window at the far end of the room looked over some roof covered with cigarette stubs. Beyond it, far in the darkness glowed the windows of the surrounding buildings. From here the yard with the car wasn’t seen, the room overlooked the other side.

The next room turned out to be the large one, apparently, it was the living room. Along the whole biggest wall stretched a Soviet buffet with glass shelves — to put the crystalware on display for everyone to envy. An immortal monster. Only with no crystalware now. But there was another prehistoric TV. Grisha wondered how quickly its tube would burn a cornea. The opposite wall was supported by a sagging couch covered with an ugly rug. Its brother was crucified on the wall, the third sprawled on the floor. Hell, yeah! More rugs to the rug god! Grisha and his parents wouldn’t be cold in winter plus they could roll the neighbors’ bodies in the rugs if they killed them by accident. Or if the neighbors killed them.

Behind the big, again curtain-less windows there was a balcony. Grisha shuddered — with the lights on he felt like he was on a stage. And he didn’t order phobias on a plate, thank you very much. There were enough exciting experiences for the day. He quickly glanced into the last door which led from the living room to a bedroom. There were two single beds clinging to the opposite walls. And a nightstand between them to make sure that the people were not sleeping together. A true ode to family happiness. Disgusted he closed the door and went back to the corridor.

Grusha returned to the smallest room which he saw first and dumped the backpack on the floor. The roof behind the window could come in handy. He sat on the bed and put his face in his hands. For the first time in the day — a minute of silence. But he didn’t get the chance to sit around for long. He heard footsteps on the stairs and then the angry bleating of his father. 

“Where the hell have you gone?!”

He jumped up and ran to the toilet. Shut the door and pulled the flush string. The ancient Soviet tank produced a demonic gurgling and released dark reddish slush. However, in a couple of seconds, ordinary water replaced it. Grisha shook his head, clenched his fists, and walked out to his father.

“Yeah, take your time! We’ve loads of stuff and it’s almost curfew. Go help your mother, quick!”

“Can’t I take a piss? I’m going,” said Grisha through his teeth and squeezed sideways past father back to the stairs. He wasn’t going to stay with him in the apartment alone.

Irritation boiling inside Grisha was so intense that it seemed to light up the dark staircase. The way back to the car was no longer frightening, the fear burned in the flame.

Mom was standing beside the open trunk holding several bundles in each hand. Seeing her white knuckles, he felt a pang of shame. He tried to snatch the heavy bags.

“I’ll take that, Mom.”

“It’s okay, Grisha…”

“Give me that!” he jerked the bags from her hands stubbornly.

“Thank you, honey,” she smiled tenderly, just like she used to when… Grisha swallowed the scratchy lump in his throat and ran off to the stuffy arms of the entrance hall.

─── ⋅ ∙ ∘ ☽ ༓ ☾ ∘ ⋅ ⋅ ───

NOTES:

* A typical Soviet pioneer would rock the red tie and spread revolutionary vibes like a scout on steroids. Though you won't find them these days, they left a legacy as fierce as a bear and as colorful as their iconic vermillion scarves. A pioneer fire was an iconic event, usually made at the end of the pioneer camp shift. Legend has it they would make a bonfire so huge you could burn unnecessary memories and witnesses in it.