LITMIR.BIZ

      Everyone from my neighborhood knew that he had mental disorders because of the constant scandals between his parents. That’s why everybody tried to be more polite and delicate with him, we tried not to annoy him. Looking at his appearance, he seemed to be a normal teenager. He wore glasses and looked like a smart person. But it was only his appearance. From the inside he was totally different. When he was eighteen years old, he was sentenced to 6 years in prison! I still don’t understand why he got to prison, but I think, definitely not because of experiments on cats, there must be something more than cats, something serious.

      The Phantom

      If you go inside of any house entrance in my neighborhood, you can immediately feel the strong smell of different food that comes from flats, especially, when someone cooks fish. Such smell is much stronger than other ones. In each stairwell there is a garbage chute, which is often clogged up and the stench spread all over the floors. Every single day, when I got back home, I could see dirty walls and broken windows. Barely working elevators made horrible sounds, it was impossible to use them because of the awful smell of dog’s urine. Almost all the buttons were burned and you had to use some force to push the button to the floor you needed.

      The elevators in these houses got stuck quite often and I was once in a situation like that. I had to sit for three hours in the cab without any light until the lift operator came and opened the doors. If the elevator was out of order, you had to walk the stairs. Going upstairs, you immediately heard a crunchy sound of seed shells being broken under your feet. A large number of smoked cigarettes and beer bottles under the stairs didn’t surprise anyone. Occasionally, some tenants got tired of this garbage and cleaned the whole staircase. There was twice much dirt in the stairs when winter came. In many entrances there was no glass in the windows and the temperature was pretty much the same as in the street, -30 degrees Celsius or even lower. But in some of the stairwells all the windows were saved. In such staircases it was much warmer than in the others, but there was twice as much trash as in the cold ones, because when winter came, all the young people went inside of the warm buildings. We sat on the stairs between the first and the second floors, because the heating radiators were there. We drank beer and smoked there. When we were smoking, the floors got immediately covered in a fog of tobacco smoke. The tenants, entering the house and knowing that the first and the second floors were filled with young people smoking and drinking, covered their mouth with scarves and mittens and waited impatiently for the elevator, in which it was also hard to breathe.

      It was always dark in the staircase of my building. When I was ten years old, I went for a walk and came home late quite often, when it was already dark. I was always scared to go into the building. It was too dark and the staircase reminded me of an ominous cave. In winter, the entrance door was always covered in snow, and clouds of steam were pouring out of the building to the street. I didn’t know what would happen to me on my way to the fourth floor where I lived.

      I always waited for someone who would accompany me to my apartment. But sometimes no one appeared and I had to go there myself. With my heart beating fast, I jumped into this cloud and ran up to the fourth floor as fast as I could. I was really scared, because at the age of ten, I knew that there were people who caught children in the dark hallways and kidnapped them, then rape them or sell into slavery.

      But there was one scary thing than every other: there was a drug addict, who lived directly opposite our door.

      I was afraid of him, but I was always polite to him said hello, “Hi, Yasha, how are you?”

      He barely moved his lips, pronouncing, “H-e-ll-o…”

      His eyes were like glass and it was scary to me than ever. In 20—30 seconds my mother opened the door and I quickly ran inside, locking all the door locks.

      The Funeral March

      There was a tradition in our neighborhood. When someone died, the funeral began with the bringing of the coffin in the staircase, where the dead person lived. His family gathered around the coffin and mourned the loss of him. I saw this ceremony every single time when somebody died.

      The invited musicians always played the funeral march. I could see all this from my window. It was hard for me to see the dead and the weeping people near the coffin. When his relatives and friends went away to the cemetery, they always left a lot of flowers lying in the yard. Those flowers lay for weeks in our neighborhood roads. They didn’t allow everyone to forget the funerals of people, who most of the tenants didn’t know. I still can’t understand why the relatives of the deceased could not start and finish the funerals in special places in the cemetery. But this tradition was accepted in our society.

      Icy Roads

      Siberia is known for its severe winters and every single year there is a lot of snow on the roads. At that time there were pretty much no services to clean it, so eventually all this snow turned into ice. All the guys from my neighborhood took that opportunity to go sledding.

      We often raced on our sleds with each other, not being afraid that there was a risk of being hit by a car. The main thing was to reach the finish line first at the end of road, which was in the form of a long ice hill. When I was 10, I got a cool sled, which was really fast and I won the races quite often. Before the start of our race, we waited until there would be no cars on the road. We sped up our sleds, jumped on them and flew on the road. Sometimes there were cars that appeared on our way. So, we had to react quickly and turn away from cars to avoid getting hit. After such dangerous and cold competitions my hands and feet were totally frozen. My eyes often got stuck together because of the ice on my eyelashes. On my returning home, my arms and legs began to warm up causing pain and tears. It was a wonderful time of the year, but it was insanely cold.

      The Hairdresser

      I decided to have my hair cut. I took my father’s car and drove to the barber shop nearby. The hairdresser who invited me to the chair was very tall and was always smiling. He put an apron on me and asked what kind of haircut I wanted. I said that I didn’t want a short haircut. The barber, shaking his head said, “Okay.” Could you please wait a minute? I’ll be back shortly”.

      I thought to myself, “Well, I can wait for a minute, there is no problem.” The barber went somewhere. I waited for five minutes. Then another five minutes passed, and I started thinking, “It’s Okay, maybe the guy is sick.” Even fifteen minutes later my hairdresser did not show up.

      So, here I was, sitting on the chair with an apron tied around my neck. I continued waiting for my barber, looking at myself in the mirror like a complete idiot. Half an hour had already passed when I began to get angry. I asked myself. “Maybe it’s a TV joke and I am being taped on a candid camera that had been put directly in the mirror, which I look at for thirty minutes. Maybe they were checking my patience, watching and laughing at me behind the door with that hairdresser?” But, finally, my hairdresser got back. I looked at him and said, “Oh, you’re quick!”

      And he asked me quietly, “What kind of haircut would you like?”

      I answered, “Oh, you have already forgotten what kind of haircut I want after you hung out somewhere for 30 minutes, haven’t you?”

      He did not respond to my rudeness,

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