Читать книгу The Exchange Student - Nikita Nesynov - Страница 13

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.