The spell was shattered to pieces by the awakening calls for me to immediately come to the dining room where the kindergarten groups were seated already for the after-“quiet-hour” tea. Yet ever since, passing below Fire Extinguisher—the bearer of innumerable worlds—I felt respectful understanding. As for sneaking into someone else’s panties, that one became my only and unique experience. And enlightened by it, at all the “quiet hours” that followed, whenever I had to go, by the undertone permission from the caretaker, out to pee then, passing by, I fully knew the meaning of sheets overlapping the gap between a pair of coupled cots, as well as why so firmly kept Khromov his eyes closed in his cot next to the Sontseva’s…
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We lived on the second floor and our door was followed by that of the Morozovs, pensioner spouses in a three-room apartment. Opposite to them across the landing, there also was an apartment of 3 rooms, yet only 2 of them were dwelt by the Zimins family, while the third one was populated by single women, now and then replacing one another, at times there happened couples of women, who declared themselves relatives after meaningful smiles at each other.
The dead wall between the doors to the Morozovs’ and to the Zimins’ was outfitted with a vertical iron ladder reaching the ever open hatchway to the attic where the tenants hung their washing under the slate roof, and the father in the Savkins family—whose apartment was smack-bang opposite ours—kept pigeons after he came home and changed into his blue sportswear.
The wooden handrail supported by the iron uprights ran from the Savkins’ door towards ours without crossing the whole landing though, because it turned down to follow the two flights of steps to the first-floor landing and from there four more steps down—to the staircase-entrance vestibule. There you pushed the wide entrance door held closed by a rusty iron spring, big and screechy, and went into the wide expanse of our block Courtyard, leaving behind the vestibule with one more, narrow, door that hid the steep steps into the impenetrable darkness of underground basement.
Deducing from my subsequent life experience, I may safely assume that we lived in Flat 5 though at that time I didn’t know it yet. All I knew was that the most numerous population in a house were its doors. Behind the first door with a large handmade mailbox screwed up to it, there would open the hallway with the narrow door of the tiny storeroom to the right, and the partly glazed door to the parents’ room on the left, where instead of a window was the wide balcony door, also glazed in its upper part, viewing the Courtyard.