The three of us – Billie, Natasha and I – walk together to 78 Chernyshevsky Street. I’m shocked to see that our balcony has been enclosed with ugly unpainted cladding and sliding glass windows. A fat middle-aged woman in a massive bra is on the balcony, hanging out her washing. There goes the idea of a nice family keeping the genius loci of our apartment alive. That bra – its size, its make and ostentatious display – in combination with the woman’s face, and the way she seems angry with the wet grey socks and tracksuit pants which evidently require from her too much bending and stretching, is like a death sentence to my fantasies of homecoming. Women like that do not let women like me into their apartments. Despite being neither that old nor really that huge, such women simply cannot be imagined as young and light. They smell of cabbage and sweat, sit in their flats with their legs wide apart, as if in the middle of a collective farm, and for ‘cultural leisure’ start fights with other neighbours on the stairwell.
 
When we left in 1989 in the days before private property was once again allowed, most people did not own their apartments. They ‘borrowed’ them from the State, which wanted them back in perfect condition (not so much Nanny State then, as Evil Stepmother State). Nineteen years later the doors of 78 Chernyshevsky Street no longer open to the uninitiated; the security entrance takes care of people like me who have no business lurking around other people’s homes. Laughing, because it is after all rather funny to come from the other side of the world only to be stopped dead in our tracks by an intercom, we wonder what it would take for this door to open. What about buzzing our old apartment, or just any apartment really, and saying,
 
‘Excuse me, could you let us in? We used to live here two decades ago!’
 
or, perhaps,
 
‘Mail, open up!’,
 
or offering no justification or excuse, but instead appealing to the basic goodness of people, or (better still) their indifference:
 
‘COULD YOU PLEASE LET US IN?’
 
‘If I only I knew the phone number of the woman who used to live in the apartment above us’, I say to Billie and Natasha. ‘Rimma Evlampevna was her name, if I knew her number she would have definitely let us in. I don’t even know if she is alive though so I guess that’s a dumb idea.’
 
As I say these words and move away from the building, seriously considering whether fifteen minutes of banging my head on the tightly shut door is enough to concede defeat, I see Rimma Evlampevna walking towards us. Our middle-aged neighbour with her impeccable high hair do (so intricate I always thought of it as simultaneously spectacular and spooky) is now an old woman, her hair lies limp, no longer twisted and raised in salute to her superior grooming prowess. I stand frozen, trying not to breathe, not sure how much work will be required before Rimma Evlampevna recognises the young Masha Tumarkina who used to live below her with her nice parents and an older sister. Is twenty years an eternity for neighbourly bonds? Rimma Evlampevna heads straight towards me, not looking the least bit surprised.
 
‘Hello, Inna’, she says, recognising my breed instantly, but thinking me my sister.
—‘Rimma Evlampevna, it’s Masha’.
—‘Oh, Mashenka, good morning’.
 
Rimma Evlampevna speaks so calmly as if it is entirely in the nature of things that your neighbours from many decades ago, the nice ones who stuffed everything up by leaving ‘forever’ (the first out of the building, in fact), will one day casually greet you at your building’s door. I am grateful for the serenity of her welcome (and it is serenity, not senility – Rimma Evlampevna’s mind, as we have plenty of opportunities to verify, is intact), grateful for the modesty and tranquility of her hug. Rimma Evlampevna takes Natasha’s lush, magnificent roses from my hands, assuming the flowers are for her. I am utterly unprepared for this development, and as I watch myself surrendering my birthday bouquet – I can hardly wrestle it from this dignified matron, or can I? – the sense of entitlement which my former neighbour still possesses strikes me as wonderful. In her mind the flowers are intended for her, and of course, they are nothing short of spectacular.
 
‘Shall we go in, girls?’, Rimma Evlampevna opens the door. Here we are, inside, and instantly I feel as if I am looking at an X-ray of my internal organs. For the past two decades I have internalised these stairs and walls decades overdue for major works, these letterboxes that look like long-forgotten birdhouses perched between the ground and the first floor and now, all of a sudden, these things appear outside me, reassembled as material objects, three-dimensional as anything.
 
We walk up the stairs (I am last in the procession, an old habit) past the door of the apartment which belongs to the woman and her bra. ‘This is the one’, I say to Billie. She nods and we keep walking.
 
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