N’s grandmother’s apartment is in a quiet, forgotten corner of the city. No one has lived there for a good twenty years. The elevator requires ten tetri to work (something like a penny) but without one you will have to climb eight flights. The coin is dropped into a little slot and the doors shove closed. The apartment door is a few cracked planks of wood with brown paint slathered across them. A tiny lock turns with a little effort. You don’t want the key to break off in there, so it happens gingerly.
Inside, there are bars across a second door - and you must reach around to two padlocks and undo them. The door squeals open and the full rush of musty air is around us. Chairs sit upside down on the couch covered in dust. Floors are uprooted, like moles made tunnels underneath them. The kitchen is lopsided. Some of the windows are broken now and there is glass scattered across the ancient linoleum. In the living room, another window is broken, and air whistles around the place moving the mushroom, sour smell around in slow circles. The ceiling is caving in, as paint peels and wallpaper turns into curlicues.
Against one wall, a glass cabinet sits - full of Soviet era glasses, all matte and thick, waiting for syrupy drinks and backyard wine. They stand in neat lines. Someone put a lot of effort into them looking like this, and the tomb they have been sleeping in for so many years.
Today, I will stretch thick plastic across the windows, as many layers as I can, and reinforce everything with duct tape and strong staples, planks of wood and then more duct tape. The work is methodical, and there are hundreds of tiny nails that hang from the panes. I cannot imagine what they were meant for, but I pull them all - one rusty nail after the next. The glass rattles around, ready to fall. And then, screw by screw, things are put back together just a little bit.
It has been raining so much this winter, and luckily today it is dry. There is no use in all of this tape, if things are soaking wet, turning to powder. I knew there was a reason to save all of those scraps of wood from our renovation last year, and I end up using every single piece of it, as the apartment grows dim in the afternoon, as the plastic holds, and flaps gently like a transparent flag.
I have always loved abandoned places. In my childhood on the farm I spent hours in the woods, where piles of junk appeared in random places, here a rusting Model T I could sit in, with spray paint cans to poke until they stopped hissing, Sears and Roebuck catalogs, old National Geographic magazines - all tied up in piles. They were romantic to me - a living encyclopedia of objects, an accidental museum of broken hand mirrors. But now, I see these places a bit differently. I see myself in them, falling apart in so many places, patched back together with spit and grit, quietly sitting in the sun and rain in some hidden corner of the world, with my glasses all in a line.
Lovely piece! What's the plan for this old apartment? I love abandoned places, too, particularly those where family lived, such as this: https://annettegendler.com/2018/02/why-returning-to-our-roots-is-meaningful/
When I was a kid we loved construction sites, which were all over the place in suburban Los Angeles. We used stuff we found at various sites to build a treehouse in a big ol' eucalyptus tree. It became our clubhouse. On a trip back to California when I was in college I drove by that treehouse. Well, what was left of it. Just a few 2x4s hanging forlornly as the tree swayed in the wind. The first time I ever kissed a girl happened in that treehouse. Her name was Lynn Bracket. Haven't thought about her for long time.