The apartment was five flights up. The numbering of the floors
was European. The ground floor was not the first floor, it had
no number. The first floor was up a steep flight of stairs. The
fifth floor was at the top of a huge climb, a mountain of stone
steps, a hiker’s climb up. It was not too far from God. Each
day an old, old, heavy Ukrainian woman, bent, covered in
heavy layers of black skirts and black shawls, black scarf tied
tight around her head hiding her hair except for white wisps,
washed the stairs, bottom to top, then cleaned, the banisters,
top to bottom. She had her bucket and a great mop of stringy
ropelike mess, and a pile of rags: stoop-shouldered she washed
and rinsed, washed and rinsed, dusted and polished. There
was no smell of urine. In each hall there were three toilets, one
for each apartment on the floor. The toilet was set in concrete.
The cubicle was tiny. It didn’t lock from the outside, but
there was a hook on the inside. Each tenant cleaned their
own.
The apartment was newly painted, a bright Mediterranean
pink, fresh, garish, powdery. You walked in right to the kitchen, there was no subtle introduction, it was splintered, painted wood floors, no distinct color, a radiator, a grotesque,
mammoth old refrigerator with almost no actual space inside, a
tiny stove, and a bathtub. There was a window that opened
onto a sliver of an airshaft. There was a room on either side of
the kitchen. To the left, on the street, above the teeming blue
soldiers and desperate fire trucks, there was a living room,
small but not tiny. It had a cockroach-ridden desk, one straight-
backed wooden chair, and I bought a
rubber to sleep on, cut to be a single mattress. I bought a
bright red rug with a huge flower on it from Woolworth’s, and
laid it down like it was gold. Under it was old linoleum,
creased, chunky, bloating. There were two windows, one
opening onto the fire escape, I couldn’t afford a gate and so it
had to stay closed, and the other I risked opening. I found a
small, beautiful bookcase, wood with some gracious curves as
ornament, and in it I put like a pledge the few books I had
carried across the ocean as talismans. The room to the right of
the kitchen, covered in the same cracked linoleum, was like a
small closet. The window opened on the airshaft, no air, just a
triangular space near a closed triangle of concrete wall. The
120
room was stagnant, the linoleum ghastly with old dirt ground
into the cracks. The room was smothering and wretched. The
walls sweated. I didn’t go into it.
The toilet in the hall was outside the locks on the apartment
door, outside the huge steel police lock, a steel pole that shored
up the door in case of a ramming attack, outside the cylinder
locks, outside the chain lock. I carried a knife back and forth
and I slept with a knife under my pillow.
