But then I remembered the porter. Phew. That’s why there’s a porter in every single block of flats in Moscow, no matter how disgusting the building is – they’re probably stationed there for just this kind of situation! And the porter in my building is always there. He’s a big oaf that literally never moves. All he does all day long is snooze in his little room-thing on the other side of this door and fester in his own filth. Hooray! I thought. He’ll open the door and let me into my flat with the spare keys he’ll definitely have. Phew phew phew.
I banged on the door. It’s a big, intimidating metal door that looks like the entrance to a Soviet-era nuclear bunker, so when you bang on it with gloved fists, it makes terrifyingly loud ‘BOONG, BOONG’ sort of noise. No answer. I banged on it a few more times, then a lot more times. Luckily my hands were totally numb so I couldn’t feel this at all. BOONG, BOONG, BOONG. Nothing. The porter can’t be in there, I realised. For the first time in his entire life, he has moved. If he was there, he would definitely have heard me knocking - because I really can’t stress how loud this sound is. It’s so loud that porters in St Petersburg were probably opening their doors and wondering why there was no-one there.
Did you then stand about for a bit? I hear you ask, rather unkindly. Yes, yes I did. My vision was going slightly hazy because of the gusts of ice-wind that are so extreme that Philip and I call them Blasts of Fire because there’s no other way of describing the burning sensation in your face when it gets that cold. I feel a photo is needed.
relatively small icicles
But, squinting through the pain, I managed to spot someone fob-keying their way through another cast-iron door into a different part of the building so, now very much in Monkey-Island-mode, I followed them in and asked that porter. Obvious error of course, because once I’d managed to communicate in crap Russian that I didn’t have my keys and that I lived in flat 79, he nodded sagely and explained that flat 79 wasn’t in this part of the building. I didn’t reply, but the expression that means ‘I KNOW, you TWAT’ must be universal because then he shrugged and shuffled back into his little den.
Slightly panicking now, I braced myself for the outside again and walked back to my cast-iron door. That makes it sound like a very smooth action but the ground here is now covered with a hard layer of thick black ice-slab topped with brown snow-slush so you don’t so much walk as.. move forward with your legs. In a permanent state of falling but not actually falling, like someone clutching the sides of an ice-rink making their way around the edges. Well, like that, but with no sides. Basically it takes a great deal of physical agility and mental energy, both of which I was running out of by this point because I was being ice-torched for the thirty-fifth minute and I had no further ideas.
Then. THEN. I noticed that next to my cast iron door was a smaller door, slightly ajar and with a homely yellow light on inside and men’s voices. Not porters… hanging about in a shed-like part of the building… Caretakers! I idiotically concluded, having for no obvious reason forgotten that I was not in Oxford. I knocked confidently on the door and pushed it further open.
‘Hello,’ I said, in crap Russian, ‘I do not have keys. I forgot keys. I… don’t… um…’
Yes - my sentence genuinely Trailed Off Uncertainly (something I had previously assumed only happens in scripts) as I took in the scene in front of me – empty bottles of beer, half-empty bottles of vodka and two leering Fagin-esque unwashed homeless unsavoury-looking characters – and realised that they were probably not about to let me in to the building and offer to fix my bike while they were at it. One of them stood up. Another amusing pickle to record on my blog! I thought. I didn’t think that at all. I thought ‘SHIIIIIIIT!’
He – let’s call him Evgeny the Foul – staggered forwards, crashing into the doorway, rebounded off it out into the freezing cold and lumbered up to me in three irregular drunken trudges. Trudge. Trudgetrudge. And then he just stopped, cocked his head and peered at my face as if he was remembering it from somewhere. He scrutinised me for a good few seconds, maybe even ten, during which time he was either ruminating on the complex machinations of the universe and all the possibilities and intricacies that led this sorry-looking girl to him or he was having literally no thoughts at all, while I remained completely motionless so as not to anger him, as if he was not a man who would have toppled over if I had prodded him but some sort of enormous.. bear. Better to be safe than sorry, I belatedly thought. And finally, he swivelled towards the electronic keypad, emitted a sort of belching/speaking sound that may well have been Russian numbers, and jabbed at number 1 with his index finger. Except he accidentally dragged his finger down the keypad before removing it so that instead of entering ‘1’, he entered ‘14677#’.
He grunted, pressed C, and started again.
‘157844’.
He grunted, pressed C: attempt three. ‘
‘1.. 39485#’
Grunt. C. Attempt four. I felt it was time to intervene. Maybe that was unwise but I could see us standing there for quite some time and did I mention it was minus -14?
‘No, no, thank you, it’s no problem, thank you.’ I tried to guide him away from the keypad without actually touching him. ‘Thank you, goodbye. GOODBYE.’ And, bewildered, Evgeny-the-Foul shuffled back into his den. Before I had time to contemplate whether or not I was lucky to still be alive, and how much longer this was likely to be the case, a lady wandered past. ‘Excuse me!’ I said. ‘I forgot keys! How this?!’ and gestured desperately at the keypad.
‘Something something 104 something something,’ she said kindly, and I quickly understood (because you get used to that sort of conversation) that the porter only opens the door if you press 104 on the keypad, and that that’s what Evgeny the Foul was probably trying to do! Evgeny the Foul But Essentially Well-Meaning! What a wonderful world it is, I realised in a rush of delirious, extreme-cold-induced sense of contentment, when people try to help you no matter how hammered or potentially dangerous they are. This feeling lasted for about three seconds until I learned that the “porter” doesn’t understand a word of English, or have any spare keys or anything useful to say. He just shrugs sleepily and looks fat. I was still locked out. DAMN YOU WORLD, I thought, because by this point I had more or less been driven to despair by how cold everything was, and how difficult everything was, and how stupid everything was, and how nothing cold or difficult or stupid ever happens in London, and how crap Moscow therefore was, and how utterly, utterly pointless this so-called porter was, all of which led me to say the following hurtful statement to him:
You are the least helpful person I have ever met and you smell appalling.
My anger dissolved. It’s unkind to say hurtful things in English to people who don’t speak English, however value-less their job might be. And an hour later, after phoning HR, and the cleaner, explaining the situation to a few more people, making many trips to various places and reclaiming my spare keys back from Judith, I finally made it back into my flat having lost all feeling in my hands (which were bright red) and face (which, and more disturbingly, had turned a sort of grey colour) but with that strange feeling - something that I did used to experience a lot at Oxford - when you think you might have learnt something but you’re not sure what it is. All ideas welcome.
