Apartment 114*

***

Twelve years ago I was offered a pretty good job in Sweden, in Stockholm. An old acquaintance of mine—also a colleague—had landed a solid position at our corporation’s head office and moved there to work, and a few years later she recommended me for a vacancy.

The city was beautiful—scrubbed, polished, washed, neat. Tourists and locals alike were polite, smiling, tidy, friendly. In a place like that, lawlessness and malice seemed not to exist. Except, perhaps, on the immigrant outskirts, where a very human, ordinary, everyday kind of evil could still be found.

I had to look for an apartment on my own. I had only three acquaintances in the city and didn’t want to impose on anyone. A realtor turned up quickly; together we looked at twelve apartments and rooms, and none of them felt right. Eventually I was ready to despair and go broke, since living in a hotel was hitting my wallet hard. Management offered me temporary accommodation for employees from different countries, but for some reason I really didn’t want that. Then one weekend, on my way back to the hotel after yet another pointless viewing, I struck up a conversation on the bus with a woman of perfectly respectable yet slightly otherworldly appearance. You know the type: ladies of indeterminate age, in high lace-up boots, wrapped in unimaginable layers of clothing, their heads invariably crowned with hats and their necks with stone beads. That was my companion—spiritual and theatrical Karin.

Karin had an extra apartment in the city center. Well, not exactly extra—there are no extra apartments in Sweden, especially not downtown—but it was vacant. Karin’s daughter had moved to warmer countries, rented out the apartment, and entrusted her mother with keeping an eye on it. A simple, common arrangement. The apartment had already been empty for a month because, according to Karin, the last tenant had hurriedly fled for unknown reasons; and since the place was peculiar and Karin didn’t use a realtor, no new tenants had appeared. I agreed to see it, of course—especially since it was in the center and the rent sounded unrealistically low.

We got off the bus and transferred to the subway. I wanted to call my realtor to come and draw up a contract if I liked the apartment—I wanted everything officially recorded—but Karin stopped me and said that only she and I should go there; outsiders were best not involved just now.

I don’t know why I wasn’t afraid. A stranger suggesting we go alone to some place, explicitly not wanting witnesses… it should have sounded suspicious, but it didn’t bother me at all.

From the subway station we walked a few minutes toward a small square, entered it, and walked exactly ten seconds along dark brown cobblestones. The square was strange. A straight alley framed on both sides by two fallen-over letters “P,” or as if the alley were enclosed in square brackets—like this, for simplicity: [||]. The brackets were two residential buildings. Huge, dark brown—slightly darker than the cobblestones—stone, heavy buildings looming over you. They shaded what was already a small square. It was autumn; there were no leaves on the trees, and on the square itself there was no vegetation at all. Only brown in all its shades. At the far end stood some equally stone-brown structure; the wind blew freely around it. I imagined what an icy corridor this place would be in winter and shuddered. There were, notably, maybe five people around. On the square itself—one person, sitting on a bench and smoking.

Karin and I entered the square, walked a few seconds, and turned left, into the lower left corner of the left bracket. The corner was dark; the streetlights weren’t on yet, so I didn’t immediately realize it wasn’t just a bracket—the bracket had a little tail, so Karin and I were standing in a dark nook, surrounded on three sides by buildings. The third side, open, looked onto the square and that structure at the end, which I never really examined afterward.

Why on earth had we come here? There was nothing here! I felt like laughing—thinking, what is this, did she bring me here to rob me? But Karin wasn’t amused. She looked at me simply and openly, pushed her knitted hat with a rose on top aside, and asked what I saw around me.

Around me I saw brown stone walls speckled with gray. And then, suddenly, I realized that in one of the walls I could see a door. Naturally, dark brown—that’s why I hadn’t noticed it right away. Above the door was a video intercom. I pointed it out to Karin and suggested that this must be the apartment. I’m not mistaken—relief crossed her face. She smiled, took from her bag some absurdly heavy key ring—must have weighed two kilos—covered in trinkets, feathers on strings, and wooden amulets, fished out one key, inserted it into the lock, and we entered the apartment. Directly from the street.

Well, the apartment was just an apartment. A typical Swedish place: one bedroom, a kitchen-living room, a bathroom. Small, cozy, furnished in beige and (of course) dark brown. IKEA would have put it on the cover. Lots of cozy little things that only a small number of men truly understand—throws, rugs, hangings, shelves. Live plants on the windowsill. I liked it. And Karin liked that I liked it. She didn’t hide her relief. She was an alien sort of woman, so when she said, “This apartment doesn’t like everyone. There are four like it here—one in each corner of the square—and they all have their own moods and their own caretakers,” I took it as a given.

The realtor arrived, drew up the contract, I paid, and moved in the very next day. Life settled into a routine; commuting from work was convenient—a bus on a different route went straight to the square. I found out there really were four such apartments. All the others had entrances from the other side of the building; only the four corner ones on the ground floor opened onto the square. I never saw the tenants of the two far apartments and never even went to the other end of the square, but the tenant of the apartment opposite introduced himself. We shopped at the same supermarket; he introduced himself politely and asked whether I lived in apartment 114. Yes, I did. We talked about nothing in particular; he said goodbye and left. I don’t even remember his face. His gestures were restrained, his manner calm, slightly wary. His name was Jonas, and he was somewhere between thirty and fifty.

Every evening I returned home around eight; it was already dark, the streetlights were on, but the square was never really bright, so I always had to watch my step to avoid smashing my toes on the cobblestones. Every evening outside the square the wind howled mercilessly. On the square, there was no wind.

About a month later I realized there was a tree in the middle of the square, two benches, and a trash can. The first time I came, it seemed to me there was no plant life in this stone tube and the wind whistled like in an open field. Not so! The square was always lifeless and quiet; not even a twig on the tree stirred. Occasionally people walked through—mostly mothers with babies—moving in the same silence I had grown used to; the babies didn’t cry or scream, and the older children ran happily around the square without making a sound. Sometimes I saw Jonas sitting under the tree and smoking. Everything was so orderly and unhurried that it always surprised me. Elsewhere in Stockholm it was nothing like this. Children were children—shouting, laughing, stomping loudly. But not on my Tystatorget square.

Three months later someone tried to rob me. Or kill and rob me. Or rape me. I don’t know for sure, because I got away. An unremarkable-looking man followed me from the subway, gradually quickening his pace and closing the distance. Of course I noticed him, got scared, and ran. When I burst onto my square, into the yellow light of the streetlamps, the man was almost upon me. I turned into my nook, somehow opened the door, and slammed it shut. The door was solid—armored, about fifteen centimeters thick, without a peephole. Catching my breath, I turned on the video intercom and saw my pursuer standing in my nook, looking around. He muttered something under his breath, but I couldn’t understand the words—it wasn’t Russian or Swedish. After standing there another three minutes and swearing in Swedish, he ran off in fear. You can’t run through a wall—I know that for sure! I don’t know why, but that’s exactly where he ran—into the wall. And I don’t know how, but he managed it. Because he didn’t run back out. He didn’t head toward the square, into the open space; he scurried straight into the wall and vanished in the thick darkness of my strange corner. I called Karin.

Karin only snorted when she heard my brief account. She had an explanation, but she didn’t want to give it to me too early. It sounded odd, of course—but that was Karin: a little mad, not quite of this world. The apartment on the square chooses its owners itself, and later releases them itself. It protects them from external harm; in return, the tenants care for it and keep it in proper condition. Karin couldn’t live there—her time had passed; the apartment no longer needed her. And was it even an apartment? Karin believed it was something like an observation post. There were four such posts on Tystatorget, each with its own watcher, each apartment performing its own protective function. What did they protect? The square itself? The tree on it? Karin had no answers. She only knew that the place had come to her by chance; there was no inheritance involved. After her death, ownership on paper would pass to her daughter—but her daughter would have no access to the apartment. She had never seen it and never would. She wasn’t suitable. For what? For the role of watcher.

The explanation was flimsy, but being inclined to reflection and interested in the unknown and parallel existences, I caught myself believing. The skeptic in me fought the desire to accept it. I even laughed, imagining myself at seventy, like Karin, strolling around in turquoise and floor-length wool skirts, discoursing on parallel worlds and spaces.

I lived in the apartment for twelve years. In summer, spring, and autumn I sat under the tree with my laptop or read books. In winter I didn’t even venture beyond my four walls. The hollow, muffled silence of the square was soothing. Even the snow fell there like a fairy tale—slowly, always in large, wet flakes. I took care of my space: cleaned it, washed it, changed pipes and sockets, installed a new stove, aired it out and kept it in order. Jonas disappeared; a tough-looking woman of about twenty-three moved in in his place.

Over those twelve years I was pursued sixty-four times, and all sixty-four times I managed to hide in apartment 114, and the pursuers vanished into the brown stone of the blank wall. A few times they were drug addicts (of both sexes), seven times women, twice old men. Mostly, of course, men in their prime, not always Swedish by appearance.

Was I afraid? Yes. But not the kind of fear you feel reading about corpses or horror stories. Not the kind you feel when you encounter something terrible in real life. It was a foreign fear—alien. The feeling that you live in some kind of sub-space invisible to others was worse than real nightmares. The last time I felt something like that was when I read *The Labyrinths of Echo*. No, that’s not advertising—just an attempt to explain the feeling. A pleasant, friendly world, but… not yours. Categorically чужой—a world living by its own laws of physics, and that’s what frightens you.

The sixty-fourth time was the hardest. Only fractions of a second separated me from my pursuer; I slammed the door in her face (yes, it was a woman), convinced I wouldn’t make it. My heart was pounding, my body was drenched in cold sweat, I was gasping—but I made it. It was spring, and I clearly understood that it was time for me to leave.

That evening I called Karin, we chatted a bit, and I reported that it seemed my time to leave my post had come.

My management helped me pack up the things I’d accumulated over those twelve years, and a week later I left. On moving day, after carrying the last box to the company car, I returned one last time to look at my refuge—the corner of Tystatorget that had sheltered me—even though I had already locked the door. There was no door in the wall. Rough, dark brown stone with gray speckles surrounded me on three sides. I had lost the trust of apartment 114, and someone else was already on their way to take my place. I was leaving for an ordinary studio in a university town on the outskirts of Stockholm. And I was truly afraid.