Apartment Number 48**

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I live in a simple five-story building in Moscow, in apartment number 47. Naturally, next to me is the apartment with a slightly crooked yellow plate on its door bearing the number 48. It is this apartment that I want to talk about.

And no, to answer the obvious question — as far as I know, no one has ever died in this apartment during its forty-year history. The people who lived there never complained of strange noises, visions, or chairs sliding across the floor on their own. By all appearances, it is an average one-room apartment with all the amenities, a perfect home for single young people (or not so young). In fact, even among the local residents, it doesn’t have a bad reputation — there are no tales or legends of a “cursed apartment.” If I think about it, I’m probably the first and only person to notice that something is wrong in apartment number 48 — and even then, only because I live right next door.

I’ve lived in this building for twenty-eight years, and during that time, six tenants have lived in the apartment. Considering it was a rental since Soviet times, that’s not too many. But the circumstances under which each tenant moved out were remarkable.

When I first moved into apartment 47, the neighboring apartment was occupied by a respectable-looking pensioner with glasses — a typical Soviet intellectual. As befitted an educated person of those years, he subscribed to stacks of newspapers and magazines, and I often ran into him in the stairwell on his way to the mailbox. We would greet each other and occasionally exchange a few words about the weather or football matches (we were both ardent Spartak fans). About two years later, I noticed that the flow of mail for the pensioner began to dwindle — no more thick magazines or specialty publications, only the practically mandatory “Pravda” and “Izvestia.” Then the postman stopped delivering even those, and the mailbox of apartment 48 was empty. During the period when “Pravda” was still delivered, I sometimes saw my neighbor in the hallway, and his appearance clearly showed that his health was failing. Well, he was elderly, and the healthcare situation was, as you know, what it was, so all I could do was feel sorry for him. Then I stopped seeing him — it seemed the pensioner didn’t even go out to the store for groceries or take out the trash. Five years after I moved in, he finally left somewhere — reportedly to the countryside, and the last time I saw him leaving, he made a heavy impression on me. Sunken gray cheeks, lifeless eyes, completely white hair in clumps, trembling hands, a frail frame — he was just a pale shadow of the plump, energetic old man I had met five years before.

After him, the apartment stood empty for a couple of months, and then a young worker moved in. I didn’t have much contact with him — the young man was always in a rush, keeping to himself, leaving early in the morning and returning late at night. At first, that is. A couple of years later, he began spending much more time inside the apartment. Some people whispered that he had seriously messed up at work and had been fired. Gradually, it became clear that the former worker had developed a heavy drinking habit: whenever I saw him in the stairwell or near the house, he always had a shopping bag with a large beer jar or a bottle of “Russian vodka.” I was surprised at how he could afford both regular drinking and rent if he practically never left the apartment. His appearance, like that of any rapidly deteriorating alcoholic, worsened: dirty wrinkled clothes, constant smell of alcohol, unhealthy thinness, dark circles under his eyes, swollen skin… In five years he aged literally a quarter of a century. Then he eventually died — he got into a fight one night while queuing for another bottle of liquor and was stabbed there.

The next tenant was a middle-aged man. He was notable for driving a huge black SUV with tinted windows (by the mid-1990s, such a vehicle clearly indicated his social circle). I can’t say much about him. He apparently owned several small kiosks, frequently ended up in the hospital after scuffles with “brothers,” and brought women of easy virtue home… At the time, I had my own serious problems, so I didn’t follow the lives of neighbors too closely. But during the five years the businessman lived in apartment 48, he also wasted away like a matchstick. By the end of his stay, the rosy-faced young man with a bulldog gaze had become a barely limping, trembling weakling whose sparse hair fell with every step. Of course, one could blame a stressful job and those hospital visits, but…

After the “new Russian” disappeared without a trace (I don’t know the exact circumstances), the apartment was briefly vacant. Then a woman with a five-year-old child moved in. She was said to be an accountant. During the day she went to work and left the child alone — perhaps they couldn’t afford a kindergarten, or the waiting list was long, as usual. And what do you think happened? Two years later, when the child was supposed to start school, she quit her job and stayed home, refusing to send the child to school. Social workers visited her, and she made such a scandal that we could hear it through the wall in my apartment. They visited several more times, but eventually seemed to give up — in any case, the child never went to the first grade. Otherwise, when left alone, the apartment was quiet, the child didn’t scream, the mother didn’t drink or bring men home. This continued for several years, until one day, while I was away on vacation in the south, neighbors heard loud crying and called the police. They broke down the door and found the woman unconscious in a hot bath. Ischemic stroke. She was resuscitated, but having been without medical help for too long, she never fully recovered — in other words, she became bedridden. What happened to the child — whether he was sent to an orphanage or relatives took him — I don’t know. Fedor Andreevich from 45 told me that the woman, Galina, looked like a living corpse, and it couldn’t have been just from the stroke: waxy skin, flabby face, sores on her hands and neck, weight around forty kilos at most…

After this fourth tenant and Andreevich’s vivid story, a light bulb went off in my head. The sequence of events formed a creepy pattern, and I decided to closely observe what was happening in apartment 48 in the future.

The fifth tenant was another elderly lonely man. However, that’s where the resemblance to the quiet, polite intellectual of the 1980s ended. He was a bitter, hunched little old man, constantly muttering under his breath and giving anyone he met a vicious glare. Apparently, he was not entirely Russian, some kind of Eastern descent, but that doesn’t matter. The old man was unpleasant, and over the next four years, he aged rapidly. He became nearly blind, completely bald, lost half his teeth, and had to walk with a cane. His blindness ultimately led to him being sent to a nursing home — he could no longer take care of himself. When they carried him away, he swore loudly, cursing the whole world, from the nurses to the ungrateful relatives who decided to send him to rot in a retirement home.

The last tenant, so far, has lived in the apartment for almost four years. She is a young female student who came from the provinces and successfully enrolled in a university. But whether she still lives there, I can’t guarantee. When I first saw her — fresh, beautiful, just stepping into adult life — my heart sank. Summoning my courage, one evening I knocked on her door and told her everything I knew about the apartment she had moved into, advising her to look for another place. However, this young woman apparently considered me a crazy old man and just laughed. Of course, she promised to “do something,” but it was only to get rid of me. In reality, she lived there as before. She just stopped attending her studies at some point. Again, the question arises: how does she pay rent — and who actually owns this strange apartment? In all twenty-eight years, I have never seen the landlord: tenants moved in and out entirely on their own.

Recently, just before the May holidays, I saw my neighbor on the stairwell. A rare occurrence, I must say — she had practically disappeared for six months. She looked terrible. Her face was sunken, her cheekbones sharp, her eyes bulging with red veins. During our brief conversation, it was obvious that she was constantly grinding her teeth. Her appearance reminded me of a drug addict. Who knows, maybe she really became addicted.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Yes, everything’s fine,” she replied nervously, trying to pass by.

“You look terrible. Remember what I told you years ago about your apartment?”

“I remember,” she looked at me with barely concealed hostility, as if I had gravely insulted her.

“Will you let me pass?”

“Excuse me,” I stepped aside. “And still, it would be better if you moved out while it’s not too late.”

She took a few steps toward her apartment, then stopped, hearing my words. Her face looked like a skeleton.

“I feel good there,” she said. “There’s no reason to move.”

After that, she approached the door, fiddled with the lock, jingling her keys, then went inside, slammed the door, and slid the iron bolt from the inside. I stood for a few seconds staring at the crooked yellow plate with the number 48, sighed, and walked back to my apartment.

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