The Voyeur*

***

I live with my girlfriend on the first floor of a dormitory—a shabby, square, five‑story building like the ones that used to be built for factory workers. The window of our room faces a playground on the side of the building entrance. There’s only one entrance in the building. A balcony also faces the same side. So the window is right next to the balcony, and the bars on them are very close to each other. Because the curtain rod in the room doesn’t reach all the way to the wall, there’s often a gap between the wall and the curtains—sometimes completely open, sometimes covered with sheer tulle.

Now to the point.

A couple of years ago, my girlfriend and I were lying together, fooling around, everything going as usual, when suddenly a sharp look of fear appeared on her face. She slid off me, pointed toward the window, and said someone was watching us. At first I didn’t pay much attention—maybe she imagined it—but literally a moment later a neighbor started knocking loudly on our door. I got dressed, went out to the common area, and he told me that he had just chased away some teenager who had been hanging onto the bars with one hand and watching us through the window.

Naturally, I was stunned. It’s not that I felt sorry about the “show,” but it’s still our private life. We got upset, discussed it, and decided it was the first and last time.

But it wasn’t.

This guest started visiting us without any strict regularity, mostly on weekends and holidays. Always after dark—sometimes when dusk was just falling, sometimes at three in the morning. Maybe there was a pattern, but we didn’t always manage to notice him. Fear, hysterics—it all became routine, and we almost got used to being watched. Well, not “we”—I got used to it, because I’m a bit slow in general and never actually saw him. I only heard the footsteps of someone running away, saw his footprints in the snow (clearly larger than size 40, since I wear 43 and mine were slightly smaller), examined the bars of the window where the snow had been rubbed off by his hands. But I never saw him. All I did was calm my girlfriend down and occasionally try—unsuccessfully—to catch the guy. Why unsuccessfully? Because as soon as he notices that someone has looked in his direction, he immediately runs away, and in the dark among buildings and various structures it’s not hard to disappear.

I didn’t see him until yesterday.

So, my girlfriend and I are sleeping in the evening. Suddenly she wakes me sharply: “Someone’s watching us in the window again!” I’m half asleep, lying there, looking at the window—naturally, there’s no one there anymore. I turn to her and start trying to calm her down again and convince her there’s no watcher, casually glance back at the window… and I see HIM. A dark human silhouette slowly floated in horizontally from the left, stopped in the gap, and stared at us.

That’s when I really freaked out, ladies and gentlemen—absolutely freaked out. One thing is when someone just tells you about a voyeur; it’s a completely different thing when you see this character practically face to face.

The lights in the room hadn’t been on all day—only the glow of our laptops. It was 8:25 p.m.—not so late that someone would feel safe being unnoticed. These are residential buildings, after all; people are walking outside and in the entrance, cars are driving by, and there are two more apartment buildings directly opposite ours.

The strangest and probably scariest part was this: the silhouette wasn’t hanging by one hand, not leaning—the body was absolutely vertical. And secondly, it was too high.

As for who it could be among our acquaintances—zero options. We’ve been racking our brains for a long time and came up with nothing. It’s completely unclear who could be watching us. We’re unemployed students, homebodies, nothing interesting happens in our lives that would deserve attention. A voyeur? In winter, in the freezing cold, at three in the morning?..

The only thing that’s clear is that this is definitely not a teenager, as the neighbor assumed. At minimum someone our age, and more likely older—much older. And one more thing is certain: this person is clearly not mentally well, because watching the same people for more than two years is already something else entirely.

Now I’m thinking about what to do. Go to the authorities? They’ll ask for evidence. We don’t have money for surveillance cameras, there isn’t enough memory on a phone to record constantly, and if we record with a wired webcam, nothing will be visible anyway, because this guy operates in the dark.

It seems to me there’s one option: during the next visit, pretend we don’t notice him. My girlfriend keeps lying there, and I jump out the kitchen window, which faces the other side of the building (in the photo, that side is on the right). Going through the entrance isn’t an option—the intercom will make noise and he’ll run away. And he always runs in the direction of the kitchen window—so that’s where I’ll meet him, with a vacuum cleaner pipe.

Or maybe I really should go to the authorities after all. Because if I were a less psychologically stable person, I might have already lost my mind because of all this.