Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Everything We Make is a Tunnel

“No,” the portly, overly made-up lady who has just walked onto the balcony says to me in a severely clipped tone.


“No?” I ask. “No what, no I can’t be on the balcony? Ok.” I walk back into the ‘hostel’ where we’re trying to get a room. I use the ironic inverted commas because this place doesn’t resemble a hostel or a guest stay, by any stretch of the imagination. It’s a dingy apartment block on the north-west end of town, situation, quite conveniently, above a bunch of peroshki and shashlik stands. There’s a blown out door for an entrance and a broken tile foyer beyond that, but the lobby, or actually just the registration desk is up on the third floor. I have no idea what’s on the second floor. It looks like all the others but so far we’ve had no business there, and know no one else that has either. Perhaps people live there, just as, I suppose, people must live everywhere.

When I come back in the lady continues to glance at me in utter annoyance and repeats her mantra.

“No!”

“No, no what? No room? You don’t have a room?” I say trying to draw the words out as slow as possible to prevent her from getting confused and repeating that word I’m beginning to loathe.

“No!”

Luckily at this point Elliot steps in and begins to talk, in a light dropping cadence, in Russian with the lady. When they have finished their discourse, much less rude sounding than the one she and I had shared, Elliot, brusquely, shoos me toward the other end of the hall.

“She’s hungry, man. Let’s just get out of her way and let her eat; she said maybe there’s be a room in about an hour.”

We’d gone from an absolute ‘no’ to ‘maybe in an hour’ in a few words.

While we waited for the administration to dine a couple came up the elevator. Upon exiting they walked directly in the direction from which we had come, that is, toward the hungry and distraught woman. The woman, who stayed a ways behind the man as he registered, was wearing a skirt (leopard print) that covered about half of her ass and tights (leopard print) that were stretched so tight one couldn’t help but to imagine them running all the way up to her neck. She stood, perched almost, waiting for the man to return, near the elevator and slightly uncomfortable. Elliot and I continued to talk, trying not to put the woman out, trying not to make her feel over-observed. After few moments, the man came back with sheets under his arm and they pressed the elevator button and stood uncomfortably together for a minute before turning and dashing up the stairs.

“Hey, did they just take our room?” I enquired of Elliot.

“Yeah, but they’ll probably be done in an hour and then…,” he trailed off, considering what that meant for us should be given that room, in particular, that bed. Before we could allow visions of wet and crumpled sheets to heavily crowd our minds we were whisked off by the receptionist, who had, by this time, probably given up on eating.

She was, however, in a much lighter mood, and laughed at all of our quips, especially the one about the bathrooms being ‘nice’ when she showed the septic, dribbling bowls to us, in tiny tiled rooms reeking, so brightly, of ammonia a few seconds feels suffocating.

The pillows have suspicious stains, the mattresses look as though pestilence incarnate had knelt down and wept disease into them and those closets, they stand open and vacant spilling out their horrible stories unto us while we sleep, like the empty eye-sockets of a corpse.

But, to stay in such a place, this is a reason, if not the reason for travel, and this place is a vast, sweltering and respiring den of stories, and we’re happy to have a place on its hard and stained mattresses. After all, I slept fine last night and if nothing else, that’s worth 9 bucks.

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