sideways at the door of my old apartment. They hadn't changed the door... even the locks looked the same to me, except that the faceplates were a bit brighter and fresher. When we had walked up half a flight of steps I looked back at my door again, and it opened, as if someone had been waiting for us to move away. A dishevelled woman of an uncertain age stuck her head out. Her face was swollen and she was wearing a dirty housecoat. She looked us up and down with a spiteful expression on her face and started shrieking:
'Have you pissed in the lift again?'
The accusation was so unexpected that I broke into laughter. But Olga pressed her lips together and took a step back down. The woman quickly half closed the door, ready to slam it shut. Olga looked hard at the woman for a while and then said very quietly:
'No. You imagined it.'
'I imagined it,' the woman said in a thick, slow voice.
'And your upstairs neighbour is flooding your apartment,' Olga went on. 'Go upstairs and tell him what you think of him.'
The woman beamed and leapt out onto the landing just as she was ?in her filthy, soiled housecoat and tattered slippers with no socks. She ran past us eagerly.
'Why did you do that?' I asked Olga.
'She asked for it,' Olga replied fastidiously. 'Let her serve the cause of the Light. At least once in her life.'
I thought that if there was really a Higher Vampire hiding in Saushkin's apartment, this could actually be the last thing the woman ever did in her life. Vampires really dislike personal insults.
But then, I didn't find the woman at all likeable either.
'Who did you sell the apartment to?' Olga asked. 'Who is this mental patient?'
'I sold it through an agency'
'And they're not poor people, not if they could buy an apartment,' Olga said, with a shrug. 'How can she neglect herself like that?'
Apparently she was more offended by the woman's dilapidated appearance than by her rudeness. Olga was almost obsessively strict about such matters, no doubt as a result of the hardships of the war years and her subsequent imprisonment.
The woman whom Olga had recruited so swiftly was already pounding on Saushkin's door with her hands and feet and screeching:
'Open up! Open up, you bloodsucker! You've flooded me out! You've filled my whole apartment with hot water, you bastard!'
'I'm always touched by these accidental insights that human beings have,' Olga remarked. 'Tell me, why does a neighbour who has flooded her apartment, even if it is with hot water, suddenly become a bloodsucker?'
Meanwhile the woman upstairs had launched into a list of her property that had be soaked and ruined. The list was so colourful that I couldn't help glancing round to make sure there was no steam escaping from the open door of the apartment.
'A Czech piano, a Japanese television, an Italian three-piece suite, a brown mink coat!'
'A chestnut Arab stallion,' Olga said derisively.
'A chestnut Arab stallion,' the woman shrieked obediently.
A little girl slightly older than Nadya came out of my old apartment. Seven or eight years old, a pretty face, with a sad, frightened expression. Unlike her mother, she was dressed like a doll ?in a smart dress, white socks and shiny lacquered shoes. She gave us a frightened glance, and looked at her mother with an expression of weary, exhausted sympathy.
'Sweety pie!' the woman exclaimed, jumping away from Saushkin's door. With a panic-stricken glance at Olga, she went dashing down to her daughter, or perhaps back to her apartment,'Go home,' Olga said in a quiet voice. 'There's no more water flooding your apart ment. We'll deal with your neighbour. And tomorrow morning go to the hairdresser's, have a manicure and get your hair done.'
The woman seized the girl by the hand and skipped in through the doorway, with a frightened backward glance at us.
'What is it that makes people the way they are?' Olga asked thoughtfully as she looked at the mother and daughter.
As she closed the door, the woman yapped:
'And don't you... pee in the lift any more! I'll call the militia!'
The word 'pee', softened for the daughter, somehow seemed especially horrible. As if there were switches inside the woman's head, clicking away as they tried to return her thoughts to normal.
'Is she sick?' I asked Olga.
'That's just it, she isn't,' Olga said in annoyance. 'She's psycho logically healthy! Let's go on through the Twilight... '
I glanced down, found my shadow and stepped into it.