A Regular Flat
by Mateusz Tymoszewski
If you wanted to survive in this country, you had to be cynical. There was no other way. If you weren’t, reality would kick in just too hard. It was a very dark sitcom no one would ever like to live in. Public healthcare was dying out, and every day inflation broke its own previous all-time record. The job market was a joke further polarized by the appearance of AI. Without connections, you could achieve nothing.
Luckily, I worked in a well-paid and stable field, where no company could achieve anything without a human. I was safe. And even rarer than those things, I liked my job. Especially since I didn’t have to work at an office or do any paperwork. I was employed by a modern, foreign company, which took care of such matters, allowing me to simply focus on my critical tasks. They were not very complicated if you knew what you were doing. However, the catch was that the tiniest mistake could lead to more damage than one could pay off. But I made no mistakes. So I guaranteed myself nice, long breaks. My working day consisted of fifteen minutes of work followed by forty-five-minute breaks full of relaxation. And I was paid for all of it.
When you spent three-quarters of your working day doing what you wanted instead of what you were paid for, it was easy to judge others. So I judged from above, looking through the window of a rented flat in a slowly crumbling and decaying blok.
As almost every other middle-aged Pole out there, I was forced by the real estate market to rent a flat. Tired of the high cost of living in a big city, I had tried to find basically anything that could meet the not-so-high standards of a single person in their early 30s.
The thing was that every decent flat had already been rented. The only ones still available had been merely livable: The current standard on the real estate market consisted of deteriorating single-room 45-square-foot flats with a toilet on the other side of the common hallway. I could not grasp how a well-earning middle-aged person struggled to find a regular flat with a regular kitchen and bathroom.
But I managed to find a decent one. A really decent one. Two rooms and a balcony with a few other amenities. The landlords were straightforward and easy-going. They even allowed pets. Not that I had any. But I was planning to get a cat, so I liked that this matter had sorted itself out already.
In the meantime, I was still waiting for the bloody telecommunications company to finally connect my home to the internet. The pleasant and polite lady on the phone told me that the specialist was on sick leave and that she could not reach the backup. But the in-app notifications showed that the backup was in a bigger city, doing only the jobs in close proximity. From what I had learned, the internet guys were paid per location served, so it did not puzzle me at all. What puzzled me was the inability of an average customer to do something about such a case. I was only told to patiently wait. I even tried intimidating them with the threat of cancelling the agreement, but they must have read my bluff, as I had no other internet services available to choose from. They were the only supplier with a fiber-optic cable connected to the blok.
The other suppliers’ upload and download speeds would not let me work at full capacity. My job required a stable and fast internet connection. It was true that a slow connection would be better than mobile Wi-Fi and using my smartphone as a router. The connection was so weak that I had to reschedule some of the video calls again, as I had done for three consecutive weeks so far. I only hoped that it would not affect my reputation, which seemed to be the case as colleagues took my place without hesitation.
Nonetheless, although decent, the flat was still just a plain one in a simple, post-communist blok. The density of residential families per square meter in the building was so high that you could never feel left alone. The tremors of water pipes accompanied by shreds of conversations flying through the common ventilation shaft constantly reminded me of all the other human beings flocking to the square, brutally gray building.
The blok’s surroundings were rather clean. It generally was tidy around here. But sometimes, when entering the blok’s elevator, I could not help but wonder whether I had rented a flat in some kind of slum. At best, it stank of wet dogs and cheap cigarettes. At best. Quite often, however, this unpleasant smell was suppressed by an even worse one – cheap vodka and an old, unwashed body. It was awful. Almost as awful as the Stain, but I did not need to go to the elevator too often. The Stain, on the other hand, peeked at me all day long. But apart from that, the whole district was clean. People picked up after their pets, polished their windows every few weeks and the municipal services swept the streets and pavements constantly.
The windows of the other buildings nearby looked more like a kaleidoscope of alien realities I was not supposed to see. Creepy insights on matters so personal that they should not be obviously accessible. All the families’ secrets and drama were easy to understand when they were not blocked out by curtains. And that was the reason everybody used them. The heavier, the better. So the nosey neighbors could not get any fuel for their juicy gossip to run on. But even without peeking through their windows, just by looking through your own several times a day, you could flesh out a lot about the others. After a few weeks, you could easily recognize the children and their families; you knew exactly who went to church, who was a dog owner and who was owned by a dog.
The ever-swept pavement paths randomly spread across the whole neighborhood. Simply darting off in sporadic directions, only to come suddenly to an abrupt end by a street, flower stand, tree or some monument. With no sign, gate or dedicated crossing. It just looked like each path led to one particular thing. Like it was not meant to guide you on a walk, not meant to help you get from point A to point B. As if getting you to that particular monument was its main and only goal.
If you had ever been led astray by such a path, you either had to turn back, try and find another way or, like all the locals did, just go around the monument, making your own path.
One could say it strengthened the will and spirit – after all you had to be brave enough to go your own way. But for me, it was just ugly. After some time, all the new, different paths tended to blend into one messy trail of mud and footprints on the ever-wet lawn that could swallow your leg up to your ankle. A disgusting sign of repetition in 21st-century human life. After all, each of us goes and goes, in the same directions several times a day. Heading for the same bus stops, the same shops and the same parking lot.
But do not even let me get started with the parking lot. Finding a place to park a car in the vicinity of the blok was nearly impossible. It felt like some kind of rerun of an unfunny reality show that no one asked for. But even if you managed to notice a decent spot, you had to maneuver through narrow passages between poorly parked cars, as their owners did not care at all about the others that could use the common space of the blok’s parking lot. I was always glad I did not have to participate in the regular commute that could put your whole life on hold for several hours.
Instead, I just stayed home and ordered everything to be delivered to my doorstep. I valued my time too much to bother going grocery shopping. It also helped me enjoy my breaks at work, which I had used for running errands and clocking my working day in the past.
Now the breaks were counted by the bells of the nearby church instead. They noted every hour of my day, disturbing my work every sixty minutes. But I did not mind it at all. It reminded me to stand up and go stretch on the balcony. I had heard it is good for your back. So I liked it. But it was not that good for my sanity. Whenever I wanted to hang out on the balcony, I had to brace myself first, to somehow restrain the anger welling up every time I saw the Stain. The deaf and mute evidence of the upstairs neighbor’s impunity. The ugliest thing in the entire blok or maybe even in the entire city. Long, wind-stricken lashes of ashcan water covering a small but ever-visible part of a wall. From any place you chose on the balcony, you had to acknowledge the Stain. I wondered if that upstairs barbarian would ever face the consequences for what he did to this poor wall.
On Sundays, the main purpose of the church bells changed drastically. Instead of measuring my back-stretching breaks, they gathered the faithful prayers. Sometimes, if the wind blew the right way, I could hear the gospels over my favorite series I had been binging on recently.
Poland had always been a very religious country. Zealous, as some could say, with its’ benighted mentality and a total lack of diversity. But this religious zeal, on the other hand, could help the people believe in miracles. In those every once-in-a-while moments you believed your decisions mattered, like voting for a politician that will change something for the better. This time for sure.
But Sundays, by the way, were a completely different thing – in the park next to the blok, old and wrinkled babcias wearing their fanciest clothes reserved specially for Sundays hatched out of their cocoon flats. They feasted on all kinds of rumors and covered all the benches in the tree shadows, from which they could see everything that happened around the blok. They avoided the benches bathed in the scorching, mid-summer sun, though. They were afraid of them, as if the slightest sunray could give them a heat stroke.
Generally speaking, the warm and sunny days were manageable. Especially throughout the spring, when the whole landscape looked just a little more friendly with all kinds of flowers springing from trees and bushes. Now, with summer coming, the heat was gradually getting out of hand. It was unbearable. Omnipresent concrete, metal sheets and cheap, melting asphalt retained heat horribly well, driving temperatures up to unimaginable levels. Although summers lasted long, they always ended suddenly, almost abruptly. Tree leaves, arrogant in their green grace, tended to fall to the ground almost overnight. It was easy to miss, especially while focusing on work and not leaving home. The last part was crucial for surviving the coming winter with its awful, toxic air.
Although my area wasn’t at the disgraceful top of the most polluted cities in Poland, in my private ranking it was to be awarded the honorable title of the stinkiest city I had ever lived in. It was located in the south of the country, where it was not uncommon to exceed two thousand percent of the harmless level of pollution.
Throughout the week, when everybody raced to their jobs and on errands, the pollution could be seen with the naked eye. In contrast to the muddy, gray sky, which tried to suppress the smog and stop it from contaminating the clouds.
The noticeable signs of pollution varied from day to day. Some days, the air was thick, hard to breathe and fog-like in appearance. On others, you could catch a breath easily, but the snow was stained with unnerving black dots imprinted on the piles like dirty, shapeless, unsymmetrical snowflakes that did not blend in.
I was not afraid of them, though, thanks to the anti-smog mask I bought some time ago. I was more climate-conscious than the old babcias will ever be. I could tell it by the judgmental looks they gave me while I was wearing my protective facial gear. Instead of just accepting the reality and the fact that they would be better protecting their own lungs too, they preferred to pretend it was not that bad. The problem of unbreathable air was not for them in the first place, but the generations that were yet to come. It was easier that way: to let the next generation fix the problems of your own, as you did with your predecessors. It was easier than facing the consequences of your own actions.
In order to prepare kids for the task of solving the pollution problem, the government installed electronic billboards at schools and offices throughout the country. They were connected to the pollution measurement devices supplying up-to-date data for the applicable area. Their main purpose was to inform everyone about the air conditions daily and rate them on an easy and understandable scale of three icons reassembling human faces or emojis. One of them was happy and green, as the pollution not exceeding the norms was the most important thing in the world. The red one was sad or maybe angry. But the true meaning of the neutral one was incomprehensible. At least to me. With a not-so-telling yellow skin and a straight, thin line in the place of the mouth, was it a sign that the air could damage my lungs or – quite the contrary – was it safe to go around without a mask? I never knew.
Before the three-face system was introduced, they had just put numbers describing the pollution in the center of the screen. Next to it, you could find the percentage by which the pollution had exceeded the norm. But when the weekly summary had been displayed, at the end of the thirty-second long informative cycle, it had looked like a cynical high-score table in some kind of a death race. So they replaced it with funny and informative faces, concealing the real number of carcinogenic particles in the air.
Despite the pollution and marks it left – such as bleak black streaks of smog-induced rain pouring from the windowsills and running across the blok’s walls or white houses built recently nearby and already turning dark gray – the cityscape was really nice. I kind of liked it. But not all the locals were as content with their everyday lives as I was.
They tended to cause a ruckus with their random heated arguments at the building’s entryway. I tried putting on my headphones and turning the volume up to a bearable maximum to block it out. And it helped, so I did not complain. The fights could be heard in every flat on every floor in the blok. They were harder to deal with in the summer since you had to have your windows open all the time, so the heat did not kill you.
But, quite contrary to the windows, the walls were thick enough to block out any noise coming from the neighbors. All except for one. The upstairs neighbor was the only resident of the blok who could be heard even outside of it, even throughout the parking lot.
At first, I could only hear some screams from time to time. But a few months after I moved here, he renovated his place and must have changed something with the flooring, weakening its soundproofing capabilities. That was the moment I started to hear more and more.
The noise coming through the ceiling worked almost the same as the church bells but it did not measure the exact hours of each day. Instead, dry screams from the neighbors acted as a prelude to acts of abuse – both physical and mental.
Insults aimed at his daughter meant that she had to go to school. If they did not align with the church bells, she was late and could expect a beating. After that, it was quite calm for the rest of the day. I could only hear his loud TV running and the sounds of beer cans being opened at regular intervals. His wife’s arrival was announced by long and vociferous arguments, always followed by an even louder, lazy and long string of kurwas.
I flinched with every kurwa. I used to think that the word was funny. Of course, it was awful, crude and vulgar, but as with every vulgarism, it could convey emotions that other words could not. But in his mouth, it was just a comma, a way to fill gaps when his tongue was faster than his brain. Because of him, I hated that word now.
Every evening was filled with loud music, travelling through all the pipes and shafts in the blok. But it was hard to tell if it was music at all. It sounded like static or some kind of electronic noise with no melody or sense. The only comprehensible thing was the kick drums. They all sounded almost the same and helped to notice the real tempo of a particular song like a metronome.
I even went up a couple of floors once, just to see if it was as loud there, as it was on my floor. It was. And from that day on I wondered if I was the only person in the whole building bothered by his behavior.
Especially since later, at night, when all the inhabitants of the block were supposed to be asleep, only one kind of sound could be heard – yelling accompanied by the cacophony of beating. But the alcohol-induced angry screams ceased from time to time. And only then, if you listened closely, could you hear a whimpering whisper: “Please, dad. Stop.”
It was obnoxious and hearing it made me feel anxious. It reminded me of all the educational videos from my school days, where they constantly repeated that if you do not act on witnessing abuse, you accept it. That being the whistle-blower was not a bad thing.
But the thing was that it was still considered a bad thing here. All the boys in the classroom had always laughed it off, screaming that they would not be snitches. I blamed the communist era for that. Back then, we, the people, had to stand against the government, which was our enemy. All the officials, police and other national agencies were merely tools for the USSR’s puppet government to maintain control of our land. Now we were an independent country. Our agencies served us, the people. Not them. But I still cringed at the thought of being a snitch. Just thinking about filling out the paperwork and testifying made me uneasy.
The fact that the girl stopped crying helped me to still not make up my mind on this matter. I was also afraid that the child welfare officer would not do anything, as every other low-ranking official. And the impunity would only enrage the upstairs neighbor to beat her even more. And, if I could hear her, the other neighbors could too, right? Why didn’t they do anything about it? Were they afraid of the monster on the floor above? Maybe I should be afraid of him too? Was it really that bad? Maybe she deserved it? Should I not mind my own business after all, like all the others did?
I really wanted to come up with answers to all of these questions. But I pulled the blanket over my head instead, to block out the noise that began anew. I wanted to sleep.