The cat has been staring for a good hour, something he commences every day at 6:14 AM and works hard at, an inch or two from my face, until my eyes remain open and I get up to put some food in his bowl.
On this Sunday I need to unclench with some urgency. It’s not as bad as some days – when you wake up from fever dreams of speedboating across clear lakewaters with a terry towel in your mouth and a boiling vat of kerosene in your lap – no, it’s not as bad as it can be, but as I say there is some urgency. I groan and creak and it’s on with the clothes, the socks and shoes, down the steps and outside. Every day at this exact point there’s a debate: put coffee on the stove now before the electicity comes back on, or deal with the bodily functions and fuss over breakfast later. I make coffee.
There’s an entranceway. About four by two metres, just a sort of anteroom between the hallway and the outside world. On two closet doors are hung coats and hats and there are dozens of shoe boxes stacked up between the front two doors, which is the only thing lays between an unbouncy me, who needs to leave with some urgency.
I try the door handle and, instead of the usual resistance one gets after turning it 45° or so, indicating the latch has cleared and the door can be opened, it just falls off. I look at it with a flashlight. The handle, which had been acting flaky, is now quite broken; the door is essentially deadbolted from within.
Pause. Stare. Try again. Pause. Oh man. Options.
Kicking it goes nowhere. Screwdrivers, then. Off comes the doorhandle – all and I hear the handle on the other side clank to the floor. No access to the mechanism of the lock, not that I’d know what to do with such access. Probing and digging with screwdrivers and pliers goes nowhere. No amount of hammer violence will loosen the hinge pins. My coffee is now cold.
I have visions of smashing through door, of axes splintering wood, of befouled houseplants and inappropriate use of the kitchen sink. I’m actually standing bent at the waist with half-crossed legs.
At last, at the bottom of one shoebox, I find a couple of wood chisels. I decide without conviction that such a door will be easy to repair, just a matter of patching on a new handle really (this sounds good at the time). I apply the tip of the chisel where I estimate the top of the lock mechanism to be and whack it with a hammer. A chunk of laminate the size of my palm comes flying off and click the lock opens and the door swings gently open. A flurry of activity ensues.
Later in the day at Pochayna market I’m trying to convey my needs to a hardware clerk, who has no problem telling me about a new used lock mechanism but can’t quite grasp why I used a chisel: all I needed to do was slip a credit card between the door and the frame. Like in the movies.
My friend from Taiwan via Austria, meanwhile, picks up at least five old gas masks, two antique sickles, a Soviet typewriter, several desk calenders and a gramophone operated by rotating the cylinder with a hand crank. The seller throws in some vinyl records to sweeten the deal.
After shopping we decide to celebrate. On the walk to OK Wine to pick up Cognac and caviar we almost bump into Andriy Kurkov, who wrote that depressing op-ed about optimimism appearing in The New York Times a couple of last weeks ago1.
Ukraine Is Running Out of Optimists (The New York Times, November 15, 2024)
Life is not all bad if you can still get Calvados.