The brown door. Part 1

 After graduation, I decided to move out of my mother's house to a rented apartment. The job was available then (and I worked as a "watchman consultant" in an organization dealing with all sorts of stone gizmos, which will be a separate story). I looked for options, looked at apartments and chose a one-room Khrushchev in the city center, half an hour's walk from my old apartment. Firstly, the price was fine with me, and secondly, the apartment was in fairly good condition, and the granny hostess thought to install cable TV and Internet there. Of course, there was no computer or TV, but I brought my own from home.

Life seemed to be getting better. He took his dog, Max, out of the house, brought his girlfriend Dashka to visit, cooked dinners for her and himself. Then we finally moved in together. I didn't notice any oddities. Except that my dog whined in the evenings and couldn't find a place for himself. I still put it down to the fact that he just missed his mom, because the animal loves the owner. He runs and runs, but after midnight he calms down, he goes to sleep at his feet.

It all started exactly from the day when Mom asked to bring Max home. They say she's bored at home, and the dog, as I mentioned, missed his mother. Well, I returned it and returned it. After work, I stopped by, walked him, and then walked slowly to the apartment. The road past the park, the coolness of the morning, a young lady in a bathrobe waiting for breakfast in the apartment — beauty!

When I arrived at the apartment, I found my lady crying and pale. When she saw me standing on the threshold, she immediately rushed to hug me. Kissing, crying. I was wary.

"What's wrong, honey?" — I'm asking.

"Honey, they're screaming so much, they're screaming so much! They're fighting, quarreling, running around the stairwell! And he's banging on our door, shouting: "Open up, bitch, or I'll take out the door!" — the girl burst into sobs.

— Wait, I don't understand. Who's shouting, who's running?  I asked, perplexed.

— Suck-ee-ee-ee!.. — Dasha drawled through her sobs.

Without thinking twice, I armed myself with a baton made of oak, which I still keep at the door just in case, and went to the neighbors. There were four apartments in the stairwell. There was only one wall in common, and Dasha claimed that it was behind the wall that people quarreled and fought, and it was their wooden door that slammed when they ran up the stairs. The only wooden doors were in our apartment and in the next one — the other two were made of iron.

And now I'm standing under the neighbor's door, clutching a baton in my hand. The door is not upholstered, covered with peeling brown paint. There are two old locks embedded in the door for a large "bearded" key, and a worn iron handle-bracket is nailed. "Greetings from the alcoholics of the 90s!" — I thought. Smiling mirthlessly, I pressed the bell. When he didn't hear any sounds outside the door, he knocked on it with his fist. Dashka's sobs and sniffling could be heard from behind our door, and my gut was filled with even more hatred for the negligent neighbors. I knocked on the door even more insistently, this time with my foot. There is no response.

After swearing at the ill-fated apartment, I rang the doorbell of the next apartment. The door was opened by a young woman in her thirties, whose name was Alyona. Alyona was divorced and lived alone with her young son. When we moved in, she came to visit us regularly once a week. She opened her mouth to say something, but when she saw me, she smiled.:

— Oh, it's you. And I thought that someone was breaking into these rooms," the woman nodded cautiously towards the brown door. Come on in, why stand on the threshold! And call your Daria, I'll pour you some tea.

After settling into Alyona's kitchen, we started talking, cursing the bad apartment and its inhabitants. Alyona told me that she also sometimes hears some kind of scuffling going on behind the wall, screams and swearing are heard, and in the morning the lights are on in the windows. By the way, the dirty, broken windows of that apartment faced the courtyard, and one of them, completely broken, was covered from the inside with a soiled baby blanket. In general, the picture is unpleasant.

After talking like this for about two hours, we shed some of the accumulated negativity. The only thing that was alarming was that neither Alyona nor I could remember the appearance of the tenants of the apartment behind the brown door. Alyona said that a married couple, heavy drinkers, lived there. When everything is quiet, it means they either leave the apartment, or the binge ends. But when they come to the denouement, that's when the Arctic fox comes to everything! According to the neighbor, the only person who saw the man was her son Kostya, and even then he was playing in the window. He said that "Uncle scary" was watching them, and then "hid." That's when we said goodbye to Alyona.

They moved on with their lives. Consistently, once or twice a month, the farce of knocking on our door was repeated, but only when I was not at home. I come in, Daria is covered in snot, crying, shaking. Every time I tried to reach the neighbors, the result was zero.

One day I had an idea. I took the day off from work, but I went out in the evening anyway, as if to work. Then he sneaked into our apartment, sat by the door and let's wait. I just sat there, but nothing happened. Well, I think I'll go to bed. We lie with Dashka, we chat, we discuss social mores, and as soon as the earth wears such drunks.

And so, at about 11 p.m., voices begin to be heard behind the wall — male and female. You can always hear it perfectly in Khrushchev, but the hostess hung a carpet on that wall (and, by the way, a wooden cross), so you can't make out the words, but clearly a scandal is brewing. He's yelling something, swearing at a woman. She snaps, starts using heavy objects — you can hear something falling to the floor with a thud and rolling. Well, I threw a saucepan at an alconaut, well, it happens. I spent my childhood with similar neighbors — a schizophrenic teacher on top, a moonshiner on the right, drug addicts on the left through one apartment. It was just nostalgic.

We are lying with Daria, listening, she is pressed into my shoulder — she is afraid. You can hear the lock opening in the next apartment, and then footsteps on the concrete steps — slap-slap. It's like someone is running with bare feet. Then other steps, someone bigger and heavier. So the woman ran away from the man, but he's catching up. Heavy footsteps retreated up the stairs, then down. Then I distinctly felt that he stopped at our door. It's like I can hear him breathing. The silence was so heavy, and then Dasha whispers, "I'm scared..." but it sounds unbearably loud in the silence around us.

And it began. Almost immediately, they began pounding on the door with fists and feet — yes, the man probably jumped with his whole body!

"Come out,— he shouts, "you bitch!" I'm going to fuck you! Did you hide at your Nadya's?! I'm going to fucking burn you alive, you hear?!!

My heart started pounding, but I got up and pulled on my trousers. The fear of a jerk outside the door pales in comparison to the desire to protect my life, which has become habitual. I grabbed my trusty baton and shoved my bare feet into my sneakers. My hand reached for the lock, but then I heard the door of the neighboring apartment slam shut. I looked through the peephole and saw no one outside the door. I decided not to take off my sneakers and trousers, called Dashka, and we sat down at the kitchen table, putting the kettle on the fire.

Dishes were breaking behind the wall, and something heavy was falling. The man took out his anger on furniture and other objects that came to hand. Dasha and I nervously drank tea and listened to the farce in silence.

The neighbor's door slammed again, but more quietly. Apparently, the drunk's wife had returned. Well, I think it's about to start. And it started to happen, which still makes my blood run cold when I think about it. Almost immediately, a woman's scream pierced the silence, in which there was such pain and horror that it seemed that the eardrums were ready to burst voluntarily, just not to hear these sounds. It was as if it wasn't a woman who was screaming, but a circular saw that was cutting live pigs was working. The scream only subsided for a second, only to return with even more creepy sticky notes.

Dasha dropped the cup, and it shattered into dozens of pieces with a clang, showering my sneaker-clad feet with hot tea. I put my cup on the table, otherwise it would certainly have repeated Dashina's fate, because my hands were shaking like they had never shaken in my life. It was really uncomfortable. I picked up my cell phone and dialed the police. The sluggish voice of the attendant sounded on the phone, like angelic singing in the midst of all the sound nightmare that surrounded us.:

— Duty Officer, Petty Officer Lipchenko, I'm listening to you.

— Come quickly, a man is being killed here! Address: Metallurgov Avenue, building so-and-so.

— The car already left ten minutes ago, stop calling! — the attendant blurted out irritably and hung up the phone.

The screams gradually subsided, turning into intermittent sobs. Dasha climbed into bed and covered her head with a pillow, echoing the sounds from the neighbor's apartment. The doorbell rang. They didn't knock, they rang the bell. I heard the bell of Alyona's apartment and the clang of the iron door. The police arrived. With relief, I went out to the stairwell, where people in uniform were crowding. There was an outfit of ordinary police officers in blue shirts and with a folder, as well as three burly guys from Berkut (this is our special police unit, they additionally patrol the streets at night) with machine guns and a sledgehammer. Alyona called the police to our address before me.