I lived in my grandparents’ apartment until I was two and a half years old, and then I moved with my parents across the street to a new co-op house, where I lived until I was 18.
By this point, I was sure I was never going anywhere. No one around here went anywhere! A trip to Bulgaria or Poland, was considered the crowning hope of particularly successful and persistent fellow citizens.
People had been waiting for decades for new housing to settle with uncles, aunts and grandmothers, living on each other’s heads.
And so, at 18, after a falling out with my parents who did not support my aspirations for free art, I first found a dilapidated mop on the Solyanovsky Lane, and then an empty tavern on the lane Grivtsova and started an independent life.
I got the cabana “for conducting art classes with children” from the local house of creativity. I wasn’t supposed to live there, but I slept on the couch in secret. Mosquitoes and rats lived with me in the joint.
After that I moved about every six months. Mostly we lived in squats: houses that were going through a major renovation, of which we didn’t have time to evict all the tenants and disconnect the utilities.
Once again, moving from apartment to apartment, we joked with our buddies that the devils in hell would probably make us lug things around.
When I was 20, I went to Gdansk for six months, then to Israel for a few years, then to Paris, again to Peter, to America, to the Dominican Republic, to Germany, etc.
I have a distinct craving for a change of scene.
It must have been the fear of staying within the 5 meters a Soviet man is supposed to have. Although the view from the window of my child’s room: an obscure technical building, a street lamp, a garbage dump and a broken fence of a kindergarten, is still remembered by me as a model of coziness and safety.
Here I will try to gather some information about my travels.