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Half an hour to go. “The Ruins” is a friendly, familiar name
we came up with for a factory dormitory, abandoned before
we came on the scene, slated for demolition but not
demolished either during perestroika or the new years
since. All that remained was the skeleton of a building, with
cavernous stairwells, winding corridors where decay
erected barricades, the chewed remnants of rooms with bits
of ceiling and black circles on the floor from fires, for which
the firewood was passed through small side windows.
Behind the hostel loomed the factory, – brown brick, the
huge machinery we never saw and which had lived its
mysterious life here long since removed. It was dire inside,
gnawed away, as if gouged out by an explosion. On the end
wall was a rickety staircase, narrow and rusty, shaky and
precarious, which we nevertheless climbed to the roof and,
settling ourselves between the air intake towers, had a
different view of the world, the view from the Ruins.
For us, this was a city within the city, a smithy forging the
undying spirit of anarchy, a laboratory, a Bastion St Gervais
where life is brighter than in law-abiding areas not strewn
with broken glass or bits of plaster. It was a place for
bohemians of the future to exchange experience with young
desperadoes, where you were with us or against us, and
bats flitted like silhouettes; girls came, both the most
intelligent, deserving and brave, and the skankiest and
most undemanding, dumb but sly. Here I met Tanya, three
years older than me who, half-joking, took me by the hand,