Trafika Europe 1 - Northern Idyll

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,

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