The Chain

23:35

The snow on Bakhtiyor's shoulders still hasn't melted while Larisa Petrovna hunts for sour cream in the back fridge and the app counts down the delivery: twenty-one minutes left out of twenty-five. She comes back with the little tub, wipes it on her apron, ladles the shchi right up to the line on the container and presses the lid down with her palm all the way around, and then once more, though it snapped shut long ago. The Syty Dvor sticker with the order number and the time goes on last.

"Take the sour cream, you hear me," she says. "Only the army eats shchi without sour cream." Bakhtiyor tells her he never served, so he always takes it, and she laughs, though she must have heard that one twenty times by now.

She stands the container in a bag, handles up, and asks who on earth he hauls these to every night, he could at least tell her. He says it's for an old lady and takes the bag. In the fridge behind her sits a cake in a box: the owner dropped it off in the afternoon and told her to cut it at midnight sharp, because at twelve it's International Chefs Day. Back at nine Larisa Petrovna announced that she'd been standing at a stove for forty years and only today found out she had a holiday of her own, and that she wasn't cutting it alone, so he'd better not dawdle out there.

The snow started a little after ten and stuck right away, on the cars by the tram loop and on the poplars that still had their leaves. Larisa Petrovna looked out the window then and said it was Sergius of Winter today, the day winter gets going, and that her mother used to say night snow stays put while day snow never lasts. Bakhtiyor is already at the door. Room forty-one tips him three hundred rubles every time, more than the shchi itself costs, and in three weeks that has added up to almost one earring. His sister is getting married in March, she needs a pair, and the man at the bazaar in Urgut promised to hold them only until the end of the month.

23:38

Building 2 stands behind a corrugated metal fence with a resettlement notice on it and a long program number. A dark builders' trailer sleeps by the gate, the snow on its step lying smooth and thick. In the whole building only two windows are lit, both on the first floor, left of the entrance: one with the blue flicker of a TV, the other with a sunflower curtain.

Bakhtiyor leans his bike against the fence, lifts the insulated delivery backpack off the rack and, before he swings it onto his shoulder, slaps the side pocket with his palm, twice, to feel that the hard thing is still there. In a plastic sleeve inside are his passport, his residence permit and his health certificate, because his jacket soaks straight through and the backpack, so far, holds. Farrukh taught him that his first winter, when the two of them rode orders around Kanavino together. Last summer Farrukh was pushed out of delivery work, since he was only on a migrant work patent and patent holders aren't allowed to courier anymore. Ever since, he's been on a building site in Sormovo, telling Bakhtiyor every evening to stay away from any place where they ask for papers.

From the gate to the entrance it's about thirty meters, and the snow is smooth the whole way, without a single dent. Bakhtiyor walks and keeps looking back at his own tracks, dark, with the herringbone of his soles in them. So since ten o'clock nobody has gone into the building and nobody has come out, not the old lady and not the people with the TV. He decides an old lady couldn't run up and down to the fourth floor without an elevator even in daylight, and the TV people have every right to stay home too. In his second week he knocked on the TV window and asked who lived in forty-one. A man in an undershirt pushed the curtain aside, looked his yellow jacket up and down and said through the glass, "How should I know. We don't go up there, it's cold." Then he yanked the curtain shut and turned the sound up.

The entrance door has no intercom, nobody has locked it in years, and the draft eases it open toward him on its own. Bakhtiyor tells it, "Rahmat." His mother used to thank every door that let her through with her shopping bags, and he has done the same since he was fourteen, even in elevators.

23:46

The stairwell smells of wet plaster, and the radiators under the windows are cold: the heat in the building was shut off in the spring, when most of the tenants were moved out. The fourth-floor corridor is long, a dormitory corridor with two wings, and almost every door is sealed with a white paper strip that carries the blue stamp of the housing office. He lights his way with his phone, past thirty-eight, where somebody's kid's scarf still hangs from the handle, past the shared kitchen with its stoves stripped of their burners.

The first order from here came in on the twenty-ninth of September, and where the customer's name should be there were three letters, G. A. K., and a phone number starting with nine twenty. That night Bakhtiyor climbed up and saw the chain, and by the time he was back down at his bike he had it all worked out. It was an old man forgotten in the resettlement, or one who dug in his heels and refused to leave, sitting in a cold room and ordering hot food because he had nothing to heat it on. He even looked up the number for district social services on his phone. Then the three-hundred-ruble tip came through, and he remembered Farrukh explaining how the neighborhood police officer works: first he checks the papers of whoever called, and he listens later. He never did dial. Since then he has grabbed this order out of turn, every night, so that none of the other guys picks it up and starts asking questions too.

Forty-one, as always, is open on the chain, and the gap is dark. He knocks with his knuckles and says into it, "Delivery from Syty Dvor." The hand comes out at once, in the sleeve of a gray knitted cardigan, takes the bag by both handles, carefully, without once touching his fingers, and draws it inside. He says, "Enjoy your meal," and on the stairs he taps Delivered in the app.

On the second-floor landing, under the only bulb in the stairwell that still works, the phone buzzes in his hand. The screen says, "Your customer is waiting at the door. Order not received?" And under that, in small print, "Without customer confirmation, a complaint will be filed in 10 minutes." A complaint means a canceled order, a ding on his rating and questions from support, and he already has two this month, and a third means they block him, and then there will be no more forty-one for him and no second earring by March. He taps Call Customer, and the ring cuts off halfway through.

Bakhtiyor lifts his head and looks up the stairwell, dark all the way to the fourth. The bag left his hands a minute ago. His palm slaps the pocket of the backpack on its own, though he checked it five minutes ago, at the fence.

23:52

He takes the stairs two at a time. The door of forty-one is open wider now, a foot or so, and the chain hangs down along the frame, still swaying a little.

He says into the dark, "Sorry, it's the delivery guy. Did you get your order?" Nobody answers. So he pushes the door and shines his light inside.

The room is small, about twelve square meters, with one window and the snow coming down beyond it. Along the wall, on the floor, Syty Dvor containers stand in neat rows, closed, with his stickers on them, another row on the windowsill and two on a table with no cloth. He bends to the nearest one and reads: September twenty-ninth, eleven thirty-one p.m. Next to it the thirtieth, then October first. The little tubs of sour cream stand apart, by the cold radiator, in rows of their own. It smells of sauerkraut and dust, the way his grandmother's pantry in Urgut smelled where they kept the pickles, and for a second he stops breathing, the way he did as a boy on the threshold of that pantry. The bed is iron, with no mattress, the springs sagging almost to the floor. A gray knitted cardigan hangs on a nail by the door, and sewn into its collar is a hospital laundry tag with a number and no name.

Under the bed it's empty and clean, there's no wardrobe in the room and no other door. He counts the containers row by row, loses count at the radiator, counts again and gets twenty. Every lid is intact.

23:58

Two minutes to the complaint, if the app is to be believed. Bakhtiyor sets the backpack down at the threshold to free his hands. Support will want photos of the containers with his stickers and dates on them, so let them see everything was delivered, and whoever is hoarding other people's shchi in here, they can sort that out themselves. He shoots the door, then the row along the wall, crouches to look for a sticker with today's date and can't find one: today's bag isn't in the room. He straightens up and takes two steps toward the window to get the whole sill in the frame.

Behind him the door closes softly, without a bang. He has time to think of the draft, the same one that opened the entrance for him. Then the chain slides along its slot. Click.

The phone in his hand is shining out the window, onto the snow. The whole room is at his back, and he knows it by heart now, twelve square meters and twenty containers, and he knows where you have to stand by the door to reach the chain. He turns around.

00:04

He is on the stairs between the third floor and the second, holding the rail and breathing through his mouth. He can't remember taking the chain off. All he remembers is that it was cold: it left a red stripe across his palm, which is slowly fading now under the bulb. His palm goes to his side on its own, to where the backpack strap ought to be, and slaps twice at his wet jacket.

The backpack is still upstairs, at the threshold. In the side pocket, in the plastic sleeve, are his passport, his residence permit and his health certificate, and without them the first patrol at Moskovsky railway station will stop him. They can be replaced, Farrukh knows people who've done it: half a year of certificates and lines at the migration office, and at every window they ask where and under what circumstances the documents were lost. He could call one-one-two right here and say there's someone inside a building that's been cleared out. Then they'll come, and the first thing they'll ask is who he is and what he's doing in a condemned building after midnight, and they'll want to see the documents that are upstairs.

The phone buzzes, and buzzes again right away. The app reports that a customer complaint has been filed. Larisa Petrovna writes, "Midnight!!! Happy holiday to me!!! Not cutting it without you, where are you???" and adds three cake emojis.

He climbs back up with the phone light held out in front of him, and on every landing he says under his breath, politely, the way you talk to the owners when you've walked into a place uninvited, "I'm just getting my bag. Getting it and going." By the fourth floor his voice gives out, and the last time he only shapes the words with his lips.

00:09

The door of forty-one is open the same foot or so, the chain hanging along the frame. The backpack sits at the threshold where he left it. Bakhtiyor squats down without stepping over the threshold, pushes his hand into the side pocket and feels the plastic sleeve, the hard cover of the passport and the second booklet, the residence permit. Everything is there.

On the windowsill, at the edge, stands today's container. The lid is off and lying next to it, a plastic spoon is sticking out of the shchi, and in the light of his phone a thin steam rises from it.

He looks at the steam for one second. Then the backpack onto his shoulder, the stairs, the entrance door, which this time he says nothing to, and the snow. From the entrance to the gate run two lines of his own tracks, there and back, and nobody else's.

October 20

Larisa Petrovna cuts the cake at half past midnight, when two night cabbies are already sitting in the café watching hockey with the sound off. She grumbles that the frosting is pale as raw dough and it serves her right, since her one man came late to the party. She puts the slice with the frosting rose into a container, sticks on a label and writes "41" on it in marker. "For your old lady. Let her know we're celebrating too." Wiping the knife, she remembers that a woman from that building used to come over for shchi herself in the evenings, with a little milk can, and then stopped coming, and it annoys her that she can't remember when that was or what the woman looked like. Bakhtiyor carries the container with the rose around in his backpack until morning, along with his other orders.

In the morning Farrukh stands at the window of their one-room apartment in Gordeyevka in his work pants, eating the cake with a spoon straight out of the container. He complains that the foreman still hasn't paid for Saturday and the concrete showed up at lunchtime again when it was due at eight. When he's done he turns the lid to the light, reads the marker and asks what forty-one is. Bakhtiyor says she's a customer, a regular, and goes into the shower and stands under the water for a long time, until Farrukh starts pounding on the door and shouting that the water bill is already a thousand rubles over this month.

At nine in the morning the app tells him the complaint has been withdrawn: the customer confirmed receipt of the order and left a tip, three hundred rubles. His rating stays where it was, four point nine. His sister sends a voice message from Urgut, laughing, to say the jeweler let her try on one earring and is holding the other until the end of the month. Farrukh asks why he slept in his jacket. By noon the snow is gone, all of it, though Larisa Petrovna's mother always said night snow stays put, and meltwater runs down the streets of Kanavino while the poplars stand there wet and just as yellow as before.

That evening, at eleven thirty-one, the phone buzzes in his pocket, and Larisa Petrovna at the stove hears it and without a word takes a container down from the shelf. The screen says 14 Pryadilnaya Street, Building 2, Room 41. Shchi, two servings, sour cream on the side. Note for the courier: "I won't put the chain on anymore."

Larisa Petrovna puts a second container in the bag, and Bakhtiyor takes the bag by both handles.