Телефон в коридоре
The Telephone in the Corridor
C1 · Advanced · fiction · 10 scenes · Premium story
An advanced story set in a Leningrad communal flat in 1979, where nineteen people share one lavatory, four gas rings and a corridor twenty-two paces long. Vera, given a room here after her divorce, expects the kitchen to be the hard part and finds it is not: the flat has built a whole working legal code out of rotas and unwritten law, and the one thing it cannot ration out is a room in which to say something nobody else hears. Her daughter rings from Tallinn on Sundays, when eleven people stand between them. What she needs is fifteen minutes, and the person who works out how to give her them is the old woman the entire flat regards as a nuisance.
Read Телефон в коридоре in Russian
Characters
- Vera (Вера) — 34, room seven
- Anna Andreyevna (Анна Андреевна) — 81, room one
- The Nikitins (Никитины) — Rooms three and four
- Vera's daughter (Ира) — 16, in Tallinn
Vocabulary from this story
- коммуналка — communal flat
- квартира — flat
- комната — room
- коридор — corridor
- кухня — kitchen
- ванная — bathroom
- уборная — lavatory
- соседи — the neighbours
- счётчик — electricity meter
- выключатель — light switch
- очередь — queue, turn
- график — rota, schedule