Near the Summer Garden

Near the Summer Garden
Vladimir Baykov

Annotation
The play tells about the life of the inhabitants of a communal apartment in Leningrad on the eve of Stalin's death. The apartment is located in a house a stone's throw away from the famous Summer Garden.
   The action of the play is based on the contrast between the European masterpiece of landscape architecture and the miserable life of the apartment's neighbors. The inhabitants of the communal apartment are forced to constantly go to some violations of the law in order to provide themselves with a minimum standard of living.
   The images of the allegorical sculptural figures of the Summer Garden echo the types of the inhabitants of the communal apartment - two-faced Janus, Saturn devouring his children, Satyr and Bacchante....

Summary of the play

Prologue
1953, summer, mass amnesty of prisoners.
Three men in shabby coats approach a small store in a semi-basement. One of them quickly runs down the steps and slips into the store, two of them remain at the entrance. A boy of about eleven years old approaches the entrance to the store.  A man standing there blocks his way. The boy is roughly chased away, preventing him from entering the store. The boy returns home with an empty shopping bag.

Main action   
Two neighbors in a communal apartment, standing in the corridor, whisper to each other that yesterday there was a robbery in a store near the house - three criminals took the cash register and took away the wallets of all the customers.
Two  people are talking - Aunt Fira, the doctor, and Lyudka, the "musician".
  Suddenly there are two bells ringing at the front door of the apartment; it's Aunt Fira.  She is a doctor, a middle-aged attractive woman.  Richly dressed and exquisitely smelling men often come to her house - expensive tobacco, expensive colognes. Sometimes the men even bump into each other in the hallway, but there is never any conflict between them.  They bow, politely lifting their hats.
  During the day, most of the tenants are at work, and the boy, returning early from school, is free to roll his scooter all along the endless corridor of the communal hallway. The doorbell rings. The boy opens the door to two men standing on the threshold. They ask for Aunt Fira by name. They do not look like her usual visitors, more like policemen.  The next day her room is sealed.
  The boy is always making something in the kitchen, either a birdhouse or a brass knuckle.  Ludka the "musician" appears in the kitchen, nicknamed so because her husband Levka plays the trumpet in the regimental orchestra.  For lack of a shower and bath in the apartment, everyone washes up in the morning at the sink in the thirty-meter kitchen.  In the daytime, when there is almost no one in the kitchen, Lyudka performs a deeper "washing" in the kitchen. Especially after she is "visited" in her room by Ivan Grigorievich, the quartermaster (the senior in the apartment).

  A fire inspector enters the apartment in a paramilitary uniform. The wife of the quartermaster collects three grand each from all the tenants of the communal apartment and then organizes with her husband a lavish treat for the fire inspector.
  The godmother (Koka Nyura), who has come to visit the boy's mother from Siberia, a rather tough woman, quickly puts the apartment in order. At the same time she puts Manefa, the wife of the criminal Kezanov, who has served time, in her place.   During the war, Koki-Nyura's husband was taken prisoner, and she is exiled to Siberia to a camp. There she remains after her release. Only after many years the trace of her missing husband was found.
  Another neighbor, whom everyone calls "Rozayaklna", walks along the corridor, holding a hot frying pan in her outstretched hand and spraying "Triple Cologne" on it from time to time. She thus tries to repel the smell of frying fish coming from the kitchen. Rozayaklna has a separate telephone set in her own room and a separate doorbell on the front door with her husband, wired directly into their room.
  In the communal kitchen there are endless arguments about whose turn it is to bathe in the bathroom with the wood-burning speaker, why the previous family did not do a good job on apartment duty, who did not clean the stove after themselves, who constantly leaves the hallway light on all night.

 In the evening, a scowling man comes out of the room of his neighbor, Kezanov. The boy almost runs into him on his bicycle in the half-dark corridor. The man glares angrily at him, and the boy recognizes him as the one who stood at the door of the store and wouldn't let him in. He falls off his bike in fear and rushes into the room. For days he hesitates whether to tell his parents about the encounter.
  If all smokers smoke in the apartment, Rosa Jaklna's husband does it only on the stairs. And it coincides with the arrival of another fashionable lady. From the whispered conversations in the kitchen, the boy learns that she makes at home women's hats and that her mother during the NEP period had a hat atelier in Nevsky.  But without a patent, it's all a legal case.
  The former but still youthful opera actress, who occupies two adjoining rooms, constantly rents one of them to shy foreign students, compensating the low rent by providing her with intimate services. During one such attempt, a student pushes her away, and she hits her head on the edge of a sideboard.  She is taken away in an ambulance.
  One of the neighbors, Uncle Seryozha, is an artist who illustrates children's books about revolutionaries and Civil War heroes. His secret passion is oil painting of nudes.  During the day he is sometimes posed by Lyudka the musician.
A boy riding his bicycle down the corridor happens to catch a glimpse of what they are doing. It shocks him.
  Two lonely elderly sisters, Germans from Riga, like to play with the neighbor's boy, the hero of the story. They learn children's songs in German together with him, treat him to sweets, and celebrate Catholic Christmas.  After that he easily enters one of the Leningrad "German" schools.
  The boy's mother works part-time at home as a dressmaker. She tailors women's clothes. Living in the same room with his mother, the boy often sees half-naked women walking around the room, trying on clothes, twirling in front of the mirror. He is fascinated by their bodies, their odors. Because of this, he sometimes can't sleep for a long time at night.
  Levka the musician, who unexpectedly returned home early, finds the quartermaster Ivan Grigorievich and his wife in his room in intimate poses.  He deals harshly with his rival.
  A couple of days later, in the early morning, when everyone is still asleep, two pairs of boots rumble down the corridor of the apartment. Lyudka's husband, the "musician" Lyudka, is arrested. In a short time after that she turns from an interesting attractive lady into an aunt of indeterminate age.
   And suddenly, after a couple of months, Lyudka comes to life again - often comes home under a hop, humming as she goes. Soon Levka the musician is released.  After his arrest he is almost unrecognizable. He is kicked out of the military orchestra, and now he plays at funerals.

  And again from their room comes a trumpet march from the opera Aida, after which Lyudka the "musician" walks tiredly to the sink in the immense size of the kitchen.
 
The finale of the play
In the evening, walking with a friend in the yard, the boy sees one of the men who robbed the store. He looks around and fears that the man will recognize him, quietly leaves the yard and goes to a pay phone booth to call the police. But the man recognizes him and stealthily sneaks after him. The criminal sneaks up to the phone booth, quietly opens the door. In his hands he has a finka.
   At the same time Lyudka the “musician” comes out of the store. She is loaded with two bags and a heavy net with potatoes. Instantly she assesses the situation and with all her weight jumps on the man, blocking the kid. She gets a blow with a sword.
  The woman falls, but the boy is saved.