Ibatullah opened the toilet door once again, and seeing a leaking pipe, yelled at the top of his voice. They both ran to the third floor where an Uzbek, Islamzhan, was living. They explained the situation to him. “It can’t be,” he shook his head. “Surely this place can’t be breaking down after only one day.” “Hey, your ‘surely’ and ‘can’t be’ don’t really matter if my apartment is already full of sewage. A little more, and all that crap is going to float into your apartment.” The three of them ran to the fourth floor. Where Gamrakeli, a Georgian warehouse manager, was living. He, apparently, had just left the toilet, fastening his belt as the men suddenly appeared. “Oh, gammarjoba my friends!” He was very happy. “Oh god, leave your ‘gammarjoba’ to yourself, just don’t go in the toilet anymore!” “Why?” “Well, because… this and that…” Serenity reigned on the fifth floor. The electrician, Ivan Krivonosov, had settled there. After the men clarified the situation to him, he shrugged his shoulders. “What do you want from me?” “We’ll go to the authorities together. We will write a statement that we did not have time to move to a new house, as our apartments were flooded with sewer water.” “I don’t have time today,” he said, taking a sip of ice-cold tap water from a cup. “I have to bring my wife from the city, you go yourself. Whosever apartments the water has flooded, let them go and file the report. A lot of time will pass before it reaches the fifth floor.” “You’re being quite inhumane on you part,” Temirbek, the proclaimed Shurshit, said earnestly. “I don’t care how you lived before, but right now, right here, we live one under the other, we have a common fate, if the neighbour from above does not care about the people below, what will life in this country become? Come and take a look at my apartment and trust me, you’ll want to run away to the ends of the earth the moment you’ll see it.” They went down to the first floor and entered Temirbek’s apartment. His wife and children, pinching their noses, stood there in rubber boots, surrounded by a dam they built from rags and old clothes to protect them from the flowing water, using all their strength to direct the
* Kozakhlar – another word for Kazakhs.