The control room was a shabby cubby with the walls painted dirty yellow. There were no curtains on the window. An old television sat on the windowsill; a worn chair with no armrests covered the radiator. By the door, under the plywood chairs held together with a board, were piles of oiled quilted jackets. Proshchelygin glanced at them and, thinking I couldn’t see, pushed them deeper with the toe of his boot.

On one wall of the control room hung a stand of keys to all the basements and attics, and on the other was a detailed map of the city. In the center was a desk with a red disk phone. The phone was broken in half and taped. At the desk sat a young man with a delicate girlish blush on his cheeks and was diligently filling out the registration log. “Trainee”, I thought.

The guy raised his disheveled head, looked tiredly at the people entering, and introduced himself: “Konstantin Romashkin, the duty master.” He smiled, noticing my confused face: “Don’t be surprised, I’m often mistaken for a schoolboy. People come and ask: ‘Where’s the master on duty? Show him to me!’ But when I say it’s me, they don’t believe me, sometimes they even swear.”

“Sit down,” Proshchelygin nodded to the chair. I sat down, took a pen from my pocket, and prepared to take notes, but by that time the workers were returning from the call. Sweaty men in overalls entered the room noisily and, ignoring the stranger, immediately grabbed the TV remote. The screen flashed and flickered with a pale blue light. A soccer match was on.

“Don’t write about that!” Proshchelygin got worried. “Otherwise everyone will think we watch TV here from morning to night and that’s why we don’t answer the phone.”

The workers looked at me, then at the boss, and pulled the cord out of the socket – just in case.

The phone rang. The master grabbed the receiver with undue haste: “Emergency service. Can I help you?” A woman’s voice shrieked nervously. “I got it”, Romashkin sighed. “We’ll be there soon.” “What’s going on?” Proshchelygin was alarmed.

“It looks like someone stole the wires on Soviet Street again.” The men grabbed their hats and ran out the door.“ A gang of some electricians has been robbing the city for the second month,” Romashkin complained to me. “Craftsmen! They break into electric boards, somehow cunningly form an electric circuit, pull wires from the first floor to the top floor, and cut them off. Two hours later, the lights go out all over the house. Household appliances fail, the tenants are furious, but the villains are long gone.” “It’s impossible to catch them,” Proshchelygin yawned and looked at his watch. “Well, I’m off. If you need anything, call me, and don’t talk too much!” the chief gave the duty master a stern look. “Otherwise”, he nodded in my direction, “he’ll write something bad about us”.

When the door slammed behind the boss, Romashkin breathed a sigh of relief and asked me: “Would you like some tea?” Without waiting for an answer, he took a plastic kettle from under the desk and went out into the hall. A switch clicked somewhere; water came out of the faucet with a noise. When Romashkin returned, he poured half a packet of tea into the kettle. “Don’t you boil water?” I asked in surprise. “Why?” he replied simply. “It’s already hot in the pipes. Besides, the kettle is broken anyway, the coil is burned out, and there is no money for a new one.” Romashkin lifted the lid, stirred the contents with an aluminum spoon, took the glasses from the drawer and poured pale lemon liquid for himself and me. “Sorry, no sugar.”

Looking at the tea leaves chasing each other in a whirlwind, I remarked aloud: “My grandma used to call this kind of tea donkey piss...” “Good tea”, Romashkin took offense, took a sip and smacked his lips. “So where were we? The electricity! In general, I have to tell you, our people are wild; they all try to get into the switchboards, even if they can’t connect the two wires properly. I remember one case where a guy’s washing machine started sparking, so he grounded a wire to the heated towel rail, while his neighbor downstairs decided to shave, grabbed a towel and got such an electric shock that he was almost got knocked out, yeah!”

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Romashkin pushed aside the unfinished tea, opened the call log, and began flipping through the greasy pages with a wet finger. “I usually get fifty calls a shift. Most of them come in the spring, during the pressure testing, and in the fall, of course.” “Something to do with the seasonal affective disorder isn’t it?”

“Why?” he lifted his eyes and looked at me intently. “The central heating hasn’t been turned on yet, and it’s cold in the apartments; so people turn on the heaters. But the networks in the houses are old, not designed for overloading, and the plugs burn like hell. When the heating season starts, there a new problem–the pipes burst. Hot water floods the tenants, but there are three plumbers for the whole city... What should I do, go down to the basements myself?”

“But most of all, I don’t like holidays,” Romashkin poured himself another cup of tea. “Everyone cooks, fries and makes salads. Do you know where they throw their garbage? Into the sewer!” I reminded him of my neighbor who used to clog the drain with potato peels. “Oh, the sinks are nothing!” he waved it off. “Toilets, yes. Rags, diapers, pickles, dead puppies and kittens – you could fish them all out!”

The phone rattled again. Romashkin pick up the receiver with an annoyed grimace and quickly put it on the lever. The phone immediately rang again. “Damn it! They will not let me finish the story!” the master threw the receiver down on the desk and explained: “Anyway, I have no workers now. What was I talking about? The sewer. I remember an old lady threw a sack of small potatoes down the drain. The plumbers opened the pipe and the potatoes started shooting out like a machine gun – tra-ta-ta-ta. That was funny.” “And there was another case,” he lowered his voice, “Ivanovich, the foreman of our plumbers, pulled a baby out of the sewer.” “Alive?” I asked stupidly. “Why, dead. A miscarriage, in short. The mother whore flushed it, that’s creepy, right?”

The crew returned from the call. Romashkin put the phone back in its place, and at that moment the device screamed like a cat whose tail has been pinched. “Hello! Emergency service. Can I help…What?” The master frowned. “What do you mean ‘the line is busy for a long time’?! Do you think you’re the only one who calls here? Busy means busy, is that clear?” He winced, took the screaming receiver away from his ear, and mimed cutting his throat, as if to say he was fed up.

“Please, lady calm down. Everyone has a problem. I don’t have a thousand people on my staff. What? They’re working somewhere else right now! No, I’m saying, there are no plumbers here. Why are you so nervous? Be patient. They’ll come to you, I promise. Yes, as soon as possible.” Romashkin threw the receiver onto the lever. It tinkled plaintively. “That crazy woman from Youth Street has called here for the third time!”

“Maybe we should go see her?” The foreman reached for the doorknob. “Not now. Go downtown first. People are calling. They haven’t had cold water in an hour.” “The water company screwed up again?” Ivanovich grinned. “No, they swear they had nothing to do with it. Looks like one of the tenants. And one more thing, Ivanovich, take a journalist with you. Show him what’s there and how.”

Ten minutes later, our UAZ was there. There were fresh boot prints in the snow leading to the basement, but the iron door was locked. The foreman patted his pockets and fished out right key. The door creaked open, and the smell of a warm basement dampness and cats hit my nose. Bending under the low vaulted ceiling, the plumbers made their way into the labyrinth of the basement, where the single incandescent bulb flickered dimly.

I followed the workers hunched over and squeamishly brushing cobwebs from my face trying not to get dirty on the rusty pipes. “The valve is closed, the water is drained; someone was here before us,” Ivanovich rubbed his rough palms with satisfaction. “Well, now we’ll give him a Fountain of Friendship of Nations!” The foreman turned the valve slightly, rolled up his jacket sleeve, and looked at his watch: “I bet he’ll be here in a minute.”

Five minutes have passed. Ivanovich took the valve and turned it two more times. But even after the water was turned on full blast, no one appeared in the cellar. Either the villain had had time to fix the problem, or he was dealing with a sudden flood in his apartment. “He could have at least warned us that he was going to block the riser,” the workers grumbled. “Because of that asshole, the whole house was without water. And whose fault is that – us, of course, who else?”

To be continued