When I was a child, Matveich lived in the apartment across from ours. Matveich was paralysed so he never got up. I saw him only through a half-open door — a massive body covered with blanket on an observation bed. Matveich had a visiting nurse but my grandmother used to care for him more often. She fed him and cleaned him up. The doors to our apartments never locked up. No one locked up doors back then. Matveich even had his door half-open so he could call “Ge-lya!” and my grandmother would come to him.

Matveich often verbally hurt my grandmother, she cried and promised in the heat of the moment that she would never come to him again but she did because the whole thing was harder for him than for her. One day a new doctor came to Matveich. He was looking like Vlad Listyev a popular journalist of that time and had a young good-looking assistant nurse. My grandmother was asked not to come anymore. Soon after Matveich died. Of course, there were rumours that this new doctor hired by the relatives “helped” him to die. Nowadays after I lock up, bar up and leave the key in the keyhole of the front door, I lie in my bed and think about Matveich.