The only thing I can understand of what she’s saying is my own name: “Anya . . . Anya . . . Anya.” It darts like a fish in a stream of speech, wild and untamed like Lermontov’s poems about the Caucasus mountains. I’m obviously guilty of something, but what?

“Sorry,” I cut in as she pauses for breath before resuming her tirade. “I’m sorry, but could you possibly speak in English?”

She seems to choke on what she was about to say as she switches from one language to the other. In an instant, she is on the attack again—this time in English, only with the same accent, at once hard and hushed.

“Don’t tell me you haven’t learned Norwegian!!” she bridles, and at such a volume that I have to move the phone slightly away from my ear. I give her a moment to get it out of her system. “I wouldn’t run that risk if I were you. Ukrainian women are so much quicker on the uptake, you know. More motivated, too. Remember, there’s a lot of your kind now! I’m charitable enough as it is.”

I could counter with “I am studying the language but . . .” only I know there’s no use in explaining. Mumbling, I acknowledge her generosity—in part sincerely. Małgosia is my boss now. She is actually Polish and was once completely new to this place, but instead of falling to pieces or giving up, she started a cleaning company. So even though Małgosia is the boss, she remembers what it’s like when you still don’t have a clue how to speak the local language, the city seems alien to you, there’s no work to be found, no one bothers replying to your emails, and every single crappy job available to people who don’t speak the language or have the right experience is snapped up by poor bastards just like you. Małgosia’s agency only employs “incomers”: Poles, Filipinas, Thais, and Ukrainians. Lots of Ukrainians. And now Russians, too. It doesn’t take a genius to grasp two simple things: Ukrainian women are first in line for work, and people now want to be seen refusing to help Russians, their evident malice thinly veiled as righteous indignation. Maybe, at times like this, people think that by kicking you they are helping Ukraine. Or maybe they just like kicking people. They don’t get the chance to vent properly in their day-to-day lives, and now things are looking up. I remember a Russian woman in Latvia who told me, her eyes positively gleaming with delight and triumph, “We can only help Ukrainians now.” What’s more, she was working for a charity that helped refugees. And I remember reading about a woman in 1918, during the revolution, who volunteered to shoot the enemies of the new Soviet regime. Some people are just waiting for the right opportunity, you see. For most of them, that opportunity never comes.

But maybe I’ve got it all wrong and there are other motives at work. After all, a lot can be covered up with righteous indignation.

“Everyone judges me for being soft on the Russians,” Małgosia continues, “but I know they’re not all assholes.”

Then she pauses, a little out of breath. She needs another reaction from me.

“You’re so tolerant and generous,” I play along, telling her what she wants to hear. But I really mean it. I have learned a lot since February this year. For one, I’ve discovered that even extremely unpleasant people have the capacity to be tolerant and generous. I work illegally. I don’t have a work permit. Małgosia pays me in cash, which means, of course, that I get less than I would if I were officially hired, and she gets to pocket the difference. You could say she’s taking me for a ride. Profiting from someone else’s misfortune, even. Or you could say she offered me a helping hand in giving me the chance to work. After all, she could have just not hired me at all and ignored me like everyone else. So, is she taking me for a ride or helping me out? Which is it?

“I’m so very grateful to you,” I add, being completely honest.

Małgosia presumably hears the sincerity in my voice. She is silent for a few seconds, I even take the phone away from my ear to see if we’ve been disconnected. Nope, the seconds are ticking away on the screen.

“Okay, enough talking,” Małgosia eventually says, sounding very far away. “Take down the address! Have you got a pen and paper to hand?”

“Better to text,” I want to suggest. This place is still so unfamiliar, and I hardly ever manage to write down local street names correctly. And who keeps a pen and paper on them? But I don’t want to set off her “Don’t tell me you haven’t learned Norwegian!!” again.  I’m studying so hard, but it’s—

“Yes,” I say, tersely. “Ready.”

That’s not strictly true, but I do have a pen at least. I note down the address on the palm of my hand.

The new client lives in an affluent part of town. I still don’t know this city the way I know my hometown, St. Petersburg. I don’t see how it fits together, which areas are upmarket and which are unsafe. I dive down into the metro and surface somewhere else, but I have no idea where I ended up in relation to where I went down. The metro here isn’t like the one in Petersburg. The stations are practically indistinguishable from each other. It’s almost like the stations stay the same, and it’s the world above ground that rotates and shifts.

It’s an affluent part of town, though, that’s for sure. The façades of the old buildings have been recently renovated. The grass is freshly cut. The same is true of the lime trees, which reach out black fists from which branches extend and little green buds will appear in the spring. The façades are just like the ones in Petersburg, with the same loops, whorls, and plaster caryatids. You can tell by the height of the windows that the apartments have high ceilings. Through some of the windows I can see chandeliers, both antique ones dripping with crystals and modern ones that look like alien spaceships. In the autumn, the lights go off late and come on early. I feel a bit sad as I look at the windows, because although everything looks so much like my Petersburg, I know that not one of these windows is mine.

Okay, this is the right number. It’s a big building, with six stories. The front door is antique and in good condition. It has a brass handle that has been polished with the touch of many hands. There’s an intercom. My client lives on the third floor, in the apartment on the right. There is a plaque with a woman’s name on it: Olga. I immediately forget the surname because, unlike the first name, it sounds completely un-Russian. Although the name Olga isn’t Russian either. My Norwegian isn’t good enough yet for me to argue with Małgosia about it, but I do know that Olga is a perfectly ordinary Scandinavian name, just an old-fashioned one.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that the client is a woman. It’s always scary going to new houses in case you get some sicko at the door wielding a knife. The intercom buzzes, the lock clicks, and I pull the heavy door toward me. The lobby is towering and echoey, with a black-and-white checked floor like a chessboard. A massive lantern hangs from the ceiling. There are candelabras with electric lightbulbs on the walls and a spiral staircase. The place is immaculate. I stand there for a moment, admiring it all and taking in the sense of everlasting prosperity. I think back to the shabby entryways of St. Petersburg that reek of urine, with their cheaply painted walls and peeling ceilings. The buildings in my Petersburg were once opulent and grand, too, but, after the revolution in 1917, prosperity was chased out of them forever. These ones here, though, are still going strong. To me, these buildings and those are like twins born into a wealthy family and separated at birth: one had a good life, while the other fell on hard times.

I climb the high staircase, imagining that I’m in my Petersburg. I picture myself living here and fantasize that history has taken a completely different course. But there isn’t much time for daydreaming. Here we are! Third floor, apartment on the right. The name “Olga” is engraved on a brass plaque, and yet again the surname eludes me. Only S sticks. Olga S.

The apartment door is slightly ajar, and I can see that the lock is sticking out its steel tongue, preventing the door from closing. I give it a push. “Hello!” I call out. But my hello doesn’t make it through. The door is jammed against something. I have to push a little harder, and something slides across the floor. I squeeze through, careful not to catch my backpack on the lock. It contains all my cleaning products, brushes, rags, rubber gloves, and a collapsible silicone bucket. I pull it off, wriggling and wresting free of the straps. There! I can finally see what was in the way: an enormous cardboard box. An unusual one, too: it’s circular.

The hallway is vast. I’m hit with the smell of old clutter. One time, in Petersburg, I was in the back room of an antique shop with this same smell. There were empty frames in the shop, plush chairs turned upside down, blotchy mirrors with faded clothes hanging off them, and a rather mangy-looking fur (the memory of those grimy hairs makes me shudder). There were rolled-up carpets in there, too, loosely bundled curtains lying all around, an assortment of fabrics, vases out on display—all gray with dust, along with a million other random bits and bobs and bric-a-brac. This place is in the same state. If I opened the door any wider, an avalanche of stuff would swallow me whole, burst out onto the landing, roll down the stairs in a clattering barrage, and spill out of the entrance onto the pavement as if the house was regurgitating all its junk, sending up a cloud of dust around the world that would cause a nuclear winter. It’s an absolute pigsty in here.

To mop the floor, you’d have to carefully excavate several layers of cultural sediment and lay them somewhere else. For a moment, I feel like I won’t ever cope in this place. I just can’t do it.

“Hello! Is there anyone there?” I call into the hallway.

At first, silence. Then the door creaks and an oblong of pale daylight is cast from a room into the hallway. I step over discarded items and skirt the edges. On the way, I spot something bizarre: a stuffed monkey on a dresser, its skin moth-eaten and balding in patches, its glass eyes shining dully. I almost trip over some kind of walking stick or umbrella set to one side. But I manage not to fall and break any bones. That’s good because I don’t have insurance or money for a doctor.

I approach the open door and pause at the threshold of the room. There is someone in there after all. Sitting in an oversized armchair is an old lady, at once decrepit and haughty. Her bony hands grip the armrests. On one of them, a red jewel twinkles like an eye. Loose skin sags below her chin, while her mouth is pursed, toad-like. The little that remains of her hair is slicked to her skull, which shines through it. The old lady is sitting bolt upright, and her eyes are strangely animated—young, even. They are extremely piercing.

“Hello,” I offer. “Małgosia sent me.”

Stony silent, the old woman looks right through me. Maybe she’s deaf. I continue, more loudly this time. “I’ve come to clean.”

Her eyes keep staring sort of past and through me. It eventually dawns on me what the old woman is trying to communicate. With her whole demeanor she is saying, “I don’t want you here.” I’m a nobody. Nothing. A thing that cannot possibly be useful to her, much less interesting. A third-class citizen.

When people look at me like that, it makes me want to take them by the hands, look into their eyes and make them meet mine. I want to tell them how many highbrow books I’ve read, and list my dreams and ambitions. I want to explain how I ended up here. But it’s a long story, and there is work to be done. If I grabbed the old lady by the hand and started going on about Nabokov and college, and how I crossed the border on foot, trundling my suitcase along behind me, it would take me until the morning to sort out this mess. Małgosia pays me by the hour, but I only have up to four hours for the whole job.

I unzip my backpack. I pull out the bucket, rags, brushes, bottles, and sprays. I pull on my yellow gloves.

By the way, neither I nor any of my relatives—in Ukraine or Russia—would live in such a dump. We would all think it was below us. Now who’s third class?

But then I realize I’ve struck up an imaginary conversation? with this old woman in my head. It’s like I’m trying to change her mind and prove her wrong, but there’s no point in trying. You can’t change someone’s mind—not about anything. I pause and take a few deep breaths, in through my nose and out through my mouth. The conversation in my head fades away. My mind is clear again and ready for work. Cleaning is almost like meditation.

I wash, rub, scrub, polish, and wipe dry. Only once do I break my silence, asking the old woman what to do about the things all over the floor and surfaces. Might I move them somewhere else, and so on. The old woman’s nostrils quiver a little. Her gaze shoots to a point somewhere on my forehead before shifting to another object, one just as inanimate to the old woman as I am.

Fine, I think. I’ll work it out for myself. I’ll take her silence as consent.

I have learned a lot since February, including how little we really know about other people.

Maybe she’s just old and everything hurts, and that’s why she’s in a foul mood. Maybe there’s no one else in her life. Or maybe there are people around, older children, perhaps, but they get on so badly that they want to avoid coming back if they can, and that’s why they called me. Or maybe it’s the other way around, and they get on so well that her children went to the effort of sorting out a clean for their shitbag mother. The simple truth is, we will probably never know anything for sure about anyone.

So we shouldn’t judge.

I wash, rub, scrub, polish, and wipe dry.

I set the vases on the shelves and the boxes on top of each other, all lined up nicely. I pick up and fold clothes. I even hang something up in the wardrobe, which smells of perfume—it’s musty, but not unpleasant.

The old woman’s silent contempt no longer wafts around me like the smell of dog shit on your shoe. I’ve forgotten all about it. I want to do a good job. After all, maybe the old woman is in such a bad mood because this pigsty has been making her gag, but she can’t do anything about it, and it’s a constant reminder of her impotence and decrepitude. A clean and comfortable apartment, on the other hand, will really cheer her up. A person’s surroundings can change them—it’s a scientific fact. Toward the end, I give the cushions a punch to plump them up and arrange them on the settee. I vacuumed it first, lifting the big bolster cushions as I went. I’m trying to make it all look nicer.

I pull off my gloves. I can feel the talc on my hands. I put all my bottles away in my backpack. I can’t help admiring how good it looks in here now. It smells clean. It makes you want to move in and settle down in a cozy forever home. Isn’t the apartment big and beautiful? It has so many interesting things in it! They were once picked out, bought, and brought back from the shop. Then they were unwrapped and laid out with the rest. That stuff was new and fashionable, and made others envious, and the woman was young back then. Now, though, they are just in the way and have lost their meaning, and their owner is old. It all feels a bit oppressive.

I find the old woman in the same room where I walked in on her when I arrived. The armchair still stands by the window with the heavy curtains. I can tell that she wasn’t sitting there the whole time, as there is now some money on a gleaming mahogany table. The old woman motions slightly toward it with her chin. My tip! I move closer. Two blue banknotes.

“Oh!” I exclaim, “That’s so nice of you! Thank you.”

But she doesn’t even deign to look at me.

“Goodbye! Have a nice evening!” I call back from the hallway, already taking hold of the door. I pause and listen. No response, only silence.

By the way, it turned out that the round box that was preventing me from opening the door contained a black silk top hat like the chimney of a steamer. I imagine it went out of fashion along with the steamship. I move the box to the dresser.

The door has a latch lock. I slam it behind me.