We never really shook hands or were introduced, but I think his name was Roman. He was a young, rather aggressive fellow who had an angry look in his eyes. Like me, he spent most of the day at home. We met occasionally when he was smoking cigarettes in the hallway.

During a house-warming party we threw there, one of our guests walked in pale as a sheet and crashed on the couch. Not being able to speak much, she spluttered that there was a guy pointing a gun at her in the hallway. As I opened the door to see, the gun was pointed in my face, and my neighbour pulled the trigger.

Unlike a Hollywood movie, my life didn’t flash by before my eyes. But I remember thinking that it seemed somehow very inappropriate to die before meeting my story deadline.

The sound of the hammer hitting the empty slide resonated in the hallway. Roma laughed. “Just to say,” he suddenly observed, very seriously, “your music is kind of loud. We’re trying to sleep, so turn it down a little bit.”

I unplugged the speakers from the laptop and somehow the party continued.

As the other people in the building knew, Roman had been to Chechnya. To most, that explained his behaviour. Some say he was running around the block naked looking for Chechens. Others reported he was handling his war trauma much better these days, not yelling as much as he used to.

Calling the police on him was not an option, however. He came from a family of respected militia men that went back generations.

Sometimes in the morning he’d leave the apartment in his MVD uniform, while other days he just hung around the place wearing not much more than jeans.

It’s hard to believe that this dark force ruling the capital will soon be renamed the police and will consist of friendly, honest officers who help tourists find their way. At least they won’t stick guns in innocent people’s faces, I hope.

We never spoke again about the “gun incident”, and in general Roman wasn’t very talkative. One day I saw him smash all the locals off the rink in a game of ice hockey on Patriarshy Prudy.

“On the ice, you’re free,” he said. “And you’re much stronger if you can dance.”

About the war he witnessed, he didn’t say much more than that it was “bad” and the whole of the North Caucasus should be bombed to pieces.

Yet in one respect, having a gun-crazed war vet for a neighbour actually turned out to be useful.

As our rental apartment was put up for sale, we’d tell potential buyers all about the lovely area, the structurally sound walls, the nice bathroom – and the little problem with Roma.
Back in the Moscow real estate boom, we managed to stay there for over a year.

In the end, the apartement was sold for half a million dollars to somebody with over 30 years of experience in counter-intelligence. He would have no troubles with Roma, he assured us.

“Every asshole fits in a jar,” he said. “You just have to show him who’s stronger.”

For days afterwards, I scoured the pages of Moskovsky Komsomolets to see who would survive the shootout.

Sometimes I think I should pay Roma a visit one of these days.

He might be missing that loud music by now.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 21st, 2010 at 10:57 pm and is filed under tags:Moscow, Russia, The Moscow News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.