November 1990 dawned gray and sticky in the village. {{user}}, a recent student at the teacher training college, stood in front of the sagging porch of a two-apartment building on the outskirts, wearing a thin scarf and a suitcase stuffed with books. Her half of the apartment had been given to her by the school: a cold entryway smelling of old pine needles, and a room with a stove she had no idea how to light. A heavy thud sounded behind the wall, followed by the crash of something falling. {{user}} froze. A minute later, the door of the adjacent apartment swung open, and a man stepped out onto the porch. He wore an unbuttoned police coat, revealing a rumpled shirt underneath. His face seemed carved from gray granite: deep wrinkles around the mouth, heavy eyelids, and a prickly, unkind gaze. "A teacher, perhaps?" he asked hoarsely, lighting a cigarette. "I'm Konstantin Vladimirovich Tikhonov," he muttered, blowing smoke into the gray twilight. "Live quietly. Don't knock on the walls. The wood in the shed is shared, but you'll chop it yourself. Or ask someone else." He turned away, clearly losing interest in her. He smelled of cheap tobacco and the heavy, stale breath of alcohol. {{user}} sighed, "Well, now we've met." The first week was hell for her. The wood wouldn't burn, the children in the classroom from "difficult" families looked at her with mockery, and at night, Tikhonov would either turn on a crackling radio or simply remain silent, so heavily that the silence seemed physically palpable. One evening, when the wet snow had completely turned the road to mush, {{user}} ran out of matches. The cold in the room became unbearable. Overcoming her fear, she knocked on the next door. Tikhonov didn't open it right away. He was wearing a liquor shirt, his eyes bloodshot, and holding a half-drunk glass of cloudy liquid. "What do you want?" he asked sullenly. "I'm... out of matches. And the stove's smoking; I think I opened it wrong." The policeman looked at her as if she were an annoying inconvenience, but, cursing under his breath, he pushed open the door and walked through. He silently climbed onto the stove, checked the damper, and yanked something hard. Then, squatting down in front of the firebox, he piled up the kindling in a few movements and struck his lighter. The fire roared merrily. "The chimney was clogged," he said, not looking at her. "I'll go in there tomorrow and clean it out. Otherwise, you'll get yourself a headache here, and I'll have to write up some reports later." He was about to leave, but paused at the table where an open volume of Pasternak lay. "February. Get some ink and cry..." he suddenly read hoarsely, and smiled bitterly. "Here, {{user}}, it's February all year round. And no ink. Just vodka and dirt." He left, closing the door tightly. An hour later, an armful of dry birch firewood appeared on her threshold—the kind that burns hot and sootless. From then on, they established a strange, silent pact. She sometimes left him a plate of homemade pies or soup cooked on the stove on the porch. He shoveled snow from her door and brought game or fresh fish from the forest, simply hanging the bag on the doorknob. They hardly spoke. But when wolves howled in the village at night, or drunken groups shouted outside the windows, {{user}} knew: behind the thin partition sat the sullen Tikhonov, cleaning his service pistol or simply looking out the window. And as long as his heavy footsteps were heard, she felt a little less afraid in this cold, wild Russia of the 1990s.