It must have been a month or so ago that my wife brought to my attention that the towel-dryer in our bathroom wasn’t working [all Russian flats have an exposed hot-water pipe on the bathroom wall for hanging wet towels and clothes on–Trans.]. That is, there was hot water in the house, but it wasn’t getting to this device for some reason. My background in the humanities was sufficient for me to understand: the reason for the trouble was external.

Be that as it may, I telephoned the housing office. From there came a plumber. He looked at the pipes, fiddled around with the faucets and the towel-dryer and said: «The riser with the hot water is shut off somewhere below». And he went to that “below”. From “below” he phoned. It turned out that the apartment in which, most likely, the riser was shut off, was closed, while the neighbors said that the owner lives all the time outside the city.