Joseph Brodsky

In a Room and a Half

To L. K.

The room and a half (if such a space unit makes any sense in English) in which the three of
us lived had a parquet floor, and my mother strongly objected to the men in her family, me
in particular, walking around with our socks on. She insisted on us wearing shoes or
slippers at all times. Admonishing me about this matter, she would evoke an old Russian
superstition; it is an ill omen, she would say, it may bode a death in the family.
...
The parquet's affinity with wood, earth, etc., thus extended in my mind to any ground
under the feet of our close and distant relatives who lived in the same town. No matter
what the distance, it was the same ground.
...

4
Our room and a half was part of a huge enfilade, one-third of a block in length, on the
northern side of a six-story building that faced three streets and a square at the same
time. The building was one of those tremendous cakes in so-called Moorish style that in
Northern Europe marked the turn of the century. Erected in 1903, the year of my father’s
birth, it was the architectural sensation of the St. Petersburg of that period, and
Akhmatova once told me that her parents took her in a carriage to see this wonder.
...
After the revolution, in accordance with the policy of “densening up” the bourgeoisie, the
enfilade was cut up into pieces, with one family per room. Walls were erected between the
rooms - at first of plywood. Subsequently, over the years, boards, brick, and stucco would
promote these partitions to the status of architectural norm. If there is an infinite aspect to
space, it is not its expansion but its reduction. If only because the reduction of space,
oddly enough, is always more coherent. It’s better structured and has more names: a cell,
a closet, a grave. Expanses have only a broad gesture.

5
...
Of course, we all shared one toilet, one bathroom, and one kitchen. But the kitchen was
fairly spacious, the toilet very decent and cozy. As for the bathroom, Russian hygienic
habits are such that eleven people would seldom overlap when either taking a bath or
doing their basic laundry. The latter hung in the two corridors that connected the rooms to
the kitchen, and one knew the underwear of one's neighbors by heart.
...
For all the despicable aspects of this mode of existence, a communal apartment has
perhaps its redeeming side as well. It bares life to its basics: it strips off any illusions
about human nature. By the volume of the fart, you can tell who occupies the toilet, you
know what he/she bad for supper as well as for breakfast. You know the sounds they
make in bed and when the women have their periods. It's often you in whom your
neighbor confides his or her grief, and it is he or she who calls for an ambulance should
you have an angina attack or something worse. It is he or she who one day may find you
dead in a chair, if you live alone, or vice versa.
What barbs or medical and culinary advice, what tips about goods suddenly available in
this or that store are traded in the communal kitchen in the evening when the wives cook
their meals! This is where one learns life's essentials: by the rim of one's ear, with the
corner of one's eye. What silent dramas unfurl there when somebody is all of a sudden not
on speaking terms with someone else! What a school of mimics it is! What depths of
emotion can be conveyed by a stiff, resentful vertebra or by a frozen profile! What smells,
aromas, and odors float in the air around a hundred-watt yellow tear hanging on a plait-
like tangled electric cord. There is something tribal about this dimly lit cave, something
primordial—evolutionary, if you will; and the pots and pans hang over the gas stoves like
would-be tom-toms.

8
Our ceiling was some fourteen, if not more, feet high, adorned with the same moorish-
style plaster ornamentation, which, combined with cracks and stains from occasionally
bursting pipes upstairs, turned it into a highly detailed map of some nonexisting
superpower or archipelago. There were three very tall arched windows through which we
could see nothing except a high school across the street, were it not for the central
window, which also served as a door to the balcony.
...

9
Oddly, the furniture we had matched the exterior and the interior of the building. It was as
busy with curves, and as monumental as the stucco molding on the façade or the panels
and pilasters protruding from the walls inside, skeined with plaster garlands of some
geometrical fruits. Both the outside and the inner decor were of a light-brown, cocoa-cum-
milk shade. Our two huge, cathedral-like chests of drawers, however, were of black
varnished oak; yet they belonged to the same period, the turn of the century, as did the
building itself. This was what perhaps favorably disposed the neighbors toward us from
the outset, albeit unwittingly. And this was why, perhaps, after barely a year in that
building, we felt we had lived there forever. The sensation that the chests had found their
home, or the other way around, somehow made us realize that we, too, were settled, that
we were not to move again.
Those ten-foot-high, two-story chests (you’d have to take off the corniced top from the
elephant-footed bottom when moving) housed nearly everything our family had amassed
in the course of its existence. The role played elsewhere by the attic or the basement, in
our case was performed by the chests. My father’s various cameras, developing and
printing paraphernalia, prints themselves, dishes, china, linen, tablecloths, shoe boxes
with his shoes now too small for him yet still too large for me, tools, batteries, his old navy
tunics, binoculars, family albums, yellowed illustrated supplements, my mothers’ s hats
and scarves, some silver Solingen razor blades, defunct flashlights, his military
decorations, her motley kimonos, their mutual correspondence, lorgnettes, fans, other
memorabilia - all that was stored in the cavernous depths of these chests, yielding, when
you’d open one of their doors, a bouquet of mothballs, old leather, and dust. On the top of
the lower part, as if on a mantelpiece, sat two cristal carafes containing liqueurs, and a
glazed porcelain figurine of two tipsy Chinese fishermen dragging their catch. My mother
would wipe the dust off them twice a week.
With hindsight, the content of these chests could be compared to our joined, collective
subconscious; at the time, this thought wouldn’t have crossed my mind. To say the least,
all these things were part of my parents’ consciousness, tokens of their memory: of places
and or times by and large preceding me; of their common and separate past, of their own
youth and childhood, of a different era, almost of a different century. With the benefit of
the same hindsight, I would add: of their freedom, for they were born and grew up free,
before what the witless scum call the Revolution, but what for them as for generations of
others, meant slavery.

19
The biggest item of our furniture-or rather, the one that occupied the most space-was my
parents' bed, to which I think I owe my life. It was a large, king-sized affair whose carvings,
again, matched to a certain degree the rest, yet they were done in a more modern fashion.
The same vegetation motif, of course, but the execution oscillated somewhere between
Art Nouveau and the commercial version of Constructivism. This bed was the object of my
mother’s special pride, for she had bought it very cheaply in 1935, before she and my
father got married, having spotted it and a matching dressing table with three mirrors in
some second-rate carpenter shop. Most of our life gravitated toward this low-sitting bed,
and the most momentous decisions in our family were made when the three of us
gathered, not around the table, but on that vast surface, with myself at my parents' feet.
By Russian standards, this bed was a real luxury. I often thought that it was Precisely this
bed that persuaded my father to get married, for he loved to tarry in it more than anything
else. Even when he and my mother were engaged in the bitterest possible mutual
acrimony, mostly on the subject of our budget ("You are just hell-bent to dump all the
cash at the grocer’s comes his indignant voice over bookshelves separating my "half"
from their "room." "I am poisoned, poisoned by thirty years of your stinginess!" replies
my mother), even then he'd be reluctant to get out of it, especially in the morning. Several
people offered us very good money for that bed, which indeed occupied too much space
in our quarters. But no matter how insolvent we were, my parents never considered this
option. The bed was clearly an excess, and I believe they liked it precisely for that.
I remember them sleeping in it on their sides, backs turned to each other, a gulf of
crumpled blankets in between. I remember them reading there, talking, taking their pills,
fighting this or that illness. The bed framed them for me at their most secure and most
helpless. It was their very private lair, their ultimate island, their own inviolable, by no one
except me, place in the universe. Wherever it stands now, it stands as a vacuum within the
world order. A seven-by-five-foot vacuum. It was of light-brown polished maple, and it
never creaked.

20
My half was connected to their room by two large, nearly ceiling-high arches which I
constantly tried to fill with various combinations of bookshelves and suitcases, in order to
separate myself from my parents, in order to obtain a degree of privacy. One can speak
only about degrees, because the height and the width of those two arches, plus the
Moorish configuration of their upper edge, ruled out any notion of complete success.
Unless, of course, one could fill them up with bricks or cover them with wooden boards.
But that was against the law for this would result in our having two rooms instead of the
one and a half that the borough housing order stated we were entitled to. Short of the
fairly frequent inspections of our building’s super, the neighbors, no matter how nice the
terms we were on with them, would report us to the appropriate authorities in no time.
One had to design a palliative, and that was what was what I was busy at from the age of
fifteen on. I went through all sorts of mind-boggling arrangements, and at one time even
contemplated building-in a twelve-foot-high aquarium, which would have in the middle of
it a door connecting my half with the room. Needless to say, that architectural feat was
beyond my ken. The solution, then, was more and more bookshelves on my side, more
and thicker layers of drapery on my parents’. Needless to say, they liked neither the
solution nor the nature of the problem itself.
Girls and friends, however, grew in quantity more slowly than did the books; besides, the
latter were there to stay. We had two armoires with full-length mirrors built into their
doors and otherwise undistinguished. But they were rather tall, and they did half the job.
Around and above them I built the shelves, leaving a narrow opening, through which my
parents could squeeze into my half, and vice versa. My father resented the arrangement,
particularly since at the farthest end of my half he had built himself a darkroom where he
was doing his developing and printing, i.e., where the large part of our livelihood came
from.
...
Still later, when books and the need for privacy increased dramatically, I partitioned my
half further by repositioning those armoires in such a way that they separated my bed and
my desk from the darkroom. Between them, I squeezed a third one that was idling in the
corridor. I tore its back wall out, leaving its door intact. The result was that a guest would
have to enter my Lebensraum through two doors and one curtain. The first door was the
one that led into the corridor; then you’d find yourself standing in my father’s darkroom
and removing a curtain; the next thing was to open the door of the former armoire. Atop of
the armoires, I piled all the suitcases we had. They were many; still, they failed to reach
the ceiling. The net effect was that of a barricade; behind it, though, the gamin felt safe,
and a Marianne could bare more than just her breast.

21
The dim view my mother and father took of these transformations brightened somewhat
when they began to hear from behind the partition the clatter of my typewriter. The
drapery muffled it considerably but not fully. The typewriter, with its russian typeface, was
also part of my father’s China catch, little though he expected it to be put to use by his
son. I had it on my desk, tucked into the niche created by the bricked-up former door once
connecting our room and a half with the rest of the enfilade. That’s when that extra foot
came in handy! Since my neighbors had their piano on the opposite side of this door, I
fortified my side against their daughter’s “Chopsticks” with a walled bookcase that,
resting on my desk, fit the niche perfectly.
Two mirrored armoires and the passage between them on one side; the tall draped
window with the windowsill just two feet above my rather spacious brown cushionless
couch on the other; the arch, filled up to its Moorish rim with bookshelves behind; the
niche-filling bookcase and my desk with the Royal Underwood in front of my nose - that
was my Lebensraum. My mother would clean it, my father would cross it on his way back
and forth to his darkroom; occasionally he or she would come for refuge in my worn out
but deep armchair after yet another verbal skirmish. Other than that, these ten square
meters were mine, and they were the best ten square meters I’ve ever known. If space has
a mind of its own and generates its own distribution, there is a chance some of these
square meters, too, may remember me fondly. Now especially, under a different foot.

Joseph Brodsky: In a room and a half,

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1986 (in: Less than one)

excerpts by in_between : architecture