This is the starving cats story: Carrie, a volunteer living in Zhytomyr, extended her Peace Corps service for an additional year. Because of this, they rewarded her with a full month off to go home to America and see her family. She gave me the keys to her apartment and asked me to feed her cats and water her plants while she was away.
This, I successfully did once. Getting into Carrie’s apartment is no easy matter, for there are deadbolts above and below the center door lock, and these are opened by turning the keys in opposite directions of one another. The top lock is brand new. The bottom one was created sometime around the fall of Rome and has one of those keys with two teeth that you only see in old movies.
Because of the nature of the locks, it's hard to tell if you've succesfully unlocked them. If the door won't open, you know it's one of the locks, but you're not sure which one it is. Also, once you're pretty sure you have the bottom lock opened, the key for the top lock has to be in and twisting for that lock to stay open. Once you've tried every possible combination of turning, the door finally opens and you're inside.
Like I said, I did this once. I fed the cats, emptied the litter box, watered the plants, borrowed two books and found that I could not get back out. Getting out required turning more keys from the inside, sneezing up a storm due to my cat allergies. In my frustrated turning, I managed to unhook a latch that held one of the locks open. That had been my mistake.
Successfully out of the apartment and my histamine production starting to slow down, I went home. The cats were going through their two bowls of food every three days, so that meant three days of not sneezing.
After the three days, I was standing in front of the apartment door perplexed. Amy, another Zhytomyr volunteer (there are a total of five in the city) was with me, and neither of us, for all the key twisting, could not get the door open. By putting my weight on various parts of the door, we had determined that we had both the top and bottom locks disengaged, but it was holding firm in the center of the door, at the middle door lock, for which there was no key. The cats mewed at us from inside.
We knocked on the doors of the two adjoining apartments. One held a portly middle aged man who told us he had no idea how to get the door opened. The other held a man I had met before, a man I am determined to photograph. This man is in his fifties, naught more than skin and bones, with a permanent five o’clock shadow of white whiskers. The most distinctive thing about him (other than he’s been drunk every time I met him) is his glasses. He wears bifocals that are at least an inch thick. The smaller lens on the bifocals makes his eyes look tiny, while the bigger lens makes his eyes look like they would in a funhouse mirror, wrapping around the tinier eyes in the smaller lens. He always has his chin up, and always moves in tiny, jerky movements, one foot sliding after the other. He pushed at the door. was unable to help, either.
At this point, I simply knew I had starving cats on the other side, and that I certainly had the money to afford to buy Carrie a new lock. I rammed the door with my shoulder. It didn’t budge. I rammed it again. It still didn't budge. My shoulder hurt. You know, it looks a lot easier in the movies.
The first guy came out of his apartment, yelling at us, telling us to stop that, so we did, and we left, cats mewing behind us.
With Carrie in the USA, I text messaged Dave, a volunteer who had completed his service in Ukraine, but was back as an election observer for the National Democratic Institute. He and Carrie were friends, and I thought he could get a hold of her. He got back to me with her coordinator’s number in Zhytomyr. I called her coordinator, who called the landlady and then called me back. The landlady was in Odessa, and would be there for a week. I envisioned skeletal cats and Carrie screaming at me.
The coordinator made a few more calls and got back to me: be at the apartment at 2:00 PM the next day, the landlady’s son will meet you. When I arrived at the apartment, the son, who was in his twenties, was already there with a friend. They had the same keys I did, and none were for that middle lock. They went through the same routine I had, trying to turn the locks this way and that, pushing on the door in different spots to find out which ones were engaged. They, too, determined that it was the middle lock.
The son went downstairs and came back with another man. He tried twisting all the locks and pushing on the door. Nothing happened. They aroused the next door neighbor that yelled at us. He tried twisting all the locks and pushing on the door. Nothing happened. They got out the glasses-man, but he didn’t try anything, as he was quite drunk. They started debating whether or not to use the balcony from the glasses-man’s apartment to get to Carrie’s balcony. The problem is the balconies are enclosed, so someone would have to hang from the edge of one and try to break out a window on the other, all while four floors up.
There were now five Ukrainian men and an American on this tiny landing, pushing doors, twisting keys and speaking in loud, booming Russian (well, I was speaking in Ukranian, and my voice doesn't boom). The cats, hearing us, mewed pathetically from inside.
I didn’t understand everything the men said, but apparently they had abandoned the balcony idea and were now debating how to break the door down.
A heavy-set woman in her fifties came downstairs. She offered her help. She twisted the locks, she pushed at the door. Nothing happened. Then she told the son to take the keys off the key ring. He did. She put one in one lock, the other in the other, twisted both simultaneously and told the son to twist the door knob.
The door opened.