About a dozen cars were parked in uneven rows in the lot behind the repair shop. Dented by loose gravel, jarred by potholes and subjected to a nagging persistence of fender benders, the boxy little cars had suffered on St. Petersburg's highways. They were arranged in no discernible order, but their uniform condition shared a quality of dilapidation that was characteristic to the creaky city by the Baltic Sea. A rust-red Lada was tireless and resting on sharp chunks of cement taken from the ruins of a nearby building. Its immediate neighbor was scorched black from its sieve of an engine spontaneously combusting. In the opposite row, a Chinese-manufactured Cherry QQ, a vehicle who mere existience violated at least two dozen Volkswagen patents, looked pristine and zippy except for the fact that it had no steering wheel, seat or inner console. Altogether, not one car was without a bowed axle, broken window or missing part.
The quality of crappiness suggested by the vehicles was further insinuated by the crudeness of the lot in which they sat. The automobiles occupied a dirt square that fell under the long shadow of the blocky apartment building towering above. The ground was uneven and flecked with shards of broken glass. It was surrounded on three sides by waist-high beach grass, impressed with wide tire tracks and festooned with debris and beer bottles.
Day and night, winds from the Gulf of Finland, which washed upon a concrete beach two blocks further down Korablstroitelskaya Prospect, blew across the lot. But the salty sea air did nothing to relieve the aether of industrial decay and low-grade petrol that persisted. It just kicked up dust and whipped about the thin shoots of beach grass.
But not everything was decay and decline in the neighborhood. After all, nature itself is no more consistent than human nature and things of aesthetic value can be often found in the most dreary places. Above the yawning concrete structures and gritty streets, a beautiful summer night fluoresced. The sky was still warm with dusk and wide ribbons of orange and violet clouds traced the horizon. From the sky, these colors and hues reflected and refracted upon the cityscape below, bathing everything in a warm twilight glow. This unnatural and rich light belied the late hour. The days are quite long during the summer’s white nights and the sun had been setting for six hours. It was still light enough to read a newspaper, but every other sign indicated that it was clearly late – stores were closed, the lights in windows winked out and the last pedestrians had finished their late-night strolls. It was still a beautiful night, but the diurnal life of the city had been replaced by dim, determined shadows and a regime of silence muting the streets.
Sitting in the repair shop by the car lot, Sergei Remontirov took no notice of any of this. Born and raised in St. Petersburg, or Leningrad as he still called it – more out of habit than any residual ideological conviction – he had grown up and grown older with the city. Its cracks and sagging fractures were as common and unremarkable to him as his own deeply-lined face and browned teeth. He no longer appreciated the familiar spectacle of the long, bright summer nights. Staring through the dusty window of the repair shop that he’d owned and struggled to maintain since the time Communism had become an untenable proposition, he was oblivious to the degraded city and the luminous sky alike.
The light was off in the shop and Sergei sat on a wooden chair in the twilight. Though stooped, his posture was aggressive and related a sort of ornery vigor, not unlike a wizened old sable. Even the etchings on his face formed patterns of discontent. Sergei’s eyes panned across the lot slowly while his fingers searched through his pockets for a box of matches. He traced the outlines of the cars, stopping at a Volga and wincing at a spider web crack on the windshield. Then he looked at the dirt and saw fragments of glass glitter in the crepuscular light. Sergei grit his teeth and grimaced as though he was chewing the shattered glass. Angrily, he found and jerked the box of wooden matches from his pockets and pulled a cigarette from the open pack sitting on the table beside him. Without relaxing his sour expression, he struck the match across the rough table surface and lit his cigarette.
