Rats

Rats are a persistent infestation in Larisa Feodorovna Antipova’s old flat, where the gaps and crumbling fabric of the house give them shelter and access. They are both a practical domestic danger and a recurring measure of the flat’s condition: the noise and damage Yuri finds on returning make visible how much the rooms, like the surrounding life, have deteriorated. His effort to stop them brings him back into contact with the household Lara had described, and leaves the infestation contained rather than conquered.

A household problem built into the walls

When Yuri first visits, Lara explains that rats are the flat’s one great trouble. She says they swarm through the old walls and that the cracks and crevices make them impossible to get rid of. She plugs as many holes as she can, but the work achieves little; the gaps beneath the skirting boards and between the floorboards still need stopping up. The infestation is thus tied to the building itself, not to a single neglected room or a brief lapse in housekeeping.

Even the place where Lara leaves the key connects the rats to the structure of the home. She points out a hollow between the bricks and recalls that a rat once frightened Katenka there. The recess serves a practical purpose as a hiding place for the key, but it also reveals how readily the worn masonry becomes both a refuge for vermin and a part of the family’s everyday arrangements. The walls offer no clean boundary between domestic life and the pests living within them.

The abandoned flat and the doctor’s return

When Yuri returns after his captivity, he fears that Lara and Katenka may be gone from Yuriatin or even dead. The hollow in the brickwork has been closed with a brick, so he kicks at the wall before reaching inside, unwilling to put his hand where a rat might be. He finds the key and Lara’s note, learning that she is alive and has gone to Varykino with Katenka. Her message says she has left a little food, mostly boiled potatoes, and cautions him to put a weight on the saucepan lid to keep rats out. Even this small provision assumes the infestation is still present.

Inside, the opening door sets off a clatter: tin pans fall, and rats scuttle from the shelves, dropping to the floor and scattering. The flat seems uninhabited, and Yuri judges that the animals may have bred there by the thousands. He feels helpless before the spectacle and decides to secure one room for the night, stopping the holes with broken glass. The rats turn his reunion with Lara’s home into an immediate task of shelter and defense: before he can settle, he must make a barrier between himself and the living presence in the walls.

Containment rather than eradication

On another return to the flat, Yuri climbs the familiar cast-iron staircase and again encounters the rats’ clamor in the empty rooms. Though exhausted, he knows he will not sleep unless he keeps them away. Darkness is approaching, and the lamp and kerosene left out in the kitchen might have been placed there in anticipation of his arrival, but he chooses to conserve both. In the bedroom, where there are fewer holes than elsewhere, a small oil lamp still contains some oil despite the rats having reached it.

Yuri spends a little over an hour packing the gaps where the skirting has separated from the floor with broken glass. The bedroom door fits well, and closing it should make the room ratproof. The sequence gives the infestation a material scale: damaged floor edges, accessible oil, the failing boundary between room and passage. It also shows Yuri’s response as practical improvisation. He does not repair the old house or rid it of rats; he makes one room defensible for the night.

A managed, recurring presence

By the time Komarovsky visits in December, about six months have passed since Yuri stopped the rat holes. Yuri has kept watch for new ones and plugged them as they appeared. The flat also has a large, fluffy tomcat, which spends its time sitting in still contemplation. Yet the rats remain in the house; they have become more cautious, not disappeared. The change is therefore one of containment and altered behavior, not victory.

That persistence gives the rats a distinctive role in the domestic setting. They recur as noise, damaged openings, and a threat to food and light, while Lara and Yuri respond by hiding the key, weighting a saucepan lid, sealing floor gaps, and guarding the bedroom. Their presence makes the home’s insecurity tangible: even after Yuri returns to a room filled with familiar objects, he must reconstruct a livable enclosure against the creatures already inside it.