ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — By the identifiably Russian logic of Tanya Konyenko, there is a good reason why she must leave her apartment, trudge five flights downstairs, cross Nevsky Prospekt, the city's prosperous main street, and walk to the local bathhouse, all simply to take a bath.
Her apartment doesn't have hot water, but that is not why. Actually, her apartment doesn't have a bathtub. But that is not why, either.
The reason is that if her apartment had a bathtub and if the bathtub had hot water, she would have to share it with two 20-ish men, a 17-year-old girl and her 18-year-old brother, their 40-year-old mother, a 64-year-old woman, her 65-year-old husband, a 70-year-old babushka, that woman's 72-year-old husband and, finally, with her own husband, Yura.
"If there was a bathtub here, I wouldn't use it," she said, "because other people would be washing their dirty underwear in it all day. And I wouldn't like it."
It is the very essence of that most Soviet of Russian institutions, the communal flat: a place so crammed with people, and so devoid of privacy, that not having a bathtub can be considered an advantage.
"I like it here," she said, then paused a beat to reflect on her neighbors. "Of course, it would be much better if I could poison some of them, and then I would have more room."
"Here" is flat 7 at Nevsky Prospekt 106, an ornate five-story building constructed some 125 years ago to accommodate two floors of stores and three rental units, one on each of the three upper floors.
There are still two floors of stores. The three remaining floors were carved decades ago into veritable warrens of cubicles linked by corridors of peeling checkerboard linoleum, stuffed to the brim and beyond with lifetimes of musty, precious possessions.
Once the staircase was an airy wall of glass. Soviet engineers solved that by hanging a steel tube of an elevator outside the staircase, shutting out any light. Outside the flat, graffiti advertise sex and politics; inside, by the front door, a wall scrawl inexplicably depicts a skating mouse named Roller Rat.
The attic, so thick with a century's dust that the wooden floor is now a thick gray carpet, has become a crash pad for homeless alcoholics.
Here the Konyenkos — film critics, chain smokers, sometime actors and jazz buffs in St. Petersburg's distinctly offbeat intelligentsia — have spent all but three of their 22 years of married life. They and their vast collection of records, tapes, CDs and religious art peacefully coexist in a space roughly 12 feet wide and 30 feet long, split into two rooms by a false wall covered with a red carpet.
This is not their dream home. Like countless St. Petersburgers, the Konyenkos are mired in the communal milieu by inertia, lack of choice and outright poverty. For their patch of a barely habitable building they pay 140 rubles a month, about $4.50.
"If we had the money, we'd live in the Hermitage," Tanya Konyenko said drily, referring to the czarist palace a few blocks away that houses much of Russia's greatest art.
Given that they do not, they make do with 360 square feet in the center of downtown, close to the clubs and movies they love, and try to keep the door closed when they are home.