The Charming Caretaker

The YardKeeper

Not long ago a new yardkeeper took over the building. He sweeps with a steady rhythm, clears the steps like a windblown tide, and washes the driveway each evening without a missed beat. Everything runs on schedule, and there is barely a complaint to makeexcept for one lingering memory.

Before him, a woman named Nadia Ivanova tended the ground. She turned our modest entrance into something that felt like the grand foyer of a ninestorey manor. At the battered doorway she always laid down a rug, absurdly out of place, yet the rug was forever pilfered. Undeterred, she fetched another, draping it over the sagging concrete and the jutting rebar, as if shielding the residents ankles from broken heels and stray nails.

Between the windows on each of the nine flights she placed pots, ceramic figurines and odd little turtles. Dust never dared to settle on those sills.

One evening a group of lads from the flat on the sixth floor barged in, celebrating life with cigarettes, whisky and something even stronger. Their pots turned into ash trays, the bottles piled up in a cheaplooking kaleidoscope, and the figurines cracked under their boots, ground to dust. The other tenants slipped past the raucous crew, wary of a volatile reaction. Somehow Nadia managed to befriend the boys, not only salvaging her pots but coaxing the rowdy circle to drift away in an unknown direction. The noisy gatherings in the hallway ceased, and in place of the former pots now sat a charming ashtray that Nadia cleaned and polished each day.

What struck me most was not her rare industriousness today but the way she would arrive at dawn, humming a quiet tune, scrubbing the lift doors and railings with a mysterious spirit blendlong before any surfacecare became a pandemic requisite. Even more, she dealt with the tenants with a genial air, despite their growing demands that swelled her workload. She trimmed the grass and shrubs of the endless cigarette butts behind the building (Im not even sure thats a groundskeepers duty), chatting sweetly with the balcony smokers, never rebuking their uncouth habit of coughing into the night. She spoke of the bustle of life and calmly swept away their filth. After a while, the stray butts ceased to carpet the back garden, and the new yardkeeperperhaps now more properly a yardwoman shattered a flowerbed, allowing tulips, oxeye daisies and proud chrysanthemums to bloom beneath the windows.

The most vivid image of Nadia was when she slipped out of her orange work coat. Her makeup was flawless, hair coifed, heels clicking regardless of the weather, her attire a parade of pastel tones. It seemed as if, after polishing our stairwell, she were marching toward the English queens gardenonly a hat was missing.

Each evening, her husband would collect her from work, stepping out of his car with a tiny bouquet, planting a gentle kiss on her forehead, always the same tender ritual.

At the end of August, the omniscient ladies on the bench whispered, Tomorrow is Nadias last day on the job; after that shell retire! Who will look after the hallway now?

The next day I bought a bunch of flowers for Nadia. I wanted to give her a small kindness. To my astonishment, by her little storeroomwhere brooms, dustpans and mops lingeredpeople from our building gathered. Some, like me, brought flowers; others arrived with bottles of champagne and a flask of cognac, elderly ladies sang and handed flustered Nadia pies and jars of pickles. Then the same lads from the sixth floor, the ones who once smashed her pots and frightened the whole staircase, swooped in. They taught the sixtyfiveyearold Nadia how to pose for stylish selfies, showing her something on a phone that seemed to glow. Im pretty sure they signed her up for Instagram and TikTok.

Her husband, the reluctant orchestrator of this spontaneous retirement party, fumbled with the trunk of his car, stuffing it with blooms, cognac and the edible spoils the local grandmothers had contributed.

Nadia herself seemed the most bewildered of all. In a classic almondcoloured dress threaded with pearls, her makeup a touch brighter than usual, she listened halfheartedly to the chatter, fighting tears. Perhaps she sensed that no colleague of hers had ever been sent off for retirement. Never before, nowhere.

Or perhaps, without aiming for any grand result, she understoodon some quiet, accidental levelthat her modest, unremarkable labour had made us, the ordinary residents of a ninestorey block, just a little kinder, a little brighter.