When I moved into my first apartment here in Ukraine, I was told that it had “central heating”. The person translating this from Russian seemed to be entirely certain of what they were stating, and I was sure I understood the concept. What confused me a little was that there was no hot water while at the same time the apartment was overheated. Questions about this were answered vaguely that “they” would be turning on the hot water shortly – and “they” did. Equipped with hot water coming from my faucets and running through my radiators, the question of central heating didn’t reappear until, a couple of weeks later, “they” turned off the hot water again. This time round, promises that “they” would be turning it on again soon didn’t manifest, and so discovering “their” true identity suddenly turned into a priority.
Who are they?
I had, naturally, assumed that “they” were some caretakers for the house, or an apartment owners’ association – whoever controlled the boiler room that was surely there in the basement of my apartment building. As it turns out, not only was there no boiler room, but the precise nature of “them” would continue to elude me. “They” are whoever is running the city hot water companies. Yes, that is “city” and “companies”. The hot water for heating and the hot water that comes out of the faucets is heated in and transported separately through two sets of pipes from stations that supply entire blocks of flats, if not quarters of the city. More detailed information is hard to come by, as is often the case in Ukraine. Since “they” reside far removed in the executive offices of mostly anonymous companies, and are not answerable to the people at all, finding out if and when the hot water was going to be turned on again was impossible. Theories ranged from the eternal “tomorrow for sure” to the more realistic “come the weekend” or “on the next public holiday”, but quite often I would hear “What do I care? My apartment has a personal water heater.”
So after a couple of weeks of heating water on the stove for washing myself in the morning, and incessantly pestering my landlady for a water heater, some workmen arrived and, in the space of a couple of hours, relegated the question of “their” identity to the back of my mind again. That is until it briefly resurfaced when “they” turned off the heating in mid-April, at a time when this led to a freezing apartment. This time around, though, I didn’t really contemplate the question for long. I just went out and bought a space heater on the next day.
Text by Alex Godde, Germany
Photo by Pierre Jeanmougin, France
