I had been living in my *new* apartment for just over a month now and it was still almost totally empty. There was plenty of furniture in the basement to choose from, but I was always drained. I had left all my friends and 98% of my family behind when I moved from California to Vladivostok and I was desperate to make new friends. This meant a lot of clubs, a lot of bars, and plenty of wandering through city parks and "department stores" which are actually closer to what you might call a "mall" in the States. Every night I'd get home late, and I'd be exhausted. I had barely enough energy to throw some food together and collapse in front of the TV to watch some bizarre Russian adaptation of an 80's or early 90's American sitcom. Seriously, that's a thing in Russia...
The apartment had some strange quirks, which I was discovering little by little while I lived there. When I first moved in, I walked through the entire apartment with my iPhone and took video to send back home to my folks. My mother in particular was desperate to know I had found a decent place to live. As I was moving through the apartment there were definite "cold spots" particularly in one of the two bedrooms, and the main living area. Another strange thing was both of the apartment's two closets, were still full of the previous tenant's clothing and shoes. One closet had clothing that appeared to belong to an older man, and the other one - an older woman. These were the ONLY belongings that seemed to have been left behind and when I asked the apartment manager what I should do with them, his equally odd answer was "Eti koo-var-tiri seychaz..." (It's your apartment now.) I tried to give these items away, but people in the building were completely uninterested. The majority of this stuff ended up meeting its end in the building incinerator chute.
It was around this same time that, seemingly from nowhere "the stench" began. I actually gave it a name because it became a common-enough, though entirely random event for the rest of my time renting that apartment. The smell was over powering, but nothing too specific. I couldn't say it smelled like "death" or "something rotting" because it didn't. It had an odd metallic smell to it for sure, and it could easily make you sick if you stayed around it too long. Beyond that, the odor is beyond my powers of description. At first, I simply assumed the crazy lady who lived down the hall was correct. That the building was infested with huge mice and one had died in my wall, or under some appliance. So I moved my refrigerator and oven, emptied and searched my cupboards and cabinets, checked the exhaust duct for the stove vent, I even took apart my sink drain... Nothing... No cause.
The other very ODD thing about this stench was that it seemed to move around the kitchen area. Most of the time, it was confined to the ceiling area over my refrigerator. I'd sniff it out to that spot, but there were no vents or anything that would allow the smell to come through. Sometimes however, it would be in the far corner of the kitchen. Or, sometimes in the dining room. It would last a few hours and vanish. After a few days of searching, I did finally contact the building's maintenance guy. He showed up, looked around, but of course - as is typical, there was no trace of the smell. The next day, it returned and was just as strong as ever. I called them back, and once again - the odor was gone. This time however, I refused to allow the maintenance guy to leave right away. I showed him some corroded fixtures in my shower and asked him to work on that, hoping the smell would return while he happened to be inside my apartment...
The smell did return, with a vengeance... An over-powering stench filled the entire kitchen and drove me out. My eyes started watering and my throat began to burn the longer I stood there. I ran to the bathroom and brought the maintenance guy with me, who was at a total loss for words at what he whiffed. He told me he had been working in that same building for almost 15 years, and never experienced anything close to what we were now being exposed to. The next day, a contractor was called in and the two of them removed a section of plaster from the kitchen near my refrigerator. The wall was empty, no sign of any dead thing - nor of any mold or other cause for the smell. They removed a section of plaster from the far corner of the kitchen as well and it was equally fruitless. After patching both walls, he tried dumping industrial strength cleaner down my drains - I could tell he was grasping at straws but I too was desperate for some level of relief... So I stayed silent and let them work the problem through process of elimination.
Several days of troubleshooting and the odor did seem to fade on its own. I assumed the relief came about thanks to the efforts of maintenance and their contractor, so I thanked them both and closed the claim. That horrible smell stayed gone for almost four months before manifesting its self again. It always seemed to happen that way. Months of nothing, and then about one solid week of grotesque on and off stench which would move around the kitchen - then as quickly as it had come, it was gone. To this day, I have no idea where the smell came from, or what was causing it. I've been tempted to contact the new tenants and see if they're going through the same issues, but sometimes I wonder if knowing would really make things better, or worse.
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