Of Bugs And Men
With a sigh, she added, ‘Diarrhoea.’
Before the summer of 2024, my relationship with Masha felt like a series of prison conjugal visits — meticulously scheduled, grabbing whatever intimacy we could, switching back and forth between her place and mine.
Instead of guards and metal detectors, we had Masha’s roommate — a lovely girl from Sicily who greeted me with a raised brow and, “Ah, you again.”
When I sublet my apartment and moved in with Masha, her roommate wasn’t thrilled. Her reaction was like someone who’d suddenly realized that conjugal visits had turned into a life sentence.
One scorching morning, I woke up drenched in sweat — as one British friend once explained, English homes are designed to trap heat rather than let it out. As I tried convincing myself that my sweaty, sticky state was somehow romantic, my phone buzzed.
My friend, whom I’d sublet the apartment to, sent me a photo of his arm. Four red welts lined his hairy skin, like a constellation of red giants.
“Check this out,” his text read.
“WTF is that?” I texted back.
He replied with a single emoji: 🐞.
“Sorry, man. This isn’t working out,” he added. His family would be coming soon, including a newborn. Whatever it was, he couldn’t risk exposing them.
Worried about losing a precious income stream, I replied, “Give me several hours.”
And, reluctantly, I typed a phrase into Google I would soon delete from history:
WHAT TO DO IF YOU WAKE UP BITTEN BY BED BUGS.
Minutes later, pacing Masha’s living room like Churchill in his WWII bunker, I FaceTimed my sister Kate. Not because she would help me in any specific way but because that’s what I do whenever I am confused.
The screen showed her walking with a group of classmates in Rotterdam.
“Can you believe it? Bed bugs!” I whispered into the phone, careful enough so that Masha’s roommate wouldn’t hear. I had, after all, just moved there — and an infested flat sure wouldn’t help my reputation.
One of the girls on Kate’s end asked, “Where do bed bugs come from?”
“From Paris, of course,” Kate replied, without skipping a beat.
“Le Bed Bug,” Masha joked when I recalled the story later.
Though none of this was, of course, even remotely funny.
I thought about the bed bug panic in Paris the year before, in 2023 — the media frenzy, the apocalyptic headlines. The British didn’t need another reason to resent the French, but there it was. Even my grandma joined in from Russia, hissing, “Those poor Europeans. Can’t do anything without our gas.”
It was as if bed bugs in question were staging a protest against Western sanctions.
I always thought bed bugs lived in ancient, grimy furniture — like the kind my 98-year-old great-grandmother had in her Soviet-era Moscow flat. There, even touching the doorknob required a full-body sanitation afterward.
Her place reeked of rotten food and waste. Whenever I visited — which wasn’t often — the nurse seemed unimpressed. “She did it again,” she’d say, matter-of-factly. Then, with a sigh — the kind people give when it starts raining again outside — she’d add, “Diarrhoea.”
The nurse’s arms were always covered in red marks, and I remember thinking: bed bugs.
But it’s one thing to read about bed bugs infesting some distant, unfortunate Parisian flat — or my great-grandmother’s disgusting one — and another when they set up camp in your own apartment.
After I hung up on Kate, I spent hours online, earning a PhD in Bed Bug Studies. Bed bugs, I learned, are resilient — almost immortal. My apartment, filled with everything I considered integral to my existence, was now Chernobyl’s reactor number four.
Panicking, I texted my landlord, hoping for some guidance.
His response was a link to a BBC article with the reassuring message:
“Renters are responsible for infestations.”
Followed by, “And send me the certificate of completion once you’re done!”
I found the exterminator on Google Maps. A woman on the phone, with the demeanor of a funeral director, assured me, “We’ll take care of it, love.”
“Thank you, thank you!” I cried, nearly in tears. Almost as an afterthought, I asked, “How much will it cost?”
“£1,500, darling,” she replied cheerfully — roughly the cost of my rent.
She told me to pack everything into large black trash bags. “The poison will ruin any uncovered items,” she warned. And hastened to add, “Love.”
When Masha’s roommate asked where we were going, I panicked.
“Uh… my apartment flooded.”
“The toilet broke,” Masha added, desperate to make it sound more plausible.
“Sewage everywhere,” I said. “Books floating in it. It’s a mess.”
Masha’s roommate cringed. “Gross. Just… wash your hands after.”
And then disappeared into the kitchen to make pasta for lunch.
That day, while my friend was at work, Masha and I went to my flat and packed.
Well, Masha packed. I hovered and panicked.
By evening, my once-organized flat looked like a landfill, with little mountains of trash bags piled up in every corner.
As we debated where the infestation might have originated — all the furniture in my flat was brand-new, after all! — I noticed an extra suitcase and a bed made up on the couch.
“Is someone else staying here?” I texted my friend.
“Oh, yeah,” he replied casually, the way someone does when they forget to tell the truth. “A friend crashed for a couple of nights.”
So — my landlord gave the apartment to me.
I had given it to my friend.
And that friend had given it, in turn, to his friend.
I had no more questions about why there were bed bugs. If anything, I wondered why there weren’t crocodiles or snakes under the couch.
“This friend,” I texted, along with a string of smiley faces rolling their eyes. “Where did he come from?”
“Paris,” he texted back.
I showed Masha the message.
“Told you,” she smirked. “Le Bed Bug.”
The exterminator arrived the next day, looking less like Arnold Schwarzenegger and more like a version of Steve Carell who’d spent two decades drinking two pints every evening and raiding his grandfather’s wardrobe. His shirt was a size too big, his trousers a size too small, and his face had the expression of a man who’d lost three divorces but won the right to keep his van.
After spraying the poison, he told my friend that he’d have to sleep in the same bed using the same sheets for the treatment to work.
“But won’t I get bitten?” my friend asked, understandably concerned.
Steve Carell gave him a sadistic smile. “Yes. That’s expected.”
As my friend gave him a confused look, the exterminator explained that bed bugs stay dormant for months. “But when someone’s nearby… ah, that’s when they wake up. And that’s when we,” at this point, he seemed to have tears in his eyes, “kill them.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” was all my friend could say. But because he had limited rent options on short notice, he had no choice but to oblige.
As they say in London, apartment seekers sleep with bedbugs.
Bed bugs, it seems, are creatures of nostalgia and habit. Poisoned, cursed, evicted — they always found a way back. They were the world’s worst roommates: eating without asking, leaving marks, never paying rent.
When someone behaves this way, after a while, you stop fighting. You make peace — like when your roommate’s boyfriend starts leaving his toothbrush next to yours. And you suddenly realise: you’re living with him now too.
Though if you put it this way, maybe those bed bugs and I — we aren’t so different.
Apologies for coming so late in this week. (Usually these essays come out on Thursday). It’s been hectic, to say the least, working full-time, taking care of myself, and writing on the side, alongside 100050000 other things, including, but not limited, to being able to stay in the UK as a (ugh) Russian.
Also, just FYI: I’ll be taking a summer vacation to focus on my novel — part of my MA dissertation — and thinking where to take this newsletter next.
If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to reach out: Faldin.sergey@gmail.com
As always thanks for the humour Serge , although I am sorry about the bed bugs....the worst we get in the algarve are fleas from the cats and ants if one is stupid enough to eat or drink anythinng sweet in bed ! Glad you are ok, overwork part of our survival these days, no need to apologise. Keep well and , I couldn't resist this "mind the bugs don't bite" ....usually pre-phrased by "sleep tight" :) my parents favourite!