I was born over there, in the Dapperstraat. Over the years, I moved around the area and eventually landed here, on the fourth floor of a stately building on the east side of the park. I spend most of my time in an armchair just inside my living room window, looking out onto the park. Most of the city’s sounds fail to reach this high, and I content myself with observing the silent stories of the world outside my window. Some things are better without sound. Even violence seems peaceful when wreathed in silence. I have witnessed robberies and drunken brawls that suggest contemporary ballet, the dancers wheeling around each other with exaggerated, expressive movements. From my vantage point, these events are almost beautiful.
I don’t have many friends. Just one, really. His name is Ruud. He’s absurdly fat and always in a bad mood. He doesn’t walk — probably because of his weight — but putters around in a motorized wheelchair. I have no idea why we’re friends. Perhaps we’re both lonely, who can say? We see each other almost every day in the library in the Linnaeusstraat. I read the newspaper, and Ruud asks me what’s in it, and then he curses the world while we drink free coffee from plastic cups.
A few months ago, Ruud asked me how long I plan to stay on in the house on the park. “You’re old,” he said, meaning maybe it was time for me to start looking for a place in a rest home. But I’m not planning on moving, and I told him so. “You’ll die there, then?” he growled, and I said yes, that is indeed my plan, not necessarily right away but eventually. At which point Ruud felt compelled to tell me yet again about his neighbor, a hoarder who tripped over a pile of junk, fell down the stairs, and broke his neck. When the police searched his apartment, they found his dog half-dead, with — so the story went — its decomposing body melting into the carpet. “They had to carry the poor thing out of the house, rug and all. Finally had to put him to sleep.”
“I’m not a hoarder,” I said.
“That’s not the point,” Ruud hissed between his teeth. “You’re too old to go on living there. One of these days you’ll break your hip or something, and you’ll be too weak to call for help, and then you’ll die up there, and your body will rot away and start to stink. Everyone else in the building will suffer, just because you’re too stubborn to go to an old folks’ home where you belong.”
“It won’t take them long to find me,” I shushed him. “You’ll miss me, won’t you?”
“You wish,” he muttered, then ordered me to go on reading from the paper.
To be honest, it doesn’t matter to me if I die alone in my apartment. I’m used to being alone. It would be strange to be surrounded by people when my time comes, to see Ruud’s fat face before me as I take my final breath. I don’t even want to think about it. No, I’m accustomed to my own company, and the prospect of dying alone doesn’t bother me in the slightest. I only hope my death is painless. Violence frightens me — even the thought of it makes me nauseous.
I clearly remember that conversation with Ruud, because it happened the same day the walls of my house began to speak. I’d been reading in bed, and at the moment I closed my book and reached to turn out the light, I heard it. The voice was soft but audible, right beside my face. A vague whisper. I listened, holding my breath. It was a woman’s voice, and though I couldn’t understand what she was saying, I could tell that she was unhappy. The experience made me quite nervous, but after a few minutes the voice faded away and I drifted off to sleep.
A curious thing about this type of old structure is that you can’t really predict how sound will travel. I didn’t recognize the voice that came from within my walls. It might have been someone living two doors away, or on the ground floor, three flights below me. Or it might have come from the third floor, where the building’s new owner lived with his wife. He was a lawyer who’d bought the house a few months earlier in the hopes of increasing his income. I watched him go out the front door every morning in a gray or dark-blue suit. A man of routine, who returned home each evening promptly at a quarter past six. His wife didn’t work. She was a quiet woman with a pale face, not unfriendly.
The owner was almost as insistent as Ruud in his attempts to convince me to move out. He even offered me a sum of money to leave. He wanted to renovate my apartment, I knew, so he could offer it at a much higher rent to expats or some other wealthy sort. But I’m not leaving, and I politely told him so, even though that means I’ll go on having to mount a discouraging number of steps to reach my nest. I don’t want to leave this house, because I know it inside and out. The stairs are very steep, yet I know which ones will creak when I step on them. I know where the handrail is loose and how the front door sticks in the winter, how you have to give it a bit of a push before it will open. And although I don’t know all of the residents, I do know the building’s idiosyncracies... and that’s a sort of love, isn’t it? Yes, I love this house, and in a way I believe the house cares for me too.
Looking out the window one day, I saw the owner approaching. I glanced at the clock on the church tower farther up the street: it was only three in the afternoon.
Without undue haste, he chained his bicycle to the fence on the other side of the road. There was a noticeable calmness in his movements. Something in the way he checked to make sure it was safe to cross — too in control. A hint of pent-up anger. I stepped away from the window and stood in the middle of the living room, listening for any sound from below. I heard him open the front door and quietly lock it behind him. As his footsteps ascended the stairs, I had a growing sense of discomfort. It was the middle of the week, a workday. At this time, the building was deserted, except for the owner and his wife. And me, above them. He’d probably forgotten all about me.
Involuntarily, I held my breath. The ticking of the clock on the windowsill sliced the air. Then, without warning, a storm of violence burst out beneath my feet. The owner roared as I’d never heard before. Furniture crashed, some glass object shattered against a wall. The wife’s sobbing pleas seemed to come from every direction. They leaked through the cracks in the windowpanes, crept through the mouse holes, climbed the walls, and oozed into my apartment and filled it, bouncing off me as I stood in the middle of my living room, my hands over my face, more frightened than I’d ever been in my life. When the crying stopped, the hitting continued, and I slowly dropped my hands to my sides. Bang bang bang, I heard, and I wondered what the woman’s silence meant.
Perhaps the scene below was less violent than it sounded? Or perhaps he had knocked her unconscious? And then, in a sudden insight I couldn’t wish away, I realized that she might no longer be crying because she was dead. Perhaps I — hiding behind my hands like a coward on the building’s top floor — had overheard the murder of the quiet woman with the pale face.
The next day, I told Ruud that the owner of my building had beaten his wife, that I’d been afraid I’d been a witness to her death — but that later, thank God, I’d heard her scurrying around below. I was concerned, I said, that at any moment the situation could take a turn for the worse.
He shrugged. “She’s the one who’s chosen to stay with him,” he said.
I don’t really like Ruud, although I call him my friend. But his words contained a grain of truth: if the woman wanted to leave, she’d be gone by now. And what, I asked myself, could an old-timer like me possibly do to help her, anyway? How could I protect her from a husband decades my junior? And what if he found out she and I had spoken — wouldn’t that make him even angrier? What if, because of my interference, he did something even more violent than he’d already done?