Now Elvira picked up a pretzel stick too, but didn’t eat it, just held it like a pen between her fingers. Except for Boris’s puttering around in the kitchen, total silence reigned.
“The man was a giant. At first I thought maybe he stuttered, but he wasn’t a stutterer at all. But he kept blinking the whole time. And he didn’t budge from the spot. Then he asked to take a pee. The guest toilet wasn’t finished, so it had to be the bathroom. It felt strange to let him in there. As he came out he was drying his hands on his pants legs. He said: ‘I call it mange, it’s deep under the skin, y’know, mange is what I call it.’” His hands were an anthracite color, like the lead in a pencil. ‘Pipe in, water out, that’s all it takes,’ he said. I didn’t quite get what he meant. He went on leaving footprints behind and looking straight at me, as if I’d said something, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. I sat down with him at the kitchen table. He didn’t want a sandwich, just coffee and a cigarette. ‘Junos’—he meant the brand of cigarettes—‘I settled on them.’ And then he just kept looking around and saying things like: ‘Gotta cost a pretty penny too, but if all you do is work and sleep, don’t matter much.’ He talked about ‘Mercedes wages’ and ‘a whole day for a working stiff’ and ‘three weeks just for the rent? Don’t need to watch that pot boil.’”
“But he didn’t harm you, did he?” Pavel asked.
“I was afraid of that too,” Susanne said, giving Pavel a nod of approval.
“He told how he’d ‘headed for foreign parts right off,’ in ’90. Hadn’t done anything wrong, no arrests, but when he came back a few years later, his building had been sold and the account where he’d sent his rent was closed, and that was the only reason for his record, he said ‘record.’ But he’d taken time to do good work for us. ‘Corners,’ he said, ‘my corners get an A, customers care about corners.’ Passing the television, stereo, and VCR on his way out, he said: ‘VCR, gotta keep the economy hummin’, I bought me just five tapes and got the knack of it, but then gave it away, not my thing.’”
“Knows her master’s voice!” Boris shouted as he came in with a tray. “And now she wants to swing from vine to vine with him, living with him like Jane of the jungle. She’s thinking about getting a pad of her own, not some palace like this. End of story. Next topic!”
Boris did not set the tray with the teapot down easy. Susanne later said he slammed it on the table. I figured I was the only one who could calm him down, so I said there’d been no mention of that whatever, and that we wanted to hear Elvira finish her story.
But that just sent Boris over the edge. I’d never seen him like that before. We had probably all underestimated how much his new place meant to him, how he’d been working the whole time with no other goal in mind, and how hurt he was by Elvira’s turning down his offer. “It’s all for her, too,” he shouted. “For her, for nobody else! She doesn’t have to bad-mouth it like this!”
We sat there frozen in place, like schoolkids when the principal flies into a rage. I thought Elvira might get up to leave now, or that Boris would throw her out. The worst part was that our silence seemed likely to provoke something of the sort. I was about to say that I could understand what Elvira was getting at, but then Charlotte bent forward, stubbed out her cigarette, setting her bracelets clanking, and said, “I know what you mean. Something of the sort happened to me, too, back when Paul and I were still together. He always knew how to use the system, or so he claimed, and — without saying a word to me, of course — gave our address to an agency, in case they might need a location for commercials or stuff like that.”
I was so relieved somebody had said something that at first I wasn’t even really listening. Taken off guard by this turn of events, Boris stood there for a while, but then poured himself some tea, added plenty of rock sugar, stirred his cup noisily, and finally retreated to his seat. Charlotte held her ashtray in both hands like a precious antique and never looked up at us, as if her story demanded her full attention.
“So some guy called and asked if he could stop by, because they had something that might work. He was teed off that he first had to explain it all to me. But the next day he called again, he was just outside our building. So I had no choice but to let him in. The way he marched right in, the way he strode over the threshold, it was clear I’d made a mistake, I shouldn’t have done it. That actually did cross my mind then and there. But you never listen to your own inner voice. With a head stuffed full of doubts and scruples, you listen to your own voice least of all. We’re taught to be too polite. And so the guy shuffles his way through our eat-in kitchen, from the hall door to the window, from the window to the hall door, squats down as if trying to see if the table has been dusted, rounds the sofa, and is so intent on his own job he doesn’t answer a single one of my questions. And suddenly he says, ‘Okay, you win.’ I ask him what we’ve won. And he goes, ‘The film! They’ll be filming at your place here. This Monday, eight a.m.’ He tells me we need to find a hotel for three days — four stars would be okay, not exactly the Intercontinental, but a good hotel. And only then do I begin to catch on: We have to leave, we’re going to have to move out of our own apartment, for three days. What’s so bad about that? he asks. We’ll be living in a hotel and raking in three thousand marks besides. If he had a place like this he’d do it every week. Martha thought it was awesome, she couldn’t wait for the hotel, and Paul kept asking me if I knew of any other job where you could earn three thousand marks in three days. One did cross my mind, but I didn’t want to risk it — he’d have gone ballistic.”
Charlotte leaned back, the ashtray in her lap now. And we gazed at her as if our weal and woe depended on her going on. Boris, however, had stretched out his legs and was staring absentmindedly at the tips of his shoes while he stirred away at his cup.
“Not even Paul realized,” Charlotte continued, “what we’d gotten ourselves into. Not in our wildest dream did we think those no-parking signs on both sides of the street had anything to do with us. On Monday there they were, one van after another, twenty or thirty of them, some of them big jobs. The doorbell hadn’t even rung yet, and they were already outside our window, on a platform lift, spotlights and more spotlights. I knew it meant trouble. We had no idea they’d be wrapping the whole building. They spread cloths up and down the stairwell — walls, steps, railing, the whole shebang! Claimed they had to do it for insurance purposes. And so everything got draped, inside our place too. Or wait — no, first they photographed everything, even Martha’s room — I wondered why they were doing that, all they wanted was our eat-in kitchen.”
Charlotte bent forward, set down the ashtray, picked up her glass and drank. Her bracelets rattled. “Nice vintage,” she said, toasting Boris, who didn’t look up.
“It was enough of a bother,” she went on, “to have to go to a hotel after work. There’s no way you can have one rational thought in a room like that. Martha and I started squabbling because of her homework — she thought we were on vacation. And as we sat waiting for menus in the restaurant, and they didn’t come and didn’t come, I started sobbing. I’ve never had such an attack of homesickness. I really did feel like a hooker, and then we had to laugh at how absurd that was. And Paul said that I should show him a family that earns its money by sleeping. We could have gone home after two nights, but the guy who called us — the same one who’d marched in the door — said if we wanted to stay put, he’d have the apartment repainted for us, it was in the contract, even though it wasn’t necessary and they hadn’t made a mess — in their own advertising they mention a possible mess — but they’d do a total renovation, that way we’d arrive home with no stress involved and everything in its place. And, since he didn’t want to make the same mistake twice, Paul asked me if that’s what I wanted. And I said, yes. I did think about Martha, but Paul suggested we make a big surprise out of it for her, or whatever. We hadn’t even set down our bags at our building door and they swept down on us, our lovely neighbors, for not having told them anything about it. Well okay, I don’t even want to go into that. I just thought, Home at last — enough anticipation and excitement — all I wanted was to step inside at last. And then there we stand in our own four walls, and everything is exactly like before, just freshly painted. But it’s weird somehow. Paul notices it, I notice it, but we don’t mention it. We say, ‘Not bad,’ stuff like that, and walk around, and I’m thinking: Just like the guy checking out our apartment. And then suddenly Martha starts bawling, she’s standing at the door of her own room, and wails louder and louder. I look inside, no reason to be upset, I think, the photographs and posters are all hanging pretty much where they were before — except one poster has been torn down, and I ask who did that. But it was Martha herself. She had ripped it down, and the next one now too, one after the other, even though they were all hanging in the right place. I don’t know how to describe it.”