My Year of Love

by Nizon, Paul.

  My housemate’s problem was that he simply couldn’t clean up, he would have had to separate the important things from the unimportant things and put his things into meticulous order, but this task seemed hopeless, a task for Hercules, but not for Florian, which is why he understandably kept putting it off, so it wasn’t surprising that hardly had he come home and unloaded his things than he sought to get away, out into the street, or a café, or he invited people in. Florian was a passionate host, he always had several bottles of wine in stock, vodka too, and besides, he liked to cook, his standard dish was small thin slices of meat cooked in sauce and served with rice, a quick meal he could conjure up at any time, and as his guests drank more and more wine, the decrepit old building resounded with Florian’s daily and nightly banquets, I could share in it all upstairs in my studio at my ironing table.

  The building consisted mainly of a dark stairwell like a cow’s stomach that swallowed anyone coming in. Once the newcomer began to climb the creaking, squeaking wooden stairs, the impression of being in something’s entrails intensified, it smelled of all kinds of excretion, of kitchen odors, apartment odors, of sorrow and sweat. When I crept up the stairs, I could not only smell my fellow lodgers, but also see them right before my eyes, their whole physical beings, their frailty, their good habits or their bad. There were no apartment doors, just room doors that all led directly into the stairwell. Florian’s kitchen door was always open, and from it poured a torrent of kitchen odors and the stink of sweat.

  No sooner had I moved in than he introduced himself as my neighbor on the floor below and invited me in for coffee. I saw his tables bending under the piles of papers and towers of books, I noted the darkened atmosphere. We drank our coffee at a quickly cleared corner of the larger table, I stared around me in disbelief, without paying any more attention to what Florian was talking about, which was some vague literary or cultural topic.

  From the second day on, he knew how to arrange things so that he intercepted me on the stairs to invite me for coffee, for a sip of wine, or for dinner, until I began to decline his invitations, saying that I had to work, and that was true, I only went out to take my dog for a walk and do the necessary shopping.

  Our encounters soon degenerated into positional warfare. At first, Florian frequently came over as it were in passing to ask if he could do anything for me.

  I have to make a quick trip out, he would say. Can I get something for you while I’m out? Or may I quickly make us a pot of coffee? Just a quick one, I’m busy too.

  Not today, I have to work, I say, I’ll gladly come another time. Many thanks.

  Not at all, says Florian, he too is terribly busy. He has writing to do. Just has to dart out for a minute to get something. I hear him rummaging around briefly in his room, and then I hear his footsteps, he bounds nimbly down the stairs, humming a tune. I hear the heavy door fall shut and his quick footsteps receding. A little later he returns with a whole group of people, the stairwell shakes from their trampling, I hear their laughter, the booming voice of my housemate, women’s laughter, glasses clinking, now and then Florian’s rapid steps between his room and his kitchen as he serves his guests, thick clouds of smoke rise up, including the dense smoke of cigars. His invitations and orgies of eating and drinking stretch through the nights and into the morning hours, by noon things seem more civilized again, sometimes behind a closed door, a tête-à-tête? Now and then Florian brings astonishingly pretty young women home with him. For a while, he goes on climbing the stairs to my room to invite me “just for a little drink” with his guests. I forcefully decline.

  Damn it, Florian, I say rudely, I’ve already told you so often, I don’t have time, I have to keep to my schedule, it can’t be changed. Leave me alone.

  From then on, when we meet in the stairwell, Florian exhibits a new type of affected behavior. Now he’s abrupt.

  Have to work, he says right away with no hackneyed phrases, have to write.

  That won’t be very easy with all the things piled on your table, and all your socializing, I’d like to know where you intend to do your work—the remark unfortunately slips out of me.

  That’ll be quite simple, he says. I just have to clean up. It’s long overdue.

  The next time we meet in the stairwell, he murmurs with no prelude:

  I’m in a hurry, I have to clean my room.

  I don’t answer. But from now on, upstairs at my table, I listen intently for Florian’s arrival. He hurries upstairs, taking two steps at a time, and unlocks his door. I listen. Scraping sounds, silence. I see him in my mind’s eye, I see him in his coat, his pupils’ assignments or books under his arm, standing in his room jammed full with everything, and peering with his little eyes at all the sediment, the room is strewn with crumbs, stained with wine, scattered with cigarette ash, it smells of cheese and the remains of other food, those telltale signs of years of suppression, and he panics. He has to make room. But where to begin? And where was he suddenly supposed to find the strength and endurance, the will, the discipline, the courage, the sheer élan? I know, no: I feel that he notices at this very moment that I’m eavesdropping on him, that I see him through all the walls, I’m keeping him under surveillance. One person keeping a watchful eye on the other, deathly silence. Then the door opens, he goes down the stairs, rather hesitantly, he forces himself to take measured steps, just don’t run, he says to himself, now he starts to whistle, he’s whistling something that at first sounds more like a hiss, a humming through his teeth, he’s trying to give the impression of a man who just happens to be going out.

  He stays out a long time. Days with and days without Florianian banquets. His absences are irregular, sometimes for days on end.

  Oh, you live in that writers’ building? people ask me, that’s where that . . . what’s his name . . . teacher, who’s working on a book, right, his name is Florian.

  And now I imagine him, with his expansive gestures, making some newly picked-up friends believe that he is of course terribly busy, he’s writing a book, yes, he’s been working on it for a long time, but just now he has a quarter of an hour’s time, so they could quickly, but just a coffee or a small sip, no more, couldn’t they . . . Besides, he would like it if they came to visit him from time to time. You can find the building easily, it’s a real scriptorium, the building. The man who lives above me is a writer too, you should know, he says. You can’t miss it, not even at night, you can recognize the building by the lit upper windows, a real lighthouse.

  Our encounters on the stairs are more reserved, Florian narrows his eyes behind his glasses, cautiously keeping his distance, then he forces a pained smile as he squeezes past me. Otherwise, he stays out of my way.

  I have a double door installed outside my workroom, I want to put some space between Florian and me, want to shut him out of my life. But as I sit at my gigantic desk, with my back to the windows, my gaze directed at the double door, I catch myself thinking: so he’s going around saying he’s writing a book, the liar, and he can’t even be alone with himself for a second. The weakling, I think, he flees from himself, always has to run after other people who will hold his hand, this massive exploiter, blood-sucker, vampire, rascal, destroyer, smoocher, sponger, repulsive creep, vermin, this bastard, I mutter. And, at that, he is free, has all the freedom in the world, and what does he do with it? And now it occurs to me that at the beginning of our acquaintance he was always going around with one of my books, as people told me, and he pretentiously gave recitations from it, as people informed me, gave recitations and readings with his Rhaeto-Romanic accent, as if we had written the book together. And now I see him in front of me, selling me, yes, as if we were a team, with me being the writer, the one who works it out in detail, while he . . . reads aloud from it; as if I were his clerk; in truth, I think, he must have been downright relieved when I showed up, now he was really free, I was his alibi, the typewriter was clattering day and night, our typewriter, while he gave recitations and received ovations, carried
on the business, kept the public interested. His jovial laughter, I think, always happy. Would you like some coffee, may I fix you something to eat? how about a glass of wine? He uses up whole armies of people to take away his time and keep him from getting anything done, he always has to go to new districts to seek them out, the people are used up so quickly, they start to see through him. Don’t talk such foolish nonsense, I once heard someone say to him.

  And I throw myself into my work at my typewriter, cursing with rage, is this life? I want to write myself out of it, just let me finish this book . . . And I thought, I had imagined the life of a writer to be entirely different, not like mine, quickly taking the dog out, darting dirty looks at people as I lurk around street corners, tugging at the leash, have you finally finished sniffing, you beast of a dog? Florian’s mother: tall, gaunt, makes an austere impression; he goes to visit her every few weeks. Did I mention that Florian has unusually large hands, very, very large and warm hands that one always notices with surprise when shaking hands with him, or when he’s cutting bread or slicing cheese, when he’s pouring wine, then one thinks with amazement, what indecently large hands he has, obviously also very strong hands, in any case his hands are always too large for cutting bread or cutting up cheese, and one imagines his hands away from the loaf of bread and imagines how they are likely to behave when they’re on the delicate body of a young girl. Another reason his hands are probably so astonishing is because his eyes are so small. And sometimes there’s something in his look that tells me that he’s very well informed, something knowing, even pleading, that can make one feel ashamed. He has a generally strange appearance, he’s impressively tall, strongly built and plump, but the plumpness doesn’t really stand out, and he has a relatively small head with black, parted hair. And glasses. And behind the glasses his small eyes are always on their guard and draw even closer together when he feels offended, either by me or someone else. He has the appearance of an escaped monk, or just of an escapee in general. When I see him walking, there’s something boyish about him, like a plump, rugged little boy, and it would hardly be surprising if he suddenly started to hop on one leg, because after all, he has just escaped from school. There’s a trustfulness about him, an expectation that people will be kind. If he sees someone he knows, he greets the person effusively. The slightest gesture that could be interpreted as an invitation causes him to approach, but he does so with a certain guardedness, a readiness to retreat, as seen in someone who has all too often had bad experiences. Someday, with his gigantic hands, he’s going to strangle someone, his chatter is just the admission fee, he’s been seeking admission for so long that someday he will have had enough.

  Good Heavens, I think now in my narrow boxroom: maybe I was the one who gave him that plan, maybe he had no plan at all before I moved into the building, maybe it’s like the fellow with the long beard who always slept well until someone asked him if he put his long beard over or under the cover when he went to bed, and after that he couldn’t get to sleep anymore, he didn’t know what he did with his beard, he had never asked himself about it, and maybe Florian had never been bothered by his free time at all, maybe I just happened to ask him in passing how he spent his time, and it wasn’t until that moment that he began to think of having a plan or of the necessity of having a plan, began to believe in it and to blather on about it, and after that he felt obliged to have a plan.

  Is it possible that I, by my presence in the building, placed him under an incommensurable, unbearable, ridiculous pressure to work harder and do well, that I caused him to criticize himself? He became my double, my other self, as it were, he was claiming all the glory for himself—is that what so infuriated me? Did I begrudge the fact that he borrowed my damned writing and clattering at the typewriter to make himself look good? He was only borrowing me for harmless rhetorical purposes, so why not. He slipped, as it were, into one sleeve of my person, nothing more, yet I took it so terribly amiss. O Florian, or did I envy you your never-ending free time and freedom, your lifestyle, of which I felt incapable, for some wretched reason, dependent as I was on the typewriter, the ironing table, bound to the idea that I had to be an achiever?

  Florian lived below me, but above me, in an attic room right next to the storage space under the roof, another fellow tenant put in guest appearances, sometimes just for a few hours. He was a teacher too, a Latin teacher, if I’m not mistaken. I was also painfully aware of his arrivals and his presence, I couldn’t come to terms with the fact that this gentleman was there.

  He had the habit or bad habit of scurrying up the stairs, usually in the late afternoon, but mornings too, and for no other reason than he was so obviously trying to flit past me as considerately and as invisibly as possible, I had to listen and make myself aware of this fellow I didn’t like, I found him physically revolting, he had that five o’clock shadow that people with a heavy growth of beard retain even right after they shave, which means they always have it, and his five o’clock shadow made the pasty texture of his face stand out, in which his dark eyes peered out from behind his glasses with an expression that was both slightly ironic and also fearful or reproachful. So he always tried to get past me without making a sound, if possible on tiptoe, and this maneuver, designed to be considerate and quiet, sounded louder to my ears than any possible clatter.

  But something else irritated me about the gentleman: he used my bathroom. I had rented the entire floor, and the bathroom belonged to that floor, it was a very narrow room, a tunnel or strip of a room, with a throne right under the small window and a little basin along the wall. Some predecessor had nailed a poster to the inside of the door, and I used to turn my eyes and thoughts toward it while I was sitting there, I no longer know what the poster portrayed, it didn’t bother me, but it did bother me and anger me no end that this gentleman had the habit of spending hours in my bathroom, leaving splashes all over the room, I assume he washed himself there, washed himself entirely, didn’t just shave or wash his hands but stood there naked and washed himself from top to toe.

  The overly long séances in my bathroom made this additional fellow tenant even more disagreeable to me. So I attempted, at first trying to be courteous, to prevent him from using my bathroom to such an extent, indeed from monopolizing it, and asked him not to use it at all, pointing out to him that it belonged to my floor and was even included in my lease under a special clause. He objected that this bathroom had to be regarded as a sort of shared bathroom because there was no toilet upstairs in the attic and he had always used my toilet, since long before I had moved into the building, his right to it was at least as established a right, and that caused me to ask the lady who owned the building about it, whereupon she offered to rent the attic room in question to me, since I had already expressed interest in it and would have had a use for it; for her part, she was quite prepared to throw out the gentleman living in the attic, apparently she too disliked him.

  And then one day this Latin teacher came to me, he had, he said, heard that I was trying to drive him out, that was the reason why he had come and the reason for the discussion that he was hereby requesting. He sat on my old sofa that I had once purchased in England, sat there with his legs crossed and his eyes wide open and fearful and said, as he asked my permission to go into some detail, that the fact was that he was attached to this attic room because as a child, a farmer’s child, no city child, a child of poor people who had many children, as far as I understood, he had lived in an attic room that was also directly next to a storage space or a dark storage hole, and this attic room of his childhood was what he had found again in this attic room here that he had already occupied for such a long time, in any case for much longer than I had been there, he couldn’t imagine another attic room, another room, even if he could find one, which was doubtful, because this room here simply meant more, for him quite personally much more, and it meant more than just an attic room, it embodied the situation of his childhood, a spiritual topos, and besides, he was deaf in one ear
and his physician had recently told him he was in danger of losing his hearing altogether, the process was unstoppable, he wanted to make sure I understood that, unstoppable, and it would have dire consequences, because sooner or later it would probably cause him to lose his position as a teacher, and for that reason too the attic room was important to him, absolutely necessary, indeed necessary for his survival, this was where he did his writing, he was writing a novel, I should know, and when it came to the point where he had to give up his position as a teacher, he would have to earn his living from his novel and other things he would write, which he begged me to understand, and writing, that is, continuing to write the novel and to finish it was only possible for him, it was particular to his own personal needs, in an attic room like this one that embodied the attic room of his childhood, because back then the neighboring room had also been a storage space, he needed this incarnation of his childhood room in order to write, that is, in order to survive, and that was why he couldn’t possibly think of leaving the attic room, it was unimaginable to him, he would have to be removed by force, but, and he wanted to point this out with all due emphasis, he would have to interpret my overtures as psychological terrorism, and I would probably not want to boast about having used psychological terrorism on a man who was in danger of losing his hearing . . .

  So once again we have a writer and a novelist in the building, I thought, but I’ve never come across anything to read by this gentleman and attic poet, never heard that he’d published anything, he was and remains a Latin teacher, and in his attic room he was often visited by young girls, female pupils came and went, maybe he gave them private lessons, maybe his ablutions were associated with these visits. He stayed put.