The Door

After eight hours of cleaning tourist filth in a cheap hotel on the edge of the city, I went back to the neighborhood where my chronically unemployed husband and I had spent the last thirty-seven years of our lives.

We were young back then, giddy with the life that lay ahead of us. We came across this apartment just in time. Our first day in the apartment was to be our zero year, this tiny, sweet, boxy apartment was to be the wedge of the great run we would challenge life with. The wall had collapsed before our eyes like a tower of cards. All of a sudden, when we least expected it. The whole city was drunk on ecstasy, and so were we. Everyone and everything was so drunk that we could only utter a few sensible sentences after one too many drinks. When a friend of mine told us about an empty apartment and its price in this neglected, partially ruined East Berlin neighborhood, we just stood there, bug-eyed. Newly married, looking for a roof over our heads, we didn’t even think about it. At night, we would cheer up as that decrepit, golden-hued wallpaper peeled from the corners, and we felt like important people as we looked at the bullet holes on the exterior of the house from the war.

Thirty-seven years later, a lot has changed, except for us. Houses, roads, shops, streets, traffic signs, tram lines, trams running on them, clothes, prices, everything! Most of all the people have changed, my husband Karl and I woke up one morning and realized that the people around us were not like us anymore and this hurt us a bit. A cafe had replaced the greengrocer’s shop across the street, whereas the East Germans like us lining up there to buy exotic fruits were replaced by young English-speaking people lining up to buy drinks with exotic names in paper cups.

I walked past the place where those young people were drinking their coffee, strutting yet timid, as if someone might snatch those paper cups from their hands at any moment. Then I ducked into a side street. I went to the pub at the end of the street, drank my chronically unemployed husband’s half-finished whiskey-coke, and we headed home together. We didn’t talk much on the way. We’re not a couple that talks much anyway.

As I was looking for the key in my bag in front of the apartment door, I noticed that the opposite door was open. “It was open this morning when I left,” I said to Karl, not showing any agitation.

Karl and the sickening smell of cheap alcohol emanating from his body answered together: “It was open when I left at noon too!”

We stopped and stared at each other for a second. “Do you know their names?” Karl asked. “No,” I said, “just the last name.” As I inserted the key and opened our door, I asked, “Do you think we should do something?” Karl, after glancing sideways across the apartment through the slight opening, said, “Like what? Should we call the police?”

I didn’t answer. I was too exhausted and despondent to worry about a half-open apartment door in my apartment building. “I don’t know… Maybe we should call the property management,” Karl said as he came in behind me. “Never mind, Karl,” I said, “we don’t even know who they are. Let’s have dinner.”

Until a year ago, an elderly woman lived alone in that apartment. There was a strange sparkle in her eyes that made you want to hold on to life, no matter what. Perhaps it was the remnant of another time, another era, one we couldn’t begin to comprehend: like hope left over from a pain. It was one of the rare luxuries of my monotonous life to spot that sparkle and comfort myself by looking at her. When she suddenly died last summer, her daughter came, sold her belongings, emptied the apartment, and left us that lampshade that we threw in a corner of the living room and almost never used.

Less than a week after her death, the apartment was cleaned up and put on the market. I remember one Sunday morning, maybe fifty people gathered in front of the building. Mostly young, excited, enthusiastic people. When I went downstairs to buy bread and walked among them, I felt them eyeing me as if they were looking at an exotic animal, a relic from ancient times. It seemed like they were embarrassed for me.

We went into the house and turned on the TV, Karl and I. He put two plates, two knives, two forks, two glasses on the kitchen table. I took out butter, cheese, salami and bread from the fridge, and Karl poured us each a glass of cheap red wine from the box. But there was something strange about his demeanor. He couldn’t stop fidgeting, the knife in his hand was suddenly freezing midair as he was about to take the butter and spread it on the bread, he was getting ready to say something and then not finding the drive to say it.

I actually love my husband. I love him despite all his foibles, his chronic unemployment, his lack of discipline, his indifference, his misplaced satisfaction with life, his festive laziness. Because Karl is a child. And I love him most of all when he is like that, when he is exactly what he is, when he behaves like a child, when he throws off the yoke of old age, responsibility, dignity and becomes what he really is, a child.

After taking a bite of my buttered-salami bread, I looked at Karl with a slight grin and asked, “What do you think, shall we go and have a look?” Just as I thought, Karl, the naughty boy of the class, was freed from his voluntary captivity. His eyes lit up, he was excited, he tried to hide it, but in vain: “Yes,” he said, “we are neighbors after all, aren’t we?” When I couldn’t help laughing, he seemed offended for a moment, but quickly got over it.

The old woman’s death was followed by the renovators, prospective tenants, armies of triumphant real estate agents and finally culminated in the arrival of a middle-aged couple with two children. One weekend they quietly moved in across us. They seemed like a nice, good-humoured couple. Whenever we met, they would smile and give a slight nod. It wasn’t fake, but it was a routine, monotonous warmth, carefully planned and rehearsed.

We stood in the doorway. “Mr. Elsner, Mrs. Elsner,” Karl called. No answer. “Maybe,” Karl said, “something urgent happened and they had to leave suddenly.” “Yes,” I said, “or they thought it was closed this morning. You know how sometimes you push the door gently and rush out without looking back, thinking it will close anyway… Maybe they’ll be back soon.”

Although it was not very late, the apartment was quiet. At that moment we heard the door of one of the apartments below open, and we involuntarily flinched at the same time, as if we had been caught red-handed. We went back to our flat, locked the door and never spoke about it again that night. I was already asleep before ten o’clock, while Karl was immersing himself in a darts game on TV.

The next day I woke up and went to work. I always wake up in the morning and sometimes, on those gray, dull winter mornings, I find myself wondering what would happen if I didn’t wake up. But then, on just such a morning, as I make my coffee and watch from the living room window the street below slowly coming out of its shell, I find myself carried along by a quiet contentment, like a river winding its way somewhere; I think to myself, then, that this must be the uncalled-for contentment of having woken up one more morning. On that Friday morning, I left the house touched by that unexpected joy of being alive and realized that the door to the apartment across us was still open. I went, worked, got tired, came back, picked up Karl, shopped, went home, and the door was still open.

We live on the fourth and last floor of the apartment building and there are only two apartments on each floor. We are probably the only ones in the apartment who are aware about the open door. Maybe that skinny cleaning guy noticed it too, but didn’t care. Anyway, why should he care?

Our Friday evenings with Karl are mapped out in advance. Half a kilo of pork from the fatty part, potatoes with bacon in the frying pan, no upper limit on the wine ration, and if there’s still time, we go out to the pub around ten and shot-glass our way until morning. It was the same on that night too, but unusually, the meal was followed not by lethargy and sleep, but by an unexpected surge of energy, a wave of joy that felt temporary and uncanny. “Come on,” Karl said, just when I expected it, “let’s go out and continue at the pub.” I looked at him - I don’t know what happened to me at that moment, but something happened to me at that moment - I said:

“Forget the pub. Let’s continue at the neighbor’s!”

Karl was like a schoolboy getting ready to taste the first alcoholic drink of his life. Unsure of himself, terribly confused, but at the same time exuberant. But it wasn’t the schoolboy who prevailed—it was that wild animal inside, smelling blood. “Okay!” he said, raising his voice and downing the half-full glass of wine in one gulp. “Get up and let’s go!”

We were drunk, but not so drunk that we couldn’t think of not wearing shoes so as not to leave a trace. We entered our young neighbors’ apartment barefoot, Karl in front and me behind. We agreed that it wasn’t a good idea to turn on the light, so Karl went back to our place to fetch a flashlight.

As he left and I stood there, in the darkness at the entrance of an apartment belonging to people I didn’t know, something else happened to me: I still wonder what happened. It was like the first step into the sea on a cool summer morning. It was an impulse, a call, missing the last exit before the bridge. In the unfamiliar stillness of this living room, which wasn’t anything like ours, where I could barely make out the huge works of art on the walls and the uncomfortable looking furniture in the center, standing on the edge of the living spaces of people I didn’t know, I felt an otherworldly palpitation I had never experienced before, and I took a dark pleasure from it. I wanted to disappear there, just like that. I wanted to strip down and sharpen whatever was inside me, in that brief period of time waiting for my husband to fetch the flashlight.

Karl sensed it as soon as he returned—a hunter catching the scent of blood. When he shone the flashlight down on his own face, I thought I could have sacrificed thirty-seven years of my life for that sly, sinister, uncanny gleam in his eye—which, in a way, I already had. I asked him to shine the flashlight across, gesturing with my hand. I slowly walked to the living room window overlooking the courtyard. I put both hands on the glass and leaned in. I stripped off my nightgown, pulled down my panties. “Fuck me here,” I said. Karl approached. He fucked me there, in front of the courtyard window of our neighbors’ fancy apartment, like he had never fucked me before.

We collapsed on the floor, breathless. My thighs in the fresh polish of the monolithic wooden floor, my mind in the vast countryside of a village sixty kilometers outside Berlin, I felt so light, even though I am considered to be an overweight person. “We need a cigarette,” Karl said. I didn’t bother to answer. He jumped up like a boy let out of school and went to our apartment to get a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. Then I got up too and put my panties and nightgown back on. I looked around with the flashlight Karl had left and caught a glimpse of a liquor bottle on top of a tall, thin, glass cabinet. It wasn’t until Karl returned with a cigarette that I realized it was a whiskey bottle. “My dear,” I said with all my good humor, “would it be too much to ask if I asked you to bring two glasses?”

Karl suddenly snatched the bottle from my hand, but not aggressively, rather playfully. He took the cork out and put the bottle on his head. When I saw the look on his face, I couldn’t help laughing. He pretended to be offended for a moment, then grinned and said, “It tastes like stove.” Then, holding the flashlight, he examined the whiskey’s label and said, “And I thought the Japanese were good at whatever they set their minds to. They’ve obviously failed at whiskey.” Naturally curious, I reached out and grabbed the bottle. The moment I had lifted it up the bottle, the living room light came on.

I stood there, wearing a simple nightgown, my feet bare, my hair disheveled, and the bottle raised like a trophy in my hand, facing the living room door. In front of me is Karl, the look of horror spreading across his face. A young man in fear behind him, and a young woman instinctively trying to embrace her children to protect them in the face of unknown danger.

I noticed the woman pulling out her phone while the man was trying to shield his family with both arms spread, as if we were going to devour them right there. At that moment they probably realized that we were their next-door neighbors. So much so that the man, after looking at our faces intently, let his guard down and seemed to calm down, but in fact his demeanor and expression were more frightening than that first moment of surprise. I broke the silence and said to her, “Mrs. Elsner, please, don’t call the police, we are your neighbors.” Karl was still in shock, unable to move. “Nina,” the male Elsner turned to his wife just behind him, “please don’t call the police. Let’s work this out between us. You go put the children to bed now.” The younger of the children was in his stroller, probably asleep, and the older one seemed strangely calm, as if he had witnessed such a scene every evening.

At first the woman attempted to protest, but then she decided that it would be a good idea to take the children away from this hodgepodge, so she took them and went into the back room. I put the bottle down, locked eyes with Karl, signalled to him that we should make a quick getaway, and we both headed for the door. “Stop!” the man shouted with an intensity that surprised us both. “Where are you going?”

He was a tall, well-molded man, probably in his 40s, who obviously worked out regularly. It wasn’t that I was afraid he was going to do anything to us directly, I had already judged him to be a pushover despite his size the first time I saw him. But still, we were the villains of the story and we had to stop.

“Sit down!” he said, and Karl and I sat side by side, like two brats called to the principal’s office. I felt embarrassed, but that uncanny excitement was still there, haunting me somewhere deep down.

The two of us collapsed on the couch, side by side. The man took the white single armchair opposite us, which looked extremely uncomfy to sit. After looking us up and down as if we were insects, he slowly got up and picked up the bottle of whiskey I had just left on the cabinet. “So,” he said, “let’s have some whiskey together, what do you say, neighbors?”

He took a big gulp from the open bottle and wiped his mouth with the back of his left hand. “Now,” he said, “I’m trying to understand this, but I can’t. Normally I should call the police, but I don’t like the police.”

“So,” he continued, pointing his index finger at each of us in turn, “I am counting on you to help me understand this! I may not like the police, but that doesn’t mean that a crime can go unpunished. Now, can you please tell me in detail why you broke into my house!”

Karl and I suddenly stood up and headed for the door, but Philipp blocked our way. We sat down again. He recovered instantly, back to his composed, calculating self. “I’m not going to let you leave until you explain yourselves,” he said.

Knowing Karl’s tendency to crumble in such confrontations, I felt compelled to step in. But the words wouldn’t obey me. It wasn’t drunkenness, it was something else: A kind of dizziness, some sort of lockdown from experiencing such extremes in a few hours while living probably the most monotonous life in the world. “When we saw your door open,” I said with difficulty, “we were worried… I mean, we are neighbors. Since we are neighbors, we wondered if there was a problem… I mean, if something bad had happened…”

As I tried to mumble with my head down, my eyes fell on his face, obviously my words were not making any sense. “Okay,” I said, suddenly looking up, defiant, even a little insolent, “we’re sorry, we were a little out of control, can we pay for the damage we did to you tonight and go home now?”

Just as he was about to continue, his wife entered the living room. “Philipp, what are you doing?” she said in the calmest, most tiresome voice in the world. “Either call the police or let them go!”

“Don’t be silly Nina, stay out of it!”

It was the dream scenario—they left us and started arguing among themselves.

“These people broke into our house and you’re sitting there drinking whiskey with them.”

“What would you like me to do? Beat them up? Throw them out the window?”

“Oh… Your macho complexes are on the rise again.”

Hearing this, his cool demeanor suddenly evaporated. He stiffened, made a strange, perhaps involuntary gesture. Then he regained his composure and switched to English, thinking we wouldn’t understand. A few sentences passed between them, which we really couldn’t discern. Only when we heard the word “whiskey” did Karl and I involuntarily look at each other again. Somehow I felt relieved when I saw that dirty grin on the corner of his lips. I thought of the worst-case scenario, as I always do when my already not-so-good life is turning to shit. It wasn’t that this asshole Philipp was going to beat us up, of course, I knew for a fact that he wouldn’t dare. So he could call the police. Not much would come of that either, because we hadn’t stolen their money or damaged their property. We weren’t going to go to jail for ten years for two sips of whiskey. So to hell with them! What’s done is done.

While I was making these calculations, the fight between the neighboring couple intensified. In my broken English I sensed that the woman was actually inclined to take our side just to spite Philipp.

When she said, “Whatever you do, I’m not interfering,” and went back to the children’s room, he sat down across from us again. “Yes,” he said, visibly straining to regain his composure, “I’m listening to you, neighbors! Why did you break into my house and drink my whiskey?”

Karl, who hadn’t spoken the whole time, was about to mumble something like, “But as your neighbor,” when I stopped him. “Well,” I said, “why did you break into our building, Mr. Elsner?” It was just as I imagined it would be, he was stunned for a moment. Seizing the opportunity, I started to gurgle:

“What happened now? You are surprised, aren’t you? You didn’t expect this from me, did you? You wanted us to bend down before you, to apologize, beg for forgiveness, didn’t you, neighbor? We have been living in this building, in the apartment across from you, for thirty-seven years. Until you came and disturbed our peace. You and people like you. Okay, I’ll tell you why I broke into your house, but in return you also have to convince us about your reasons. Why did you come here and disturb our peace? Before you, an old woman lived here. A woman who had seen two wars, who had seen poverty and hunger, who had spent her youth shivering in shelters and gnawing bark in forests. She had that specially reserved smile for me some mornings, you know, Mr. Elsner, such a smile… I wouldn’t trade the sparkle of those eyes, that beautiful silky face, the way that smile comforted me for not one but a hundred thousand of your Japanese whiskey. In fact, I wouldn’t trade it for all the whiskey in the world!”

I stopped, looked at him. He had listened to the whole tirade without interrupting me, peacefully, even with a look of cheeky satisfaction on his face. But the real surprise for me was not his state but my own flow. You know how in spring the snow melts in the Alps and all those streams, cascades, waterfalls merge into one thundering flow toward the sea? That’s what I wanted too—to reach the sea, in one violent rush.

The neighbor waited for me to finish, ran his hand through his beard, eyed his belongings around, trying hard not to catch sight of my face. Then he picked up the bottle of whiskey lying on the floor and took another sip, but unlike before, it was a cat’s sip. Then he said, “I understand you, but there’s something you didn’t consider.”

This unexpected softening, this relationship of equals which made itself felt for the first time since the beginning, had a cushioning effect on my nerves too. Was this what I was craving for maybe? A relationship of equals.

“Look,” he said, “you are from Berlin, I am not. I am an immigrant, yes. But isn’t this also a city of immigrants? Hasn’t this city grown and swelled with immigration and migration from the beginning? Haven’t people from outside like me always come and upset the order here? Always-”

I don’t know what happened to Karl, but he interrupted him like a guillotine falling. “You’re cleaning your conscience, Philipp, you’re digressing,” he said.

You should have seen Philipp then. Karl couldn’t call him “you” or by his first name, his name was “Mr. Elsner”, where did this intimacy come from? Who are we to enter his house, drink his whisky and call him Philipp like a school kid? Karl’s astonishing intervention was enough for him to lose it, funnily enough not with its content but with the form.

As it got noisier, the wife came back to shout the words, ‘Shut up, Philipp,’ so loudly that all of us, including Philipp, fell silent. Then she opened the apartment door, turned to us and said, “Go away, please! If nothing is stolen, we won’t call the police, I promise. Please go home now!”

Karl was about to get up not to miss the opportunity, but I took him by the arm and made him sit down. “Mrs. Elsner,” I said to her, “what theft? Are we thieves? We may not have as much money as you, we may not have as much stuff, but that doesn’t give you the right to insult us.”

Philipp’s eyes were wide open at this time, a dirty smile on his face, trying to appear like he’d seen it all. “Very good, very good,” he said, standing up again. He was overacting terribly at that moment. He picked up the whiskey bottle again. “Do you know how much this bottle costs?” he said, looking at us. I shrugged, he continued. “I paid 115 Euros for this bottle and you have half-finished this bottle without my permission. Now, isn’t that stealing? Your sense of morality seemed to be wounded because the word ‘theft’ was just mentioned. ‘Uuuuuuuhhh we are poor but we are not thieves’? I don’t know what is theft if this isn’t, Ms…”

“You don’t even know my name, do you?” He really didn’t.

“Don’t change the subject,” he said, watching his wife, who was still standing in the doorway.

“Now this thief-”

Karl interrupted him again and said something that made me chuckle every time I remembered the incident: “But we were going to fill that bottle with cheap Aldi whisky and put it back!” So that’s what my wise husband was thinking while he was gulping down the stove-flavored Japanese whiskey.

The husband laughed hysterically, forcing himself a little too hard. Taking advantage of his showboating, I intervened. “Yes,” I said dryly, “that’s what we were going to do, and you were going to drink it without realizing that it was 5-euros worth of Aldi whisky, saying ‘Wooooovvvv, how unique, how exquisite’, and you were even going to make your friends drink it. Isn’t it true?”

Now it was our turn: Karl and I started laughing like we were lunatics. Oddly enough, the man was laughing with us too. At that moment, the woman still standing at the door shouted again, this time even louder than before, “Enough!” We fell silent again. Karl got up. I stayed where I was.

When the husband moved and closed the apartment door again, the wife completely went off the rails. “Do what the hell you want!” she said to us. Then she turned to her husband and gave him one of the most degrading looks I’ve ever seen in my life and said, “Philipp, I’ve been wanting to tell you something for a long time. Today is the day.”

All eyes were on her now, including Karl’s and mine. She took a step closer to him, lowered her voice slightly, acting utterly malicious and insidious, her voice like venom, and said, “I hate you!” Poor Philipp just froze there. With a huff she turned her back on him and went back into the room where she was putting the children to sleep. The sound of the door slamming startled both Karl and me, even though we knew it was coming.

I felt incredibly exhausted at that moment, like a monkey sent into space against its will, like we had fallen into the middle of an unfamiliar fairy tale. The man picked up the whisky bottle again, took another sip, checked us. “Well,” he said, “how do you know this isn’t cheap Aldi whisky?” This time the three of us burst out laughing. It was as if the madness that had descended on me when I entered this apartment was now spreading to everyone in the room. More than the joke, we were all laughing at our own pathetic state at that moment, at our own wounds, fragilities, our own crookedness as human beings. But, as expected, our neighbor was the first to snap out of it, not gradually, not like water cooling down. He abruptly stopped laughing, straightened up, forced himself back into that calculating, sly, cold-blooded man. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth!” he said, again with his index finger raised. “I won’t let this go until I get my revenge on you.”

Then he went and got two glasses from the kitchen. He poured us each a glass of whiskey and served them. He sat across from us and began to explain in earnest how this revenge plan would work. Karl and I lent an ear to him, sipping our whiskeys, as if we had been long-time friends, discussing the plan together.

Just then there was a knock at the door. As the neighbour got up to answer it, his wife came out of the room. “I called the police!” she said. The man buzzed them in without even looking at her. He turned to us. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll send them away and we will continue!”