SHORT STORIES

We had been searching advertisements obsessively. We needed something that would hold. A roof that did not expire after seven days. A place where the clock would stop resetting.

One of the many adverts K replied to was this one. She assumed, quite naturally, that she was writing to the owner. The reply that followed appeared to confirm it. Would we like to come and see the flat? A few days passed. Reality caught up. Bank statements. Income histories. The quiet arithmetic by which people are filtered out. We wrote back, thanked them for the reply, wished them success, and explained, pre-emptively, that we were only looking for something temporary. One year. No longer. This was our standard exit strategy. Step back before being filtered out.

But another reply arrived. Warm this time. Almost relieved. They thanked us for our honesty and directness, said they had not yet found the right people, and asked whether we were still interested. We must be the right people, we thought, and a date was set.

The flat itself was fine. Three rooms, a bath, a kitchen. Compared to the nightmares we had seen before, it was palatial.

By then we had learned that Samira and Martin were not the owners, only tenants living upstairs above what would have been “our” flat. They had been entrusted with the preliminary screening by the still unseen owners. That, too, seemed natural enough. The Kampmanns were simply looking for the right people to live below them. Nice people. People like themselves.

The first indications of what this actually meant arrived in the hallway. Martin was speaking expertly about old buildings, their virtues and inevitable shortcomings. I had drifted off, already rearranging furniture in my head, when I noticed that he and K were laughing. They had found a solution.

A bell.

If it became too loud upstairs, we could ring it. Seeing that I was lost, he said, as if this were simply how things worked, that his son, Elija, was a Hackentrampfer. A heel walker. I needed a moment to understand that we had arrived at one of the classic problems of communal living. I looked at the young woman who had been living there and smiled.

“And what was it like?” I asked. “Is it really that loud?” The room went still for a moment and she began answering in a way that suggested no answer would be entirely safe.

Outside, Martin showed us the garden. First his. Large, productive, exuberantly uncontrolled. They grew their own basics. Then, on the way to what would have been our side, he carefully pointed out the exact border. Our section was fair in size. A horticultural desert perhaps, but with a view across a small meadow and then another much larger one framed by forest. I could live with that, I thought.

What struck me only later was the precision with which the boundary was explained. Where ours ended. Where the others began. At the time it seemed oddly thorough but harmless enough. I nodded politely and continued dreaming.

Then came the inevitable. Martin asked us upstairs to fill out the necessary forms. I fled. Muttered something about the dog and disappeared. K had no such escape and followed him upstairs to be processed alone. I already knew how this would end. Freelance artists with freelance incomes rarely top a landlord’s wish list.

So I stood outside waiting and watched a family of storks. Father stork sat on the barn roof looking visibly exhausted, like someone halfway through his second beer. Mother stork and two teenagers were still crammed into a nest far too small for all of them, balanced absurdly atop a thirty metre pole. Another family drama. Such nice people.

K eventually reappeared. We talked on the drive back and quietly closed the book on the whole thing.

Or so we thought.

Holiday flats occupy a strange category of architecture. Usually the upstairs section of elderly people’s houses where the children once lived. Under the eaves. Modernised. The warning is almost always the same. “Mind your head. My mother was tiny.” Polite German for enjoy your stay while smashing your head. Hanging lamps over every conceivable table. Kitchen cupboards positioned with surgical precision at skull height. I carried bruises like a travel diary.

The next afternoon I was lying in the bath. A small luxury. An escape. I was imagining interiors with four metre high ceilings when the phone rang. I ignored it. It rang again. And again. Finally K placed it into my wet hand. I always answer with my name. That’s how I was raised. My parents had not anticipated the future development of telephony.

“Hallo, Adrian Mellon.”

“Robert Gerlach here.”

His English was as good as mine. Perhaps it was the bath, or the language, or simply the name. One of my oldest friends is also a Robert. But the conversation immediately felt oddly familiar, almost intimate. I nearly said, “Hey Rob, I’m in the bath,” and caught myself just in time.

“Robert, I’m in the bath.”

He immediately offered to call back later. Polite. Correct. We exchanged a few words and then, without ever explicitly agreeing to it, continued the conversation as if I were fully dressed and seated behind a desk.

We talked easily. As if we had done this many times before. The fact that he was calling to say we had been chosen felt almost incidental. Only later did I understand that this too had been a screening. The second to last one. The final one took place a few days later, when we met his ex-wife, Greta, who would show us the house.

Greta lived directly across the road from the Hof. We arrived far too early, quite nervous, and took a short walk. On our way back I stopped, captivated by the beauty of a single chestnut leaf. Without thinking, I picked it up.

When we knocked, she opened the door smiling. I suddenly noticed the leaf still in my hand. “Here,” I said, impulsively. “This is a special leaf for you.” Something shifted. She looked surprised, then amused. She understood.

Nice people after all.

Her living room was a catalogue of herself. Music. Painting. Sculpture. Domestic creativity arranged into a glowing nest of self presentation. The room seemed to say I am what you see. And I must admit, I liked it.

We began to talk. Or rather, she spoke. Continuously. I tried to participate by interrupting politely, pointing at objects, asking questions, but every answer simply opened another corridor. The electric violin. Japanese calligraphy. Herbal concoctions. Paintings. Ceramics. Travels. Waldorf education. Steiner. Spirituality. Layers of biography arranged like a permanent exhibition of the self.

At one point, imagining this might finally become reciprocal, I mentioned that I too had attended a Steiner school. It made no difference. No pause. No curiosity. The current simply continued flowing around itself.

If we passed the screening, it was because we listened. And because of the leaf. Nice people after all.

After two hours we finally crossed the road to see the house. The pattern repeated. Colours on walls. Japanese calligraphy. Where things came from. Where they were going. Histories attached to objects. Objects attached to identities. Another two hours passed like this. By then I no longer knew whether we were being shown a house or an entire cosmology. We left exhausted. Thoroughly screened. Sieved. Flattened.

But the house was beautiful.

A few days later Robert called. “When would you like to move in?” Moving in was intense, as it always is. Boxes. Improvisation. Exhaustion. The slow reappearance of objects one had already mentally abandoned.

And then, gradually, the improbability of it began settling in. We had arrived here from holiday flats. Smash your head architecture and seven day contracts. And now suddenly we were living in a manor house.Twelve rooms. Two centuries old.

One afternoon I called my sister. She is a business person. Someone who understands, or believes she understands, that the world revolves around a single axis. Money.
I told her the story. The endless searching. The holiday flats. Robert. The screenings. The absurdly low rent for such a place.

She paused. “That’s incredible,” she said. “But where’s the catch?”

I laughed. And felt something tighten slightly inside me. “I don’t see it yet,” I said.