I only know the old neighbor of the top floor of the flat behind our house from the relentlessly loud voice with which, in good weather, she sits on a chair in front of her door on the gallery and yells at her neighbor, also sitting in front of his door, and with that not only takes over the airspace above our backyards, but also penetrates the wall and windows of the bedroom in which I was sweating my corona.
I am least fond of her stories about Mrs. de B., the sweet, confused nuisance from the flat, who died so lonely last year. “Man, man, man,” she cried. ‘She comes to me. I say: not now, Mrs. de B., I am very ill. She says: Shouldn’t you call a doctor then? I say: No, there is no need for that. Ten minutes later, I just got back in, the phone rings: the doctor’s office, if I needed help!’
“I say damn it,” the neighbor called out to her neighbor in the gallery. ‘I go there. I’m telling you, Ms. de B., don’t do that to me again, call the doctor for me – if I’m sick already, will I get this too!’
“Yeah, haha,” said the neighbor, with a nervous submissiveness, to which, in his circumstances, old and frail, you might want to leave yourself in the face of the neighbor’s voice violence. ‘Yes haha.’
“Do you follow politics?” she cried. ‘Do you follow politics?’
“Yeah, haha,” said the neighbor. ‘No.’
‘Well, neither do I. All lies, you’re just annoyed. Have you seen the Reflections? Or the gas survey? They always have nice talks, but when she is asked about how and what, they don’t know anything anymore!’
“No, haha,” said neighbor. ‘Nothing.’
There was silence for a moment – a short, invigorating silence in which you still hope for an acute vocal cord injury, a small but venomous hairline crack that will not heal and forces the patient to keep his voice quiet.
But alas: ‘What a magazine, isn’t it?’ she cried. ‘What a leaf – there is leaf everywhere! For weeks. I walk through the city and I think: it seems like November, it seems as if it is almost winter, as much leaves as there is. Not normal.’
“Haha,” said the neighbor. ‘No.’
‘That’s what the trees do on purpose,’ she cried, ‘letting the leaves fall so early, they do it to survive.’ Perhaps it was the fever, but for a moment I thought she was talking about herself, metaphorically, thus giving up her life motto – if you want to grow old in order to be able to complain for a long time, you must drop your leaves early – a small variant, but different , it seemed to me, to a life lesson such as you could have recorded from my grandmother’s mouth in the past: ‘If you don’t want to grow old, hang yourself early’.
“Because of the drought, huh,” said the neighbor. “Because of the drought, haha.”