A Petty Epiphany
Summer solstice excites for the same reason Stonehenge does. Otherworldly wavelengths provoke creatures to ponder notions beyond their ken: the movement of the planets; the suspicion that their light—and life—comes from sources far, far away. Perhaps we were all on edge that day. In any case, it was on summer solstice day 2011 that I was dealt my epiphany like a slap in the face.
The epiphany? The unchanging truth, demonstrated brutally throughout the centuries, that human consciousness breeds class war. Kings know they are greater than their subjects; lords that they are finer than the common folk; masters that destiny mandates they rule over slaves, the matter of procurement posing their single weighty prerequisite; burghers that they are better than beggars; and the Eigentümer in my apartment building that they are superior to the tenants. I, a tenant, collided with this wisdom in the same moment as I nearly collided with the door of my upstairs neighbor—an Eigentümer. His new wife closed it on my face to deny me, not just entrance to those grand chambers, but any glimpse of that stunning interior. The knowledge that a lowly tenant had got up their private stairwell to knock was, I felt, almost more than she could bear.
An Upstairs Neighbor?
I only first acquired an upstairs neighbor after residing in this building for fifteen years. Once upon a time, I had none. I occupied the top floor with nothing above my rented space but the flat roof, flowerboxes full of rocks, and the pigeons that brooded up there. Ah, those were the days. There was a problem, though. The roof leaked. It had leaked ever since 1986, the year I moved in.
What to do about a leaky roof? Fifteen years of squabbling were required for the absentee Eigentümer to determine how to slice this Gordian knot and what a brainstorm it was when it came: cover up the leaks with another layer of apartments, grand apartments, pricey penthouses.
Although the decision impacted my living quarters—and thus rather directly, me—I was neither consulted nor informed on the matter. I did not count. I was a tenant. German law goes a long way towards substantiating that point. A tenant has no legal right to receive information of any sort about her living quarters or the environment in which she lives from anyone but her landlord. Call up the department of urban planning and building regulation in Munich to ask if the rumors you heard about plans to build a parking garage next door are true, and the first question asked is: “Sind Sie Eigentümer?” If you lie and say yes, you’ll get what info they have, which may be that, yes, an eight-floor parking garage is going up ten meters from your fifth-floor terrace. If you tell the truth and admit you are only the tenant, the answer will be that they are not allowed to tell you, that you must contact your landlord to find out. Consider the exercise: They are charging you to write to your landlord and ask him to please find out if the man who owns the stamp collecting business on the corner and passed the rumor on to you knows what he’s talking about. I’ll tell you right now, your landlord won’t. My landlord lives hundreds of miles away, does not know the city, and neither knows what my living circumstances are nor cares. But, no matter. In reality, at no time did my landlord volunteer any information about any plans to add a sixth floor, so I had no clue about it until the air hammers started overhead. All I could do was take it, and I did. For a solid year.
The apartments that resulted were constructed as matchbook-size warrens, touted as a big deal, marketed as luxury penthouses, and sold to a small horde of condominium owners. No lowly tenants moved into our apartment building this time. We received our first and probably last batch of mighty impressive residents. After the contracts were signed and they were all moved in, they found there was a tiny catch: the roof still leaked.
Sind Sie Eigentümer?
After Mr. So-and-So moved in upstairs, his first question to me when he passed me in the hallway was the same one the Munich department of urban planning and building regulation asked me the few times I called: “Sind Sie Eigentümer?” No? Oh, well. Mr. So-and-So backs away. No point in talking to me, then. However, it turned out he did have other things to say to me. He asked me repeatedly if he made too much noise up there, if I had heard some clatter or other coming from upstairs, if he was too heavy on his feet over my head … In other words, he seemed quite anxious to impress upon me the fact that he was the lord up there and I was the lowlife down here. My attempt to make him understand that for sixteen years he hadn’t been up there, that I had been the penthouse dweller all that time, fell on deaf ears. He was up there now, and that proved I had been lowlife always.
Then came the elevator discussions. These gossip sessions were singular in one respect: He waxed loquacious. He told me he had owned a printing press, had sold it for a great profit when he retired, was divorced, had been flayed alive by that woman, who turned out to be—to his complete surprise, but utter conviction—a nymphomaniac. She had gotten the house, most of the money, and his other penthouse, which was why he was living here … right over me.
Mr. So-and-So’s father, related Mr. So-and-So in another elevator chat, had been a machinist-entrepreneur who built up a successful business after World War II—indeed no easy feat. The business had gone to Mr. So-and-So’s older brother and was now the third-largest air conditioning manufacturer in the world. This last nugget was the more impressive when I looked up the company in the Internet and read that it provides air cooling systems for massive data storage centers, has a division that researches and manufactures high-tech plastics, and brings in one billion dollars per annum. Not a fly-by-night operation.
In these elevator chats, Mr. So-and-So revealed that he is a mountain climber of considerable ability and experience, a sailor, and, to sum up for the sake of brevity, an all-round super-athlete, with prowess honed to the utmost degree. He used the present tense to describe all this, despite the fact that he is over seventy, has a sizeable belly, and suffers from tremors in his head so marked that I wondered neither he nor I mentioned them.
None of these elevator discussions smacked of flirtation, by the way. He, the Eigentümer, was trying to be nice to me, the tenant. But even those generous labors of his made me wonder. Why did he have to try so hard? I soon learned: Bowing to my level from his great height felt just slightly like groveling.
Genteel Inaccessibility
The original construction of the apartment building was simplicity itself. The ground floor contained commercial classrooms with separate entrances to each. Sammy Abdo’s belly dancing school was the most colorful, but we lost him to water damage. The next four floors contained apartments. Above that came the leaky roof, the flowerboxes full of rocks, and the pigeons.
The building has three entrances, ingeniously named Aufgang 1, Aufgang 2, and Aufgang 3. Aufgang 1 was at the juncture of the building’s two wings, Aufgang 2 and Aufgang 3 at the wingtips. Each Aufgang gave access to a spacious but drab concrete stairwell that led up to the four L shaped hallways that communicated with all the apartments on each floor. Beside each apartment was a nameplate and buzzer. Mounted in the wall in an orderly array by the appropriate Aufgang were matching nameplates and buzzers. Each address included Aufgang 1, 2, or 3 so you knew which entrance to go to summon … Herr Braun? You go to Aufgang 3, locate his nameplate, ring, Herr Braun answers, expresses delight to hear from you, opens the door, and up you go.
This description may seem belabored for something so obvious as ringing at someone’s apartment, but such logic was not preserved for our penthouses. Here mystery reigned, and the arbitrary inaccessibility reeked just slightly of aristocracy.
First of all, because the apartments were so unique, you couldn’t tell where one stopped and another began or how many apartments were up there, so you couldn’t even guess which entrance gave access to which penthouse. As a result, you had no way of locating a particular penthouse buzzer unless you knew the name of the person living up there. But you didn’t know that. They were Eigentümer, had not come round introducing themselves, and didn’t talk to the tenants anyway. I had no idea who was up there. To find out, I would have to climb up to the sixth floor and read their nameplates. Since there was no common hallway up there, I could not simply ascend a stairwell, casually stroll down the hallway, read the names on the nameplates as I passed by, and safely descend the next stairwell. No, I had to climb each staircase in turn, furtively examine the two or three nameplates I found, then hurry back down before someone caught me and asked me whom I sought. Since it would be all too obvious that I sought no one in particular and Eigentümer have a tendency to regard the actions of tenants with suspicion, the danger of being exposed as a snoop was considerable. If I had the courage to be honest, I would of course answer that I simply wanted to find out who lived up there even if it was none of my business.
Glass Door Innovation
The risky exercise of ascending to a floor above my level to spy out the nameplates of a couple of penthouse residents was elementary compared with the barricade my guy had erected against direct access. A glass door, studded with a large steel handle and conspicuous lock, appeared sturdily mounted in the stairwell hallway one day two meters from my door, blocking off the flight of steps that led up to his apartment. You could still see up there, but you couldn’t get up there anymore. The message was loud, clear, and of great significance: this is my section of concrete stairwell, you worm.
There could have been a number of reasons for this construction. Perhaps the apartment sold to him was so stingy in dimension that they threw in part of the stairwell as compensation. Or, perhaps the man was of such prominence that he required seclusion that only his own private bowel of stairwell could ensure.
The absence of both nameplate and doorbell by the glass door compounded the two massive disadvantages this idiotic glass panel created. First of all, if it so happened that unbeknownst to him his hair dryer fell out of his window onto my snapdragons (which has happened twice), instead of just walking up one flight of steps to ring his damn doorbell to return it or ringing his damn doorbell by the glass door, I had to travel down four flights of steps, exit the building, and ring at the entrance like a delivery boy. If he answered, I could then ask for a face-to-face audience—which he was by no stretch of the imagination obliged to grant me—to give it back. If such graciousness was forthcoming, I would then make my way back up four flights of steps to idle outside his glass door until he descended to open it and receive from the waif standing out in the back alley, so to speak, his hair dryer, who would probably also apologetically explain that if the appliance was damaged the waif hadn’t done it. If worse came to worst, he could thunder down from the landing of his stairwell what the hell I wanted. The architect has no idea how many enticing variations that glass door gave Mr. So-and-So of condescending to the meek, the lowly, and the trash living in the depths below him, that is to say, the tenant. Now if it so happened that the news I had to give him was that his apartment was on fire, I might be tempted to let him burn to death.
The second disadvantage the glass door imposed might not be so bad considering the first: if I did not happen to know Mr. So-and-So lived above me, I would have no way of finding out short of contacting my landlord. (Don’t forget, I am a tenant and no one is permitted to give me information about the building but that eminent personage.) Necessarily, I would write my landlord requesting he please provide the name of my upstairs neighbor whose apartment was on fire so I could locate said neighbor’s buzzer four floors below to inform him of the matter. I do not know if my landlord would be bound to answer me, whether he would be within his rights to demand that I tell him why I wanted the information, or whether such information could possibly remain withheld from me indefinitely. In the meantime, dear Mr. So-and-So would be—as modern rhetoricians so fondly express it—toast.
The Medieval Wife
Then our man got married again. It didn’t take him too long. Maybe he’s of the type that has to be married. The woman he chose was a fine example of medieval womanhood: between 15 and 20 years younger than himself with a thick mane of frizzy butter-yellow hair and a fair, open face (looks can be deceiving); tall enough to match him; and as substantial as a sandbag. I met her briefly before the marriage, at which time she was flustered but winsome; she excused the fact that they were getting married by explaining that it was urgently incumbent upon her, after all, to insist that he “make an honest woman of her.” Her remark fell on deaf ears, as that logic stamped me, a 57-year-old bachelor lady, a hardened criminal.
Right after the marriage, there was one friendly moment when she ingenuously confessed to me, “Gee, I’ve never been an Eigentümer before.” It was all downhill from there. Her greetings, however tepid they had been to begin with, were replaced by a wordless scowl whenever we happened to pass each other, if she deigned to acknowledge my presence at all. Apparently in the meantime she had been confronted with the fact that the roof leaked, that the neighborhood was very like a slum, and that I was the primary agent of both.
As the years when by, Mr. So-and-So, who was exercised by his duty to appease his wife, gradually dispensed with his overbearing cheeriness towards me. This alteration in his manner was a mild relief. At least we had achieved a level of sincerity in our relations.
The Petard
An open breach in relations between Eigentümer and tenant occurred some months ago. Despite the fact that Mr. So-and-So’s penthouse commands two stories of rooms, nooks, crannies, hallways, staircases, and a sun porch, I found a tree by the floor-to-ceiling window in my hallway just outside his glass door. What’s more, it stood in exactly the spot from which I frequently survey the wayward growth of wisteria in the northwest corner of my terrace. What’s more, I felt pretty sure Mr. So-and-So, whose tree I strongly suspected it was, would expect me to take over responsibility for it: to please water it when he left on one of his frequent and lengthy vacations; to pick up the dead leaves that would inevitably fall from it if I watered it too much or not enough; to answer if the tree failed in any way (was I watering it too much or not enough?); to volunteer to take over watering altogether because, after all, Mr. So-and-So couldn’t even get his newspaper delivery stopped when he went away, let alone outsource a tree. What’s even more and the true annoyance of the matter was that the lord and master was spilling his guts out of his two-story abdomen, down his glassed-in private intestine and into a part of the building’s anatomy he had no right to constipate. It was an excess I neither should nor would accept.
However, in truth, I did not know whose tree it was. I did not know who had put it there. And I wasn’t about to travel down four flights of steps to ring his bell to ask for an opportunity to speak to him face to face, travel back up, and shuffle at the glass door awaiting his descent to ask if he put the tree there in order to ask him to remove it. I know how that would have ended. I would suffer an interrogation from him for why I didn’t want the tree there, and maybe, just maybe, I would end up excusing my neurosis and begging him not to be annoyed with my pettiness as I listed all the stupid little reasons I had for wanting it removed. No. It was against house rules to put private property in the hallways. The tree had to go. Period.
I printed out a nice, neat sign and taped it to the tree’s planter: “Diese Pflanze ist bitte zu entfernen!” (“This plant is to be removed, if you please!”) I was careful to add the typical enthusiastic German exclamation point, a punctuation mark the Teutonic folk uses frequently and eagerly in contrast to the somewhat prudish style of American punctuation. I appended my name to the message and the date, which was also, you might think, rather prudish, but it was unquestionably correct.
The sign caused an eruption. He rang at my door shortly thereafter, only chagrined at this stage, saying he had thought the plant looked nice there. At least, he reproached me, I could have asked him directly rather than putting up that sign. I said I could not have done so because I did not know who had put the tree there. He turned and retreated up his stairwell. A moment later, I realized it was very unwise to risk bad relations between us. Quickly I packed in foil some chocolate chip cookies I had baked just that day, raced down the four flights of stairs, and rang their bell. Mrs. So-and-So answered. I identified myself. She did not understand. I identified myself again. She did not understand. A third time—I lived right below them; should it be so difficult for her to grasp that it was I who was ringing? Especially when the matter of the tree must have been a hot topic for them by this time. Finally I managed to get through to her that her neighbor one floor below had something to give her and her husband. I then traveled back up and, yes, idled shiftlessly at the glass door for someone to descend. Mr. So-and-So appeared, and it took not long for me to see that he was in a towering rage. He descended indeed to the glass door and opened it, his light blue eyes black with fury. “As compensation,” I said, proffering the tin foil package of six cookies: I didn’t want to overdo it. Wordlessly, he trained on me those venomous eyes, their lids lowered, the pupils black and wide as tunnels (why so wide I don’t know; I thought that when you looked at something you disliked—or hated—the pupils constricted). Then he did something unaccountable: he raised one hand almost gently, laid it on my shoulder, and shook his big, handsome, white-haired, trembling head. He had never touched me before and has never since, but in that moment he laid his hand on my shoulder, almost it seemed to protect me, and shook his leonine head, but his eyes continued to smolder, ferocious and threatening. I withdrew my rejected gift. “Is it that bad?” I uttered with faint heart. He gave no answer. I shrugged, turned, and retreated into my apartment, not looking back once.
Relations have soured ever since. But we have carefully kept our distance as well. Until the leaking roof brought us together one more time on summer solstice.
The Summer Solstice Epiphany
As I mentioned, the roof still leaked. In fact, it had gotten much worse for me. Water now ran directly into my living room, but it was no longer possible to determine the source, catacombed as it was between my ceiling and Mr. So-and-So’s floor. I had written to my Eigentümer many times with textual descriptions and photos. Workmen had come to my apartment many times, flat-roof experts had explained the problematic construction of flat roofs to me many times. People had come with moisture measuring devices. Gutters had been mounted, metal slats had been fitted over lateral cracks, Mr. So-and-So’s planters had been emptied out and their insides waterproofed, a measure objected to violently as patent nonsense by everyone who heard of it. But the work was done, three days of emptying Mr. So-and-So’s dirt down onto my terrace, while I worked away at my bread, butter, and beer not two meters away wondering if I would suffer my stroke that day or the next. The waterproofing of those particular flowerboxes ameliorated the flooding in my apartment not one jot.
The house management firm was canned because they had not fixed the leakage and a new one brought on precisely to fix the leakage. (I, a tenant, was not informed of this switch until I called the canned house management firm to notify them that water was still running into and at times overflowing my three-liter Tupperware tub, by now a permanent fixture under my interior gutter spout.)
The round of letters, visits, and leaky clarifications began anew. Finally, on summer solstice day, a small army of specialists, know-it-alls, the janitor, and an Eigentümer with persistent leakage problems assembled in my apartment to take pictures; measure the moisture in the walls (way too high, as always); explain the construction of flat roofs to me and each other; tell me that the black mold in the crevices was very bad for me and that I should remove it immediately, but that it had nothing to do with any leaks; reject the Eigentümer’s suggestion to clear the downspouts, which had never been cleared, pronouncing that that had absolutely nothing to do with the problem; and finally shake their heads, admitting it was impossible to tell how the water was leaking through because no one was small enough to wiggle his way up through the cracks to find out. But that wisdom was what they had walked in with. The fact that they intruded on me time after time to rediscover it was more than annoying at this point.
My buzzer rang yet again. I went to the door. It was Mr. So-and-So. Somewhat exhilarated by all the commotion, I told him gleefully, “They’re coming your way next!” That’s what he had come down to find out, he said; he had been waiting and waiting. When were they coming? he wanted to know. I answered it would probably be in about ten minutes, and he left.
Sure enough, the company soon exited my apartment and headed for Mr. So-and-So’s stairwell, the glass door to which he had considerately left ajar for them. Up they went. In the ensuing peace and quiet, I returned to my work. But as I approached my Stehpult, I saw an unfamiliar camera lying there. I grabbed it and, seeing Mr. So-and-So’s glass door was still open, hurried up the stairwell. At the top of the steps, where I had been a few times years before, I was surprised to see that the original door to the apartment had been replaced by a massive wooden one you would sooner expect to see set in the three-foot-thick stone wall of a medieval fortress. Perhaps it was meant to impress people with Mr. So-and-So’s extravagant wherewithal, but it communicated to me an excessive caution: that door would withstand an onslaught of the most unruly tenants, the nearest example of which for the So-and-Sos was undeniably myself. The door had also been thrust forward several feet closer to the top landing to give them more room, no doubt, to take off their hobnailed boots in utter privacy. In any case, this massive barrier had a bell and I rang. The door swung back so quickly to reveal Mrs. So-and-So standing there that she must have been standing by the door as I rang. Her stony expression also indicated she knew who had rung, which betrayed the fact that they had a peephole installed in the door, which I, naïve tenant, had not noticed. She uttered no word of greeting.
“Someone forgot his camera!” I sang out, still a little exhilarated from what was turning out to be for me an unusually gregarious afternoon. In making the announcement, I dangled the device from its cord and leaned inside to cast a look to my right where I expected the water-damage experts to be gathered between Mr. So-and-So’s dining room table and window, staring no doubt outside at Mr. So-and-So’s waterproofed flowerboxes, under which somehow sometimes water coursed into my apartment to flow neatly and directly into my three-liter Tupperware container. With my call and movement, I intended to signal whoever in the group had left the camera. But my clumsy design was nipped in the bud. The camera was instantly snatched out of my hand and the most honeyed tone I have ever heard in my life, and the most odious, murmured, “I’ll pass it along.” I glanced up in alarm, and saw nothing but the massive door, which had already been shut firmly in my face.
A queer sensation went through me. Something very unsavory had just happened, but what? I had just been delivered a solid put-down, but how? I pondered it off and on throughout the afternoon. Throughout the night, sudden recollections of the incident always startled me awake, but my feelings about it were not terribly unpleasant, an important sign that I was able to handle this. But still, something very wrong had been done to me, and I didn’t know what. Then I knew: I had been shut out because I was dirt. Mrs. So-and-So might admit entrance to the house management people, to the Eigentümer, to other leak-seekers, to the janitor himself who had been one of that jolly group, but she was not going to let me in because I was trash.
In the same moment of clarity, I realized the cordial enthusiasm I had shown Mr. So-and-So that afternoon had not been reciprocated a whit. Effervescence too often serves as hazardous camouflage, masking the complete indifference, even latent hostility, of the person addressed. So it was in my case, and now it came home to me that Mr. and Mrs. So-and-So were simply treating me with the contempt due to people of a lower class.
I don’t see them much and am fortunate that I find their attitude, though onerous, preposterous, although it’s class war all the same. Since I find it preposterous, I can only continue to be friendly when I see them, but I can sincerely confess that my soul responds with sad sympathy when I catch an occasional glimpse of Mr. So-and-So seated Indian-fashion on the bare concrete landing of his private stairwell repairing his mountain bike. His goodly wife has outclassed him.