The neighbour’s dog waited at the gate for fourteen days.
They had lived there for fifteen years, and for fifteen years every morning was the same routine: at half past six the gate would open, the dog would run out, sit down at the edge of the pavement and watch the street. He did not bark. He just sat and waited for his owner to come out with the coffee.
Then one morning the gate did not open.
The neighbour was eighty-one and lived alone. His daughter came once a month, always on a Sunday, always with a box of cakes. The dog was called Bolyhos, a stupid name for an animal that size, but he had chosen it and could not be talked out of it.
That afternoon the ambulance came. The gate stayed shut.
The next day Bolyhos sat down at the edge of the pavement again. So he did on the third. By the seventh day he no longer got up; he just lay in front of the gate and watched the handle.
I did not know what you are supposed to do at a time like that. Nobody teaches you.
On the tenth day I took him out a bowl of water. He did not touch it until I had gone away. On the eleventh, a little bread. On the twelfth, I sat down beside him on the pavement and said nothing, because there was nothing to say.
On the fourteenth day his daughter came out of the house.
“I can’t take him with me,” she said. “I have two small children, and my husband is allergic.”
I looked at Bolyhos, who by then was sniffing my shoe as if mine were the most important smell in the world.
“He can stay here,” I said.
I did not say it because I have a good heart. I said it because for two weeks I had woken every morning to somebody waiting for somebody in the street, and I knew what that felt like.
In the first week Bolyhos did not come into the house. He slept on the doorstep, turned towards the gate. In the second he came in as far as the hall. In the third, as far as the kitchen.
Now he sleeps on the sofa, and in the morning he is the one who gets up first, not me. But sometimes, around half past six, he goes out to the gate, sits down at the edge of the pavement and looks down the street.
Not for long. Five minutes, maybe ten. Then he comes back in and waits for me to make the coffee.
I do not speak to him at those times. I do not think he is waiting for me then either. He simply goes to check that the world is still there.
I have a place like that too. The kitchen window. Sometimes I stand there and look out, for five minutes.
Not because I am waiting for somebody. But because it is good to know that the world is still there, and that from there a person is not alone in it.
