On my first day in the new flat the lift was broken, and nobody helped carry a sofa up to the sixth floor.
That is not a metaphor. There really was a sofa, and the lift really was broken.
The movers carried up the boxes, then said the sofa would not fit through the stairwell, and left. I was left in front of the gate with a sofa, a key to a building, and the certain knowledge that this day had not been planned this way.
In a city this is the hardest part: a person thinks moving is logistics. Then it turns out that in the first days it is not logistics, it is who speaks to you.
A man came out of the building, about my age, with a canvas bag.
“That won’t go up,” he said.
“I know.”
“But the second stairwell has a service lift. Nobody uses it, because the residents don’t know about it.”
I looked at him.
“How do you know?”
“I live here. On the fourth floor. Ten years.”
That is how it emerged that there is a service lift, that its key is kept by one of the residents, and that the resident has to be asked, you cannot simply use it.
The man left, and twenty minutes later came back with a key.
Three of us carried the sofa up: him, the resident who owned the key, and me. On the sixth floor we stopped, panting, and in the meantime the sofa had scratched the wall.
“That’s why you shouldn’t bring a sofa up here,” said the resident.
“Then why did you help?”
“Because once I was standing in front of the gate with a sofa too.”
That sentence has stayed with me, and I do not know exactly why.
In the first week I knew nobody. In the second, the man from the fourth floor nodded to me in the stairwell. In the third he asked whether I had electricity in the kitchen yet, because at theirs they had had to complain twice.
In the fourth he came over and looked at the socket, because he said that in buildings like this it is always the same fault.
In the fifth we took the rubbish down together, because it turned out we do it at the same time.
In the sixth I asked whether he would like to come up for a coffee. He said he would.
Now he was sitting on the sofa — the sofa we had carried up together — looking at the room, still full of boxes.
“It’ll be lovely,” he said.
“There’s nothing in it yet.”
“But there’s a sofa.”
We laughed at that, and it was the first real laugh in this flat.
We did not become a couple straight away. That is not how it goes in a city: first a person gets to know their neighbour, then they find out that the neighbour is not only a neighbour.
For two years we lived in one building, one floor apart. Then one day he said:
“I don’t want to live one floor down.”
“What do you want?”
“The same place.”
Since then we live in the same flat. The sofa is still here. So is the scratch on the wall, because he said we are not repairing it.
That scratch was the first thing that happened in this flat. Not the furniture. It was that two of us carried up something that one could not.
