The building where I live has twelve flats, and every letterbox looks the same.
That in itself is not a problem. The problem is that the numbers three and eight were painted on by hand, and the paint has worn off, so everyone mixes them up. In the first month I received three other people’s bills, and once a notice that somebody’s insurance had run out.
Then one Tuesday a handwritten note appeared in my letterbox.
“Sorry, this may be yours. I didn’t dare put it in number eight, because I don’t know which one is eight. — 3.”
The letter was a postcard from Germany, written by an elderly woman, and at the end it said: “I hope my grandson is well.”
It was not mine. But I did not know whose it was, so I wrote back on a note:
“It’s not mine. But number eight is the one by the lift, the rusty one. — 3.”
The next day there was another note in my letterbox.
“Thank you. The rusty one is mine. Are you number three? The other rusty one? — 8.”
That is how it began.
I do not know her. That is the most important thing I have to say. We have been talking for five months and I have never seen her. I know she gets up at six, because the note is already there by then. I know she likes smoked cheese, because she once wrote that the shop had none. I know her grandmother lives in Germany, and that she does not dare phone her, because she does not speak German.
She knows a few things about me too. She knows I work in a library. She knows I hate the lift, and always take the stairs, even to the sixth floor. She knows that once I nearly got engaged to someone, and that nothing came of it.
I did not write these things down because I wanted to make a confession. I wrote them down because it is easier on a note. On a note there is no face, no voice, none of that moment when the other person looks away and you realise you have said too much.
In the fourth month, one day there was no note. Then two. Then a week.
At first I thought she had moved out. Then that she had got bored. Then that I had written something wrong.
On the eighth day there was a note in my letterbox, longer than all the others.
“Sorry for the silence. I was in hospital, nothing serious, I’m home now. But there’s something I have to ask, and it doesn’t work on a note. I don’t want to intrude. If you’d like, Saturday at four, in the stairwell. If you don’t come down, that’s fine, and I’ll never ask. — 8.”
On Saturday at four I went down to the stairwell.
A woman was standing there, about my age, with wet hair, holding a note — the same one I had received.
“I was waiting by the lift,” she said. “Because you wrote that that’s number eight.”
“No,” I said. “I wrote that number eight is the one by the lift. The rusty one.”
We looked at each other. After five months there was finally a face, a voice, and that moment too, when the other person looks away.
“So which one is yours?” she asked.
“The other rusty one.”
She laughed. And then I understood that this sound was familiar too — because sometimes it comes through the wall when she is on the phone.
“I lived on the sixth floor until now,” I said.
“And I’m on the third.”
Two floors. Five months. Ninety-two notes.
We do not write notes any more. Why would we? We meet in the stairwell every morning at half past six, and go down together. And we never had the letterboxes fixed.
We don’t want anyone else to mix them up.
