It rained for three days, and on the fourth it turned out that the cellar of the building had filled with water.
Not a disaster. This kind of building is seventy years old, and the cellar floods once every five years. The old residents know, and at times like this everybody goes down, and everybody organises.
I did not know, because I had lived there for two months.
At seven in the morning the doorbell rang. A man stood in the doorway in rubber boots, with a bucket.
“Are you the new one on the third floor?”
“Yes.”
“Come down. Your stuff will get soaked too.”
I went down. There were already ten people in the cellar: women, men, a boy who might still have been at school. Everyone was holding a bucket and standing in an imaginary line, one end of which was in the water and the other at the courtyard drain.
Nobody spoke to me. I was simply given a bucket.
That is the best thing a community can do: it does not ask, it does not explain, it just gives you a bucket.
For two hours we passed the water along. In the meantime it emerged that on the third floor, opposite me, lived a woman who had moved in at the same time as me. Two months ago. In the same building. On the same corridor.
“Why haven’t we met?” she asked.
“Because it hasn’t rained.”
We both laughed at that. Then we went on passing the buckets.
In the afternoon the water began to go down. The caretaker brought bread with lard and onions, and we sat down on the cellar steps, twelve of us, and ate as if this were an outing.
We did not talk about big things. We talked about how the cellar used to be a wood store, and how the husband of the woman on the second floor used to come down here to smoke. About how the courtyard drain blocks every year, and how the city never fixes it.
That kind of conversation is the hardest, and the best. It needs nothing, only a shared trouble and a free afternoon.
The woman sat beside me. She held the bucket in front of her feet, and her hair was wet.
“What do you do?” she asked.
“I translate. From home.”
“I teach. In a primary school.”
“Then we both work from home.”
“And still we haven’t met in two months.”
That sentence sounded like a reproach, but it was not. It was something else: a door that had opened.
In the evening, when we finished, we went up the stairs together. On the third floor we stopped, because both of us had our flats there, opposite each other. It was ridiculous, and we both knew it.
“Would you like a tea?” she asked.
“Now?”
“Now. I’m wet, I’m tired, and I don’t feel like being alone.”
We went into hers. Her flat was the same as mine, only mirrored. Even the curtain was the same, because everyone in the building was given the same one when they moved in.
The tea was strong, and the cups did not match. That is the best sign I know: whoever keeps mismatched cups is not expecting guests, but people.
We did not become a couple that evening. In fact, for a long time we were just neighbours who dropped in on each other for tea.
But over the next five years, at every flood, we carried the buckets together, and during those five years I learnt that love does not always begin the way it does in films.
Sometimes it begins with somebody handing you a bucket and asking nothing.
