Manuela and Saskia walk as though they live around the corner, with assurance, a youthful at-homeness, without glancing at street names or numbers. We pass a halal butcher’s, an African clothing store, a knock-off electronics store, a pizza place, and a shoe shop with leopard- and zebra-patterned men’s dress shoes. Then we turn down a smaller road. There’s a hemp store and a store for bags and suitcases, a hairdresser’s with a gaudy purple façade, then nothing but doors and numbers on doors, and unadorned post-war buildings. The sidewalks are snowy and icy. The cars are all snowbound, and there’s trash beside the tyres, and mounds of cigarette butts. This seems pretty depressing, I say, and for the first time all day I consider the possibility that I might dislike the apartment. I am not interested in post-war utility, pressed wood, and vinyl or laminate wood flooring. I am not interested in plastic toilet seats. Saskia says, Trust me, this is not your area. These apartments go for half your rent. Much less, says Manuela. Much less, Saskia agrees. We walk a few more minutes, then we come to another big intersection. The buildings on it are old and tall, and the ground floors are flower shops, cafés, a place to buy Apple computers, and a chocolatier. There are strollers being pushed by young, beautiful women. Now the street is full of old, sincere, beautiful buildings, with big stairways leading up to the front doors. The sidewalks have been swept clean, and are dry. We see a man pick his dog’s shit out of the snow between two snowbound Mercedes, wrap it in a bag, and put that bag in another bag that is slung over his shoulder. In the basement level of a place we walk by, there’s a single lantern hanging over some steps down to a little bar. The bar’s name, says Saskia, translates as The Lantern. It’s your local bar, says Manuela, whether you like it or not. The glass on the windows is stained amber, so you can’t see inside. There’s a blackboard outside that reads 13.00 – 02.00. It looks pretty serious and dull, a place Mr and Mrs Pyz might run. I imagine it’s a nice place to have a late drink, a place you can talk to the bartender about the history of the neighbourhood. And when two a.m. rolls around the bartender is happy to let you stay a while longer.
Ahead, there’s a woman in a gleaming white wool coat and black tights and high heels standing on the corner of a T-junction, smoking a cigarette and looking at her phone. We see each other from a long way off. She lifts her head. She has a long nose and dark eyebrows. This is it, Saskia says. The woman looks at us, realizes we are probably the people she’s waiting for, smiles, then returns to her phone. I have a look around. There’s a little store on the corner opposite, where, on mornings when there isn’t anything in the place to eat, I might buy milk and eggs and ham and cheese and bread and sugar and coffee. Beside it is an awkwardly large flower shop, and this strikes me as strange until I comprehend the full view of what’s in front of me, across the T-junction. The rectangle I thought was a park when Saskia pointed to it on the map is not a park. It is a cemetery. The woman looks up again, and Saskia waves hello to her. The woman gives us a brief and businesslike smile and puts her phone in her bag. Her hair is brown and straight, shoulder-length, with a fringe. She’s probably thirty-five. Her coat is opened at the front, and she’s wearing a black dress. I feel the need to take off my hat and my gloves. It’s painfully cold, but necessary, somehow. The woman doesn’t seem cold at all. Saskia shakes her hand and introduces me, and then I shake hands with her. Hello, I say. Hello, she says. Shall we speak English? Yes, I say, I am sorry about that. Fine, she says. She does not wait to be introduced to Manuela. She says, Shall we have a look? She extends her arm toward the steps to the door, a large wooden door with an arched transom window above it. The building is tall and grey, and covered in dead ivy. Each window facing the street, on every floor, has a tiny balcony, enclosed by iron railings, not quite large enough to stand comfortably in but big enough for flowerpots. Please, I say, and extend my arm back to the woman. She goes up the steps and digs through her bag for keys. Her phone rings and she answers it while unlocking the door. Saskia says, It’s on the top floor. Manuela says, with a sympathetic grimace, You’ll have a nice view of the graveyard.
A friend once told me that the only time you ever really see a place is the first time and last time you’re there – the day you move in and the day you move out. She wrote it in a letter, and sent it to me just days before I was commissioned. She had a rare and degenerative autoimmune disease and did not expect to live through the year. Her letter, which was over thirty pages long, handwritten, in cursive, began matter-of-factly. She caught me up on how she had left for college in New York, but became sick within a few weeks, then got diagnosed with this thing, which was serious, and had to come home. She was disappointed. I thought that was odd and heartbreaking – that, even when writing me the letter, when there was very little time left, she was still disappointed she had not attended college, as though knowledge were something she could pack in a suitcase and take with her, and might do her some good. I don’t remember all of it, of course, but I remember it was a witty and positive letter, and because of that it was all the more painful to imagine a world in which she no longer existed. But that was an odd conclusion to leap to, since it had been years since I’d spoken with her, and, apart from one very strange day, I had not often thought about her since. Her name was Josephina.