Administrator

The first of Horvath’s neighbors moved away in late winter. This neighbor, an older man with an unclean white beard, gave no warning. Horvath discovered his leaving by chance, when he noticed that the old man’s door was hanging open. Entering the apartment after knocking, he found no one. The place was orderly except for the bedroom, where the closet was open and clothes lay strewn on the floor, and the small bathroom, where a cup of coffee, still warm to the touch, was sitting on the rim of the tub. Horvath told the doorman about this. The doorman already knew. The old man had left a note and included the apartment keys in the envelope. The doorman asked if Horvath wanted to keep the keys, since he lived next door. Horvath hesitated for a long time. He did not like to involve himself in the affairs of his neighbors, not least because the building was large, which meant that any problem he might encounter could expand, pullulate, assume truly nightmarish contours, infinite eyes, infinite mouths, infinite arms, like a classical Titan. The doorman frowned at his hesitation. He told Horvath that he himself had a lot to do, and at times like this, everybody had to pitch in and help out. Horvath lacked the strength to argue with the doorman and agreed to take the keys. Because a fight with a doorman also verges on the infinite with respect to time. That afternoon, Horvath checked the apartment to make sure the gas and water were off, and he turned off all the lights and cracked a window to keep the air inside fresh, then locked up. Horvath’s neighbors at the end of the hall asked about the old man, and Horvath told them the truth. He didn’t know anything. Everyone agreed that the old man was an asshole, so no one was too upset he had gone away. Horvath had not liked him much either. He had criticized Horvath (unjustly) for making noise. Then the old man had tried to get Horvath to join his crusade against the people who lived above him, whom he also accused of making too much noise. He tried to get everybody interested by leaving leaflets on doorsteps, and Horvath had heard that enough residents joined up to get the attention of the management board, but it had all come to nothing. The upstairs neighbors were not noisy, just like Horvath. All the same, Horvath felt an obligation. Not to the old man but to the building. What if a gas line started leaking? What if the toilet flooded in the night and ruined someone else’s apartment? To allay these fears, he started checking in on the old man’s apartment once or twice a week, just to make sure. A couple of weeks after he started, he found that the pipe feeding water to the sink was leaking and a biggish puddle had formed in the kitchen. The floor was a little waterlogged, and Horvath, who had worked as a plumber’s assistant in his youth, wanted to check with the old man’s downstairs neighbors to make sure that their kitchen ceiling was not dripping. When he got downstairs, he found that the residents, a husband and wife, were getting ready to leave. The husband was carrying their baby on his shoulder and lugging suitcases out into the hallway with his free hand, while the wife was adjusting the limp straps of a blue car seat, pulling and pulling at them, though they did not give. Before he could say anything, the wife looked up from her pulling and said they were sorry but they had to head out. They did not know when they would be back. She’d heard that Horvath had the old man’s keys — would he mind taking theirs too, just in case? She did not always trust those doormen. Horvath did not want these keys either. He took them anyway. You can’t say no to people in a moment like that unless you are some kind of Greek hero, striding beyond all boundaries. Horvath now had two apartments to watch over. The first one was annoying because the plumber kept rescheduling his visit and Horvath had to deal with the leak by using a bucket that needed changing every few days. The second caused no such problems, but Horvath disliked it because he disliked the inane expressions that the husband and wife wore in the numerous photographs on the walls, and the inane expression that he could see already developing in the eyes of their child. A week after they left, someone came knocking on Horvath’s door at six in the morning. It was another young husband, his wife standing behind him. She had tears in her eyes. The husband muttered something about the doormen and about looking after things, just for a while, and then in a voice lower still, he offered Horvath money. Horvath asked him to speak up. The young husband repeated his offer, and Horvath accepted it. The crying wife stopped crying, and her face hardened. The young husband handed over a grimy stack of bills. Horvath threw the money away as soon as he was inside, then hung the new set of keys up next to the other two sets he was responsible for. (He jury-rigged a pegboard by hammering a few nails into a clear space on his vestibule wall.) Their apartment, H3, was a real shithole.