After the former owner moved out, they finally entered the fourth floor to see not only piles upon piles of trash but piles upon piles of rat droppings as well, and a few meagre pieces of furniture rotting where they stood. Everything about the place screamed abandonment. It was unbelievable to the woman that this had been “where someone was still living” until recently. The second she began to pick up the trash, cockroaches came pouring out underfoot. The deluge was more than she could stomp with her foot, and her initial attempts to whack them brought out a bevy of surprised rats. She screamed and declared a retreat.
The problem was not solved by fumigation sessions with exterminators. They had already come in four times to fight against the horde of roaches and rats while she had been practically breaking her back cleaning up. Fed up, she called the former building owner.
The owner did not pick up. She dialed again, but after a few rings, the line cut off by itself. She called several more times out of spite, but just as she was about to give up, there was a voice on the other end of the line. “Hello?” Glad to finally get through, the woman explained who she was and tried to summarize the situation, but the moment she mentioned the word “building,” the old woman at the other end suddenly screamed obscenities so loudly that the younger woman thought her eardrum would burst and abruptly hung up before the young woman had a chance to speak again.
That was enough to quash any desire to call again. Instead, the woman called the fortune-gainer.
What an odd day the woman was having vis-à-vis phone calls. The fortune-gainer was out showing a home to a client, said the auntie who had only picked up after the phone had rung for a long time. The woman figured she was the wife of the fortune-gainer. They had met only once before.
“Don’t be like that,” said the fortune-gainer’s wife when she heard the woman’s story. “You’re younger, you must be the one to be patient. That old woman is a pitiful person herself. Her husband died early and her only child, a son, went out on a delivery helping his mother’s business and hurt his head in a motorcycle accident … So young, such a waste, he wasn’t even married, poor thing …”
The fortune-gainer’s wife sighed. “After that happened, the old woman went a little strange … She closed the restaurant she’d run nearly all her life and left with her son. To some Christian retreat. The building was all she owned at the time but she got rid of even that at a pittance …”
This surprised the woman. “She went on a retreat? So … she didn’t live in the fourth-floor apartment?”
“I haven’t seen her in a long time. She did seem to come back every once in a while to fetch clothes and such—”
“How long has it been since she left?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” said the fortune-gainer’s wife calmly. “Three or four years?”
After she hung up, the woman found it hard to sort out her feelings. Now she understood why the building had been so much cheaper than others in the same neighborhood. And perhaps a little of why her neighbors would give her and her husband anxious glances. All she had thought at the time was that the old people were simply resentful that young people had bought an entire building and were moving in.
Now there was nothing more she could gain by chasing this up with the former owner. After about ten bouts with the exterminator in the first month alone, the rat and roach problem was finally under control. There had been an incident where the rats, pushed out of their refuge, had swarmed through the café on the first floor. This had upset the café owner who declared he was moving out. The woman was worried that she would have no renters left and the building would end up empty, but a new renter appeared quite swiftly. A blood-sausage stew shop stank a lot more than a café, but the woman was relieved. Finally, she and her husband could retrieve the boxes stored at her mother’s and move into the fourth floor of this building of their own.
The child liked the basement. The woman thought this was because there were many things to look at and play with. She had been told it was all stuff that had been left behind by the former third-floor renter. Whatever this mysterious person did, the basement was filled with costumes, shoes, and props one might see in a play. When she switched on the light and entered the space for the first time, the sight of the child jumping out of the ranks of lined-up mannequins in freakish gowns made her jump back in surprise. But once she had the exterminators confirm that no rats or roaches were hiding in the basement and she changed the lightbulbs, the basement didn’t seem so scary anymore. She actually began to enjoy walking through the rows of mannequins and their unbelievably ostentatious clothing and shoes and mysterious props, the likes of which modern city-dwellers rarely got to see, brightly illuminated by fluorescent lights.