Woman in the Fifth

‘Like I told you, Omar, Monsieur Sezer has the television.’

‘How you know my name?’ he demanded, suddenly fixing me with a drunk/paranoid stare.

‘Adnan told me—’

‘You turn Adnan over to the police—’

‘That’s not what happened,’ I said, trying to stay calm.

‘You want his room, you call the police, they catch him in the metro. And then you sell my television.’

He shouted this last line, then looked bemused — as if he was a spectator at this event, suddenly surprised to hear himself yelling.

‘Look,’ I said, trying to sound even-tempered, reasonable. ‘I was a hotel guest just until this morning. As you must have heard, I was sick for the past week. I didn’t even know where Adnan lived until he told me about a chambre de bonne down the corridor from his own—’

‘So that’s when you decide to take it from him.’

‘My name’s Harry, by the way,’ I said, hoping this change of conversational tack might throw him. He ignored my extended hand.

‘Sezer has television?’ he asked.

‘That’s what I said.’

‘I kill Sezer.’

He burped. Loudly. He fished out a cigarette and lit it. I silently groaned. I hate cigarette smoke. But it didn’t strike me as the right moment to ask him not to light up in my little room. He took a half-drag on his cigarette, the smoke leaking out of his nostrils.

‘You American?’ he asked.

‘That’s right.’

‘So fuck you.’

He smiled as he said this — a crapulous smile, his eyes gauging my reaction. I remained impassive.

‘Adnan a dead man. When they send him back to Turkey, he dies … in prison. Four years ago, he kills a man. A man who fucks his wife. Then he finds out the man does not fuck his wife. But the man still dead. Bad. Very bad. That’s why he come to Paris.’

Adnan — a killer on the run? It didn’t seem possible. But, then again, nothing about this set-up seemed possible … and yet, it was the reality into which I had slipped.

The cigarette fell from Omar’s lips on to my just-cleaned floor. He ground it out with his shoe. Then, with another loud, aromatic burp, he abruptly left, reeling into his adjoining room. Immediately, my housekeeping instincts took over. I opened the window to air out the smoke. I picked up the cigarette butt and used kitchen paper to clean up the flattened ash on the linoleum. Then I went outside to use the toilet and found Omar’s large unflushed turd greeting me in the bowl.

I pulled the chain — and felt myself tensing up into a serious rage. But I forced myself to pee and get back into my room before the rage transformed into something dangerous. When I was inside, I turned on the stereo and boomed jazz — in the angry hope that it might disturb Omar. But there were no bangs on the wall, no shouts of ‘Turn that crap down’. There were just the edgy dissonances of Ornette Coleman, penetrating the Parisian night. Eventually, his grating riffs became too much for me, and I snapped off the radio and sat in the half-darkness of my room. I stared out at all the minor scenic adjustments I had made … and considered the energy I’d expended to try to set up house in a place which could never be anything more than a grungy cell. That’s when I started to cry. I had wept here and there over the past few weeks. But this was different. This was pure grief … for what I had lost, for what I had been reduced to. For a good fifteen minutes, I couldn’t stop the deluge. I lay prostrate on the bed, clutching on to a pillow, as all the accumulated anger and anguish came flooding out. When I finally subsided, I felt drained and wrung out … but not purged. This kind of grief doesn’t go away after a good cry … as much as I wished it would.

Still, the cessation of my sobs did force me to pull off my T-shirt and jockey shorts and stand under the sputtering shower head for a few minutes, towel myself down, then drop a Zopiclone and finally surrender to chemical sleep.

I didn’t wake up until noon, my head fogged in, my mouth dry. When I went outside to use the toilet, I found the seat crisscrossed with urine. Omar, in true dog style, had marked his territory.

After brushing my teeth in the kitchen sink, I dressed, scooped up several invoices from yesteday and went downstairs and rang the bell for Sezer Confection. Mr Tough Guy answered the door, the usual scowl on his face.

‘I want to speak with your boss,’ I said.

The door shut. Two minutes later it opened again. He motioned for me to follow him. Comme d’habitude, Sezer was sitting at the table, the cellphone on the desk, his gaze never leaving the window as I walked in.

‘Tell me,’ he said.

‘I replaced the seat and hung up a lampshade in the toilet on my floor.’

‘Congratulations.’

‘The seat, the brush and the lampshade cost me nineteen euros.’

‘You expect reimbursement?’

‘Yes,’ I said, putting the receipts on his desk. He looked at them, gathered them together, then crumpled them up into a ball and tossed it on to the floor.

‘I don’t think so,’ he said.

‘The toilet seat was broken, there was a bare lightbulb—’

‘No other tenants complained.’

‘Omar, that pig, would happily eat out of the toilet …’

‘You do not like your neighbor?’

‘I don’t like the fact that he woke me in the middle of last night, demanding his television, which you took away.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘All right, Joe Smoothie here took it away.’

Sezer said something in Turkish to Mr Tough Guy. He shrugged his shoulders in bemusement, then hissed something back.

‘My colleague informs me that he didn’t touch the television,’ Sezer said.

‘He’s lying,’ I suddenly said in English.

Sezer looked at me and smiled.

‘Out of respect for your safety I won’t translate that,’ he said back in perfect English. ‘And don’t expect me to speak your language again, American.’

‘You’re a crook,’ I said, sticking to my native tongue.

‘Tant pis,’ he said, then continued on in French. ‘But now Omar is upset. Because I told him that you sold the television to buy the new toilet seat. And he is such an ignorant peasant that he believed such stupidity. My advice to you is: buy him a new television.’

‘No way,’ I said, returning to French.

‘Then don’t be surprised if he comes home drunk again tonight and tries to break down your door. He is a complete sauvage.’

‘I’ll take my chances.’

‘Ah, a tough character. But not so tough that you couldn’t stop crying last night.’

I tried not to look embarrassed. I failed.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said.

‘Yes, you do,’ he said. ‘Omar heard you. He said you cried for almost a half-hour. The only reason he didn’t come looking for you this morning to demand his television money is because the idiot felt sorry for you. But, trust me, by tonight he will be in a rage again. Omar lives in a perpetual rage. Just like you.’

With that last line, Sezer had trained his gaze on me. It was like having a white-hot light shined in your eyes. I blinked and turned away.

‘So why were you crying, American?’ he asked.