Floors [1]
Peter Bichsel [2]
Translated by xia23
People can understand a house temporarily, a house with four floors, with a staircase that connects and separates them with a tiled roof; a house on the street, squeezed on the expensive land between others, the windows facing the street, the entrance in the backyard.
No one would live on the first floor. They have seen no one on the first floor. On the first floor there is the same brown door, cracked paint, frosted glass pane, blue striped curtains. Perhaps no one lives on the first floor.
The second floor: brown door, cracked paint, frosted glass pane. Someone lives there.
The third floor: someone lives there.
And on the fourth floor someone lives there.
If someone moves out, someone else moves in.
On the first day they smell it, they smell the predilection for garlic or the oil smell of mechanic or the saw dusts of the carpenter, late perhaps the diaper smell of the little ones, but then, by the third day already, belong to the smell of the house, it is again the house with the four floors.
Someone lives on the third floor again.
The door signs are changed.
A telephone installer opens the small box down in the hallway, changes the connection, curses, changes it again and leaves.
Perhaps someone lives on the first floor.
In spring, on April 4, for example, the sun throws a drawing on the stairs between the third and the fourth floors, it is the same as the one last year.
The girl on the fourth floor knocks on the third floor and politely and shyly asks the woman, if she can have the ball which falls from the fourth floor to the balcony of the third floor.
The attic is subdivided with slats, each floor has a compartment, each compartment is safeguarded with a padlock, surely old mattresses, photo albums and diaries, mirrors are also stored here.
Someone sweeps the attic every two weeks.
Peddlers usually ring the bells on the top floor first. After they have asked if someone lives further up there, then they go downstairs, ring on the third floor, then on the second floor, then on the first floor. Hope makes stair-climbing easier and disappointment you can only go down. Peddlers have to deal with houses.
Forest rangers have to deal with the forests. Women have to deal with waiting. Houses are houses.
[1]. p. 7. Stockwerke. Eigentlich möchte Frau Blum den Milchmann kennenlernen. Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main, Walter-Verlag AG, Germany. 1996.
[2]. Peter Bichsel. 3/24/1935 - . Swiss writer and journalist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Bichsel
