Frau Herrscher
As I was coming back from the supermarket yesterday, I made eye contact with Frau Herrscher through her kitchen window on the ground floor. I scowled at her. I shot her a really mean, disgusted, focused look.
She was gazing absentmindedly out into the courtyard – maybe cooking something or doing the washing up – and her expression didn’t change for a second, like she hadn’t noticed me. Then her eyes widened, and she looked shocked. She gasped, or maybe even started to say something, but I was gone before I could tell.
I walked on into our building, past the door to her flat on the ground floor, up the stairs and into my flat, which is directly above hers. “I saw Frau Herrscher…” I started to tell my boyfriend, as I put vegetables into the fridge, a frozen pizza into the freezer. But I didn’t go on. Despite my tiny buzz of achievement, what I’d done sounded weird when I said it in my head.
Later that evening, I went into our living room and shuffled some heavy furniture around because I know how much she hates it. I lifted a chair about a centimetre off the floor, in the spot which I imagine is directly above her bed, and I let go.
“What are you doing in there?” my boyfriend called from the next room.
“Nothing,” I said.
I tilted the coffee table, let it fall back, and then I went to the bedroom, read for an hour and fell asleep.
I saw inside her flat once. The crazy Australian man above me had been playing his violin for three hours straight and then I felt the earth shake like a freight train was going past. It was Frau Herrscher banging on her ceiling with something like a broom. She probably thought it was my violin, that it was me diddling out that folksy tune again and again. There was another bang from below, then another. When I went downstairs to tell her what a rude, mad old woman she was, she opened her door wide and I could see right into her hallway.
She has really bad fluorescent strip lighting – like one you might find in a little cafe in a side street in Rome or Athens or the basement supply closet at work – but she also has some decent vintage furniture: a side table, a big mirror. I’d bought a lot of similar things at fleamarkets and online when I’d moved in a few years ago. Her stuff would probably look great in my flat.
Sometimes, when people have parties in our building, Frau Herrscher goes up to their flats and rings their buzzers. She holds the button down and doesn’t take her finger off until they answer the door. Mostly, though, she hangs out her window and screams up at the sky: “Good night! Good night! I will call the police.” Frau Herrscher has one job: to keep us all quiet. And one care: to get to sleep before 11pm. Strangely enough, I actually had a job like that once, at a summer school for teenagers. I lived on campus and enforced lights out in the dorms at ten thirty. I broke up their little parties, confiscated bottles of Jack Daniels. I stopped the boys from sneaking into girls’ rooms. “Back to your rooms, everyone!” I used to shout. “Lights out! Lights out!” I was the Frau Herrscher to those kids. They hated me.
“Stop accepting my packages,” I said to her on my birthday, when she came up to slap on my door with her open palms and complained that my guests were laughing too loudly. “I don’t want to have to come down to pick them up off you anymore. I hate having to talk to you.”
She waved her hand at me dismissively. “All your packages,” she spat. “You buy too many clothes. And your friends laugh too loud.” She did an impression: “Ha ha ha.”
“You’re drunk,” I said. I was feeling brave. I’d had about five whisky sours by this point. “I feel sorry for you if the sound of laughter on a Friday night hurts you so much. You must have a sad life. Stop accepting my packages.”
She did the impression again as she walked back down the stairs. “Ha ha ha.”
There’s a tiny second courtyard to our building that you can only access through the cellar. That’s where I met Frau Herrscher for the very first time. I’d just moved in and I was putting a couple of small rose bushes in terracotta pots in an empty sunny corner.
“Hi,” I said. “I just moved in. I think I live directly above you.”
“This is my garden,” she said. “You’re not allowed in here. It’s only for me.”
“Errrmm … that’s not true,” I said. “It belongs to the building. It says in the contract. And the estate agent people said …”
“It’s only for me,” she repeated. “You can’t use it.”
I argued with her for a bit, but I never went back down there. My rose bushes disappeared a few months later. Pretty much all of my windows look directly out onto the courtyard, so I see all her flowers come up in spring. It’s a bit wild and overgrown, but she’s done an okay job. She put a couple of bird feeders in, and my cats love watching all the coming and goings.
It’s funny to think of Frau Herrscher in her flat, exactly the same size and layout as mine, the same old furniture that once belonged to the same dead people. Although we know nothing about each other, and we have nothing in common, our lives are literally metres apart as we move from room to room. We’re linked by the sounds of my footsteps on her ceiling, or when I drop a book or a chair. A little message from my life into hers
-By Ralph Williams.
