A Tale of Love and Darkness [antikvár]

I i was born and bred in a tiny, low-ceilinged ground-floor flat. My parents slept on a sofa bed that filled their room almost from wall to wall when it was opened up each evening. Early every morning they used to shut away this bed deep into itself, hide the bedclothes in the chest underneath, turn the mattress over, press it all tight shut, and conceal the whole under a light grey cover, then scatter a few embroidered oriental cushions on top, so that all evidence of their night's sleep disappeared. In this way their bedroom also served as study, library, dining room and living room. Opposite this room was my litde green room, half taken up with a big-bellied wardrobe. A narrow, low passage, dark and slighdy curved, like an escape tunnel from a prison, linked the little kitchenette and toilet to these two small rooms. A faint light-bulb imprisoned in an iron cage cast a gloomy half-light on this passage even during the daytime. At the front both rooms had just a single window, guarded by metal blinds, squinting to catch a glimpse of the view to the east but seeing only a dusty cypress tree and a low wall of roughly dressed stones. Through a tiny opening high up in their back walls the kitchenette and toilet peered out into a litde prison yard, surrounded by high walls and paved in concrete, where a pale geranium planted in a rusty olive can was gradually dying for want of a single ray of sunlight. On the sills of these tiny openings we always kept jars of pickled gherkins and a stubborn cactus in a cracked vase that served as a flower pot. It was actually a basement flat, as the ground floor of the building had been hollowed out of the rocky hillside. This hill was our next-door neighbour, a heavy, introverted, silent neighbour, an old, sad hill with the regular habits of a bachelor, a drowsy, wintry hill, that never scraped the furniture or entertained guests, never made a noise or disturbed us, but through the party walls there seeped constandy towards us, like a faint yet persistent musty smell, the cold, dark silence and dampness of this melancholy neighbour of ours. Consequendy right through the summer there was always a hint of winter in our home.