The Greenhouse

Forty-six

My first home after Dad’s house is on the second floor of a building with a mint-green facade. The apartment stretches lengthwise and is made up of two rooms that lead into each other with incredibly high ceilings that are totally out of sync with the small size of the apartment.

— Twenty feet, says the woman when I look up at the ceiling, indicating six with her fingers. The bedroom, which is accessed through the dining room, has a double carved bed and wallpaper with a white fleur-de-lis pattern against a maroon background, and an antique-looking painting hangs over the bed.

— The flight from Egypt, the woman explains somewhat at length. The furniture could be collector’s items from an old manor. The apartment is nevertheless clean and bright and there are no personal effects, apart from two painted plaster statues standing on the chest of drawers in the bedroom: a stooping old man with a halo and a monk in a habit with a child in his arms, also with a halo.

— Saint Joseph and Saint Anthony of Padua, the woman explains to me. She tells me that the apartment belongs to her sister, who has moved out with most of her personal belongings, so it’s therefore almost completely empty.

The other room is bigger and some kind of sitting room, dining room, and kitchen all rolled into one. There’s a sofa you can pull out and use as a sofa bed, says the woman.

— If need be, she adds looking at me from head to toe, as if she were surprised that the priest should have taken me under his wing.

The rent is practically nothing. I think the woman might have even made a mistake; I actually only pay for the gas.

— Gas is extra, she says.

There are mirrors literally everywhere; I count seven of them in total, which makes the place look bigger and almost gives it the semblance of a maze. For a moment it feels like there are three women standing close to me. Although I have no experience of a nine-month-old child, it occurs to me that she might find mirrors fun.

— This is only temporary, I say.

— So Father Thomas was saying. He said it would be six weeks to begin with and that you’ll be having a little child with you.

She studies me carefully; maybe she thinks I don’t look much like a father?

I suddenly look into the mirror beside me and meet the worried gaze of a man with newly cut red hair. Although it could, of course, be a good antidote to loneliness, there is something peculiar about being mirrored all the time, about being constantly reminded of one’s self.

The woman says she is going to lend me some bedclothes. I’m not sure I fully understood whether she is coming back with them straight away or later, but meanwhile I don’t dare leave the building.

After the woman has left, I lie on the bed and discover on the bedroom ceiling, twenty feet above, the remnants of a fresco depicting winged angels spiraling around a blue hole in the celestial vault. In the middle of the blue sky there is a white dove with a wing missing. I stand up and take another round of the apartment. On the desk there is a vase with plastic flowers; to me a home can never be a home unless there are living flowers, so I take the vase and stick it into an empty kitchen cupboard.

— Where are the flowers? is the first question the woman asks me when she returns with a pile of ironed bedclothes in her arm.

I walk over to the cupboard, open it, and hand her the vase with the plastic flowers without saying a word. She takes it and puts it back on the table again, in the exact same spot as before. When the woman is gone and I’m left standing alone on the threshold of my first apartment with three keys in my hand, I put the plastic decoration back into the cupboard again. Then I draw back the thick curtains in the bedroom. They’re made of red velvet with interwoven patterns that look like fire lilies, with double silk lining; I have the feeling they might have been moved from a grander house. It makes sense; turning them, you can see that the hem has been shortened and re-sewn. The windows extend to the floor and open onto a balcony with a railing; I estimate it can hold a stool and four or five potted plants.