Breathe Easy

Breathe Easy
By Brendan Ray

The alarm on my wrist-watch went off and I hit the ground running. I rolled off of the couch and bee-lined straight to the can for a quick shower and shave before work. I had fallen asleep the night before, as I had on most nights that week, in front of the TV. In those days, my bedroom was used more as closet space for my clothes and personal possessions. I had no memory of turning off the tube before I fell asleep, but it was off now, so when I got out of the shower I turned off the rest of the lights in my apartment and went about my way to school.

The elevator down to street level was a three sided coffin, with an open exposure in the shaft to a push/pull door. Since it wasn’t at my floor right then, I ran down the three flights of stairs to the ground rather than waiting for the slow carriage to lumber its way up to me. The stairs were made of crumbling stonework and they continued down into a dark basement that had been ‘under construction’ since before I got there, though I’d never seen or heard anyone working down in the building’s belly. The air pressure in the stairwell was such that whenever anyone opened a door that led to the stair shaft, air was sucked up from the bowels of the building and it sounded like someone inhaling a half lung full of air.

My front door opened into a shaded alley, flanked on both sides by tall buildings with overhanging balconies. All day long, the Turkish and Kurdish women would lean out, talk to each other and smoke, then put their smokes out once their husbands came home. Smoking among women is seen as a dirty thing. All of the men smoke of course, but that’s not unhealthy, those sticks are chock-a-block full of “Vitamin N!” It’s just an unsightly thing for a woman to do. From their daily perches they would observe my comings and goings and fill in the blanks with their own imaginative speculations. I would habitually smile up at them in my friendly manner, and they would sneer down at me, letting me know that they were watching.

I emerged from the alley and started hoofing up to the E5, the major highway that snakes through western Istanbul, and separates my low income, predominantly Kurdish district of Shirinevler (The Nev) from the more affluent residences of Atakoy on the good side of the tracks. Alongside the E5, my school was a mere ten minute walk, so I chose not to be put off by the feckless poverty of The Nev.

Ten years prior, the Turkish Lira collapsed, and with it so did industry. The area through which I travelled on my walk to work was littered with construction sites that were half-finished and abandoned, because the pay for which the workers were contracted had lost eighty-per-cent of its real buying power. Grown men of ages ranging from 20 to 60 now linger about listlessly in front of their laundry stations, tailor shops or Kebab Salonus hoping for, but not honestly expecting any business, especially this early in the morning. This morning they would just sit around and smoke with their friends, drink tea and maybe play some cards or backgammon in the afternoon. They’d cast a polite, if suspicious, glance my way as I passed.

The economic and urban misery was compounded that same year by an earthquake that killed 45,000 people. Buildings crashed, people died in droves and were buried in the rubble of shanty-towns and ghettoes like The Nev. Here, the signs of the earth’s fury were still all around, in buildings that leant against each other for support and ruins that no one could afford to clean.

Capitalising on the public’s fear of poverty is where my job came in. I was an English teacher at a private language school, one of the dozens of dozens that are scattered about the city. Jobs are difficult, and the wages low. Not many people believe that the EU is going to bail them out any time soon, so the language schools sell them a false hope, saying that if they learn to speak English, then they will get a better job, in a better country, for a better wage. It should warm your heart to note that no one will ever go broke selling hope. My school’s name is Inglizce Zaman Dil Okulu, which translates as English Time Language School. If you’ve ever been to Istanbul, the big yellow advertisements are visible at just about every street corner. They establish franchises like McDonalds. Near the meydan (city square), the roadside businesses start to class up a little bit, and along the neighbourhood’s main drag, there are some good places to buy food, or cheap textiles. It’s the side streets where the poverty is really visible.

English Time takes up the seventh floor of a building with a name that I never bothered to learn. It’s on one side of the meydan, across from the Metro station. The other floors are occupied by another (cheaper) language school, and a private high school for kids that have been kicked out of the government schools. The building is like a polite jail for children.

My school was all about appearances. The floors were always shiny, the secretarial staff were always snug in their form fitting clothes that were conservative enough not to reveal any skin but tight enough to reveal the volume beneath. The rooms were always clean and the canteen was smoky and bustling. The teachers were all expected to be present twenty minutes before their classes, and we all usually were. When I got to the teacher’s room, my friend Natasha was already there, although she was visibly half asleep.

“Good morning, Sunshine! Sleep well?”

Natasha was born in the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic and raised in Siberia. She was a typical Russian-looking girl whose image I would describe as ‘round.’ This is not to say fat, she was far from that! She had a broad and round face, like a dinner plate, punctuated with a round nose. Her big blue eyes were round, circled by blond hair. Her breasts and hips were pronounced, and she a tiny belly that caused her some self-conscious, but unnecessary fretting.

Everything about her appearance was contoured, which attracted a lot of unwanted attention from Turkish men.

“Hello, Peter. I’m fine, thanks. How are you?” Not paying enough attention to realize that I asked a different question.

“You awake, Nat?”

“Oof, Peter!” She said, coming out of a bit of a trance. A blond moment, if you will. “I was out last night, I’m so tired!”

I lack the ability to describe how cute this girl is when she pouts, but it’s really quite attractive.

“Have you had any luck finding a new place?” she asked.

“I spoke to David. He and his wife are going to be moving out of their place in a couple of weeks, and I’ll be meeting their land-lady and then taking up the lease, so that’s one thing settled.” I didn’t exactly trust the company for which we laboured, so I was looking forward to having my own place; where my boss didn’t have his own set of keys, and if they decided to fire me, then I wouldn’t get evicted the same day. This is an endemic problem for teachers of English as a foreign language, particularly in Turkey. “I keep hearing the neighbours through the walls and the ceiling, and the place is freezing at night. David’s place is quiet, except the mosque down the road, but that’ll only be annoying five times a day.”

“That’ll be very good.” she replied. “Nobody ever stays in that apartment of yours for long. Before you moved in, there was Irish Mike, and before him it was Ryan’s flat, then Lucy, then Bernice, then Karen. Is David’s flat nice?”

“Nice enough. On the subject of other people in my flat, I found a silver cross next to the dresser in my room, do you know whose it might be?”

“What does it look like?”

“Well, it’s shaped like a big letter T, and there’s a partially naked bearded man hanging on it...”

“Aside from that!”

I smiled. Natasha’s pretty religious, and I like to joke about religion, because I find it amusing but I really didn’t mean anything by it. She’s just fun to tease. “It’s a normal silver cross, something you’d wear on a small chain around the neck, nothing too extravagant or anything.”

“It isn’t mine... maybe one of your students...” She said in a coy voice. Her English wasn’t really great, especially for someone whose job it was to teach the language, but she had a flare for the dramatic that made up for it.

“Not a lot of my students wear crosses, Nat. It probably belonged to Bernice or Karen. It isn’t gaudy enough to have belonged to Lucy.”

We hushed as one of the office girls came into the room, picked up a pile of class logs from the Head Teacher’s desk, and left the room. She’d listen in on us on behalf of our prying manager. It’s a stress to work in a constant state of observation. We resumed our conversation upon the secretary’s departure.

“So how are things with your room-mate, Filiz?”

“Ooof. I don’t know how much longer I can stay there, Peter. Anytime I do anything that she doesn’t like, she calls up Kazim (The company’s General Manager), and tattles on me. I confront her about this, and this she says she doesn’t but, last week Rami and Muzaffer (two sleazy school custodians) came over and looked all through my apartment! I don’t want to keep living like this! Ohh, Peter!” She said and she put her head on my shoulder.

I gritted my teeth, knowing that even a friendly intimacy like this would be passed on to the manager if witnessed by the inquiring secretaries (it was).

“You can move into my flat after I move into David’s,” I suggested

“I told Batal (our illustrious branch manager) that I want to move in there, and keeps saying, ‘No, that apartment is unlucky. Teachers move there and then leave’ but I can’t keep living with Filiz!”

Filiz was the GM’s mistress who had been placed in Natasha’s school apartment for some mysterious reason. She lived in the flat free of charge, and harassed anyone who was placed in the four bedroom flat with her until they inevitably moved out and she once again had the place to herself.

The bell for class rang.

“I think that I might have to move in with Geoffrey,” she announced, referencing her fiancé.

“If you think of that as a last option, it may not boast to well for a marriage,” I half-joked. I didn’t care much for Geoffrey. Certainly nowhere near as much as I cared for his fiancé.

“I know,” she replied sullenly, departing briefly into the land of thought.
“Well good luck with that. I gotta get to class, do you want to grab some lunch afterwards?”

“I’d love to, but I have a tango lesson in Taksim this afternoon.” Taksim is the trendy bar and nightclub area of the city. “Do you have class tonight?”

I nodded.

“I’ll see you then,” she said and then departed.

Class finished at half past noon and I went home, with the hope to catch up on my sleep that had been so rudely interrupted by something so petty and trivial as a split-shift work schedule. I popped open a can of soda and made myself a tomato sandwich. I sat down in front of the TV, and watched the BBC World Service to catch up on the outside world while I ate my lunch. Little life-lines to your parents’ civilization are a siren’s call to most ex-pats.

Between my sofa/impromptu bed was a small square coffee table that supported my carb-rich lunch. In front of my sandwich plate lay the little silver cross that I had unearthed while cleaning the living room one day. I took a good look at the thing. There weren’t any particularly distinguishing marks about it. A sombre Jesus was strung up and hanging at the moment of his death. There are probably millions like it all over the world. This one was made of good silver, though I must confess that I’m hardly an expert as to what is real quality silver and what isn’t.

I’m as irreligious as it comes, and I most certainly don’t wear jewellery, so I knew that it wasn’t mine. I decided that I would bring it in to school tonight and ask the other teachers at evening classes if anyone knew who it belonged to. It wasn’t a cheap bauble, so someone probably wanted back - so I reasoned.

Ignoring the cross for the time being, I kept on watching the news, while my eyelids went droopy. I was near slumber when the business news came on. I do not now, nor have I ever followed the stock market, or rolling currencies. I lifted the remote to change the channel, rather than listen to the perky Asian-Briton girl tell me how the yen is doing.

“Stupid batteries.” I grumbled to myself when the TV didn’t respond to my remote instructions. I decided that I would have to suffer the pretty Eurasian girl twittering about, rather than get off my sleepy ass and manually turn it off. Eventually I did manage to get to sleep, on my couch, long before the business news wrapped up and they moved onto sports, a subject that holds as much interest to me as business does.

I woke up a few hours later. The sun was still in the sky, so the room was alight through the window, but the TV was off. I picked up the remote and tried to zap the tube. The batteries were still dead. This morning I had no memory of turning lights on or off. My mind did a quick gear shift into full awake as I recalled that I had a specific memory of not turning off the TV.

I stood up and I listened.

One of the problems with the apartment is that it’s noisy all night long. The kid that lives upstairs plays marbles in the evening, and the mother vacuums at all hours. But right now, my living room was the kind of quiet that you find in a forest, an obfuscated quiet when you step in out of the city, smelling of urban humdrum and all the fleet animals hide from your outside presence when you first get into their element. I walked up to the TV and pressed the on/off button. Click.

Adrian Finnegan of the BBC popped up and was laying down the details of the latest Arab-Israeli peace abortion. I pressed the button again, and click – off he went.

I stood for a second and listened for something. For the first time in my memory, there were wasn’t any sound of Turkish women chattering and smoking across the alley, or the brat upstairs with his marbles. I went to the bathroom that was just across from the TV room and grabbed the broom handle from the wall. A wooden stick in hand made me feel that much safer, and I started looking around the living room.

“Efendim! Kim O?” That would translate as ‘Excuse me! Who’s there?’

I went through the living room and opened the door to the balcony. The usual collection of elderly women, smoking and gossiping the day away was nowhere to be seen. I had my first moment of urban solitude since I’d left Canada, and felt strangely unnerved by the sensation. The next building over was about three metres across from me, but it seemed just as empty as my own.

I went back into my living room, my impromptu pole arm still in my hands and looked in the kitchen. My fridge was humming along, and all else seemed as it should be. I went to my bed room and grabbed my wallet and my keys, my intention was to go back into the hall to put my shoes on to go to work.

Emptying into the hall were the kitchen, bathroom, living room, my room, and two other bedrooms. I kept the two unused rooms locked, so that I wouldn’t have to clean them when the school moved any more teachers into the apartment. They were both locked by keys that were kept in the lock.

Deciding that my broom handle was kind of foolish, I put it back in its place in the bathroom and went over to the first bedroom. I unlocked the door and walked in. The light didn’t work. It had never worked, but there was enough ambient light from outside to see in the room. I looked behind the door, and I opened up the little blue cabinet in the corner. There was nothing to see, so I walked back out into the hall and locked the door behind me.

When I turned the key to the second bedroom, it felt like there was a sudden imperceptible stop to an action. The only thing I could compare it to would be playing hide and seek as a child, when you’re it, and you walk into a room where one of your friends is hiding right under your nose. You can sense that something’s there, but it’s there just beyond what you can readily perceive. In I went to search about.

The second bedroom faced the alley, but was nonetheless awash with enough light that I didn’t need to turn on the overhead bulb. There was an unmade folded mattress on stilts in the corner. No one from the school had ever bothered setting up the bed. The wardrobe on the wall was an aluminium case with nylon draped over it. I prodded it open to reveal nothing. The little pink cabinet beside the bed was a mirror image of the blue one in the first bedroom, and it was just as empty as its predecessor. I checked the handle on the window, and it was locked.

There wasn’t any perceptible change in the room’s temperature, but my skin felt tighter than normal. Sort of like if you walk into a room where there is a live electrical current. My hair follicles seemed to tighten around my joints (I’m particularly sensitive to this, as I am a very hairy guy). Like I did in front of the TV, I stood there and listened, but there was still nothing to take my attention, only the vague sense that there was something amiss.

My thoughts went back to my whacking broom-stick handle in the bathroom. The phallic security blanket that would let me know I could hit something; it would make the fight-or-flight instinct more palatable. I walked out of the second bedroom and locked the door behind me. I finished putting on my shoes and hurried to work. Within the week I had gladly moved out of the apartment, as planned, and into my new place, two blocks away.

The new flat was smaller than its predecessor, and more expensive. I had to pay my own bills, rather than just hand them over to the school, but I still appreciated my independence from work. After I moved out of the old flat in October, Jason, a new teacher from the UK moved in. He moved out a month later, and in with a couple other teachers in another apartment. Then Irish Mike (not to be confused with Canadian Mike) moved in. After a month, he was out of there and into his own flat, and just like Jason and myself, paying the extra money out of his own pocket to live outside of the flat that the school would provide free of charge. Though to be fair to the school, our contracts did give us an additional housing allowance.

In the early spring, an overweight teacher from Chicago, Heather, moved in to the old apartment. She was flaky, for lack of a better term. She was into aroma-therapy and the bubble-gum spiritualism of Wicca and womb-worship. She was what I call a “Crystal Jangler”. Her and I didn’t even come close to getting along. She hated the old apartment from day one, and no one really missed her when she disappeared one day after a rather public emotional episode at work, complaining about being constantly spied upon. It turned out that she had amassed a particularly grisly debt back in the States, and decided that the time was right to simply vanish into the night. She did contact Natasha once, to say that she was alright, but no one at the school ever saw her again.

In six months, the apartment had gone through four occupants. This giant, free apartment could simply not keep anyone there. Three of the teachers moved outside of the school’s observation and one teacher disappeared entirely. It was against this backdrop that my good friend Natasha moved into the place.

Some months prior to her migration, she’d moved in with her dumpy fiancé, rather than continue to live with her horrible, spying, tattletale flatmate. The relationship with her fiancé inevitably deteriorated and finally fell apart.

Throughout that breakdown, I was the fly on their wall, Natasha’s confidant and shoulder to cry on. To say that I felt mixed emotions at that time would be an understatement. So, eventually she needed a place to stay. I offered to let her stay with me, but she opted not to share my one bedroom apartment - the dynamics of that decision aren’t important to this story though I still look back on it with a touch of regret.

Towards the beginning of summer, I helped her move in to her new pad; my old one; the dreaded unlucky teacher’s flat of The Nev.

We hired a taxi for the afternoon and the job was finished in three trips. When I was helping her set up TV, I got to thinking about my stay in the flat. The place looked quite different, I suppose that it was Heather the Crystal-Jangler that did most of the redecorating. The walls were now painted a pastel pink, and the kitchen was clean for the first time in my personal memory. When I was there, there was a sort of permanent mess in the kitchen, which now seemed to have dissipated.

I also noticed that the two extra bedrooms were still sealed away, and that Nat was moving into my old room. The sofas in the living room were moved slightly. I had them set up in the middle of the room instead of by the walls. Of course, I was using one as a bed so it needed to be near the TV because I’m near-sighted. My minimalist couch-potato-chic was apparently not up to par with her standards.

Also in the living room, there was a corner table that was set up with some women’s magazines on it and I had moved Natasha’s garden of flowers and herbs from her old place to her new. The green living things really spruced up the place. In the middle of the living room was a brand new coffee table, and in one corner of it, was a small silver cross.

“Hey, Natasha! Is this yours?” I called out when I remembered the trinket.

“No, I found it when I moved in. Do you know who it belongs to?”

“I found it when I moved in here, I couldn’t find the owner, so I guess it’s just been floating around here since then.”

“Oh, yes. I remember you saying something about it.” She picked it up. “I have a chain that I was going to put it on, did you ever find out who it belonged to?”

“Nope,” I repeated. “I guess it’s yours now... It’s not like I want it.”

“I don’t know, I could see you wearing jewellery,” She joked. This is amusing to her because I usually wear very plain clothes without any accoutrements. “But you need something bigger and flashier. Maybe I have some big, giant, gold, loop earrings for you.”

“Don’t judge me, because I’m beautiful.” I smiled back at her through my bad impression of a central European accent. I flittered my hand through the air. “My style is lost on you plebeians!”

“Thank you for helping me. You are a good friend.” She would usually call me a good friend, which I personally interpreted as a warning against me trying to push the friendship any further than she wanted it to go. At the end of the day, that pretty much worked out for the best... I suppose.

“I’ll cook dinner for you this week, a good Russian meal, you’ll like it.”

“A good Russian meal from a good Russian girl, that sounds good to me.” I left her to set up the rest of her stuff. We kissed cheeks good-bye at the door, a quick peck on each side, as was the Turkish custom, and with that I was on my way back to my own apartment.

As I walked out of the place, I saw the shadows of two feet under the door across the hall, the neighbour was watching me leave through the eye-hole in the door. I politely waved as I passed by. The school had probably spoken to the neighbours and asked them to keep an eye on their charge. A single woman on her own; Oh the horror! Turkish culture encourages communal policing, which leaves the regular police as little more than a corrupt street gang. If the women of the building think that Natasha is having men over, they will call her man (since her father lives in Moscow and she doesn’t have a husband, that means they’ll call her boss) and let him know, so as to have him discipline her. Batal, the idiot manager, will probably call her into his office when he hears that I helped her move in. It’s a patriarchal world, what can be said?

Passing through the elevator lobby, I could feel the familiar draft and the familiar sound of the unworked stairwell. At all hours of the night, the sound of windy breathing coming from down there would creep anyone out. I marched through the lobby, out the door and made my way home.

The next night, Natasha and I went to Aydinlar Restaurant after work and had some dinner.

“So, how’s the new place?” I opened. I noticed that the silver cross was now hung around her neck.

“Oh, it’s ok. The neighbours are noisy though. I think that I have everything where I need it to be.” She touched the cross around her neck subconsciously. “Do you still have my DVD player?”

“Yeah, I do. Do you need it back?” I really didn’t want to give it back.

“Sometime, yes. I hate television. I fell asleep in front of the television last night.”

“I do that a lot. My cat hates it because he thinks my couch is his bed.”

“Did the neighbours make a lot of sounds when you were there?”

“Yeah, lots. I could always here them through the paper-thin walls and ceiling. It was good for my Turkish practice, though.”

“Last night was my first night there alone, and it was awful. I woke up in the middle of the night. It felt like they were there in the room fighting! Ooof, Peter! I hope it’s not always like that.”

“Sometimes it’s quieter than others. There isn’t really a lot you can do about it. No one to complain to, and even if you could, it wouldn’t be considered neighbourly.” A complaint from a non-Turk in Turkey is about a weighty as a complaint from a Turk in Germany.

“I hope that it’s not so bad in the future.”

We ate our dinner of kebab and ayran, and then paid as we left. On the way home, we decided to pick up a bottle of wine and go back to my place. We drank the first bottle and I ran out to the corner shop to grab a second and third. We both had to work at nine o’clock in the morning, and at about one-thirty our conversation ground down to a halt.

Natasha went to the bathroom and my cat hissed at her. My cat (named Kedi - Turkish for “cat”) is usually aloof to all guests and would simply ignore them. He seemed to instantly develop a new sense of himself in the face of my guest. Natasha still managed to chase him out of the dunny and go about her business. I waited on the couch for her.

After the usual time that it takes, she came back and collapsed next to me on the couch, head resting comfortably on my shoulder. “I hate my new apartment.” She said resolutely.

“You just moved in!”

“It felt terrible last night. I thought that there was someone in my bedroom, right there with me!”

I could sense that she was little drunk from the wine. I hate to indulge in stereotyping, but when this girl is drunk, I’m usually well past that point myself. My advise to the world is not to try going jar for jar with a Russian.
“Did someone break in?” There had been a few break-ins in the neighbourhood over the past couple of months.

“No, the door was locked from the inside. But for a little while, the neighbours stopped arguing and I thought I could hear footsteps. I was really scared.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t anything.” I assured her.

“Why did you move out of there?” Her question floated across the room.

I stopped to weigh my answer here. “I wanted my own place. I didn’t trust the school’s flat.” I answered deliberately.

“Why did you get a cat when you first moved out?”

Again, I was given to pause. “I wanted a cat.”

“I asked Ella if I could borrow hers.” Ella was another English teacher. She was from the same village in Siberia where Natasha was raised, and she worked on the Asian side of town. “In Russia, we say that cats can see ghosts and they won’t let them stay in their house.”

“You can borrow my cat if you want, but I think you’re being silly.”
I could tell that she was scared. Natasha’s a pretty superstitious girl, given to weird little tangents. “Of course, I don’t think that Kedi could chase out a mouse, let alone a ghost, which don’t exist, incidentally! You’re welcome to spend the night here if you want.”

She nodded to my offer.

We were both half in the bag by this point, and so it was time to rack out.

We both went to sleep in my big bed; her on her side and I on mine. To my regret, there’re no details to divulge there.

I was woken up by a grumbling in the middle of the night. It was neither my belly nor my snoring bed-mate (another big shock of the evening). It was my errant cat, who’d waltzed into my room and gutturally voiced his disapproval of my guest. I chased the furry spy out of my room and closed the door behind him. He had never been so annoyingly aggressive before. Fortunately, Natasha’d managed to stay dead to the world throughout Kedi’s protest, and I quickly returned to sleep.

We woke up to my watch’s alarm at half eight and got ready for work. We made it to the school on time and practiced the well-honed teacher ability of teaching while hung-over.

At one point in the day, I joined my only non smoking co-worker, Irish Mike for quiet tea between classes. Irish Mike is an introverted skinny guy with long hair and a beard, and has a whole Jesus look going for him. He’s a bit of a weird guy, but an all around good person with a very sharp mind.

“Nat’s having a rough time in her new flat.” I said as the conversation dipped into a lull. “It is a pretty noisy location.”

“Ya got that right.” Mike said through a periodically comprehensible Corker lilt. “I wouldn’t wish that place on anyone except Batal. I didn’t get a proper sleep my entire time there.”

“Why’s that? Just the neighbours?”

“Well... it was the neighbours constantly fighting in Turkish. When they were quiet the place seemed downright frosty. There was always something not quite right about the place, ya know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I suppose I do. Why did you leave the place, aside from the whole privacy thing?”

“Privacy was part of it, especially when the girl and I were first together, we had to really keep that out of the face of His Highness.” Ever since Batal proclaimed himself, in garbled English, to be The King of the Here, it had become a nickname for our dauntless manager. “Also, the place just had a bad feel to it, so when the chance came to leave, I took it.”

“It was pretty dreary.” I conceded. “Heather did pretty the place up, though. Have you been back to see the place since you moved out?”

“No.” Mike looked down at his tea.

“Natasha’s talking about having some folks over for a Russian dinner tonight. Would you be interested in such a meal?”

“No. I’ll have to refuse on that one, Mate.” Mike said. “Why’d you move out?”

“I just didn’t like the place.”

“Our mutual Slavic friend had cross round her neck. Was that from you?” He asked coyly.

“No, she found it in the flat,” I ignored the inquisitive accusation. “Actually I found it while I was kicking around the place, I figured it belonged to someone who lived there before I moved in. I tried to find an owner for it, but eventually it just disappeared, and hadn’t given it much thought”

“It was on the desk in the master bedroom when I first moved in there. I put it by the door and forgot about it, until I saw Nat wearing it.” Mike finished up the last of his tea. “That place just had a bad vibe to it, and I’ll go out for dinner, or have dinner at your place or mine, but I don’t want to go back there. Sorry, Dude.”

I smiled at his attempt at an American surfer-accent. I understood him, and agreed with what he was saying, but it struck me as such an odd thing to say. I recalled my conversation with Natasha the previous night, and her thoughts about any supernatural realities to the place. I couldn’t bring myself to bring them up to Mike. It just seemed so silly, but I couldn’t honestly dismiss them in my head the way I dismissed them to the girl’s face. “I suppose I see where you’re coming from, but she’s my friend, and if she wants to play house, I’ll help her settle in to the new place.”

Talking about ghosts and goblins to another grown man would seem so strange. What would he think of me if I broached the subject? I can talk about politics or theology or hockey, but this? I couldn’t shake the notion that he felt something about the place and that he wouldn’t say outright, but I decided that it was just the vibe to the place. The reason that I felt foolish even thinking about broaching the topic was that the topic itself was foolish. That was the end of that conversation, and the end of our break. The bell rang and we returned to our factory floor positions in front of our delinquent students.

After my afternoon class, I went straight to my former apartment. My host had cooked up a pot of potato soup and some chicken. We washed that down with some beer, and opened up a bottle of cranberry liqueur, which we soon polished off. She was feeling sorry for herself and unlucky in love. In the past couple of weeks, all of her male friends (except me) had been trying a little too heavily to get her in the sack. I didn’t want to alienate her, but I certainly shared their ambitions. Now, after a month of being single myself, the beer, the cranberry liqueur and beautiful tipsy Russian girl before me where testing the limits of our friendship.

We talked for a few more hours, and when midnight started to roll around, it was time for me to walk the two blocks over to my flat. Then she asked me if it “Would it be alright if you spend the night here?” There was a quick recognition in her face of how I had interpreted the request.

“No, Peter!” She joked with a hint of sadness. “I mean I will make your bed in the living room. Don’t you turn on me like all the others. You’re my friend!”

Yeah, friend… great.

Natasha took out some sheets and a blanket, and dropped the back of the sofa into a flatbed. She made my bed while I just sat there like a bump on a log and made small talk. When she finished, I hopped into my temporary bed, and she went to her room and hopped into hers. Her room was my old bedroom when I’d lived here, and this sofa, in front of the TV was acting as my bed again. I went to sleep, my thoughts elsewhere.

After a few hours of light sleep, I slipped back into consciousness at the sound of footsteps in the hall. Natasha’s room was at the end of the hall, past the lavatory, but the sound was coming from right outside the living room, where I was sleeping. ‘She must be going to the kitchen for some water.’ I thought to myself, and I tried to get back to sleep.

After a few minutes, I couldn’t return to sleep. I stepped out into the hall and looked into the kitchen. The door was open and the light was off. I heard a quick stop to the footstep but it wasn’t coming from the kitchen, but from one of the empty bedrooms.

Like myself, my superstitious friend had kept the extra rooms locked, and segregated from her own personal flow through the apartment. Also like me, she kept the keys in the keyholes, so that no one had to putter around looking for the keys should they ever wander off. I unlocked the extra bedroom where I heard the sound coming from, clicked the light and looked in.

Like before, it was the same egg-shell white walls, the same pink cabinet dresser, and the same nylon wardrobe. The bed was where it always was, the mattress folded in thirds in a corner. The curtains were drawn over the closed window, and a bit of light stole through the weave from the lit alley outside. I stepped into the room.

The room seemed colder than the night outside, and I recalled the weird sense of the air that I’d felt the last time I was in this room. I turned on the light, which now worked, and crept into the middle of the room. I looked at the hangers in the closet and looked in the still empty pink cabinet. Lying atop the cabinet was the tiny silver cross.

“Peter?” Natasha’s voice came from down the hall. “What are you doing?”

“I thought I heard something.” I all of a sudden became conscious that I was only wearing my boxers. “Go back to sleep.”

She walked into the room from the hall, broom handle clutched in her tiny hands as I had once done. She was wearing pink pajamas that at any other time would have distracted a lot of my attention. “This is the room that I hear noises from.” She looked scared, so I put on my most brash and confident voice.

“Well there’s nothing here. I guess we should both go back to sleep.” And I walked towards the doorway in which she was standing. She didn’t budge. “Natasha, it’s nothing!” I took the broom handle from her, and I almost pushed her back into the hall. I really wanted out of that room, right then and there.

Once we were in the hallway, I placed the broom handle by the bathroom door, and turned to face my friend. “Nat, I...”

The light in the empty bed room crackled and dimmed, and then slowly extinguished itself. The door drifted itself into a closed position, and the handle slowly clicked shut.

I heard Natasha gasp as I took I deep breath. Her hand grabbed my arm “Get dressed.” She told me. “Stay in my room while I get changed?”
I didn’t need any light to know what her face looked like right then.

“Yeah,” I grabbed my pants and my shirt from the foot of the sofa and followed her to her room. We both threw our clothes on and headed for the front door. The flat was as quiet as a church, not a word either of us, and the neighbours were as silent as mice.

When we reached the main hall, I grabbed the door handle and was taken aback for a second. The handle itself was freezing. Not to the point that I couldn’t simply turn the thing and open the front door, but it was still another start in a night of starts.

I turned the handle and we left the flat and hurrying down the stairs to the lobby. On that main floor, the breathing sound coming up from the dark was louder and more identifiable than it had ever been. On look on Natasha’s face said that under no circumstances were we staying to investigate. We walked down the stairs and into the alley between the shadow-caked apartment buildings. We walked through the alley and onto the street, and we looked back and the building that we had just left. There were no lights, or distinguishing marks of any kind on the apartment.

Nothing. No Hollywood-style silhouette in the window, no more spooky sounds or breezes. And no story of being chased around by some malevolent spirit. All that we had really seen was a light flicker out; Shirinevler constantly suffered brown-outs, and we saw a door close. Turkish carpentry is not exactly world renown, it could have just been poor construction. I’d seen nothing that couldn’t be easily and rationally explained away, and neither did Natasha, but we went straight to my place, had some anisette and went to bed.

The next day I helped her pack her stuff up, and she moved in with a Romanian friend of ours, Irish Mike’s girlfriend. After I helped her move, I never went into the flat again, and neither did Natasha. No teachers stayed there for more than a month, and eventually the school got rid of the place. In the time since then, neither Natasha nor I have breached the subject, nor do I intend to in the near future. I left that apartment for good, just like everyone else who’s ever lived there.

A few years later, the apartment building was torn down in order to make room for a feeder road onto the E5 highway. I was shocked to see the building on the news one night. It was only through destruction that the basement finally got cleared of its rubble, and it was there that construction workers found a basement apartment, crushed and sealed in reliquary of a collapsing building that never did topple all the way over. The shock of the 1997 earthquake sealed a family of Assyrian-Christian economic refugees from the east of the country in there. They had no friends among the outside world to come and call on them, or check up on them. They were anonymous poor who died in an unmarked grave, and no one ever came to check on them for ten years. No one heard their screaming and shouting when the neighbourhood was abandoned. No one heard their cries for help when their apartment filled up with natural gas prior to the pipes being shut off. No one heard their last breaths floating up the staircase to the lobby.
No one, really.