MargenFor three years I heard my neighbour on the fourth floor play the piano every night at eleven. She was not good. She always stumbled in the same bar, went back, started again. I came to hate that mistake, then to wait for it, and in the end to need it in order to fall asleep.
I never saw her. I knew of her what one knows of walls: that she existed, that she was breathing on the other side.
The night she stopped playing I lay awake until three, my ear against the ceiling, waiting for a mistake that never came. The next morning I went down to ask. I rang at the fourth floor. The door was opened by a man in a T-shirt, hair all over the place, looking as if he had slept badly too.
"Sorry," I said, "your neighbour, the one with the piano..."
"There's no piano here," he answered. "I live alone. I've been here twelve years."
I pressed him. I told him about the mistake in the same bar, about eleven o'clock sharp, about the three years. He looked at me with a strange patience, the kind you keep for people who have got the wrong floor.
"My wife used to play," he said at last, and something broke in his voice. "She always went wrong in the same place. She died three years ago. I've never opened the lid since."
The two of us stood there in the doorway, not knowing what to do with it. I asked him, because I could not keep quiet, why it had stopped sounding that particular night.
"I sold the piano last night," he said. "I couldn't stand it any more."
I went back up to my flat. That night, at eleven o'clock sharp, I sat on the edge of the bed and waited. Nothing played. And for the first time in three years I understood that the mistake had never been hers. It was mine, for having learned to sleep on a stranger's grief.