Art's apartment was on the second floor. As he climbed the stairs, he heard a door opening somewhere above. Footsteps were approaching.

Mrs. Knooch, his next-door neighbor—a hawkish lady in her sixties or seventies—turned around a corner. She carried a large basket of laundry, hugging it to her chest.

"Good evening, Mrs. Knooch," Art said.

She nodded. "You too." Her head bobbed up and down. With her stooped posture, her long neck, her neatly arranged gray curls, and her small, beady eyes, she reminded him of a wigged turtle.

A smell wafted from the lady or from her load, somewhere between a chemical and a perfume. It was strangely familiar, but Art couldn't place it.

He pressed himself against the wall to let her pass. But as she did so, a white piece of clothing hanging from her basket brushed against him and dropped to the ground. He picked it up. It felt soft between his fingers. Taking care not to examine it too closely, he returned it to its companions with a smile.

"Thanks." Her voice had the charm of a rasp. "I'm lucky that the blouse needed washing anyway—the stairs are so dirty this week." The thin smile on her lips failed to reach her eyes.

"You're welcome." Art nodded. "Enjoy the evening." He climbed on and heard her descending below him, muttering something.

So, you think the stairs are dirty?

Art had a pretty good idea who had ratted on him for not sweeping the staircase.

He scanned the steps for the dirt that Mrs. Knooch had spotted. Not a speck did he find. He stooped down and moved a finger over the smooth stone surface then rubbed it against his thumb. Nothing, not a crumb of offending matter.

The woman's strange smell lingered, scampering over the folds of his mind, tugging at memories here and there, but failing to connect.

As he reached the second-floor landing, the level of his and Mrs. Knooch's apartments, he continued his search for incriminating traces of things unclean. The gray tiles were spotless except for a small, white something on the ground close to the threshold of Mrs. Knooch's abode. He picked it up. It was a crumpled piece of paper. He flattened it into a small square, cut along two edges and torn along two others, as if ripped from a larger sheet. Both its sides were blank—no writing nor print.

A tracer to trap a negligent neighbor oblivious of the roster?

He held it up to his nose. The Knooch scent was there, no doubt about that, but he wasn't sure if it came from the paper or if it was still lingering in the wake of her passing.

The possible origin of the paper in his fingers intrigued him. It looked totally innocent, yet he ogled Mrs. Knooch's apartment door with suspicion.

He shrugged, unlocked his own entrance, entered, and locked up behind him.

A sigh escaped his lips as he looked into the evening gloom of the short, unadorned corridor connecting his two rooms and the frugal kitchen between them.

This country felt so unreal. Its rigid façades, inscrutable inhabitants, and arcane rules—qualities that seemed to have found their distilled perfection in the very house he lived in.

Not for the first time, he considered looking for another place to stay—something more modern and less creepy. But decent apartments were rare in the city and exorbitantly expensive. 

And there was something about this place's order and orderliness that resonated with him.

He went into the kitchen and tossed the paper, or the marker—whatever—into the bin under the sink.

The rankling thought of someone telling on him, of Knooch ratting on him, stuck to the back of his mind as if glued there.

At this moment, a memory popped up, the image of a wardrobe, oceans and decades away. At his grandmother's house. He had seen that wardrobe when he had been there for the last time, with his mother, some weeks after Granny's death. He had been a student at the time. They had had to clean out the house. And there had been that monument of a wardrobe holding an endless row of garments. The story of a whole life written with gowns, skirts, blouses, and dresses. 

And from that wardrobe had wafted that same smell, strong and forbidding. The Knooch smell.

His turtlish neighbor smelled of mothballs.

After dinner, Art went through his e-mails.

The subject line of the first one congratulated him on having inherited a small fortune, and the second was from a woman called Olga looking for a true friend and supporter. He briefly considered redirecting the first message to Olga, but he ended up deleting both of them.

His mother wanted to know about his life in beautiful Tavetia, and he sent her three photographs from a trip he had taken with a Chinese colleague the weekend before. They depicted an old tower hulking in a fog-filled town, cows being bored on a misty meadow, and two swans bobbing on dark water under a low lid of heavy clouds.

The last message was from his friend Daniel — a report from a fruit market in Hilo. Hawaii, on the other side of the globe. Dan had attached pictures of him between a surfboard and a tanned blonde. 

Art hit the reply button and started typing.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Dan

I hope you didn't get a sunburn while surfing the blue waters kissing the shores of your far-away island.

You know, there's no danger of getting sunburns here. Mold, maybe, but no sunburns. When it's not raining, it's foggy. And when the fog finally clears, you'll see the clouds again.

The fruit market sounds delicious. Here, my fare is provided by my trusty microwave.

And did I tell you that I have to sweep the staircase of the house where I live? Every six weeks? No, I'm not joking. I wouldn't dare—they are dead serious about that. I nearly got court-martialed by the janitor today for having failed my duties.

I think my neighbor, a lovely, retired lady, has ratted on me. Think of that.

I do wonder how some people find employment in Honolulu while others end up in dreary Tavetia.

Don't get me wrong, I don't begrudge you your paradise. But one of these days, I'll fly over, and we'll play some games of chess on the beach. Not tomorrow, though—I'll have to sweep stairs then. :-(

Art

Drowning the rest of the evening in Netflix, he went to bed around 10 p.m.

As he stared at the ceiling in the gloom of his bedroom, he heard footsteps from the staircase, someone climbing their way up to the third floor. That wouldn't be the waitress, she probably worked later hours. So it had to be the other third-floor tenant. He was a Pakistani taxi driver. A talkative guy, so different from the taciturn natives.

The next morning, Art slept late until an excited staccato ringing of his doorbell tore him out of a pleasant dream of abstract, symmetrical patterns.