I Was Sent to Empty My Uncle's Apartment. Do NOT Answer the Intercom.

The fog came off the Elbe plains so thick I nearly missed the turn onto Kastanienallee. I parked on the kerb by the bins, got out, and could barely see the far end of the courtyard. Grey slabs on three sides, all the windows the same. I dragged the flattened boxes out of the boot first, then the bin bags, two rolls of them, and got everything under one arm. The tape gun was in my jacket pocket. My mother had asked me for exactly one thing, and I had brought supplies for it.

"Empty the flat, Klaus. Give the keys back to the housing people by the end of the month." That was all. She said it on the phone in her small voice, the one she uses when she's already decided you'll say yes. I said yes. She's seventy-four and she doesn't go out much anymore, and Johannes was her brother, and there was nobody else.

There wasn't anybody else for me either, back when I was fourteen and she was in the hospital for the better part of two years. Johannes took me in. He was a tall, quiet man who smoked at the window and made me do my maths at the kitchen table. He never asked me how I felt about anything. I'd have hated it if he had. After I left, we saw each other maybe four times in nineteen years. She got the phone calls. I got the news in December that he was dead.

I'm not saying that to feel bad. I'm just saying it was the reason I was standing there.

The front door of number fourteen was propped open with a folded flyer. Inside, the lift stood shut at the end of the ground-floor hall. I pressed the call button out of habit and nothing lit. Twenty-three years of doing this for a living, and I still can't walk past a dead call button without wanting to open the panel. I told myself it was Monday's problem, somebody else's problem, and took the stairs.

Six floors with boxes and bags. The stairwell light was on a timer, and it clicked off between the second and third floors. I stood there in the dark with my arm full of cardboard and listened to the building. Pipes ticked. Somewhere above me a television was on. I felt along the wall until I found the switch plate and slapped it with my flat hand. The lights came back. They went again between the fourth and fifth. I slapped the wall again. By the sixth floor I had a rhythm and didn't need to think about it, which I suppose is how you live in a place like that.

The flat was at the end of the corridor, number six-oh-four. The key stuck a little, and then the door gave.

The smell got to me before I'd got my boots off. Stale tobacco, mostly, gone into the wallpaper and the curtains. Under that was radiator dust, that hot burnt-paper smell you get when the heating has been running on empty. And under that, boiled potatoes. It was the same smell I remembered from when I was fourteen, and I had not expected that. I stood in the hall with the bin bags a while.

The flat wasn't big. Living room with a sofa and a sideboard, a bedroom, a kitchen with a two-person table, a bathroom with a mustard-coloured tub. Everything was tidy, and dusty in the way a place gets after three weeks with nobody in it. I put the boxes down in the living room and went to look at the kitchen, because that's where he always was.

The calendar hung on a nail by the window. One of those free ones from a pharmacy, with a photograph of a lake for January. Every square from the first up to the day he died had a small pencil tick in the corner. Neat little diagonal ticks, all the same length. The squares after that were empty. He'd ticked them every day. Fine. Plenty of old men do that.

I opened the pantry to see what food was there, and it was mostly the wrong door for that. Tins and a sack of potatoes on the floor, yes. But the whole back wall of the shelf was calendars. Stacked flat, spines even, one on top of another, each year with its cover photograph facing out. I took the top one off. Last year. Ticks in every square. I took out the next, and the next. Different lakes and mountains, different pharmacies. Same ticks in every day of every month, all the way down. I counted covers until I stopped at the bottom of the pile, because the bottom of the pile was nineteen years back, and I didn't feel like checking whether the count came out right.

I put them back in the order I found them. I don't know why that mattered.

I did the rest of the flat before the light went. I taped up a few boxes. I opened the sideboard and shut it again. I put a bin bag in the bathroom and stood there holding it, not sure what to put in it first. Around four o'clock, with the fog turning the window to a flat white, I went out into the corridor to find the rubbish chute, and that was when I saw the line.

It was on the plaster, right beside the lift door on six. A single pencil line, straight and level, about the height of my hip, running maybe a hand's length along the wall. Next to it, small, in the same pencil, was a number. 6.

I've spent my working life looking at marks on walls beside lifts. Floor numbers, inspection stickers, a mechanic's initials, a fitter's scribbled measurement from some job in 1987. I know what most of them mean. This wasn't any of those. It wasn't a floor mark, because the floor number was already on a steel plate over the door. It wasn't a measurement I recognised. The pencil was the soft kind, and the line had been gone over more than once.

I looked for a note. Taped to the door, tucked in the frame, left on the floor by the skirting. Something from Johannes, or the housing company, or a neighbour. There was nothing. Not on the door of the flat, not in the sideboard I'd opened an hour earlier, not on the kitchen table. Nobody had left me a word about it.

I put my thumb against the line. The graphite came off a little on my skin.

So that was it. Whatever it meant, I'd have to work it out on my own.

I'd made up the sofa with the blanket from the boot of my car and my jacket over my feet. I wasn't going to sleep in Johannes's bed. The radiators ticked for a while, then stopped, and the fog kept the window quiet. I don't remember dropping off.

Something rattled in the corridor.

I was awake before I knew what it was. Metal on metal, short, the sound of a car door running in its track. I know that sound better than my own doorbell. I lay there with my eyes open and listened for the rest of it. The hum of a motor, the clunk of the brake letting go. Nothing came after. Just the rattle, once.

My phone said two forty.

I got up and went to the door in the dark and put my eye to the spyhole. The glass was old and bent everything, but the corridor was lit, a long yellow smear across the lino, and in the middle of it stood the lift. Doors open. Car lit. Empty.

The lift downstairs had been dead when I came in. The button hadn't even glowed. I'd assumed the whole shaft was off, which is what you'd assume. Nobody was in the car and nobody was in the corridor. I watched for maybe half a minute, waiting for someone to step out or step in. Nobody did.

I know what I should have done. I should have stayed on the sofa and dealt with it at eight in the morning like a man with a job to do. Instead I turned the lock and went out in my socks.

The lino was cold enough to hurt. I stopped a metre short of the door. The car light was that flat white you get from the old tube fittings, and it lay across the floor of the corridor in a clean rectangle. No hum. No sound of any load on the motor. I could hear the cables, or thought I could, a very faint tick of tension somewhere above me, but that could have been the pipes.

I took the steel rule out of my back pocket. I carry it everywhere, even to funerals. Twenty-three years of habit. Before I touch a lift I want to know where the car sits against the landing, because the car tells you what's wrong with the machine before the machine does. I crouched and laid the rule across the sill, edge down, so it bridged the gap between the landing and the car floor.

It didn't lie flat. The car floor was lower than the landing and the rule tipped toward it. I held it steady with two fingers and read it against the sill edge.

Fourteen millimetres.

That isn't a lot. You'd catch your toe on it if you were carrying something. But it's more than any lift should be off, and the regulations start complaining at a lot less. And a car doesn't settle low on its own with the doors open. A lift that's under power holds level. A lift that's dead sits wherever the brake left it, and it would be sitting on the ground floor, not here.

I looked up at the indicator over the door. It was a segmented display, the red kind, and it was showing an 8. I stood there with the rule in my hand and thought that was wrong too, because this building had eight floors and I was on six, and if the car was standing open in front of me it ought to be saying so.

The 8 flickered. Then it went to something else.

I want to be careful how I say this. It was a numeral. The segments were lit the way segments light for a number, in the right shape, in the right box. It just wasn't one I knew. It sat between where a 9 would be and where a 0 would be and it wasn't either. I looked at it for a long time. Then it stayed, steady, as if it had always been there.

I didn't say anything out loud. I remember that. I've heard men say a word when they see something wrong on a job, a curse or a name, and I didn't have one.

Then I did the other thing I always do. I stood up, and before I'd decided to, I lifted my right foot and tapped my heel on the car floor. Twice. You do it to hear how the floor's supported, whether the platform's tight on its frame, whether there's a loose plate. Old mechanics swear they can tell a bad guide shoe by the sound alone. I can't, not really, but I do it anyway.

It answered hollow.

Not the flat dull knock of a steel platform sitting on its frame. Hollower than that. Deeper, and it came back a moment late, as though there was a long space under the floor and my heel had gone into the top of it. I've stood on cars over open shafts with the doors off. This was different from that. The shaft was underneath, obviously. But the sound I got wasn't shaft sound.

I took my foot back. My sock was damp at the heel, which meant nothing, or meant the lino was wetter than it looked. I didn't look.

I stayed where I was. The doors stayed open. The car light hummed, or I thought it did. The corridor was very still. Somewhere in the building a television was on low, the one I'd heard earlier, and I listened to that because it was the only thing in the whole block that sounded like people.

I checked my phone. Two forty-three. Then two forty-eight. I wasn't counting on purpose. I kept looking at the time because I needed something to look at that wasn't the car.

At two forty-nine the doors moved.

They didn't jerk or slam, the way a tired door does. They closed slowly, both leaves together, at an even speed, slower than any operator I've ever set. The gap narrowed. The light in the car went on lighting the inside of it, the brushed steel walls, the empty floor, the handrail. Then the leaves met and the seam sat there, and the light was only a thin line down the middle. Then that went out too.

The indicator went dark. No hum, no clunk, no cables running. The car didn't go anywhere that I could hear. It was just closed, and the landing was dim again, and I was standing on cold lino in my socks with a steel rule in my hand.

Nine minutes. I'd stood there for nine minutes.

I went back inside and locked the door. Then I stood in the hall for a while, and then I checked the lock again, which I don't usually do. I wiped my heel on the mat. I sat on the sofa with my jacket over my knees and the rule on the cushion beside me, and I didn't lie down.

The radiators started up around four, ticking. I watched the window go from black to grey and never did close my eyes.

I went up to the machine room a little after eight, once it was properly light. The stairs don't stop at eight. There's a half flight past the top landing to a steel door painted the same green as every machine room door in Saxony-Anhalt. The hasp was open and the padlock hung on it, unlocked.

The notice was taped at eye height. It was laminated, with sharp corners and no dust, and the tape was still clear instead of yellow. WOBAU Magdeburg across the top, then a few lines. Night maintenance was in progress on the passenger lift at Kastanienallee 14, and the lift would be out of service from one to five. It apologised for the inconvenience. There was no contractor named, no phone number, no date it was valid from or until. In twenty-three years I've read a lot of these, and they always say who's doing the work.

Inside, the room was cold, and it was the cold of a room nobody had been in. I put my palm flat on the motor casing. Nothing. I checked the brake drum and the sheave, and both had a fine grey dust on them that no rope had disturbed. The ropes went down through the floor hatch and hung dead straight. The controller cabinet was live, one relay clicking now and then, and the logbook on its hook had no entry newer than March of some year I didn't bother to work out.

So nobody was doing maintenance. Nobody had been doing it at one o'clock or two forty or any other time. I stood there a minute longer than I needed to, then closed the door and put the padlock back the way I'd found it.

Downstairs I went at the sideboard properly this time. Yesterday I'd only opened doors and looked for a note. Now I took out the tablecloths, a box of playing cards with a rubber band round it, and a tin of buttons. Under all that, flat on the bottom of the left cupboard, was a stack of envelopes with the window kind of address, the WOBAU logo in the corner. Johannes had kept them in order, oldest at the bottom.

I sat on the floor with my back against the sofa and read them one after another.

The oldest was nineteen years old. It was short and polite. In view of Herr Wagner's particular circumstances, his rent was waived until further notice. Further down, he was reminded that the flat could not be sublet or shared, not even to relatives. Below that, in the same tone, he was required to remain resident on the sixth floor. The next year's letter said the same thing. So did the one after. The names at the bottom changed, and the wording didn't. Somebody had copied it forward every year, and nobody had ever softened it or asked how he was getting on.

Nineteen years of rent, gone, and he'd never mentioned it to my mother. Or if he had, she'd never mentioned it to me.

The last letter was from October. It confirmed the arrangement. It hoped he was well.

Someone at that company had known. Maybe not the person who signed, maybe not the one before, but somebody in an office in Magdeburg knew exactly what stood in that shaft at night, and their answer was to pay a man to sit above it and hang a notice on the machine room door. I'd wanted, I think, for it to be a fault. Bad wiring, a stuck relay, some ghost in the controller. A fault I could put a meter on.

This wasn't one, and I got no comfort out of that. If it was managed, then somebody was keeping it going, and the man they'd kept there was in the ground since December. The letters were still written to him. The flat was still paid for. Whatever the arrangement was, it had lost its one part that moved, and I was sitting on the floor in his living room with the keys in my pocket.

I put the letters back in order, oldest at the bottom, and shut the cupboard.

I did some of the job that afternoon because I didn't know what else to do with my hands. I filled two bags from the bathroom and the cupboard under the sink. I didn't touch the pantry. I didn't eat much either, just bread and a slice of cheese I found still sealed. Mum rang at six and I let it go. I didn't want to hear my own voice tell her it was going fine.

At half past two I was standing at the door in the dark with my boots off. I hadn't decided to. I'd been sitting on the sofa, and then I was in the hall with my hand on the latch, and my phone said two thirty-eight. I gave it two more minutes and opened up.

The corridor light was already on. The rattle came at two forty, the same short one as the night before, and the doors opened on six. The car was lit and empty. The indicator showed the numeral that isn't one.

I crouched and laid the rule across the sill. Eleven. I read it twice with my thumbnail on the line because I wanted to be sure it wasn't a trick of my eyes.

Three millimetres better than last night. I noticed that and then wished I hadn't. Nothing else about it was better. The light was the same flat white and the floor was still low. The pencil line stayed where it was beside me, the 6 next to it, and this time I didn't step away from it.

I didn't step into the car either. I stayed on the lino at the edge of the sill with the rule under two fingers, and I didn't speak. My feet went numb from the cold. Somewhere below, a pipe knocked twice. The television was off tonight.

I don't know what I expected. For it to do something, I suppose. It didn't. The doors stood open and the car waited, and I stayed where I was and looked at the gap between the floor of the car and the floor of the corridor. I thought about how a lift that's this far off can still open its doors, and how no inspector would let it run, and how it wasn't running anyway.

At two forty-nine the leaves started to close. Slow, even, both together. I lifted the rule off the sill so the doors wouldn't touch it, though I don't think they would have. The seam met and the light went to a line and then went out.

I stayed there a while after, looking at the plain grey doors. Then I went in.

Nothing happened the next day, which I'd started to think was the worst part of it. I filled three more bags and carried them down to the bins in the fog. I ate bread standing at the counter. Around four I went and stood in front of the intercom by the flat door, because I'd been walking past it all day and it bothered me.

It was the old kind, a beige plastic box with a grille and one square button, no handset. I pressed the button and got nothing. No click, no hum. I took the cover screws out with the tip of my rule and looked at the board. Two wires had come off their terminals, green with age, and the third was cut clean. It had been dead a long time. Years, probably. I put the cover back and told myself that was one thing in this building that made sense.

I didn't sit on the sofa that night. I'd learned that much. I stood in the hall with the light off and my back against the coat hooks, and I watched the phone until it said two thirty-eight.

The intercom lit.

A small orange light came on behind the grille, and it threw a dull square on the wall. I stopped breathing. I mean I actually stopped, and noticed only when my chest started to hurt. There was no power to that box. I'd had the cover off. I'd seen the wires.

It crackled. Long, dry, the sound of a speaker warming up that hasn't been used. I stayed exactly where I was, a metre from it, with one hand flat on the wall behind me.

"Klaus."

It was Johannes. Not close to Johannes. Him. The hoarse, cracked edge, the little scrape at the back of the throat before he said anything, from forty cigarettes a day. I hadn't heard that voice properly in years, except the few times we'd met and once or twice on my mother's phone across the room, and I knew it before the second word.

"Klaus, are you there? I think you're there."

I didn't answer. My mouth was dry.

"It's all right," he said. "I'm not cross. I wouldn't ask if there was anyone else." A pause, and the speaker hissed. "It's only the ride. That's all it is. You go down, you come back up. Only until they find someone."

"Who's they?" I said. It came out as a whisper.

He didn't answer that. He went on in the same slow, tired way he used to explain fractions to me at the kitchen table, when I'd stopped listening and he knew it and kept going anyway.

"It's cold down there. I won't lie to you about that. Colder every year. My hands don't work in the mornings any more." I heard him breathe in, a wet, rattling breath. "You know how to do this. You know it better than anyone. That's the truth. Better than me. I only ever guessed."

My knees were going. I could feel it in the backs of them, a tremor I couldn't stop by locking them. I pushed harder against the wall. I thought, this is a recording. Thought it hard. Somebody at WOBAU, somebody with a tape, some trick with the building's wiring. Then I thought, he's never said any of this to me in his life. Nobody had a recording of it.

"Johannes," I said. "You're dead. They told us in December."

"Yes," the voice said, gently, as if I'd said something sensible.

That was all. Nothing else. The orange light held steady on the wall.

Then the rattle came from the corridor, short, the same one, and the light from the landing changed under the door. I hadn't looked at the phone. I didn't need to. I went to the door anyway, opened it, and stepped out onto the lino in my socks. My whole body was shaking now, hands, jaw, everything, and I let it.

The car stood open on six. Lit, empty. The indicator showed the numeral that isn't one.

I crouched and put the rule down. It took me two tries to hold it steady. Nine.

Two millimetres better again. I looked at it and didn't feel anything about it, which frightened me more than feeling something would have. The floor sounded no different in my head, and I hadn't even touched it. I kept my heel well back from the sill.

Behind me, through the open flat door, the intercom crackled again.

I didn't turn around. I stayed crouched with two fingers on the rule and the cold coming up through the lino into my knees, and I listened to it breathe. Slow, in and out, the way he used to at the window with the cigarette between his fingers, waiting for me to finish my homework.

"Kläuschen," he said.

Nobody had called me that since I was fourteen. Nobody else ever had.

I spent the next morning doing the only thing I actually knew how to do. The lift ran on mains. If I took the mains away, it had nothing to run on.

I fetched the tester and my fuse puller from the toolbag in the boot, and I checked the batteries in the tester twice before I trusted it. In the machine room the notice was still taped to the door and the padlock was still hanging open. I left both alone. The controller cabinet was live, and the relay was clicking to itself now and then. I opened the main isolator and the whole cabinet went quiet. Then I put the tester on all three phases, and on the terminals below the switch as well, because a dead switch tells you nothing about what's behind it.

Nothing. Zero on every leg.

I pulled the three big cartridge fuses out of their carriers with the puller. They were heavier than they look, with blackened ceramic ends. I put one in each jacket pocket and the third in my trouser pocket. Then I hung my own padlock on the isolator handle and locked it, which is how it's done properly, even when you're the only person in the building who cares. It felt good. For about an hour I was just a mechanic who had a job done right.

I did more bags that afternoon and I ate a proper meal, tinned lentils out of the pot. At half past two I was in the corridor, not the flat. I'd put my boots on for once. The corridor light was on, the house circuit, so that hadn't been the lift's doing. I stood with my back to the wall opposite the doors, where I could see the whole landing, and I held the rule in my hand like it would help.

The shaft made no noise at all. No brake, no motor, no cable tension, nothing you'd hear when a lift is even thinking about moving. I could hear the fuses shift in my pockets when I breathed.

Two thirty-nine. The intercom in the flat stayed dark, or I couldn't see it from where I was.

Two forty.

The rattle came. Short, in the track, the same one. The doors slid open on six and the car was lit, flat white, and empty. The indicator above it showed the number that isn't one.

I didn't move for a bit. Then I went over and crouched and laid the rule across the sill. Six.

I stayed there with two fingers on it. Down in the machine room my lock was on the handle and there were three fuses against my legs. There was no wiring in that building that could have lit that car, moved it to my floor, opened the doors and held them. Twenty-three years I've been in this trade, and every car I ever met wanted current. This one hadn't asked for any. I had thought of the power as the problem, and it was never the problem.

I checked the light. Fluorescent tubes want a supply, and these were burning as steady as any I'd seen. I put my palm flat on the door edge and it was cold, not the cold of metal but the cold of a room where nothing has been going on. I didn't put my heel near the floor. I've stopped needing to hear that noise.

The doors stayed open. I counted them out on my phone, because I couldn't look at the car for that long. At two forty-nine they closed, slow and even, the light narrowed to a seam and went out. The indicator went with it.

I stood up and my knees cracked. The corridor was very quiet. I took the fuses out of my pockets, looked at them in my palm for no good reason, and put them back.

Back in the flat I locked the door and then didn't know where to go. I ended up in the kitchen with the light on. The calendar hung on its nail by the window where it always had, lake photograph, January. I'd been looking at it every day for four days without really looking, the way you stop seeing a clock. This time I saw it. Every square up to the day Johannes died had a tick. Past that, empty squares. I'd checked that on the first afternoon.

Except for one. The last day, the day I'd come, had a tick in it. And yesterday's square, and the one before. Three of them, small, neat, same length, diagonal in the corner. Those I'd half expected, if I was honest, and I'd been telling myself I hadn't looked properly.

Today's square had one too. Today's, the one I was standing in, with the date after midnight. The graphite was still shiny.

I hadn't made it. I'd have known. I stood there and ran back through the day, the machine room, the tester, the lentils, and I couldn't find a minute when I'd come to this wall.

Then I felt something in my right hand, something thin and hard I'd been holding so long I'd forgotten about it. I looked down.

It was the pencil. The stub that hung on a string beside the calendar, that I'd never once touched. I was holding it the way you hold a pencil to write, with my thumb along the side. The point was worn down to a flat, bright edge, fresh, as if somebody had just used it. My fingers were grey with graphite.

I didn't put it down straight away.

I put the pencil back on its string. It took two tries to get the loop over the nail. Then I washed my hands at the kitchen tap, and the graphite came off grey and slow.

I didn't sleep. By morning I'd stopped asking whether the lift needed power and started asking what it did want. It had come four nights running and the gap had closed every time. Fourteen, eleven, nine, six. Something was being paid down. If it took a rider, maybe it would take a stand-in. I had no better idea.

The pantry was the obvious place. Johannes's sack of potatoes sat on the floor under the calendar stacks, ten kilos, the paper gone soft at the corners. They were the only thing in the flat he'd handled every day for nineteen years, apart from the pencil. I did not want to think about why I'd picked that.

At half past two I was in the corridor again, boots on, sack at my feet. The corridor light was on. At two forty the rattle came and the doors opened, lit and empty, the indicator on its number that wasn't one. I crouched and laid the rule across the sill. Four.

I picked up the sack, and it was heavier than I'd remembered. I stepped over the gap and into the car, and the floor gave me nothing, not even a sound. I wedged the sack into the back corner against the steel wall so it couldn't tip. Then I stepped out backward, fast, with my heels clear of the sill.

The doors closed. Slow, even, the seam meeting. I watched the indicator, because I couldn't help it. It ticked down. Five, four, three, two, one. Then it went past one, to where there's no floor, and the light behind the door went dark.

I stood there with my phone in my hand and timed it. Eleven minutes. Nothing in the shaft made a sound. I could hear my own breathing and the pipes below.

Then the rattle, and the doors opened on six.

The sack was still in the corner, upright, exactly where I'd wedged it. But it was open at the top, the paper folded down neat. The potatoes weren't in it. They were in the far corner of the car, piled up, and every one of them had been peeled. White, wet, round, not a strip of skin left on any of them. The peel wasn't anywhere. The floor of the car was wet too, a dark film across the steel, and it reached the sill and stopped a finger's width short of my socks.

I stayed where I was. I remember thinking, stupidly, that a potato takes a while to peel, and that eleven minutes for ten kilos was quick work.

Behind me, through the flat door I'd left open, the intercom crackled. The orange light threw its square on the wall. Johannes's voice was soft, almost apologetic.

"It doesn't want things, Kläuschen. It never has." A wet breath. "It wants the one who counts."

I didn't answer. The voice didn't say anything else.

I'd been counting since the first night. The sill, the minutes on my phone, the ticks I'd found on the calendar, the fuses in my pockets, the millimetres coming down. I'd thought of it as being careful. It was my whole trade. You measure a thing, you write it down, and you know what's owed and what isn't. The car didn't take the sack because the sack wasn't owed. It had peeled the potatoes and handed them back, the way you'd return something you'd been given by mistake. It took what was owed. I was counting what was owed, and I was the one who counted.

The doors stayed open. Longer than the first night, and I was sure of it, because this time I counted them out loud under my breath, in seconds, the way I'd count a door cycle at work. I got to seven hundred and thirty-one, and then they closed. Twelve minutes and some. The light narrowed to the seam and went out, and the potatoes and the sack went with it, wherever it was they went.

I went inside and sat on the sofa with my boots still on. I stayed there until the window went grey.

The phone rang the next day, at dusk. I was in the bedroom with a bin bag open on the bed, holding a cardigan I hadn't decided about. I let it ring five times before I picked up, because I knew who it was.

"Klaus." Her voice was small, the way it is when she's tired. "I didn't wake you?"

"No. I'm up, Mum."

"Are you eating?"

"Yes."

"Good." I heard her move the receiver. She still has the phone with the cord, and it scrapes on the table. "Have you found the keys? To the flat. He'd have another set, the housing people always want two."

"I've got the one set. I'll find the other."

"And it's empty? Nearly done?"

The cardigan was grey wool, gone thin at the elbow. I put it in the bag. "Almost," I said.

"Almost." She said it the way she says things she's decided to believe. Then she was quiet a bit, and I thought she'd finished. She hadn't.

"He used to say something," she said. "Johannes. On the phone, when he was low. He'd say the last night was the easy one, because the lift came level." She gave a small dry laugh. "I never knew what he meant. I thought it was the drink."

My hand had gone flat on the mattress. "Mum, what last night? What did he say exactly, did he—"

The line clicked, and then it was the dial tone.

I rang back. It rang out. I stood there with the phone against my ear listening to it, and I knew she wasn't going to pick up, that she'd put the receiver down the way she always does, without a goodbye, and gone to sit by the window with her tea. She hadn't been telling me anything. She'd been passing along a thing her brother let slip in nineteen years of calls, one sentence she'd kept because it was odd, and she'd never understood a word of it. He hadn't told her. Nobody had told her either.

I put the phone down on the bed next to the bag and looked at the wall, where the corridor was on the other side of it.

I gave it until dark to be a bad idea, and it stayed a good one.

There was nothing clever in it. I'd done what I was asked for a week, and my mother would take "almost" for as long as I said it. The keys would go back when they went back. I could drive home, sleep in my own bed, and ring the housing people from a kitchen where the floors were flat.

I packed fast. The flattened boxes I hadn't used went back in the boot, then the tape gun, the toolbag, the blanket. I left the bags I'd already filled by the flat door, tied off. My steel rule was in my back pocket where it always is. The three fuses were still in my pockets, one in each jacket side and one in my trousers, and I didn't take them out. I locked Johannes's door and tried the handle twice. In the kitchen I hadn't looked at the calendar. I want that on record. I walked past it.

The stairwell lights did their trick between the second and third floors and I slapped them back on without thinking. It was already coming up on nine when I got the car started. The fog had been thick all week, but by then it had settled on the road so that the headlamps lit only the fog itself, and I drove with the window cracked to hear the tyres.

There isn't much between Neu-Olvenstedt and the river, just tram lines and a lot of grey. I took it slowly. Every set of lights I hit was a red halo I didn't see until I was on it. I turned the radio on, got a man reading the weather, and turned it off again. I noticed I was counting the lamp posts. I stopped, and a few posts later I was counting again.

I got as far as the Elbe bridge. It was a good hour, most of it crawling. There was almost no traffic, one lorry ahead with its hazards on, then nothing. I pulled onto the verge on the far side of the first span, put the hazards on, and got out. I don't really know why. I think I wanted to be able to say I'd crossed something.

The river was down there, and I couldn't see it. I could hear it, a low steady sound under the fog, and the cold came up off the water into my face. The fuses knocked together in my pockets when I leaned on the rail. I stood there and did the sum, because I'm not made to leave a sum alone. Fourteen, eleven, nine, six, four. Tonight would be two. My mother's sentence didn't need explaining to a man who'd spent twenty-three years telling people what level meant.

I told myself out loud that it was a flat, a lift and a building, and that I was standing on a bridge. Nothing in the fog answered. I had a drink of the water I'd brought and my hand wasn't steady enough to do it neatly. I got back in the car. I remember the door shutting, and the dashboard clock saying something past ten. I remember putting my hands on the wheel at ten and two, the way they teach you. I don't remember anything after that.

Two thirty-nine.

I was standing up. That was the first thing, that I was on my feet, and my feet were cold through my socks, colder than they should have been on lino I'd walked on all week. The corridor light was on. There was a smell of wet wool, which was my jacket. It was buttoned wrong.

My right hand was flat against the wall by the lift doors, palm pressed to the call button. It was lit. The little plastic square was glowing orange under my hand, and I could feel it warm against my skin, a tiny heat, no more than a pilot lamp gives off. I had been leaning on it. My arm ached from the shoulder, so I'd been there a while.

I took the hand away. The button stayed lit.

The rattle came, the short one in the door track that I'd been hearing all week. The doors ran open on six. The car was lit and empty, the flat white tube light lying across the corridor in its clean rectangle. Above the door the indicator showed the numeral that isn't one.

I didn't need the rule. You could see it from where I stood. The sill had a shadow now, a thin dark line where the car floor sat under the landing. I got the rule out anyway and crouched, and my knees cracked, and I laid it across, edge down. Two millimetres. Two, on the mark, and I looked at it for longer than I needed to, because it was the only thing I'd done all night that I could account for.

The pencil line was at my hip with its six next to it. I was standing exactly where I'd stood the other nights. I looked down the corridor to Johannes's door, which was shut. My car keys were not in my hand, or in my trousers. I checked the other pocket and there they were, wet, with a bit of grit on the fob that hadn't been there this morning.

I didn't remember the drive back. Not the bridge, not the lamps, not the tram lines, not the stairs. I didn't remember the door of the flat, or taking my boots off, or the lock. I had gone out into the fog to leave and I had come home, and something had done the driving and the stairs and the hand on the button, and it had done them well enough that I hadn't so much as scraped the kerb.

I stayed crouched with two fingers on the rule and my other hand on the lino to keep me steady. The car waited, open, two millimetres low.

The car moved. I didn't hear it. The rule lifted under my fingers, tilted, and lay flat. Edge down, flush, no shadow at the sill, no gap for a thumbnail to find. I looked at the numbers on the blade and they were all where they should be.

Twenty-three years I'd been on lifts. I'd seen them land within a millimetre on a good day and within five on a bad one, and I'd adjusted every one of them by hand. I had never once seen a car arrive perfectly. Nobody has. There's always a little give in the ropes, a little settle in the brake. This one had none, and it was the first thing all week that made my legs go.

The doors stayed open. I waited for them to start closing, the way they had every other night. They didn't.

I put the rule in my back pocket. I stood up. I thought about the flat behind me, the locked door, the bags tied off by the wall, and my mother by her window with her tea. Then I stepped over the sill, which wasn't a step at all, and into the car.

I tapped my heel on the floor, twice, my old habit. It answered solid. Steel on a frame on a proper platform, nothing under it but a shaft. Then it tapped back. I hadn't touched it. It gave me my own two taps in my own rhythm, a little slow on the second, the way I do it.

I turned around. The doors closed without a sound, no rattle, no rubber on rubber. The tube light stayed on.

The indicator ran down. Five, four, three, two, one. It went past one and kept going, and the numeral that isn't one came up and stayed a moment. Then it went out. I don't know how long we dropped. My ears didn't pop and my stomach didn't lift, and there was no motor. The cold came up through the soles of my socks first, and then the smell. Boiled potatoes and old smoke, the smell of the flat that first afternoon in the hall with the bin bags. It was stronger down here.

The walls of the car are brushed steel, and you can see yourself in them if you stand right. I saw a man in a wet jacket, buttoned wrong, but only his back. Grey hair, the collar turned up on one side. He was walking away from me, and he was going the same way I was facing. I looked at the wall behind me and he was there too. I didn't move my feet. He did.

The car stopped. Nothing shifted in my body when it did.

The doors opened on a corridor of grey panels, floor to ceiling, no doors in them, no numbers. Light came from somewhere I couldn't see. Johannes stood a few metres off, holding a pencil.

He was thinner. I hadn't thought that was possible. The cardigan hung off him and his hands looked too big at the ends of his sleeves. His face was slack, all of it let go at once, the way a man's face goes when the phone rings with the result he wanted.

"Kläuschen," he said. Hoarse, gentle. No cough. "Thank you."

He didn't step in. He didn't come any closer, and I noticed that he never had, not once, not on any night. Behind him, farther back where the panels went darker, something shifted. It was taller than him. Taller than the corridor should have let it be. I saw the edge of it move and I looked at the floor.

The rule was already in my hand. I hadn't decided that either. I jammed it across the door track, edge to edge, and the doors came against it and stopped. Steel on steel. It held.

"That's one," said the intercom, from the little grille by the buttons. It was Johannes's voice, but he was standing right there with his mouth closed.

"One what?" I said.

Nobody answered. I understood anyway. I started counting.

I counted aloud, in seconds, because that's how I'd done the doors the night before. One, two, three. My voice sounded flat in the cold. I kept my eyes on the rule and the strip of grey floor beyond it. I heard Johannes's slippers on the panels, going away. He didn't say anything else. Something behind him came forward a step, and I counted louder.

At some point I was past six hundred and I knew I'd only been going a short while. Then it was past a thousand, then two, and the words stopped meaning what they were. I said them the way you say a phone number you've dialled every day of your life, with no picture attached. Four thousand something. Then I lost my place and started again from one, and I couldn't say how many times I did that.

The car went up. I didn't feel it start. The rule lifted out of the track by itself and dropped into my hand, and the doors slid shut, and the smell thinned out. The indicator lit up and counted back. One, two, three, all the way to six.

The doors opened on the sixth-floor corridor. The lino, the yellow light, my own flat door at the far end. My phone said three fifty-two. Johannes was not with me. The car floor was level with the landing, and I stepped out over nothing.

The pencil line was by the door where it always was. Somebody had gone over the number beside it in soft pencil, pressing hard, and it said seven now.

I gave the keys back at the end of the month. I drove to the WOBAU office on a Thursday and put both sets on the counter, the one I'd found and the second one I'd turned up in the end, in a biscuit tin. The woman took them and didn't count them or ask about the flat. She didn't ask who I was. She slid a form across, and I signed it, and I didn't go home.

I rented the flat. Nobody made me. I filled in what they gave me and the rent was the same as it had always been, which is to say nothing. The first letter came in the second week of February, in a window envelope, addressed to Herr Klaus Zimmerman, sixth floor. It said that given my particular circumstances, and that I must remain resident. I put it in the sideboard, on top of the others.

Every night at two forty I'm in the hallway in my socks. I've stopped setting an alarm. The rattle comes, the doors open, and the lift is level. It's level every time now, and I lay the rule across the sill anyway and read zero and stand up.

Floors don't feel flat to me anymore. I walk across the kitchen and there's a give in it, a little hollow, that isn't there when I check with the rule. I tick the calendar in the morning before the pencil can, and I ride, and I come back up a little less myself each time.