The Mystery Man in his Mystery Flat

I should write about the apartment block across the road, right opposite the window that I look out when I’m procrastinating. It’s one of the old buildings, patchy and filled with bullet holes. Yes, real bullet holes from the war. Some of the windows are boarded up and it reminds me a bit of Yasser Arafat’s face – old, patchy, bumpy, extremely unattractive.

It looks like no one lives there in its four dark, quiet floors. But someone does. Not a homeless squatter or anything. The top floor has electricity and a satellite dish stuck outside one of the windows. In summer, the windows were always open and occasionally a guy would lean out and smoke his breakfast cigarette in the sun. We’d wave at each other if I was sitting on the balcony.

I still wonder about this man. Why does he live in an old, dilapidated, frankly haunted-looking building? (I don’t believe in ghosts, but I would never live there). Does he sleep well at night, thinking about the three abandoned floors below him?

I must admit, a friend and I had had a few drinks one night and tried to get in the front door and have a peek round (the building, not his apartment). But it wasn’t one of those obliging doors that just swings open when you give it a gentle kick, so we got nowhere.

At the rate cranes are swinging their way through Berlin, this building will be gone in a few years, or at least remodelled so it’s white and fresh, with all floors in use.