A few days ago, I was watching out my window—something I do a lot these days—when Aleksi, a melodramatic teenager in the apartment across the street, came out on his balcony, set a wad of paper on fire, and dropped it to the sidewalk below. Then he did it again. And again. A fire had destroyed an apartment a couple of blocks away a week earlier, so I can't imagine what he was thinking. As if in response, he was wearing a shirt that said "TAKE IT EASY YO."
You can learn a lot about your neighbors just from watching them. Under Aleksi is a woman who cleans her windows obsessively, which is almost as odd as lighting little fires, since she only has three windows. But I like her. We were sitting on our balcony once and she came outside to gossip with us about that little shit Aleksi. (That's not true, but the conversation was in Russian, which I don't understand, so I just use my imagination and smile like an idiot.)
The other night, a large man who lives next to the window lady and who I think sells costume jewelry, made three separate trips out in the rain around 3 in the morning. Carrying his jewelry case. Who sells costume jewelry at 3 a.m.? In the rain?
A few balconies over from ours is a tiny Pomeranian (Alfred) with the bark of a medium-sized Brussels Griffon. Sometimes he's lowered to the ground in a basket to wander around and bark at cars. Recently he's been digging like hell in a patch of dirt that the large man uses as a garden.
Something is up with this guy, though, I swear. He's always doing creepy things with ropes, large trunks, and saws. Also, his wife (an invalid) disappeared a few days ago. I asked Katya if she thought maybe he had murdered her and then, you know… But she took my binoculars away and said I was crazy. "We've become a race of peeping toms," she said. "What people ought to do is get outside their house and look in for a change."
I wanted to say I wasn't much on rear window ethics, but I couldn't remember how that line went. So I just looked at her, bleary-eyed from a lack of sleep, and said the next best thing: "Take it easy, yo." Then I went for my telephoto lens to see what that dog was digging up.