This was written in April 2020.
Last September, I moved into a new apartment by the canal. All Parisian buildings come with their own curiosities, and this one was no exception. My door sits in the middle of the top floor, and when I arrived my new home was tightly nestled between a woman with four children, whose exasperated yells I could hear through the thin walls as I lay in the bath, and an old man who ate all his meals standing at a battered computer table in the corner of the corridor. Now and again I’d hear his shouts through the wall too, though I couldn’t understand who or what he was crying out for. We never exchanged more than a brief greeting as I came and went. Occasionally I would see him in the street, stooped over and walking slowly back from the supermarket, or shuffling past my door to the grotty hallway toilet. A few months ago, I returned from a week away to find the woman and her children gone. Just the two of us, now.
Then the pandemic swept through Europe. A quarantine was announced. I thought of my frail neighbour, how in all these months I’d never seen him with a visitor. I left him a note on the old speakers that sit between our doors, offering to pick up some shopping, medicine, essentials. When I came home later that day, he was waiting for me in the corridor. He asked if I had left the note, and wondered if I could perhaps buy him some things - just simple things, soup, milk, tea, bread, comté. He then explained that he couldn’t heat his own food, and asked if I could do that for him too. At first, I didn’t understand - I ran inside and brought out a spare electric hob, thinking his was broken. He told me gently that he lived without electricity. He was very poor, he said. He had been very poor for a long time.
For two weeks, we fell into a routine. Shopping every few days, hot tea and bowls of soup at regular intervals, fresh baguettes with cheese and pâté. I baked banana bread one night and brought him a piece with his bedtime tea as a surprise, still warm from the oven. Before I went to sleep, I heard him singing La Marseillaise outside my door.
Our conversations never lasted too long. I was reluctant to linger, not wanting to stand too close, knowing that if he got sick it would be my fault. But we talked a little. He worried about me not being able to carry all the cartons of milk and soup, and I joked that I needed to work on my arms anyway. He told me he’d been a professor of history, geography and maths at the university, and asked if I knew anyone looking for a tutor. He beamed when I told him I was studying.
His needs were so small, but I was afraid of all the uncertainties. What would happen if he fell ill? Why didn’t he have any electricity? Why was no one taking care of him? How long had he lived like this? I asked the police what I should do. I called the Mairie. I contacted charities. I emailed social services. No help to be found, aside from the kind neighbour downstairs who began to appear with her own small offerings every few days. The questions would have to wait.
One day, the woman from downstairs came by again with things for him - coffee, a pain au raisin, a radio for him to hear the news. She left me her number, and we agreed to call each other and co-ordinate how to best organise his shopping and meals. That night, I left another slice of banana bread with his tea. In the morning, I heard his cheerful singing through the wall again.
Then, an hour or two later - a thud, and a faint cry. I opened the door to find him flat on the floor, eyes staring blankly up as he struggled to keep his head off the ground. I ran inside to call my downstairs neighbour, then laid a small, butter yellow cushion under his head while we waited for her and her husband to arrive. They brought a mask and gloves for me, and we carried him to his sagging single bed. He seemed confused, as if he was struggling to recall our faces. An ambulance was called. The neighbours went downstairs to wait and I brought him a cup of water, helped him sit up to take small sips. I stood by the bed, unsure of what to say, other than that help was coming. I smiled at him, forgetting for a moment the mask over my mouth. I hoped he could see it in my eyes that I was smiling and understand that I waiting, that I was staying. I tried to hide my shock at his tiny room, the concrete floor littered with newspapers, the gaping holes in the slanted ceiling, the thick layer of dust covering every surface. The little pile of threadbare socks, hand washed, on a plastic bucket in the corner. The old hand-drawn mathematical chart, pinned to the wall by the window.
Help arrived. His condition was discussed. My downstairs neighbours said he’d been in the building for decades, but they’d never spoken to him until this week. He had an older sister somewhere, in the south. Estranged, as far as they knew. They would try to contact her. He was taken to hospital. I went home and sat on the bathroom floor and sobbed for an hour.
That weekend, I got a call to say that he seemed to be doing better. They expected he’d return soon, and that they’d assess his living situation when he did. On Monday, I pulled his old table out of the corner and cleaned every inch of it, before laying out his dishes ready for him to return. On Tuesday, the downstairs neighbours came by and told me he had died in the night. Epilepsy, they thought. Not the virus.
We only knew each other a few weeks, but in that small pocket of time it felt like our lives had become intertwined. His small needs marked intervals in my day and I grew grateful for them, a reliable reminder of time passing. I was alone and separated from everyone I loved but so was he, and I felt a silent companionship between us, a kinship through the walls. When he died I felt cast adrift again, floating in a timeless sea. My days passed by unmarked, with no one to witness me come and go, tether me to the ground.
I wondered how it had been, living that way for decades in a small attic room under the eaves. If he had become accustomed to the loneliness, or if it still stung after years and years. But perhaps he wasn’t lonely. Perhaps he was perfectly content with this little life, and I’m projecting my own fears unfairly upon him. I’ll never know. I don’t even know if there will be a funeral for him, now, or if he will slip out of this life as quietly as he lived in it. But I hold onto the hope that he died warm and safe. That it didn’t hurt. That he wasn’t alone.
It’s just me here now. Every time I come home I see his little table, the cutlery lined up and shining, ready for him to return. I still can’t quite bear to put it away, admit he’s not coming back. So for now I leave it there, with the unopened soup and cartons of milk and his favourite biscuits. I think about the banana bread I gave him, small slices of comfort, and hope somehow he tasted everything I couldn’t say. I’m here. I’ll take care of you. You’re not alone, anymore.
CHOCOLATE CHIP BANANA BREAD
- 250g wholemeal flour
- 120g butter, softened
- 100g brown sugar
- 80g dark chocolate
- 3 overripe bananas
- 2 eggs
- 2 tsp baking powder
- 1 tsp cinnamon
- 1 tbsp milk
- 1 tsp salt
- a dash of vanilla essence
Heat your oven to 165C (fan-assisted).
Take three bowls - in the first, mix the dry ingredients (flour, sugar, baking power, salt), in the second, mix the butter and sugar, and in the third, mash the bananas and blend with milk, cinnamon and vanilla essence.
Beat the eggs into the butter bowl, then add everything into the dry ingredients bowl and stir gently until fully blended.
Roughly chop the dark chocolate into small pieces, and fold into the mixture until just combined.
Line your loaf tin with baking paper, or a loaf tin liner if you have one. Pour the batter in.
Bake the bread for 60 minutes, then check to see if it’s cooked by inserting a clean toothpick. Bake for another 10 minutes if necessary.
Leave to cool on a wire rack, or eat warm from the oven.