Sleeping While the City Is Awake

The shutters in my room are not decorative. They are thick wood and they close properly, and with the curtains behind them the room becomes a dark with no clock in it. I bought the curtains with my first month's wages. They are the most expensive thing in the flat, and I would buy them again.

The building wakes at seven and I hear all of it. Doors. Water in the pipes. The woman upstairs, who talks to her mother on the phone in a voice meant for a bigger flat. A drill on Tuesdays. Children coming down the stairs one at a time, counting the steps out loud, which I like.

What I sleep through

I have learned to sleep in pieces. Three hours, then the pipes, then two more, then the drill, then whatever is left until four. It is not good sleep, but it is mine, and I have stopped fighting the building. We have an arrangement: I stay in my room, it makes its noise, and we both finish by evening.

The light was never the problem. That took a week. The invitations are the problem.

Everyone I know lives in the hours I don't. Weddings, christenings, a birthday lunch at one in the afternoon, a coffee at eleven that means eleven and not eleven at night. I go when I can. I am the one who arrives at the end and stays for the last hour, and they have stopped asking why.

On Sunday there was a dinner for my mother's birthday at seven in the evening, which is my six in the morning. I woke at four, showered in cold water because the boiler is slow, and ironed the linen shirt. Grey-blue, a little too big in the shoulders, bought near the market two winters ago.

Before the shift

The shirt does not hold the smell. I have washed it three times and it does not. My hands do. At the table my sister took one of them and said something about it, laughing. I said that was the whole job. She said no, the whole job is getting up at night, and the smell is extra.

I left at half past nine with the shirt still on, because there was no time to change. I lit the ovens with a clean collar and one of my cousin's cigarettes behind my ear that I never smoked. The dough does not care what I am wearing. That is one of the good things about the dough.

By midnight the shirt was off and folded on a shelf, I was back in the apron, and the dinner had already become a thing that happened. I like that about nights: everything from the day is over by the time I start, and I begin from a clean counter.