A Living Room Facing the Courtyard

Fourth floor, no lift, ceilings at three metres forty. The staircase is the reason I took the flat: stone, worn hollow in the middle, a handrail of some dark wood I have never identified. I looked at the apartment for four minutes and at the stairwell for twenty. The agent was polite about it. I signed the same week.

The living room faces the courtyard, which in this city means a square of grey air, four facades, and whatever the neighbours happen to be doing. The window is tall, and the light arrives late and then all at once, around ten, and again at four it goes. I arranged everything around those two moments and around nothing else.

The Table Faces the Window

My drafting table stands at the window and points into the room, so that I work with my back to the light and the paper takes it. Everyone who visits moves the chair. I move it back. In October the sun at four crosses the table at such an angle that the pencil lines stand up in relief, and I have stopped scheduling anything for that half hour.

I have never trusted a room in which you cannot read without turning on a lamp.

The bicycle lives in the hallway, which annoys the neighbour opposite and pleases me more than it should. Two floors up lives a woman who plays the piano badly on Thursday evenings. I have never complained. Bad music at the right hour is a form of weather.

The records are the only thing in this flat I have never rearranged. Jazz, mostly, ordered by year and nothing else. The turntable sits on a low board I built out of pine in my first year here, badly; it has outlived three rounds of furniture bought and thrown out. It is the only piece in the room that is not a compromise with the walls.

Almost No Furniture

People come in, look around, and I know what they are thinking. There is a table, two chairs, a lamp, a shelf. I am not a monk about it. I simply cannot put an object in a room until I know where the light will fall on it, and that takes me months. Some corners are still empty after nine years. I have decided to call this patience rather than laziness.

A room is finished when it stops asking you to add something.

In the evening I open the window and let the courtyard in. Someone's television. A door. The S-Bahn three streets away, a sound you stop hearing and then hear again, suddenly, in the middle of a record. Then I put the pen down and listen, which is the only part of the work that nobody ever taught me.