Chapter 16: The Building

The folder had become heavier than paper.

I carried it under my arm through morning rain, wrapped in a plastic sleeve because Mrs. Claes had once looked at a damp document as if it had insulted the entire banking system. Claim receipt. Proof of payout in progress. Account statements. Tutoring receipts. A note from the notary with three questions I could answer and two I did not yet understand. A list of inspection points written in my hand: roof, wiring, plumbing, room compliance, heating, damp, tenants.

The last word sat at the bottom of the page. I had written it the week Mathis kept his pen moving without my help, when I discovered that leaving my hands where they were could feel like work.

Tenants.

The word did not fit the folder as neatly as roof or wiring. It had weight in another direction.

I checked the documents once at my desk, then once more standing by the door because the old habit of preparation had teeth. The room was cold. The small heater coughed at my feet, doing more noise than labour. On the chair lay the coat I had bought second-hand from a shop near the station, dark wool, good shoulders, one repaired seam inside the sleeve. It made me look older if I stood properly. That was becoming useful and dangerous in equal measure.

I put it on. In the mirror, the young face still arrived first. Twenty. Too young for property, too young for bank caution, too young for the life behind the eyes. But the coat helped. So did the folder. So did the way I had begun to stand before anyone chose what I was allowed to be.

I tied my shoes, polished the night before with a cloth and patience. Then I left before I could turn preparation into delay.

Leuven was wet and hard-edged under the low January sky. Bicycles hissed over stone. Students moved toward exams with scarves pulled high and faces closed against weather and fear. A girl outside the bakery held a stack of flashcards under her coat and recited aloud to no one. A man in a suit carried flowers under one arm and a briefcase under the other. The bells were late or I was early. I could not tell which.

Mrs. Claes had given me eleven minutes the previous afternoon.

She had not called it eleven minutes. She had said, “I can see you at four-twenty,” which in her office meant eleven minutes if no one misused the chair. I had brought the papers. She had read them without changing expression.

“You have proof of funds,” she had said.

“Yes.”

“That is useful.”

Useful, from Mrs. Claes, was the emotional equivalent of applause. She turned one page.

“It is not the same as affordability.”

“No.”

She placed her pen under one line. “After purchase, registration, notary, probable roof work, electrical correction, plumbing allowance, insurance, and reserve, this number becomes thin.”

“How thin?”

“Too thin if you discover another problem.”

“I will discover another problem.”

She looked up then. “Good. You are learning from buildings before owning one.”

I did not smile. She would have disliked it.

“What do you need from me before the ninth?” I asked.

“Updated proof when the payout is deposited. Written estimate from inspection if possible. Confirmation that no unexplained cash enters the file before signing. No fragments. No cleverness.”

“I understand.”

“Bring the notary questions after you have answers from Van Acker. Do not let him hurry you past words you do not understand.”

“He tries.”

“Then write slower than he speaks.”

That was nearly kind. Mrs. Claes rescued it by closing the file.

The betting slips stayed out of the folder.

I had taken them from their hiding place the night before and laid them beside the bank papers. Small football slips, old ones and new thoughts. Porto. Greece. Henin. Names that could become money if memory behaved and if I was foolish enough to let a betting counter become a second altar. The old man in me remembered men arguing in barracks about matches after the fact, as if hindsight were a sport of its own. The young body wanted certainty. Mother. Building. Repairs. Security.

I put the slips away again. Mrs. Claes would ask where they came from. I did not need another answer.

Van Acker was waiting outside the building with a cigarette he had not lit.

He wore a brown coat that looked older than some of the tenants and shoes that had seen basements. Beside him stood the inspector, Peeters, a narrow man with a metal case and the expression of someone paid to disappoint people. He shook my hand, then wiped rain from his glasses with a cloth that came from an inner pocket folded into a square.

“You are the buyer?” Peeters asked.

“Potential buyer.”

Van Acker made a noise. “He says that so the building does not hear him becoming hopeful.”

Peeters looked at the facade. “Buildings hear only water.”

I liked him immediately and distrusted the feeling.

The building stood three storeys high and did not try to charm anyone. Brick darkened by rain. White window frames that had not been white for years. A gutter sagging slightly at the left corner. The front door had been painted green once, then touched up in a shade near enough to count only from a distance.

Three mailboxes sat beside it, one with a label half-peeled, one with no label, one with two names written over older names in different ink. A folded advertisement for cheap pizza stuck out of the middle box. Someone had written geen reclame above it in blue pen and underlined it twice.

Van Acker unlocked the door. “Mind the step.”

I minded the step and still felt it dip under my weight.

Inside, the hallway smelled of damp coats, old plaster, onions, and drains that had learned to speak quietly. The floor tiles were cracked near the wall. A bicycle leaned against the staircase despite a handwritten note saying geen fietsen in de gang. Someone had taped the note at eye level and someone else had hung a wet scarf from the bicycle handlebar.

“Whose bicycle?” Peeters asked.

“Everyone’s until rent day,” Van Acker said.

He took a ring of keys from his pocket. They made a practical music in his hand.

I had inspected barracks, storage rooms, field clinics, temporary shelters made permanent by neglect. The first lesson had always been smell. Damp. Fuel. Mildew. Old food. Sweat. Electrical heat. Men lied. Paint lied. Smell got tired of lying before anything else.

The hallway did not smell catastrophic.

That was not the same as good.

Peeters opened his case on a narrow table near the stairs and removed a torch, a small meter, a notebook, and a folded form. Van Acker watched him with the resentment of a man seeing his house become evidence.

“We start below,” Peeters said.

“The basement is not below,” Van Acker said. “It is under. Different moral category.”

He led us through a door at the end of the hall. The stairs to the basement were steep and narrow. The bulb at the bottom flickered before staying lit. The air changed at once: cooler, wet at the edges, with a mineral smell that sat in the mouth.

The basement had brick walls, a low ceiling, pipes running in several directions, and the general atmosphere of a place people entered only when necessity had defeated hope. A stack of old tiles leaned against one wall. Two paint tins had rusted shut. A plastic bucket stood under a pipe that was not currently dripping.

“Does it drip?” Peeters asked.

“When it rains sideways,” Van Acker said.

“Which direction is sideways?”

“The expensive one.”

Peeters wrote something down. I crouched by the bucket. There was a line of dried mineral at the bottom, old enough to have dried and recent enough to matter.

“You changed that joint,” I said.

Van Acker looked at me. “Three years ago.”

“With what?”

“A plumber with cold hands and bad manners.”

Peeters shone the torch. “It will need looking at again.”

“Everything needs looking at again. That is what ownership means.”

He said it while staring at the pipe, not at me. It worked better that way.

We moved along the wall. Peeters tapped, tested, measured damp in three places, wrote numbers without explaining them until I asked. The first was acceptable. The second was not. The third made Van Acker mutter something about old brick and new instruments.

“Water comes from somewhere,” Peeters said.

“Very philosophical.”

He did not take it. “Nought point eight on the second one. Write that down.”

I wrote the readings down. My handwriting stayed neat. That annoyed me more than the damp.

Back in the hall, a door opened above us. Footsteps stopped on the first landing.

“Inspection,” Van Acker called up.

A woman’s voice answered, “Again?”

“Again,” he said.

The door closed. Peeters looked at him.

“Tenant in two,” Van Acker said. “Anja. Nursing. Works nights. Complains about cold like she invented winter.”

“Does the radiator work?” I asked.

“It works when bled.”

“When was it bled?”

Van Acker looked toward the stairs. “Recently enough to argue.”

Peeters wrote another note. The ground-floor room belonged to a boy who was not home. Van Acker knocked anyway, waited, then opened it with a key while saying the tenant had been informed. The room was larger than mine by three square metres and less orderly by a lifetime. Bed unmade, books open, trainers near the desk, a poster of a band I did not know, two plates stacked near the sink. The window had condensation at the bottom. A small electric heater sat unplugged in the corner.