The Cellar

Ruda was in every story the building told about its bad days. The lift stopped between four and five and Ruda was on the stairs. The boiler went in February and Ruda had been down there Tuesday. Nobody accused him. They only said his name first, the way you reach for the switch you have reached for all your life.

What he was doing those evenings, in the room off the drying room, with the door shut because the draught kept putting out the pilot: feeding a stray and her three, keeping the old pipes wrapped, talking to Mrs Hruba's deaf dog, who could not hear a word of it and leaned on his leg anyway the whole time he talked.

Nobody could have known. Nobody went down there. The air was bad. You want a reason to be in a room like that, and he had one, and it was smaller than anybody's theory.

It took the building thirty years and a new man with a key to learn that the boiler was simply old, and that Ruda was the one who heard it first, every time, from underneath, and came up to say so, and stood there while they looked at him.

I don't think they owe him much now. He is dead and the lift is new. But I keep the part where they called his name first, because they were not wrong to. He was the sign, if not the fault, and a building with no Ruda in it finds out in the dark.

Let the record say: present at the scene, and busy elsewhere. A dog leaning on a leg in a room without air, hearing nothing, and staying.