How I Got My Apartment (Part I)

The house where I lived was a specific kind of architectural confusion and disarray. You could not even call it an apartment building or a large villa, and its style formed accents of the gothic, baroque, buildings of antiquity, not to mention already the influence of wooden Alpine architecture, pre-Bauhaus or borrowed from Gaudi. 

It was built maybe at the end of the nineteenth century. It had six large three, four, and even five room apartments, plus my small one. Today these kinds of apartments are called studios, except that my studio had a terrace. 

The apartment had a separate entrance from the street, from where the very tight and narrow stairs led up to a hall the size of a postage stamp, where in order, from the left side, were, first, doors to a rather large, and actually long WC, then, as if on the main wall, a great porcelain sink with only cold water, the door to my room, and to the right side of the exit from the stairs, directed north, a small window, because the house took up the northeastern portion of the intersection of two streets. The room was rectangular. 

Opposite of the entrance situated in the middle of the end wall was visible that it was occupied by the large four-paned glass door to the terrace. To the right side of the entrance there was a fairly shallow recess, where on a marble counter I had an electric heater for tea and where there were two small windows, identical to the one in the hall. 

On the side wall, to the left of the entrance, there were the doors to a small bathroom, which was dominated by a very large bathtub, set in standard sized tiles in an antique motif, and also a ventilator and the copper gas heater to warm water for the cannily built in shower. A resident of this house I became thanks to one Vinny.

Vinny was a few years older than me. He had been the heir to of one of the larger pre-war capitalist fortunes, but it turned out somewhat unfortunately, that despite his parents living peacefully in Canada almost from the onset of the war, he was momentarily forced to sit in the country and build socialism, which, frankly speaking, with all his heart he hated.

We surreptitiously grew closer, becoming friends and gaining for each other full trust thanks to our shared great love of jazz. Vinny dreamed of escaping the country. He even had several contacts, but unfortunately he lacked money, a fact he always bemoaned.

There was a very expensive, well organized escape through Czechoslovakia to the American zone in Bavaria. He once confided in me that on the grounds of a park they owned before the war, a small distance from the palace, at the very beginning of the war there were buried there three medium sized suitcases full of silver, gold and treasures. Unfortunately he, who knew this place precisely, because in the year 1939 he himself participated in the digging, could not show himself within a fifty kilometer radius because the wicked local people who were there now would immediately hang him by his balls.

In spite of everything, for the recovery of this bounty Vinny had fairly high hopes. At a certain moment he promised me that if I helped him in recovering these three buried suitcases, and he was able painlessly to make his way out of the country, he would arrange everything such beforehand that I would get his apartment.