Cursed Bunny(45)

She knew she was not “being clever.” Where these people learned such tricks to being clever, she didn’t know, nor did she want to know. Making as much money as quickly as possible, buying a larger house and more expensive car, sending your children to expensive English-language kindergartens and competitive private schools, and going on expensive family vacations abroad every season may seem like a prosperous life to some. But it wasn’t the life she wanted. She wanted a quiet and peaceful life and sought a modest yet warm community where she could live out her days in harmony with her neighbors. She thought she had finally found such a place.

Except she did not like the building from the start.

It’s an old building in an old neighborhood, she thought as she kept trying to convince herself. It was the price of an apartment, and if she wanted to buy a whole building, small as it was, there was no choice but to go with a more dilapidated one, no matter how uninspired the location. The building was much cheaper than most other places, was situated at the entrance to an alley that led to a main road, and wasn’t so far from the subway or bus stops—so perhaps it wasn’t that uninspired a location, either. After briefly consulting with her husband, and a short moment of hesitation, she made her decision to buy.

The real problems began after the woman and her husband bought the building.

It had four floors aboveground and a larger-than-expected basement. There was a café on the first floor and a small rented-out office on the second. The third floor had just lost its tenant and was empty, and the fourth floor had been where the owner had lived according to the “fortune-gainer.” Saying it would be improper to barge into an apartment where someone was still living, the fortune-gainer showed them the empty third floor instead. To not ask questions or demand answers and simply look at what was being shown before signing on the dotted line was a fatal mistake that even rookies like them could’ve avoided.

After the former owner moved out, they finally entered the fourth floor to see not only piles upon piles of trash but piles upon piles of rat droppings as well, and a few meagre pieces of furniture rotting where they stood. Everything about the place screamed abandonment. It was unbelievable to the woman that this had been “where someone was still living” until recently. The second she began to pick up the trash, cockroaches came pouring out underfoot. The deluge was more than she could stomp with her foot, and her initial attempts to whack them brought out a bevy of surprised rats. She screamed and declared a retreat.

The problem was not solved by fumigation sessions with exterminators. They had already come in four times to fight against the horde of roaches and rats while she had been practically breaking her back cleaning up. Fed up, she called the former building owner.

The owner did not pick up. She dialed again, but after a few rings, the line cut off by itself. She called several more times out of spite, but just as she was about to give up, there was a voice on the other end of the line. “Hello?” Glad to finally get through, the woman explained who she was and tried to summarize the situation, but the moment she mentioned the word “building,” the old woman at the other end suddenly screamed obscenities so loudly that the younger woman thought her eardrum would burst and abruptly hung up before the young woman had a chance to speak again.

That was enough to quash any desire to call again. Instead, the woman called the fortune-gainer.

What an odd day the woman was having vis-à-vis phone calls. The fortune-gainer was out showing a home to a client, said the auntie who had only picked up after the phone had rung for a long time. The woman figured she was the wife of the fortune-gainer. They had met only once before.

“Don’t be like that,” said the fortune-gainer’s wife when she heard the woman’s story. “You’re younger, you must be the one to be patient. That old woman is a pitiful person herself. Her husband died early and her only child, a son, went out on a delivery helping his mother’s business and hurt his head in a motorcycle accident … So young, such a waste, he wasn’t even married, poor thing …”

The fortune-gainer’s wife sighed. “After that happened, the old woman went a little strange … She closed the restaurant she’d run nearly all her life and left with her son. To some Christian retreat. The building was all she owned at the time but she got rid of even that at a pittance …”

This surprised the woman. “She went on a retreat? So … she didn’t live in the fourth-floor apartment?”

“I haven’t seen her in a long time. She did seem to come back every once in a while to fetch clothes and such—”

“How long has it been since she left?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” said the fortune-gainer’s wife calmly. “Three or four years?”

After she hung up, the woman found it hard to sort out her feelings. Now she understood why the building had been so much cheaper than others in the same neighborhood. And perhaps a little of why her neighbors would give her and her husband anxious glances. All she had thought at the time was that the old people were simply resentful that young people had bought an entire building and were moving in.

Now there was nothing more she could gain by chasing this up with the former owner. After about ten bouts with the exterminator in the first month alone, the rat and roach problem was finally under control. There had been an incident where the rats, pushed out of their refuge, had swarmed through the café on the first floor. This had upset the café owner who declared he was moving out. The woman was worried that she would have no renters left and the building would end up empty, but a new renter appeared quite swiftly. A blood-sausage stew shop stank a lot more than a café, but the woman was relieved. Finally, she and her husband could retrieve the boxes stored at her mother’s and move into the fourth floor of this building of their own.