No Post on Sundays
I think we used to live next door to a man who didn’t know the Berlin Wall had come down, but I haven’t got to that bit here
The mailbox for our building is in the lobby, two floors down from our actual front door. A tall bank of chipped white metal boxes, each one is about the size of a cereal packet – perhaps four or five inches in depth, with a round silver lock in the top righthand corner. There’s one for each flat, and ours, Norton/McBride, is the last on the right, third row up from the bottom.
Kay checks it for post regularly, and is always excited to do so.
The letters from her bank are cordial and polite, bordering on friendly, while mine can be rather more ominous. It’s for this reason that all our utilities are registered in her name, and so the meter readings for the gas, water and electricity arrive addressed to her also. The student loans company sends healthy summaries of where her repayments are up to, her office keeps her up to date on her pension policy, and her friends who live in other countries will send postcards just to say hello, even when they aren’t themselves on holiday.
It’s no surprise then that she’s always keen to check for such positive correspondence – and I do mean, always.
It doesn’t matter what the circumstances are, whether we’re running out the door to catch a train or coming back from the supermarket with a week’s worth of shopping, Kay will stop to open the mailbox, only too happy to risk delay, or leave me weighed down with anything that we’ve been carrying. Once, in late November, she left me standing with our new, seven-foot-tall Christmas tree balanced on my shoulder.
“Can this not wait?” I asked at the time, the sweat of the effort stinging my eyes and pine needles dropping down the back of my collar.
It could not wait.
She just stood there, idly turning over fresh envelopes in her hands and looking very pleased.
“There’s nothing here for you,” she replied, smiling. “And you’re getting tree all over the floor.”
The flat in Berlin was the first place we’d lived where it was just the two of us and nobody else. Before that, Kay had been by herself in a smaller apartment that had a view of Treptower Park and was closer to her office, while I was in a basement flat in South London, living alone but with two other people.
Our building in Friedrichshain was on a quiet, tree-lined street, and had a heavy, orange steel door that swung slowly on stiff hinges, yet still clanged loudly when it closed. On its immediate inside, the walls of the empfangshalle were lined with faded green tiles, save for the large space occupied by the forty-two mailboxes. At the far end of the lobby, a wide staircase with linoleum steps curved across the hallway, the dark wood banister sloping from its acorn newel cap toward our home on the second floor. Disappearing into the white plaster and then reappearing on each subsequent floor, this chunky railing punctured the walls on each level like it ran through the building in one long, unbroken spiral all the way to the rooftop, as if it was something organic that the apartment block had been built around, to preserve and to keep safe. Indeed, when I think of Berlin now, I picture the city from the sky, with none of its cladding, brickwork or stone, but as many, many thousands of rows of spiral bannisters, corkscrewing out of the ground to the heights of their different storeys, like a great twisting wheatfield of metal and wood.
Our first time living together as a twosome, Kay and I had been quick to gift each other new behaviours to get used to – which I suppose actually were some of our oldest behaviours, previously hidden to better present ourselves as reliable, untroublesome companions. I pick my nails till my fingers bleed; she can’t sleep without a desk fan on; I have a ‘way’ I like to fold the tea towels; she wees with the bathroom door open. So it was pretty early on that the fixation with the mailbox settled comfortably into the list as an endearing quirk of character that, now noticed, was cherished.
In the same way as I took comfort from feeling the second-hand breeze in bed, or hearing the tinkle of piss from the hallway, I enjoyed being there in the lobby to see her face light up as she rifled through each new batch of letters. Or on the rare occasion that there weren’t any, to do my part to console, or to remind her that actually she’d already collected the post earlier that same day.
I’d say it took about four months all told for it to become annoying.
What happened I think was that it was just too frequent an interruption to retain its charm, and so actually, it quickly irritated me.
In time, I drifted away from the mailbox and joining Kay in the big reveal, and instead took to standing pointedly with my back to the pair of them, scowling in the direction I hoped we’d soon be going – whether that was out of the building or up the stairs.
I hope she doesn’t think I’m acting like a child, I remember thinking to myself one evening, stood as I was with my arms clamped to my sides and my nose pressed firmly up against the main door.
“What are you doing?” she asked from somewhere behind me, rummaging in her handbag for the mail key.
“Me?” I said. “I’m waiting to go.”
“No,” she replied. “You’re acting like a child.”
“You are,” I muttered, stepping onto the street and counting a beat before the door banged loudly behind me like I knew it would.
The sad truth of the matter was that I’d grown to resent it – the postbox, I mean.
I was taking it too personally.
This source of joy for her, so close to home, that wasn’t me, was a constant reminder of all it could offer that doesn’t come easy for most humans to provide – least of all unemployed creative writing graduates.
First of all was a sense of security.
Where I could only give Kay my thoughts and opinions on where we were in our lives, and where we might be going, the mailbox could be far more certain: the bank statements revealed the very reality of the present, while the letters about her mounting pension could provide her with a more concrete assurance for the future. All I had to offer on both was my very genuine belief that we’d always be okay, whereas the postbox was able to define things rather more clearly in fiscal terms.
Then too came a sense of possibility; of the unknown.
What she really loved was that on any given day she never knew what she might find. Maybe her friend in Los Angeles had sent a handwritten letter with an invitation to visit in the winter, or perhaps the frequent use of a store loyalty card had yielded some money-off vouchers. It could just be routine admin or even junk mail that drew a smile. We’d receive shiny leaflets advertising local restaurants and takeaways, discount flyers for nightclubs and thrift stores, and even homemade political pamphlets, rallying against local gentrification, regional inequality, domestic responsibility, international war, global terror and intergalactic concern; all needed to be read, acknowledged and understood before either being taken upstairs for further review or pressed into a wire metal bin that had been bolted to the wall between the mailboxes and the main door, appearing overnight and overflowing ever since with consumer-savvy or radical literature.
It soon became clear that the landlord, the hauptverwaltung, was becoming sick of the junk mail too, and perhaps was increasingly mindful of it not upsetting his gentrifying tenants, and so one day, not long after the appearance of the bin, small oblong stickers appeared on each of our mailboxes; ‘Bitte keine werbung einwerfen’. Barely a week went by before Kay chipped the polite little notice away with her thumbnail, dropping it into the new bin and carrying her envelopes and flyers up the stairs with me following on behind.
The mailbox was able to offer her ‘out of the ordinary’, whereas I am endlessly predictable.