Of Houses and People | Author Jan Urban

OF HOUSES AND PEOPLE

The wind can tear the roof from above your head as if it were nothing.

When I was ten, I built a small house from large cardboard boxes in our yard. All day I crawled through the corridors of my kingdom, peering out through windows carved into the thin cardboard walls. A gentle wind moved through it. At some point I drifted into a contented sleep, and I dreamed the dreams typical of August—the ones that carry the scent of grass.

Then the thunder began.

The wind blew the boxes away.

Only a slip of paper, freckled with tiny crosses, remained in my hand.

Years later, I stepped into my apartment in Brussels for the first time. Soaked to the skin, exhausted, I tore a blank page from a notebook and marked a single cross on it.

Here I would sleep, I told myself.

And there, I truly slept while rain oiled down the windowpanes.

The next day it rained bricks. Broken after a cold night on the floor, I rose and drew another small cross.

Here is the water. Here I will drink.

And I drank.

And here I will wash!

Under the warm stream of the shower, I brushed my teeth, washed my hair, my neck, my back... The sweat ran off me. The pain too slipped away.

Wrapped in a towel, I sat atop a stack of old Jules Verne books and thought: One day, a bed will stand here. Cross.

Bookshelves here. Cross.

A wardrobe over there— cross.

The chair, the vase— cross, and cross.

Thunder rumbled and lightning flickered behind the window. The trees trembled in the low streets. Soon the wind will roll the rooftops up like rugs, I thought.

As a child, I passed my time in all kinds of shelters. In summers, I stayed beneath the bound branches of trees; in winter, I hid in small igloos. Once, in August, I waited out a storm inside a mountain of hay. A year later, I hid in the chicken coop to escape my mother’s fury, and the fleas hid in my hair until the next bath.

Each year I found a place beneath a different roof: churches, hostels, one-room flats, cafés, bus stops, phone booths...

And now—here.

Did I already know all there is to know of houses?

I held the marked page between my fingers. I looked at the crosses. They reminded me of that game where you try to sink the enemy’s submarine. This page was already complete.

Then, for the first time, someone knocked at my door. Was it thunder? Or hail?

I opened it.

She stood there.

We looked at each other. Her eyes were like August windows, the kind you long to open each morning, just to glimpse what’s blooming: dahlias, lilies, roses in the garden.

That evening, for the first time, I felt a brick settle in my stomach.

“Wind can blow the roof right off your head,” I said later.

She nodded.

“Wind can blow away your very head,” she said.