The Winter Seam

Anja held the paper flat while I brushed paste along its back. Outside, frost had whitened the balcony rail and sealed the bedroom window at the corners.

We were covering the hall in a pattern of small green pears. The paper had been cheap because the pears leaned in different directions from one roll to the next. Anja said nobody would notice unless they lived in the hall.

The building was quiet in the cold. Pipes ticked inside the walls. Somewhere below us, a spoon scraped the bottom of a pot.

Halfway down the hall, a steel strip ran from ceiling to floor. It covered the joint between the two halves of the building. In summer it lay flush. That winter it had drawn away from the plaster by the width of a finger.

Anja pressed her eye to it.

“There’s light,” she said.

I told her it would be coming from another apartment. She shook her head and fetched the button tin from my sewing basket. Before I could stop her, she slid a bone button through the gap.

We listened for it to fall.

Nothing struck the floor below. Instead, after a little while, the button clicked against stone somewhere far off.

The paste brush cooled in my hand.

I pulled the steel cover aside. The screws had loosened in the contracting concrete, and it came away without much force.

Beyond it was an alley.

It was narrow and paved with square grey stones. Frost lay between them like spilled salt. On either side rose blank walls pierced by windows, kitchen windows mostly, with curtains and plants on their sills. A pale sky showed overhead, though we were well inside the building, with apartments above us and apartments below.

No snow fell there. Nothing moved.

Anja crouched beside me. Her breath entered the alley and thinned.

Across from us was a window with yellow curtains. On the sill stood my chipped white bowl, the one in which I kept onions. Beyond it, our kitchen table waited beneath the hanging lamp. A heel of bread lay on the board.

I could not see the hall where we knelt. From that side, it seemed our home had a front we had never used.

Anja whispered, “Is that ours?”

Then I noticed the other windows.

Mrs. Vey’s red geraniums stood opposite a dark room. The twins’ paper stars hung in another. Higher up, a man’s shirt had been draped over a chair to dry. Every room faced the alley as naturally as if the builders had planned it so, although every one of those windows should have opened into concrete, cupboards, stairwells, or other rooms.

At the far end, the alley turned.

Anja reached through after her button.

I caught her wrist. Her skin was warm and smelled faintly of paste. For a moment she resisted, not frightened, only curious. Then something in the kitchen opposite shifted as the building settled, and the hanging lamp began a small, slow swing.

We replaced the steel strip. I tightened the screws until the heads bit into the paint.

By morning the temperature had risen. The joint closed. Our pears crossed it badly, some upright, some leaning, with a thin silver line between.

---

Anja is grown now and has children who leave mittens on my radiator. She remembers the decorating, but not the alley. She says the button tin had always been missing one of the bone ones.

When the weather turns hard, I visit her apartment and look at the places where one wall meets another. Most are sealed with plaster or covered by cupboards.

Still, no house is all inside.

Sometimes winter finds the seam.