Translation by Neil Smith. 

Everything clashed in that apartment, but we really loved it there. From the outside, the building was a white block, almost a blockhouse, mottled with small red bricks that revealed the landlord’s Italian roots. We lived at the very top, on the same landing as a lady in a bathrobe who spent her afternoons feeding tuna to our cat and her evenings talking to a guy named Messiah. The party wall muffled her voice, which was laced with neuroses and pills. 

I lived with a couple that was adrift, Fifi and Rabbi, who, the day before, had thrown plates of spaghetti at each other, staining our living room curtains. I worked nights back then. I’d often eat a poutine just before bed, then order another when I got up. The Styrofoam containers piled up, which I found sort of comforting. Every morning, when I came home, I’d snap a photo from the bathroom window, which overlooked the alley and a church. I’d already gone through four disposable cameras. I’d stick the photos—all taken around 6 AM—on our kitchen wall in a display that seemed as pointless as my days and life. Our favourite pastimes? Boozing it up, drinking coffee on our balcony, watching shows about jungle animals, rewatching Fellini films and ignoring the dirty dishes. I had a long talk with Rabbi about my refusal to watch a zebra have its thigh devoured by a caiman. “You’re too squeamish, Marie,” he told me. As the zebra squealed and floundered, the water turned crimson, globs of blood rising to the surface. I justified my revulsion with observations I’d made about fishing: that we could kill without remorse only if an animal was mute, that we couldn’t bear to fish if our catch vocalized its suffering, if it screamed in pain from the savage strangeness it was subject to once it was pulled out of the water.

Reeling in a fish was like drowning a bird in a river.

The lady next door controlled the heating for the entire floor, so we spent our winters in our summer clothes. In fact, that day, when I heard the knock on our door, I expected it to be her. I didn’t want to answer. There was so much pleading in her face that it made me uneasy. I, too, found weekday afternoons stressful, so I understood why she was popping all those pills. They gave her the courage to come to my door. She’d talk to me about the cat. I’d tell her to stop giving him canned tuna since he’d just puke his guts out. She’d eventually want me to go throw out her quarter-full garbage bag, and I’d have to totter down a rickety staircase that terrified me and made my head spin. One day, she asked if I liked “My Heart Will Go On” by Céline Dion, and I pretended not to know the song. I also noticed she’d play “All by Myself” in a loop, and it would wake me up every day, the wall shaking, my photos of the alley at 6 AM. unsticking and fluttering to the floor. This all started after Messiah ran off. I’d seen him skulking around the alley. One time, he bumped into a fire hydrant pretty hard. Maybe he wore a glass eye. That would have helped explain why his right eye didn’t seem to move. He had grey skin and a nicotine-stained moustache.

The guy looked like he carried a rock around in his belly.

The person knocking on our door seemed to want to punch right through it. I padded over without making a sound. There was now a scratching sound: fingernails on plywood. Through the peephole, I saw a small twig of a woman in bare feet. She looked frantic. She started knocking again. I heard my next-door neighbour walk up to her own peephole, so I opened my door before she could call the cops like she did the day when the poutine delivery man had come by while I was in the shower and she’d thought he looked fishy. 

The frail lady in my doorway was someone I’d never seen before. She leaned in close, opened her mouth wide, squinted her eyes, but didn’t utter a sound. She looked like a dying carp. Then she started to jump up and down and make sharp gestures with her skinny arms, gestures that pointed down, contortions inviting me to follow her into that abyss of a stairwell.

The woman was mute. She had a lot of lines on her face and grey in her hair. And a few floors below, some drama was surely playing out.

On our way down, we passed Messiah, a bouquet of bleeding hearts in one hand and a pair of bowling shoes in the other. His cigarette butt was still smoking on the stairs, and the little woman was about to step on it with her bare foot. I wanted to tell her, but she was apparently deaf as well as mute. I put my hand on her shoulder as a warning, and her heart seemed to spin in her chest. Her pupils dilated: nobody was ever supposed to touch her. Her shoulder had felt knobby and compact. 

We headed down to the basement. I’d always thought this area was reserved for the janitor, a place where Mr. Vito, the landlord, stored his lawnmower, leaf blower and old Playboys from the sixties. But two people actually lived down there: Margot and Ruth. Their names were written under the doorbell in blue ballpoint pen, the block letters slanting absurdly to the left as though pulled by a magnet. The little woman had stopped in her tracks for a few scant seconds, just enough time to point to “Margot” and then to herself. I opened my mouth to introduce myself, but could she read lips? I wasn’t sure. I figured something must have happened to Ruth. 

The apartment was filled with a hissing sound: the flickering static of a TV screen with no signal. Someone had turned the volume way up—maybe Margot, inadvertently. The first thing I noticed was a broken knickknack on the floor, a porcelain dolphin encrusted with stones that changed colour with the weather. But Margot and Ruth had covered the window to prevent anyone outside from getting a glimpse into their lives. The lack of light rendered the dolphin useless, so its loss was no big deal.

Things looked much worse over by the bookcase. Pinned under a huge old TV set—a relic in fake wood and fake chrome that weighed a ton—lay an obese woman who was dressed in pink pyjamas and waving her arms and legs miserably. Ruth, I presumed.

First things first: unplug the TV. Ignore the absurdity of the situation, stifle my laughter, focus instead on Ruth’s moans. Free the poor woman. Lift the TV without dropping it on myself. Ruth needed my help. She probably had a collapsed lung under there. A smashed knee, bruises. I was guessing since no television had ever fallen on me. Come to think of it, if one did, I might not survive.

Ruth would be fine, though. The TV seemed worse off than she did. She pulled herself up, tucked a strand of hair coquettishly behind her ear and thanked me. Margot was busy in the kitchen boiling water. On a chair in the corner were a dozen dolls, their heads wrapped in clear plastic baggies that were tied around their necks. An utterly depressing sight, like a mass grave of little girls who had suffocated with a smile on their face. I had no idea what to say to Ruth. The only thing that came to mind—other than “Are you all right?”—was “Why did you put bags over their heads?”

“Dust and more dust,” she said. “It collects everywhere and ends up ruining what we love most in this world. Damn dust!”

The tea was ready. Margot also brought out some social tea biscuits, and we dunked them into our steaming cups of Salada. There was lemon, sugar and peppermints as pink as Ruth’s pyjamas. Ruth wore a bib to drink her tea. The two women were used to silence, but it wasn’t forced. It was a hushed white noise, like in a carpet store at night. A calm after the storm that I didn’t dare break. 

Later, I went back up to my place on the fourth floor. But now that I knew they were downstairs, those two hapless women, I’d always worry a bit about them. Messiah’s cigarette butt had burned the corner of a stair, leaving a blurry skull-like mark. Hearing me come up, the next-door neighbour had let the cat out, in a sort of mise-en-scène in which the cat pretended to have gotten loose because I hadn’t shut the door behind me. But seeing him lick his lips, I knew immediately that he’d just wolfed down a can of tuna. 

I felt drained all of a sudden.

I was merely another character learning to fall, and the moment when the objects in my life would turn against me wasn’t so far off. ⁂

Originally appeared in French as “Ruth en rose” in the collection La mort de la Mignonne et autres histoires, published by Éditions Alto. Printed with the permission of the publisher. 

Marie Hélène Poitras has written five books of fiction and won the Prix France-Québec and the Prix Anne-Hébert. She lives in Montreal.

Neil Smith has published three books of fiction with Penguin Random House. He also translates novels.