Chapter 52 next door

My business rests entirely on my own shoulders.In the front hall are the two ladies, the typewriter and the account book. In my room, there are writing desk, cash drawer, guest table, easy chair and telephone.I was young and the business was rolling in.I don't complain, I don't complain. Since New Years, a young man rented the vacant small apartment next door without hesitation, and I foolishly hesitated for so long and did not rent it.It was also a one-bedroom, one-living room, but it also had a kitchen.The main room and the antechamber may be of use to me--my two young ladies have sometimes found them overburdened, but what am I going to do with that kitchen?It was this little scruple to let someone else take the house.Sitting there now is the young man.His name is Harras.What he was doing there, I don't know.Written on the door: "Hallas, Breo".I tried to ask, and people told me that he was in the same business as I was.No one dared to warn anyone outright against lending, for it was a matter of a young up-and-coming young man, whose career might be very promising.No one dared to propose a loan directly, because at present he did not seem to have any property.This is usually how people reply to you when they don't know anything.

Sometimes I met Harras on the stairs, who must have been very urgent, and walked past me cautiously, and before I could take a closer look at him, he had the key to the office ready in his hand.In an instant he had opened the door, slipped in like a rat's tail, and I was again standing in front of the "Hallas, Breo" sign, whose name I no longer knew. I have read it meaningfully many times. This pitifully thin wall always betrays the honest and shelters the cunning.My phone is mounted on the wall that separates him from me.I'm just emphasizing it as a particularly ironic fact.Even if the phone is hung on the opposite wall, the next door can still hear everything.I've gotten into the habit of not mentioning my customers' names on the phone.But it certainly didn't take a great deal of cunning to guess the names from the unmistakable but unavoidable phrasing of the conversation.Sometimes I feel like a thorn in my back, I put the earphones on my ears, and jump around the phone on tiptoe, but this can't prevent the secret from being leaked out.

Naturally, my business decisions became uncertain and my voice trembled.What was Harras doing when I called?If I wanted to be extravagant--and people have to do it so often in order to explain what--I could say: Harras doesn't need a phone, he's using mine, and he's moved his couch to this wall eavesdropping on the phone while I was running to the phone when it rang, taking requests from customers, making crucial decisions, doing a lot of persuasion—and most of all, being helpless the whole time. Report everything to Harras through this wall. Maybe he didn't wait for the call to end at all, but got up as soon as he heard enough to make him understand the business, and ran all over the city quickly, as was his custom, and before I hung up the receiver, maybe he had Start to stop me.