This most recent apartment has been named The Cave. It's a half underground storefront in Stuttgart West. It's proved most useful for its proximity to an optician, drugstore, supermarket and laid-back gay bar. One can also walk to the opera in twenty-five minutes, should yet another U-Bahn strike be on.
My first night in The Cave was last October 22nd. I had cut a deal with the former tenant, a clothing designer, to live among her sewing machines and store displays until she could complete her move (as soon as possible turned out meaning six weeks) The landlord had confused my arrival date, and neglected to turn on the heat. I spent that night wrapped in every garment I could find near the top of my still-packed boxes. Even with the heat turned on--as it was a few days later, the nightly swaddling would continue until sometime around late April.
The kitchen in The Cave is outfitted with a 15-liter boiler, which supplies the shower in the bathroom next door. In order to produce 15 liters of warm water, one must switch the boiler on around thirty minutes before the intended shower. As I would rapidly discover, 15 liters creates a shower of between three and four minutes in length, depending on chosen temperature.
The Cave abuts the main house's front tenant entrance, divided only by a paper-thin door (conveniently located next to the headboard of my bed). This allowed the duel benefit of hearing every screeching child, boom-box equipped handyman, and early-morning post delivery in living, dolby-quality splendor--as well as allowing my early-bird-gets-the-worm, privacy-averse landlord immediate evidence as to whether I was home or not.
"Frau Steier, Frau Steier..." from an 84-year-old man knocking on what should be a wall in your "apartment" and requesting immediate entrance is about the last thing most people would want to hear even before dawn breaks, whilst wrapped only in a towel, running through a freezing apartment.
Another fun feature of The Cave is its panoramic views of headless bodies traversing the Breitscheidstrasse sidewalk. The street is at approximately chest level from the apartment. When I decide to open the curtains, I can immediately enjoy sight of overwhelmed turkish mothers, refractory unemployed men, Lidl shoppers groaning under the weight of bundled bottled water, and even that guy who plays saxophone with a parrot on his head on Stuttgart's main shopping drag walking by.
However, much like in any zoo or aquarium, the passerby can also see me. If I'm lucky they'll just stare in for a while, and then keep moving. Once or twice, I've had old customers of the former store at this location rap incessantly on my windows, to inquire if I'd also be able to alter their pants. On a few other occasions I've also had the honor to look up to four or so teenaged buttcheeks pressed against the glass. One morning, and older gentleman decided to present his dangling penis whilst I sat nursing my first coffee of the day and reading the Times online.
I closed the curtains before the dangling could turn to knocking.
Still, despite all the very obvious drawbacks of living in such an improvised environment as The Cave, I must say that I'll miss it. Hypothermia and voyeurism aside, this place has been a relatively eloquent mirror of the chaos that continues to mark my life as I swim around on this continent that, regardless of the length of my stay, seems to grow even stranger by the day.
In less than two months, I'll celebrate the sixth anniversary of my arrival in Germany. Since then, I've lived in a share and two solo apartments in Berlin, two apartments in Stuttgart, surfed couches for weeks on end, sampled guest-artist apartments in Barcelona, Vienna, Graz and Berlin, and slept in hotels in more cities than I can count. Opening suitcases full of stinky laundry and packing mannequin-heads into boxes so they don't break--these things seem as normal as three minute showers and buttcheeks on glass for me by now.
It's all relative, I suppose.
