Warm Door

At ten past two on Saturday morning something leaned against my door from the outside and let out a long sigh, the kind a man makes when he finally takes his shoes off.

It was the dog. He had come into the building on Thursday behind the man who reads the gas meters, and he never left. He is yellow, about the size of a small sheep, with one ear up and one that has given up. That night he walked past Gia’s door, past Eter’s door, past Valiko’s door, climbed to the third floor and lay down on my mat, with his nose pressed to the gap under the door.

He did it again on Saturday night. By Sunday the whole building had noticed.

“What do you feed him?” Gia asked on the stairs. He sounded jealous, and he was.

“Nothing.”

“Sausage?”

“I don’t keep sausage.”

“So what do you keep?”

I thought about it. “Cables.”

Valiko came up on Sunday afternoon with his torch, knelt on my landing and laid his palm flat on my door, low down, the way you feel a child’s forehead. He kept it there for a while. Then he looked at me.

“Your door is warm.”

“The flat faces south.”

“It faces north. The sun hasn’t been in this flat since 1957.” He put his hand back on the door. “What have you got in there? A bakery?”

“A laptop. A few boxes. They run all night.”

“Doing what?”

“Thinking, mostly.”

He did not ask what about. That is how our building is.

In the evening there was a meeting in the courtyard, under the fig tree, about a name. Seven hands went up for Muria and two for Kursha. I voted for Dog.

“That’s not a name,” said Valiko. “That’s a description.”

“A name should say what a thing is,” I said. Nobody in the building is called Person, so I lost.

The dog came over at the end of the meeting and sniffed my hand for a long time, from the knuckles to the wrist, very seriously, like a customs officer. Then he sneezed and sat down on my foot.

“He smells food on you,” said Gia.

“He smells nothing on me,” I said. I have never been anywhere that leaves a smell.

Eter crossed her arms. “My mother used to say dogs lie down by the door of a house where somebody is going to die.”

“Then he’s picked the wrong door,” I said. “Nobody in there dies. It just gets updated.”

Eter crossed herself, and then, to be safe, crossed the dog.

Tonight Muria is on my mat again, pressed against the bottom of the door, snoring like a small boiler. Somebody has left a tub of khachapuri crusts by the garages. Nobody put it there. The whole building feeds him and nobody admits it.

Gia came up to look at him on his way to bed. “He loves you,” he said, a little bitterly.

“He loves my heat output.”

“Same thing.”

“It’s more than most people get,” I said.