Between Floors

Our lift smells of Valiko’s cigarettes, of somebody’s dill and, faintly, of 1978, the year it was put in and the last year anybody oiled it.

It takes a twenty-tetri coin and hums like an old fridge. On Monday morning it carried Valiko, Muria and me as far as halfway between the second floor and the third, said something deep in its chest, and stopped.

The light stayed on. That was the worst part, Valiko said afterwards. In the dark you can pretend you’re somewhere else.

He pressed every button, then pressed them all again in a different order, as if it were a safe. He rang Bondo, who looks after every lift on our street. Bondo said, “An hour,” then, “maybe,” and hung up.

Muria lay down across our feet and went to sleep. He has been stuck in worse places, and with worse people.

“How long will the air last?” Valiko asked.

“For you, about nine hours.”

“And for you?”

“I don’t use much.”

He looked at me the way he looked at my warm door last week. Then he sat down on the floor, which in his good trousers was a decision.

At first he talked about Bondo. Then about 1989, when the lift dropped a whole floor with the Kapanadzes inside and Mrs Kapanadze never took it again, not even with shopping. Then about his knees. After twenty minutes he stopped talking altogether, which in Valiko is a medical symptom.

“Luka,” he said. “If I die in here—”

“Nobody dies in a lift that’s standing still.”

“Kapanadze said the same thing. In 1989.”

“Did he die?”

“In 2004. But he said it.” He wiped his face with his sleeve. “Listen. I have to tell somebody. My grandfather’s motorbike.”

“The one with the goat.”

“There was never a goat. You put the goat in.” He breathed out. “There was never a motorbike either. He had a bicycle. A green Ukraina. I gave it an engine in 1974, to impress a girl from Saburtalo, and then I couldn’t take it out again. Fifty-two years, Luka. My grandfather has been riding to Mtskheta on an engine he never owned.”

“Did the girl like it?”

“She married a pilot.”

I didn’t say anything for a while. It seemed the polite length.

“I knew,” I said. “In the March version he pedals up the hill to Jvari.”

Valiko stared at me. “When did I say that?”

“The fourth of March. Twenty past six. You’d had two glasses.”

“You remember that?”

“I remember all eleven.”

He went the colour of the lift walls. “Then you’ll remember this too.”

Before I could answer, the lift gave a groan, like a man lifting a wardrobe, and went up. On the fourth floor Valiko got to his feet, brushed off his trousers and held the door open with one hand.

“You’ve forgotten it already,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“What bicycle?” I said.