1001 Nights Cast

I moved into a new apartment in Queens less than one month after the destruction of the World Trade Center. My office is only ten blocks from where the attack happened.

I was already looking for a place when the towers fell. The week after that, I wasn’t in a state of mind to be very choosy. I just had to get from one place to another, fast.

I chose the apartment because it was big and because I immediately liked the landlady, a sixty-year old woman that claimed to be either Yugoslavian or Rumanian, depending on the day.

Simka talked non-stop in her native tongue and her own idiosyncratic version of English. We got along, because I liked to listen to her. Whenever I started to talk, she caught the thread of the subject and yanked it brusquely back into her own frame of thinking.

Fortunately, Simka had a caustic sense of humour and made great cookies. She had me sit with her and drink ‘international coffee,’ an excellent Turkish brew that she destroyed by stirring in a huge portion of artificial hazelnut-flavoured coffee creamer.

‘I like mine black,’ I’d say hopelessly.

‘I know, but this is special, it’s the way we drink it in Yugoslavia,’ she’d insist, ‘You’ll learn to love it.’

I’d sigh and eat the cookies until she’d pop up to answer the phone in the other room. That was my chance to carefully pour the lukewarm coffee down the kitchen drain.

Within the first week of living there, she taught me how to clean what was already clean. She described in detail how to sanitize pots through a complicated process of washing them in soapy water, bleach water, and spraying them with oven cleaner before washing them in the soapy water again. I was amazed her pots weren’t worn through by the time she’d finished.

She explained to me how when she was a girl in Yugoslavia it was her job to clean the dirt floors in the house. No wonder she felt as though nothing was ever really clean! Since she’d come to the United States, she’d learned that there was the natural dirt that came in from outside (from her gardening, for example) and there was the unnatural dirt that came from tearing off paper towels and toilet paper. This tearing of paper made a little unnatural dust that would build up on all the surfaces in the house.

She insisted that I had to clean constantly to keep ahead of the game. I should come home after work and sponge down the stove while heating up some dinner. I should clean the bathroom tiles when I was taking a shower. There really wasn’t any reason to be lazy and live in a heavy mixture of natural and unnatural dirt.

Later, she noticed me carrying home a big bag of clean clothes from the laundromat and asked me if I’d used the dryers there. She said I should use the clothesline outside my kitchen window. They would dry fast in the sun and smell fresh. I remembered my grandmother drying her clothes on a line in her tiny bathroom.

I took her advice and hung the next batch of laundry on the old rope that was stretched in a long flat loop between two rusty wheels: one attached to the left of my window and the other to a wooden pole on the other side of her garden. The rope was secured to itself with an elaborate knot. It had surely been tied like that for at least thirty years, probably not long after she had come to America.

As I pinned my shirts and socks to the line and watched the knot move away from me over the garden, the thought came to me that I should try to untie the knot with my bare hands. Maybe it wasn’t even possible to untie a knot that had been through thirty New York summers and winters. My clothes did smell better.

The next day, Simka gave me a lesson in how to hang the clothes on the line, how to avoid unsightly clothespin marks and rope impressions on my pullover shirts. Over the next weeks, I observed the clothes hanging on other neighbours’ lines. Each line had a particular ordering of items, usually based on the idea that the thickest materials were put out first because they took the longest to dry and therefore should stay out longer. But a few lines of clothes were to some degree arranged by colour or shape. And there were several methods, for instance, of hanging a fitted sheet so the wind would not wrap it around the clothesline, making it difficult to reel in what had dried.

Every time I put out the laundry, I looked at that knot and pictured its unravelling. I stared at it as it moved away and then back to me again.

Simka told me that one day soon, bad people would poison all the food in the world and we would survive because she knew how to make soup out of grass and cook bread over a fire deep in a hole in the ground. In the meantime, it was best to keep everything clean.

On a windy day, shortly before I moved to the apartment where I now live, the clothesline with all of my clothes pinned to it fell into the garden. I ran downstairs cursing to myself that I should have untied that knot and put up a new clothesline four years ago.

When I reached the garden, I started picking up my muddy pants and underwear. I turned around and saw Simka holding the knot in her hands.

‘This knot will never come apart, I tied it myself,’ she said proudly, ‘It’s the wheel. It came off the hook on the post. I forgot to tell you. It does that sometimes on the windiest days when you have a lot on the line.’