He lives nearby, he says, about five minutes away on foot, in a ten-floor apartment building—he’s on the eighth. It has a little kitchen, a living room without a TV, a bathroom with a commode that always gets clogged, a bedroom with a single bed, another bedroom where he stores boxes of his things. What things?, asks Soon, and he explains diffidently, as if it were all too obvious. His magazines! His albums! His stereo equipment! The notebooks with his notes! Some of his mother’s clothes! Dishes, saucepans that he still hasn’t used but that people insisted on giving him! And what’s Soon’s apartment like? What floor is she on? That’s the typical landscape in the area: apartments in tall buildings, brown towers, green towers, small windows, little balconies that recall drinking troughs in canary cages. Soon shakes her head. No, no, she lives in a house, she’s already explained; a few years ago they moved to a house, and that was right when everything started to go wrong for them—or for her, because her brother, after all, had left. The house has two yards, one in front and the other in back, and a storage shed—it’s big, there’s always more to clean. The whole street is full of houses just like it; some people park their cars in front, others don’t, and that’s the only difference. But those houses … where are they? I haven’t seen any houses like that around here! Of course not, Soon tells him, because they’re not here; it takes her over half an hour to walk to the park, doesn’t he remember? Old Man closes his eyes, reflects. Houses are worse, he says, because they don’t have views, he prefers the view he has from his apartment—I can see the expressway, miles and miles of expressway! At night it’s a show worth watching because the car headlights shine, lines and lines of cars that go one direction and the other, it’s crazy! Some want to go one direction and others in exactly the opposite direction, and they get stuck, they always get stuck. Someday Soon should come to his place to see the expressway from so high up, she’d be surprised how pretty it is, she can’t imagine. Yes, she should come, he repeats, he’d be delighted to show her. In the building’s eaves there are also some swallows’ nests, and with any luck you can see them peeking their heads out—another show! Old Man makes his suggestion calmly, without changing his tone of voice, as if he weren’t really saying it seriously or there weren’t anything malicious behind it, and because of that Soon doesn’t let it trouble her, or not too much.

She started to feel bad when her brother left. Her brother said he loved her, but it wasn’t true, because he left unapologetically, claiming that he had to go. Had to? That’s what makes Soon the angriest: that he would disguise his freely made decision as an obligation. Is a person forced to do a master’s degree? That’s the first thing. And, in second place, why did he insist on studying abroad? Weren’t any of the programs in his hometown good enough for him? Or did he do it to escape, to get away from her? Of course, Soon had begged him to stay. She’d begged him in tears, she’d pleaded, but in vain. He looked at her with sorrow, he wrung his hands, assured her he also felt bad about leaving, very bad, and he said he was sorry, but his words—the words bad or sorry, for example—sounded so false they tore into her. Her brother is older, nine years older than her, and it’s been ten months since he left. Soon often goes into his room, still full of his clothes and books, to remember him more intensely, though it makes her even sadder.