They guess wrong almost every time, but that’s what makes it fun, even when some of the people who open the doors are strange. They speak indistinctly, or they answer the door in their PJs, and many of them seem annoyed. One man is grumpy about being woken up on a Sunday morning and he snaps at them. Other places, there’s a rustling behind the door. People whisper inside, though everything’s audible out on the landing: “Don’t open it. I’m sick and tired of all these people asking for money,” says a woman behind one door, while at another, a kid comes out and slots some change in the can while Mommy and Daddy look on. They clap and say, “How clever,” and Lina thinks that people are weird. Their flats smell intimate, and filth is one thing, but their cleaning solutions seem like something you don’t really want to know about either, and “Hello, we’re from the Cancer Society, would you like to support our work?”

That’s their spiel. But it’s not really true. Neither she nor Kirsten has anything to do with the Cancer Society, and personally, she doesn’t want to have anything to do with them 33either. This is all about spending a Sunday with a friend, and since they came up with the business of the door decorations in the second stairwell, Lina’s also been feeling like a tourist— plus she supposes that what they’re doing is a form of begging. Ringing on strange people’s doorbells to demand love and respect, Lina thinks, and in the fifth building she’s on the point of remonstrating with a young man who says through the letter slot that he has no money but is a big fan of what they do. She wants to tell him that she isn’t doing anything. “All I’m doing is trying to move on after my emotional life went to the dogs, so shove it, motherfucker, you goddamn loser,” she thinks of saying—if she were the type to say such things. But she isn’t. She knows perfectly well that she’s more the type to focus on how sticky the floors seem in some of the flats and how gross it is, and that, despite all the door decoration, people aren’t very modest about their lives. That some places stink of medicine and dogs. Even though people aren’t allowed to have dogs in apartments like these, and even if they are, they shouldn’t be, Lina tells Kirsten, and Kirsten says she glimpsed a fighting dog through the letter slot of the fifth-floor flat in the seventh building, where the tenant, a younger woman, gave them two hundred because, as she put it, “My own life has been affected.”