A letter from a strange woman

Chapter I, Subsection III

I want to confide in you my whole life, and my life really began the day I met you. Before that, my life was gloomy and disorganized. It was like a dusty, cobwebbed, musty cellar, and my heart had long forgotten the people and things in it. When you came, I was thirteen years old and lived in the house where you live now. Now you are in this house, with this letter in your hand—the last breath of my life. I also live on that floor, right across the door from you. You must not remember us, of the widow of the poor accountant (who always wore filial piety) and the skinny little child who was not yet fully developed—we lived in seclusion and quietly the miserable life of our little citizens—and you may never have heard our names, for there were no signs on the door of our rooms. No one came, and no one came to inquire about us. Besides, it's been a long time, fifteen or sixteen years. No, you must know nothing, my dear. But I, ah, I remembered everything with excitement, the first time I heard about you, the day I first saw you, no, it was that moment, and I still remember it very clearly, as if it were today. How could I not remember it, because for me the world only started then. Please be patient, my dear, I want to tell you all this from the beginning, I beg you to listen to me for a quarter of an hour, don't get tired, I have loved you all my life and have not felt tired!

Before you moved into our house, the family who lived in your house was ugly, fierce, and quarrelsome. They themselves are poor and miserable, but they hate the poverty of their neighbours the most, that is, our poverty, because we do not want to be complicit in their barbaric behavior of the proletariat. The man was an alcoholic, beating his wife a lot; the sound of smashing chairs and smashing dishes often woke us up in the middle of the night. Once the woman was beaten to the head and bloodied, and fled to the stairs in a shawl, and the drunken man followed her and screamed wildly, until everyone came out of the house and warned the man that if he made such a fuss, he would have to call the police, and the drama would end. My mother avoided any contact with the family from the beginning and did not let me talk to their children, so the children retaliated against me at every opportunity. If they met me on the street, they would shout swear words after me, and once hit me with a hard snowball, hitting me with blood on my forehead. People all over the building instinctively hated the family. Suddenly, something went wrong—I think the man had been caught stealing something—and the woman had to pick up her little bits and pieces and move away, and we were all relieved. A note of the rental room was posted on the wall at the entrance of the building, and it was taken off after a few days of posting. Word quickly spread from the cleaner that a writer, a quiet single gentleman, had rented the room. That's when I first heard your name.?

The room was greasy to the original occupants, and a few days later the painters, the painters, the cleaners, the plasterers came to clean up the room, knocking hammers, mopping the floor, scraping the walls, but my mother was very satisfied with this, she said, and the dirty and messy door finally left. And I had not seen you when you moved in person: all the moving work was taken care of by your servant, the short, serious-looking steward with gray hair. He spoke softly and commanded everything with a condescending spirit. He touched us all, first of all, because a servant in charge was a novel thing in our suburban building, and secondly, he was very polite to all people, but he did not reduce himself to an ordinary servant and talk with them like good friends. From day one he regarded my mother as a wife, greeted her respectfully, and was always kind and serious even to me, the ugly. Whenever he mentions your name, he always carries with a certain reverence, with a special respect—and it is immediately obvious that his relationship with you is far beyond that of an ordinary servant. How much I like him for this, how much I like this kind old John! Although I am jealous that he can always serve you by your side.