For Rent

I go out these days with a friend who looks for an apartment to rent. I like the search process, the imaginary arrangement of the furniture and the smell of the newly painted rooms.

Our family house was originally built as a villa; two floors and a garden. Many years later and because of the high prices of land and real estate, my parents decided to build 3 more floors. We had two different gates, one to our house and the other to the walk up. Two of the new apartments were available for rent for short terms.

Through the years we had some memorable tenants.

Three very beautiful sisters came from a neighboring country to begin career in acting in the big city. They often had fierce physical fights in the middle of the night. The contrast between their elegant look in the street and their savage screams and each other’s hairs in their hands in the night was unbelievable. They never made it to the big screen and as far as we knew they went back home afterwards although there were, as we saw, many wealthy men willing to help.

A woman who said she was working as a nurse and used to go out very late for her night shifts in the hospital until it was found out by a neighbor she was a belly dancer in a nightclub.

A young man with whom my father had a heated argument after he demolished a part of the wall to install a new air-conditioner without our knowledge. He became hysterical and decided to leave the apartment and started to tuck his stuff into a suitcase in front of us. There were many women clothes and accessories. My then-70-somthing-year-old father said to me later that it seemed the guy was a big womanizer. I remained silent for a moment and then said “Yea, maybe”.

A man who lived apparently happily with two wives from two different countries and four children. A few years after they moved, my father and I were filing a complaint in the police station (another long story) when we ran into him. He was handcuffed and waiting to be transferred with others from the station to the office of the General Prosecution. We could exchange hastily few words, and it turned out he was accused in a drug smuggling case.

It was not like we were always renting the apartments to those who did not fit in the conservative and calm neighborhood, but in a more than 20 year stretch of time and with the intensive flow of the tenants, some cases stood different. Besides, the insane gentrification of the neighborhood through these years changed a lot (luckily!) the types of its residents.

An interesting little incident took place once when a man and woman knocked on our door and said they were a married couple who read the "For Rent" sign and would like to see the apartment. My mother was alone at home, and because of her osteoarthritis of the knees, she did not want to walk up the stairs and preferred to give them the key. According to Mama's description, they were middle-aged and the woman was wearing this sort of religious dress and headscarf. They took like 30 minutes until they came down and said it was nice, but they needed more time to take their decision. After they left, Mama felt a bit uncomfortable and decided to go up to check if everything was all right. Well, everything was fine in the tidy clean apartment except the main bed which was a complete mess with the fresh stains on the sheets. Mama told me later what happened and was very upset. My response was like "Whether they acted in the heat of the moment or it was a trick they liked to play, they are really clever, aren’t they?"