Mr Bernhardt

Mr Bernhardt lives on the fourth floor without a lift on Scheffelstraße and orders books regularly. Usually history, sometimes crime novels, once a book about breeding rabbits that I carried up four flights for him and talked about for twenty minutes even though I know nothing about rabbits.

The conversation that lasted forty minutes was in March. He'd ordered Chekhov, the collected stories, and he asked if I knew Chekhov and I said I knew him by reputation but not really, and he said then sit down for a moment. I shouldn't have sat, I had twenty more packages. I sat.

He explained Chekhov's gun to me — if a weapon is shown in the first scene it must be fired in the third, that's the principle — and then told me his whole life as if it were a story with a gun in the first act. He's eighty. The gun in his story was a barber's shop in Karl-Marx-Stadt that his father wanted to open in 1961 and wasn't allowed to. I got back to the depot late. It was still the right decision.

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