The Competence of Pan Feliks

Pan Feliks Mazur had been the building administrator for Ulica Miodowa 7 since approximately the fall of the Berlin Wall, and in that time he had developed a governing philosophy so refined it deserved its own entry in the encyclopaedia: never fix anything that might, if left alone, fix itself.

This worked, on the whole, remarkably well. The boiler had fixed itself in 2003 after three weeks of collective suffering. The lift had fixed itself twice, though admittedly not before Pani Kowalczyk from the fourth floor had spent forty minutes inside it eating a bag of walnuts and reconsidering her choices. Feliks documented each resolution in a ledger he kept with the seriousness of a medieval monk, as evidence, one assumed, that patience was a legitimate maintenance strategy.

The crack in the communal stairwell ceiling, however, showed no signs of sharing his philosophy.

It had appeared in April — a modest thing at first, a hairline, the sort you might blame on seasonal expansion and forget over Easter. By June it had the ambitions of a river delta. By August it was exhibiting a baroque extravagance that several residents found, despite themselves, almost impressive. Old Pan Brodziński from the ground floor had taken to standing beneath it each morning with his coffee, watching for developments, the way men of his generation had once watched the news.

'It's moving,' he told anyone who would listen. 'Eastward.'

Feliks had been notified in April, May, June, July, and August, each notification arriving in the form of a handwritten note slipped under his door by Pani Dąbrowska from the third floor, who had discovered that the building's official complaint procedure was a form she'd obtained from the municipal office, which, upon close inspection, concerned agricultural drainage.

Feliks's responses had been consistent and beautifully evasive: he was awaiting the assessment of a specialist; the specialist was awaiting a second opinion; the second opinion required a scaffold permit; the scaffold permit office was, apparently, staffed by philosophers who believed no decision should be rushed.

Then one Tuesday morning in September, a chunk of plaster the size of a dinner plate fell from the ceiling and landed squarely on the umbrella stand in the stairwell, shattering it and distributing Pan Brodziński's good blue umbrella across three steps like evidence at a crime scene.

Brodziński, who had survived martial law and two hip replacements, was not a man who raised his voice. He knocked on Feliks's door at nine o'clock precisely, waited, and when the door opened he held up what remained of the umbrella handle — about fifteen centimetres of curved wood — with the dignity of a king presenting a sceptre.

'I would like,' he said, 'a receipt.'

Feliks stared at the umbrella handle. 'A receipt.'

'For the umbrella. For my records. In case further action becomes necessary.' He said this last phrase in the tone of a man who has decided on further action but prefers that the other party understand it as a reluctant escalation.

Something happened to Feliks's face then — not guilt exactly, but something in the family of guilt, a distant cousin twice removed. He looked at the umbrella, then upward, toward the ceiling he could not see from his doorway, as if the crack's progress had only now become real to him. Perhaps it had. Perhaps reality requires a sceptre.

'Pan Brodziński,' he said. 'I'll call someone today.'

'You've called someone every month since April.'

'Today I will give them a deadline.'

Brodziński considered this. 'And if they miss the deadline?'

'Then I will give them another one,' Feliks said, and then — and this was what no one who heard the story afterwards could quite account for — he smiled. Not a bureaucrat's smile, not the performed warmth of a man buying time, but the smile of someone who had caught himself being absurd and found it, under the circumstances, the only honest response.

Brodziński looked at him for a long moment. Then, slowly, he also smiled. Two old men in a stairwell, holding the ruins of an umbrella, beneath a ceiling that was proceeding eastward at its own pace.

'Fine,' said Brodziński. 'But I still want a receipt.'

The repair crew arrived eleven days later. They were efficient and loud and filled the stairwell with dust for a week. Pan Brodziński supervised from below, coffee in hand, with the critical attention of a man who has earned the right to watch other people work.

The crack was sealed. The ceiling, once replastered, was even whiter than before, almost aggressively so, as if embarrassed by its recent behaviour.

Feliks noted the resolution in his ledger.

He did not issue a receipt. But then, Brodziński hadn't asked again. Some things, they had both seemed to understand, were never really about the umbrella.

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