The New Tenant

Roger watered the plants that stood on the windowsill of the kitchen overlooking the backyard. His girlfriend had planted them in pots, organized the pots, and placed markers on them so that Roger would know how much water each plant needed. Every second morning when he would finish watering his plants, or his girlfriend’s, he would take a step back, grab his chamomile green tea, and watch the plants with a sense of fulfillment and pride. Every time he stood by the window watching his plants, he would rest his left hand on his hip and take long sips from his mug. It was only on Saturdays and sometimes Sundays that he would water the plants later than eight o’clock in the morning. But those days were also the days when he would make breakfast for himself and for his girlfriend.

She was different than the folk living in the neighborhood, or the ones who had inherited the neighborhood. She was an immigrant, dark-skinned, curly-haired, but she was gorgeous. The chili peppers that hung to dry by the window were of her own doing. Before ‘Dom’ moved in with Roger, he had thought of selling the house. Of course, Roger had inherited the house from his grandmother, but he thought that the neighborhood was changing; something was amiss. Not a few years before celebrating his 58^th birthday, he discovered that his neighbor had rented out sections of his house. His neighbor’s house changed from a place where a small family and later a single widower lived to a collective of separate rooms rented out to separate individuals. The tenants were changing once in a while, and with them was the neighborhood.

One of the individuals who lived across from Roger was Ammar. He was a refugee. When Ammar first moved, he visited Roger three times. The first two, he knocked on the door, but Roger, who had presently watered his plants not an hour before, put down the blinds in the kitchen and did not answer the door. The third time, Roger was emptying the bins when Ammar visited him. He had a short conversation with Ammar and accepted the plate that Ammar brought him. Roger placed the plate on the kitchen table and was alarmed by the contents: sliced and spiced tomatoes, pickles, a light brownish paste called hummus, and a wrap of falafel. There was a note explaining the contents beautifully written that Roger threw away. What infuriated him was the level of spice in the wrap. Ammar had placed the spiciest chili in there, and when Roger confronted him about it, Ammar pretended that there was nothing spicy in there. Then, he pointed out that the sumac could have been the spicy agent. Ammar apologized for the inconvenience with his strange accent. The morning after, Roger discovered another covered dish in front of his front door. In it, there was bread and some sort of oily green mix, and in a note that Roger discarded along with the food. Ammar had explained that it was something called ‘Zaatar’ which consisted of thyme and olive oil from Ammar’s homeland. Roger did not taste it for fear of spice.

It was so that when Dom moved in, many times, Roger’s rosy cheeks had turned raging red. More often than not, he would need a glass of milk. His spice tolerance not only improved, but he began to appreciate spice more and more, and one morning, he hammered nails on the wall above the window so that Dom could hang the chilis to dry. Despite Roger’s newfound appreciation of spices, he had never forgiven Ammar for the spicy falafel wrap.

What most irritated Roger was Ammar’s behavior in the evenings when he would go out for a walk, or most outrageously when he would play that strange oriental music in the evenings. Three times Roger had called the police, and three times the police returned to Roger, informing him that the music was at tolerable and acceptable levels. He did not mind the volume level too much, but it was the strangeness of the music that aggravated him. But most of all, it was the infuriating greetings that Ammar gave him every morning whenever he saw him.

Dom, on the other hand, seemed to find Ammar quite agreeable. There were a couple of times when she bought groceries that Ammar helped her carry the groceries from the car to the door. In one exchange, Ammar mentioned that he was a lab technician with a degree in biochemistry, but he had been displaced, and ever since, he had been reliant on government funding until he found a suitable job in his field of experience.

Roger kept a closer eye on Ammar since the conversation with Dom, but his attention had waned when he discovered that the new tenant was moving in. He watched the new tenant when he was moving in and counted the 18 small boxes, the fish tank, and the guitar set. The new tenant was a black man who did not greet as often as Ammar. He was much more reserved, often going out for walks in the middle of the night.

One day, while Roger was sipping his tea after watering the plants, he found the new tenant collecting some leaves from a plant and spreading them on a tray. That prompted a call to the police, and when the police informed Roger that there was no crime committed, he instead called the migration services. Despite losing his temper at the long waiting list and the irritating behavior of the call center representatives, he finally informed them about the tenant. Roger did not receive a response then, but he knew that he would find out one way or the other when the tenant was moved and possibly deported. But that day did not arrive as soon as Roger wanted it to. Instead, he was repeatedly faced with greetings from Ammar, whose grasp on the language was improving, and his greetings were becoming more and more fluid.

While Roger had not forgiven Ammar, he was beginning to accept him. After all, Ammar was unlike the other fella. He would greet him back, and sometimes he would have a conversation with Ammar, brief as it may be, but a conversation, nonetheless. One time, he asked Ammar about the black fella who lived in the house, and when Ammar told him that he was only there temporarily because of visa complications, Roger was content. He never asked about Ammar’s visa, but Ammar also never shared. He had a suspicion that Ammar was from that place where the war constantly wages, or that other where the civil war was at its peak, but he never asked, and Ammar never told him.

However, much like Ammar and the black fella, Roger was facing trouble of his own. It was on a Wednesday a couple of weeks ago when two police cars parked in front of his house. When they knocked on his door, I thought that they had confused House B with House C, but the fact of the matter was that they wanted Roger’s house. I was in my bedroom when he stepped outside, shouting at the police. I was exercising my right as a citizen-concerned and a neighborhood watch, to see what was happening. A moment later, they dragged out Dom, who was in her nightgown.

There was a lot to unpack, and when they came to question me as the neighbor, they first asked how long Dominique had lived there. I told them an approximation and asked if she was involved with that cartel or this, but they told me that it was much more complicated than that. You see, Dom was not registered in Roger’s house, and that made it difficult to track her down, which meant that whatever taxes she would pay would not reflect the location of her living and her status as a foreign worker. When I told them that I did not see her go to work, they informed me that it made matters all the worse because if she was not working, she was not paying taxes, and if she was not paying taxes, then she had no right to stay here.

While Ammar stayed there the longest, the black fella soon left, and Roger too found that it would be better to live with Dom in a country where all the food is spicy rather than to stay in a place where spice is forcibly imported. He rented the house to three immigrants, and soon enough, I found the police knocking on my door yet again, this time questioning me about Roger, how he rented, and where he was. They questioned me as if I were the neighborhood watch, when in fact, no neighborhood went unmonitored, no purchase went unnoticed.

They knew.

Written by Amr Abbas.

Cover illustration by Amr Abbas.