Looking for housing in a country where you don't speak a word of the language is not easy. Early last July, when we first arrived in Brno and needed to find an apartment, we had no choice but to enlist the help of Petra, the English department secretary. After making a trip to the bulletin board downtown where landlords post available housing, she made some phone calls and arranged a couple of visits for us. She had to accompany us in order to translate. (Czech is not an easy language to learn. After a year of practicing, we can successfully make our wishes known to waitstaff and shop clerks, and not much more.) So we made a couple of appointments, and Petra took us around to see the places, talking to the owners for us. They would chat for a few minutes, laughing, agreeing, and nodding. Petra would ask a question, they would talk and laugh some more, and then she would turn to us and assume a hushed, official tone. “She says that utilities are included.”

At one place, a shabby little flat on the ground floor of a panelák, one of the countless prefab communist high-rise housing blocks that ring the city, Petra stood listening to and commenting on what must have been the realtor’s detailed description of every misstep her husband had ever taken before she finally kicked his ass to the curb, and then turned to us. “She prefers not to rent to foreigners.”

So we left that place and went to our last stop of the day, a place she warned us was “just a little out of town.” The owner, a woman in her mid-50s, met us at the door in a pink bikini bottom and a bra. She chatted on and on. She really liked to talk. She didn’t stop talking while she went around the corner to put on a shirt. She’s a very lonely woman, we figured, whose children never visit, who’s just dying for someone to talk to. She showed us to the apartment, a basement that had been converted into a little two-room furnished apartment. The far room was the bedroom, with two twin beds pushed together, a free-standing wardrobe, and a little china cabinet. The near one was the everything-else room: kitchen, dining room, guest bed, and shower. Kitchen, in this case, meant a veneered plywood counter atop some utility cabinets, a bathroom sink, and an electric hot plate. The refrigerator was an old 1950s model whose brand name was printed in Russian. It looked like a dorm fridge on steroids, but when we opened the door we could see that it would keep exactly one loaf of bread, and possibly an egg, cozy and cool.

But there were certain advantages to this place, we told each other. There was a huge backyard garden, and we rightly guessed that the pink-bikini-clad grandmother might share with us some of the rows and rows of tomatoes, peppers, kohlrabi, parsley, and carrots. We might even get to taste the plums, apples, and pears from time to time. We would have our own entrance, Petra said. The place was only about half an hour by bus from the university. It’s at the edge of a small village, with open green spaces and fields all around, much better in this respect than any place in town. That, and you didn’t have to walk all the way to the bathroom to take a shower. To top it off, this place was by far the cheapest of anything we'd hoped to see. We said thank you, and returned with Petra to the university.

We wanted to look at more apartments, knowing that between a room in some obviously crazy lady’s basement and a panelák, we had probably missed some of the other options. We felt bad, knowing that Petra had other work to do, and we didn’t want to take up all of her time. She was, after all, the English department secretary, not our tour guide and translator. C. and I talked about it on the bus on the way back to the university, and by the time we reached our stop, we had decided to take the out-of-town place. We made certain stipulations, however. We told Petra to tell the lady that we wanted a larger refrigerator. We also wanted an oven but we knew that, since there was no gas hookup or a place to put one, we’d probably end up with a glorified toaster oven. This is exactly what we got. We managed to adapt. By December, we were roasting whole chickens (45 minutes at 6) and making pizza (12 minutes at 9, if you like a nice crispy crust). C. even managed to coax several loaves of wonderful bread (35 minutes at 7) from it.

As summer crested and then dwindled, the apartment turned out to be more than we'd hoped. A fifteen minute walk took us into the little red-roofed villages that surround Brno, up the narrow streets past roadside chapels and neighborhood pubs that don’t turn on their signs at night, or out among the wheat and alfalfa fields. The landlady did bring us produce, almost more than we could eat, and she told us to help ourselves to the contents her potato cellar. She kept pet rabbits in a row of cages in the back yard, and the picnic table and the swing strung from the walnut tree kept us entertained in the after-dinner hours during the last summer days before the school year started.

By early October, the evening temperatures had dipped into sweater weather. One evening, I was boiling some pasta water on the hot plate when a knock came on our door. C. was still at work. I could see through the barely frosted glass pane that it was the landlady standing on the other side. Whenever she knocked, I tried out a new word that I thought might indicate the equivalent of what I wanted to say in English, which was simply, “Come in.” Nothing worked, and I always had to walk the ten feet and personally open the door for her. I didn’t mind, but I always hoped to achieve the kind of informality that would allow her simply to enter at my request. After all, she didn’t care if I saw her in her bra, so I thought we might be able to forge a new, more casual relationship, while still strictly adhering to the formal personal pronoun, of course.

She scurried in before I had even removed my hand from the door handle. “May I?” she asked after she had already passed me and headed over to the window, which I now noticed was fogged up from the pasta water steam.

(I must ask for the reader’s patience as I introduce here a brief parenthetical remark about what I consider to be one of the greatest feats of household engineering since the dishwasher: The European Window. This is an ordinary-seeming arrangement of two adjacent glass-paned doors, one of which locks into the frame and to which the other in turn can be fastened. The genius lies in a sort of magical double-action hinge, which allows, when it is in one position, for the door (or optionally, doors) to swing open as one would expect. A turn of the handle, however, simultaneously disconnects the top hinge while sliding a bar into place through the base of the locking door and the bottom hinge of the other, so that it is now anchored at the bottom and opens inward a few degrees at the top, just enough to allow air to circulate without letting in, for instance, rain. If the reader has ever seen these windows before, he or she has surely marveled at them as I have.)

So the landlady was in our apartment, picking up the box of herbs that we kept on the window sill and taking it outside onto the back porch, which really is just a dark room with one small window and a door into the back yard. Then she returned and opened the window in the standard fully-open-door way, indicating to me in simple Czech words and gestures—water, pfff, pfff, [pantomimed billowing motion], water IN THE AIR (though here she substituted luft, the German word for air), pfff, do you understand? water, pfff, pfff, in this luft, it is not good—that there was too much steam in our apartment, and further, that opening the window in the slightly-open-at-the-top way would never be enough to disperse it. Thus the removal of the window box and the fully open window.

I must admit that my Czech is not very good, and that the only reason I could understand her was because she was expressing herself in ludicrously simple words and gestures like this. I was thankful that she had small grandchildren, and that she enjoyed talking at length to her pet bunnies, whose cages were right outside our bedroom window, in the tone of voice whose particular pitch only grandmothers can get away with. It was clear she was well practiced at getting the point across to ignorant creatures. It wasn’t until several minutes had gone by, and she was still rubbing the moisture off the window and showing me her wet finger—wah-ter, it is not good—that it dawned on me that the method and manner of her communication was not calculated to span the language barrier, but simply because it was clear to her that I’m a moron.

Having opened the windows, she stopped on her way out at the shower doors, which we always kept shut to hide the fact that we never cleaned it. She slid them open, which I would normally consider rude behavior in a guest, but then she said some things and gestured down to the floor of the shower, which I could only assume meant that she was worried about the accumulation of hair under the drain. Since I had almost flooded the everything-else room the previous morning, I had in fact recently cleaned all the slimy, stinking, soap-scum-greased hair out of the drain assembly, a process that had made me gag several times. Realizing that I had actually performed the maintenance in question—and actually afraid that she would begin doing it herself—I hurried into the shower, lifted the drain assembly, and proudly showed off my work. “Yes? Clean,” I managed.

“No, no, no,” she replied amidst some other sounds, one of which I’m pretty sure was “stupid.” She stooped down and ran her finger along the floor of the shower.

“Do you know how?” she asked. I had just learned the verb to know how in Czech class the day before, and proudly I showed off not only my understanding of that verb, but my newly acquired ability to put things in the future tense.

“I know how, but not yet it me do. Soon I will it do.” This was enough to satisfy her, I thought, because she nodded and scurried back upstairs. The curtains moved slightly in the breeze. I looked at the dead thyme branch that had fallen down behind where the window box had been, and at the faint rectangular outline in the dust on the wide sill. C. and I had noticed the wide window sills on the day we first came to look at the apartment, and had talked to each other about how nice it would be to have a little box of herbs in the everything-else room. We would put fresh herbs into the meals we cooked in our pot, we said, and it would be like home.

We had run out of cereal, so the next morning when we woke up before the slightest hint of daylight to finish our last minute preparations for the school day, I fried a couple of eggs for breakfast. We were seated at the table eating and talking, C. still in her pajamas, my hair plastered to the side of my head, my mouth still tasting like yesterday's potatoes, when I heard the knock at the door behind me. For a moment I considered running to the bedroom to brush my hair, and C. thought about running in to change into pants, but then we noticed the landlady's clear silhouette through the barely frosted glass, and we realized that she could see us just as well. I tried to consider it a pre-dawn opportunity to forge a new, more casual relationship. I walked over and opened the door.

“Good morning,” she said. “May I?” she asked, pushing past me and heading straight for the window, which I noticed was becoming fogged up. After the dissipation of the prior day's steam, I had returned the herb box to the window sill, so once again she carried it outside. She again opened the window, rubbing the glass with her finger, showing us both this time the moisture on her fingertip and explaining all over again that this—water, pfff, pfff, in the luft—was not good. She talked as if we had never discussed it previously, as if I were a poor animal, as stupid as a rabbit whose memories were lovingly erased each night by blissful dreams of alfalfa and hopping. She patiently explained to us that all this steam was nothing but tiny drops—very small pieces—of water in the air, that it collects on the windows when it is cold outside, that it is not good. We agreed with her, and demonstrated our understanding by pointing to the open window and saying, “Yes, we understand—open is good—no water—air.” She opened the shower doors for us on her way out.

Our interactions with the landlady centered around steam for a span of several days, and we began to dread hearing her footsteps in the hallway. Since she only visited us when the windows fogged up, the fear of moisture on the windows soon became our guiding principle. We began to check for the presence of moisture on the windows whenever we moved in the kitchen. We washed dishes in lukewarm water, removed the teapot from the hot plate well before boil. We developed carefully choreographed operations to minimize the moisture. When one of us showered, the other spearheaded the ventilation responsibilities, throwing open both sets of windows, even the one without a screen, as well as opening the door to the dark room with one small window. While one cooked, the other dutifully wiped away the translucent patches from the glass as soon as they appeared. We soon kept a dedicated window-wiping rag stationed near the bedroom window.

Opening the screenless window hurt the most. For a couple of weeks we had been plagued in the pre-dawn hours by mosquitoes in the bedroom. We couldn't figure out how they were getting in. After checking the screen for holes and gaps a few times, never finding anything, we noticed that the gaps under the doors were large enough for insects to slip through. Like dorm room bong aficionados, we began stuffing a towel into the crack at the bottom of the bedroom door at night, but still the mosquitoes came. Then we noticed a gap at the top of the bedroom door and introduced the nightly ritual of stuffing a dishrag into that, but still the mosquitoes came.

Even one was enough to ruin the night. We often stayed awake far too late into the night, planning the next day's lessons and working on the seemingly endless stream of paperwork for the school year. C. and I were both fresh out of college, first year teachers who had no training but who, by some fluke and a little luck, had found jobs teaching English at the same Czech university. As a result, we were learning the ins and outs of teaching university students by making daily mistakes and trying to learn from them before we had to face the same group again. This task took an embarrassing amount of time, which we tried to hide from our students and colleagues by attending to it at home. Not until the wee hours of the night would we finally climb into bed, stick out our thumbs, and immediately hitch a ride on that most seductive of highways, craving the five or six hour hour ride into the next morning. And then, but a couple of hours into the journey, the sound would appear, the buzz of such specific frequency that it is both directionless and omnipresent, rising in pitch and volume as it approaches until it fills the room, subsumes even the darkness, and then—silence. What can the victim do, freshly awake in the silence, eyes still closed, room still dark, but begin slapping blindly at his own exposed cheek and ear and neck in hopes of seeing the tiny telltale smear of blood black on his palm in the night?

Mosquitoes are smarter than you think. The self-slapping session rarely succeeded. The buzzing, the silence, a perfectly timed pause . . . and then the slapping. My drowsy mind would be convinced by the ensuing silence that it had succeeded in outwitting the insect, that it could drop its defenses and relax again into sleep. I'd brush my cheek a couple of times with the back of my hand. But invariably, soon after I had settled back into my pillow, that insistent buzzing would return.

After a few nights of this torture we adopted the experimental methodology of the most rigorous scientists. We had sealed off their only means of entering the room at night, so we began to suspect that they were coming in during the day and hiding, perhaps in the folds of our clothes in the closet, perhaps elsewhere. We began keeping the door to the bedroom and the door to the back porch closed at all times, turning the everything-else room into an effective airlock. We made rounds before we went to sleep, slapping the clothes in the closet, sneaking up and ripping the sheets off the bed, examining the lace curtains, peering at the walls from various angles to make sure the shadows in the stucco offered no asylum. We developed mental checklists of possible entry points, augmenting and decreasing the factors in our various hypotheses in hopes of stumbling upon anything statistically significant.

After a few nights, knowing at the first distant buzzing that the damn thing would keep at it until the alarm went off, I began leaping out of bed and turning on the lights. Had any of our neighbors been watching, they would have been witness to my systematic naked movements around the bedroom, blindly slapping the walls and ceiling, bending indecently to slap the pile of laundry in the corner, then returning upright to peer at the walls and ceiling from all angles. What’s the crazy foreigner doing now? they would wonder.

Luckily, when the lights went on the mosquitoes almost always landed immediately on the nearest white wall, where they were quite visible. Often it happened that one or two would settle on the wall, and we would grab the dedicated mosquito-thwacking map and set to work. Sometimes, though, it was three or four, and the killing of the first couple would send the others up into the air against various dark backgrounds, where they were quickly lost. No matter how diligently we studied their behavior, we could not penetrate the depths of mosquito psychology. But in the end we gained at least a rough ability to predict their behavior. Without necessarily understanding their operating principles, we were able to draw correlations between our actions and their responses. We compared our observations of the sample population and discussed our latest theories over our bleary-eyed breakfast. Through our untiring efforts, the mosquito problem was eventually downgraded from intolerable to manageable.

That was when the landlady began her daily visits to insist that we open the screenless window too, and we knew if we buckled now, all our work would be lost. We tried to explain, looking up the words for fear and mosquito in our pocket dictionary, and coupling them with a carefully developed pantomime: we mimicked the two-thumbs-and-a-finger hand posture used to grasp a needle, flying it around in the air near our heads while making a high pitched buzzing sound. Then, ensuring through eye contact that she was with us so far, we would bring the needle-grasp hand into contact with the forearm slightly below the elbow, abruptly ceasing the buzzing sound at the precise moment of contact. Surely she would understand, we thought. And she did. “But, silly foreigners, you need not worry,” she gestured. “In the wintertime, it will become cold and the mosquitoes will die—winter, outside, yes? Winter, frozen, do you understand? No mosquito—no buzz-buzz—in winter.”

We were defeated. We opened the screenless window, bared our flesh, and beseeched our unseen assailants at least to make it painless. The weather was in fact cooling down, she was right about that, but the network of green algae-filled ponds not far from our neighborhood, in combination with the unseasonably warm weather that autumn (the first snow finally fell a couple of days before Christmas), meant that lone mosquitoes would occasionally infiltrate our bedroom even in late November.

For weeks we tried to figure out why moisture was such a problem in the first place, but it wasn't until months later, when we put the landlady on the phone with our friend Petr, that we learned her fear of moisture was in fact a fear of a rare type of toxic mold which she was convinced would start growing on the walls of the basement. The communication breakdown that led us eventually to put her on the phone with Petr happened one day when a crew of men in royal blue overalls were working with various high-wattage power tools around the exterior of the house. At some point we suffered a house-wide electrical outage and, instead of investigating the actions of the men with power tools, she rushed in a panic into our apartment, unplugged our hot plate, and took it away. She explained, through simple words and elaborate hand gestures, that month after month of all that pernicious steam, pfff pfff, had corroded the circuitry inside the hot plate and caused a very dangerous short circuit. She wrote down the address of the shop where she'd bought the hot plate, and told us that we would have to pay for the repairs. The technician at the shop kept the hot plate for two weeks, but couldn't find anything wrong with it. After bringing it back home, we called Petr so he could try to explain to her, in as many ways as he could think of, that it was very unlikely that steam had caused this problem.

Time has passed, and both the mosquitoes and the steam are now a distant and scarcely-mentioned memory. We have came to an unspoken arragement with our landlady, wherein she continues to bring us fresh produce from the garden, but she leaves it on the kitchen table when we are not home. She even does our laundry now (in fact, we are forbidden to touch the washing machine). When we are away, she takes our laundry hamper, washes the clothes, hangs them on the line outside, and returns them folded to our table. We live parallel and unconnected lives, interacting in this way because we have both learned that it is best if we don't try to communicate except through the evidence of our actions in each other's absence. In a family, of course, this would be a textbook example of disfunctionality; in our present circumstances, however, we like to call it, at least for the next week or so, “home.”

i hate your landlady, i really do, but i love the fodder she provides.

also, i never realized you had so many dedicated objects. you are a dedicated man of the blog world.

now, you go read mine, okay, which is a paean set to the tune of "dry the rain", and features headrests above the urinal. padded, for your comfort and convenience.