Scott Lynch

The conclusion of Brendan Bernhard’s quest to address one of the banes of New York City apartment living: a neighbor’s noisy radio.

The landing was a long, very narrow rectangle of peeling linoleum, about four feet wide, with a continuation of the staircase in the middle of it leading up to the roof, as well as a window that let in some much-needed sunshine. The radio was coming from my right. Two grim apartment doors faced each other at one end of the corridor, painted that soul-destroying brown so cherished by New York landlords. It was obvious which apartment the radio was in and I started banging on the door right away. No answer. I banged some more. Nothing. So I tried the door opposite, hoping to find a sympathetic neighbor trembling on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Again nothing. Was everyone dead?

Now I started pounding on the door furiously with the side of my fists. I sensed somebody moving around inside. The door opened six inches and the face of an old woman came into view. “Your radio is driving me crazy” I yelled at her, though it was hard to make oneself heard. “I can’t hear a thing,” she said. “I’m deaf.” I yelled even louder. “COULD YOU PLEASE TURN YOUR RADIO DOWN! I CAN HEAR IT IN THE NEXT BUILDING! THE NOISE IS DRIVING ME CRAZY!” A faint look of understanding, bordering on sympathy, appeared in her eyes, which I encouraged by miming turning down a knob, over and over again.

“The radio’s bothering you?” she asked. “YES!” I replied. “THE RADIO IS BOTHERING ME A LOT! YOU TURN IT ON EVERY MORNING AT 6 A.M. I CAN HEAR IT IN MY APARTMENT. WHY ARE YOU LISTENING TO THIS JUNK ANYWAY?”

Mario Ramirez

“Wait a minute,” she said, and disappeared inside the apartment. She was turning the radio down. I knew I was being rude, even abusive, but what about the people in her building? What about the people on her floor? How could they possibly put up with this? It was auditory insanity. I’d expected a terrifying thug with six German Shepherds and a stockpile of Uzis to open the door — instead it was a little old lady.

“OK, I turned it down,” she said, although the volume was still way above what most people would consider normal. “Well, can you keep it down?” I asked. “I’ll think about it,” she said — and before I could plead my case further, closed the door.

I was about to knock on it again when I sensed a presence to my right. It was the tall widow I’d seen earlier on the ground floor. So finally, after two decades in the neighborhood on and off, I was about to speak to this woman with the absent husband, that jovial, reliable figure who was no longer here, who was only a memory in an unknown number of rent-stabilized heads.

She lived at the opposite end of the corridor. She had overheard the commotion and had come to explain the situation to me. That the woman was deaf, that she was very old, and that she was concerned about her. Yes, the radio was annoying, but she was happy that her neighbor could still make it up and down the five flights of stairs. She would miss her if she were gone.

I stared at her in some amazement. Such compassion! And such a soft, lilting Ukrainian voice issuing from this lanky widow, who now that I was in the building, no longer regarded me with suspicion but admitted that she recognized me, and seemed an altogether more relaxed, even girlish figure than the woman who trod the sidewalks as if she no longer knew where she was, or who all these people on the sidewalks were. Up here, evidently, in her aerie five flights above the city, she felt at home… Even with the torment of that radio.

Mario Ramirez

I got a quick précis of her life story, gave mine in return, and we discovered we had something unexpected in common: Though she had been born in the Ukraine, and I in New York, both of us had spoken Portuguese before any other language, and both of us had since forgotten every word of it. When she was a baby, her family had fled the Communists to Germany. From there they fled the Nazis to Brazil, where, as a baby, she had started speaking Portuguese before Ukrainian.

My story was far less dramatic, but despite being born a New Yorker, my family was in Portugal when I first started to speak. And those words were Portuguese. That this should have happened to both of us — how unlikely was that? As for her husband, who I asked her about, he had died right in front of her in their apartment. Continuing to live there was not easy; his memory haunted her still.

It was very quiet in the corridor now – the radio had been turned not just down, but off. I realized I was experiencing one of those magical moments in which New York seems to specialize. Having ascended these stairs in a rage, I was now being flooded by an overwhelming sense of calm, even joy. I liked this woman so much. She seemed so kind. And yet this confusion — this blood-boiling anger alchemically transmuted into pleasure at the flick of a neurochemical urban switch — isn’t this why New York drives people over the edge?

The Ukrainian lady did give me one vital piece of information, particularly since it had been so hard to get into the building. If the radio continued to bother me, she said, I could usually find the old woman early in the morning at McDonald’s. That’s where she went when she turned the radio off — for breakfast.

Mario Ramirez

The next morning was Easter Sunday, and sunny. The radio had gone on and off. I was up early and went for a walk through blissfully empty streets. On Sixth, I stopped into Saint Stanislaus Church, where the doors were wide open and the early morning Easter service was about to begin. A good number of impeccably dressed Polish women filled the pews. Amusingly, the air inside the church smelled powerfully not of incense but of perfume. And then I remembered the time — just when the radio lady might be at McDonald’s! I started walking over there, and just as it came into view, there she was, crossing First Avenue and heading straight for it.

I was up to her before she even reached the sidewalk. “I can’t hear you!” she said, waving me away without even glancing at me. Obviously this was her response to everything. But once again, I forced her to look at me. The moment she reached the curb, I planted myself in front of her and stared straight into her face. I mimed pounding on her door. “I’M THE GUY WHO CAME TO YOUR APARTMENT YESTERDAY TO COMPLAIN ABOUT THE RADIO!” I shouted. She looked at me closely, and a little expression of wonder appeared in her eyes. “That was you? You look different in the daylight.”

Whether I looked better or worse was a train of thought I decided not to pursue. “LISTEN,” I bellowed into the early morning traffic shooting up First Avenue, “I’M BEGGING YOU. YOUR RADIO IS DRIVING ME OUT OF MY MIND. IT’S DOING THE SAME TO MY WIFE. YOU WAKE US UP EVERY MORNING. CAN’T YOU GET A HEARING AID? YOU NEED A HEARING AID!”

“I don’t want a hearing aid,” she said.

Mario Ramirez

“WELL THIS CAN’T GO ON,” I persisted, pleading with her, ready to go down on my knees. “THINK OF WHAT YOU’RE DOING TO YOUR NEIGHBORS. THE RADIO IS WAY TOO LOUD! CAN’T YOU READ A NEWSPAPER INSTEAD?”

She paused for a moment, as if deciding whether to ignore me and walk straight into McDonald’s, or hear me out. The expression bordering on sympathy I had seen in her eyes yesterday had now fully blossomed. I had the obscure sensation that she was flattered someone several decades younger than her should be paying her such attention. She was looking at me carefully. She was taking me in.

“OK,” she said finally. “I’ll turn it off. I won’t play it anymore. I don’t need to listen to it anyway. I’m fed up with it.”

“YOU’LL TURN IT OFF?”

“I’ll turn it off.”

And she did. Just once — about two weeks after that conversation — I heard the radio come on, not quite as loudly as before, but still loud. Then five minutes later it went silent again. And six weeks later, it’s still silent.

She really did turn the radio off.