My Neighbor Davorin
a short story
I was eleven when I met Davorin Kovačević or as he was known to me through those fateful years, Jan Janson. In the rowhouse apartment across from my mother’s on Leliegracht, he lived for two years, and I must admit when I first met him, I feared his presence. He stood at an extreme height, his green eyes shining with the intensity of a hungry tiger. Despite his rotund frame, it was evident he possessed the strength of an ox. In that first year, I had fantasized him living an unassuming life, though had I not been making up for an abysmal school year over the summer, I’d have seen he had a rigorous schedule for his age.
It was fortuitous in that second year; I met him on the first day of my summer break. An early morning, somewhere around 7:30, I was accompanying my mother to the grocer in order to beat the traffic, and as we left the apartment there was a short stocky man in a blue suit knocking at 45E. The door was answered almost as if on cue, and there Davorin appeared, tightly held by a black suit which punctuated the hang of his jowls. He growled some strange words of a foreign language rather uncommon to Amsterdam, completely incomprehensible to me at the time, and the blue suited man responded in English, “Not today.”
Mother and me went our way, she giving no mind to the odd men. While I couldn’t help but fear them, sensing their…