The man in flat six never spoke to anybody. He had lived there for six years and nobody in the building knew his name. We invented explanations. My mother said he was rude. The family on the second floor said he was probably hiding from something. I thought he simply did not like us, which felt like the most likely answer. In February the lift broke between the third and fourth floors, with the two of us inside it. He pressed the alarm. Nothing happened. I called the technician and was told forty minutes. We stood there. I said something about the weather because the silence was unbearable, and he nodded without looking at me. After ten minutes he took out his phone, typed something, and turned the screen towards me. "I am sorry. I can hear you but I cannot answer well. I had an operation on my throat in 2019." I read it twice. Then I said the first stupid thing that came into my head, which was that his handwriting on the screen was very neat. He laughed. It was a strange, quiet sound, and it was the first noise I had ever heard him make. We were in there for fifty minutes in the end. He typed; I talked. His name is Sabri. He knows everybody's name in the building, and he has known them for six years, because people say their names to each other in the corridor and he has been listening the whole time.