The Tenants' Board (Part 4)
Aiko typed the notebook into her computer on Sunday, and the numbers were worse than anybody had guessed. Dov had written down the temperature of his kitchen twice a day since the fifteenth of September. Since the boiler failed, the highest reading was sixty-one degrees. On the nineteenth of January, at seven in the morning, it was fifty-one.
The city rule fits on one line: from the middle of September to the first of June, an apartment has to be sixty-eight degrees in the daytime and sixty-six at night.
The board's answer was one page again, and this time it asked for one thing. Not forty dollars. Not heaters on loan. A repaired boiler, with a date on it, in writing. Nineteen pages of Dov's kitchen went behind it as a table, with the two city numbers printed across the top of every page, so that each low reading sat underneath them like a bill nobody had paid.
Nina wanted to add a paragraph about lawyers. The board voted it out. One demand, Aiko said, or it stops being a demand and turns into a list.
They met in the lobby on Monday. The landlord read the first page quickly, and then he read the table for a long time.
“Who else has this?”
“Everybody in the building,” Aiko said. “It's taped up by the mailboxes. And I sent a copy to the city office that inspects heating this morning.”
He looked at the page again. “The fifth,” he said.
Renata asked him to write the date on the letter and sign under it, and in front of twenty people in coats, he did.
The new part arrived on the second of February. By eight that evening the radiators were so hot that Aiko had her window wide open, and Nina stood in the hallway in a T-shirt, fanning herself with the meeting notes.
“It's about ninety degrees in my bedroom,” she said. “Should we write a letter?”
Renata was still laughing when Dov came up the stairs. He handed her a notebook — a new one, with the rubber band already on it.
“For next winter,” he said. “Just in case.”