A proposed set of house rules appeared on the noticeboard, including a new restriction on visitors after ten. Selma read it while waiting for the elevator. She had divorced a year earlier, and her partner Alen sometimes arrived after his late shift. Nobody had written her name. There was no need.
Branko, the residents' chairman, gave a speech about the building's reputation. He spoke while looking at the ceiling, as though everyone who disagreed with him lived up there. Selma sat in the front row with the communal heating bills. She had come because of cold radiators, not to explain who made her tea.
"We can't allow every passerby to have access," Branko said. His wife added that they had to think of families. Selma asked why the rule concerned visits to adults rather than noise or actual damage. They replied that some people understood decency without legal arguments.
Ibro, the plumber called in to explain the fault, put down his tools. "If we're charging for other people's visits," he said, "what rate applies to Branko's fifth year of free parking in a space we all pay for?" Several residents laughed, but he did not continue the joke. He took out the plumbing plan and pointed to the blocked passage leading to the main valve.
Branko insisted that his car bothered nobody. Ibro explained that it had prevented him from reaching the valve the previous morning, too. The chairman had been in another building, visiting a female friend, with his phone switched off. Selma did not ask what kind of friend. She did not want to use someone else's private life to defend her own.
"We can discuss my visitors if they make noise," she said. "Let's discuss your parking because it's costing us our heating." She separated the two folders, house rules and bills. A neighbor from the second floor, silent until then, asked that they fix the fault first. The meeting finally had an item about which everyone knew something.
The proposal about visitors failed. They agreed on a nighttime noise rule that applied to everyone and scheduled the repair. Branko had to move his car and hand the keys to the communal space to the building manager. On the way out, he quietly told Selma she had taken everything personally. "It was aimed at me," she replied, "but we were voting about everyone."
That evening, Alen brought soup. On the stairs, he met Branko's wife, whose bag of apples had spilled, and helped her pick them up. Selma heard him introduce himself. Later, she put two spoons on the table, opened the window and, for the first time that week, stopped listening to every sound outside her own door.