The notice hung beside the mailboxes, neat and laminated. The shared courtyard was to become presentable, so the building committee chairman had ordered the washing lines removed. Vera read it with a basket on her hip. In her ground floor flat, towels took days to dry in winter. Even so, she obeyed at first. She did not want to be the woman who obstructed every agreement with stories about her daily life, as Boris called her at meetings.
A week later four ornamental chairs arrived in the courtyard. Nobody knew who had paid for them or whether everyone could sit on them. Boris said the building was finally acquiring a proper face. His holiday apartment on the third floor had a balcony where so much white bed linen dried every morning that the railing disappeared. Vera knew because her kitchen looked directly toward it.
One Thursday the wind dropped his duvet cover over a new chair. It caught on a metal flower on the back and tore. Boris came downstairs angrily, carrying the other end as evidence against the badly chosen furniture. Vera stood in her doorway with a wet coat. She asked whose blue monograms appeared on the white fabric. They matched the ones in the advertisement for his apartment, pinned above the courtyard ban.
At the next meeting she brought her old basket. She did not empty it theatrically; she simply placed it beside her chair and asked where her things should dry. Boris explained the difference between a private balcony and shared space. Then a resident from the second floor spoke up. His guests were staying in Boris's apartment, whose advertisement promised a quiet, tidy garden. In that listing, the shared courtyard looked like an extension of one holiday rental.
Boris said a successful apartment benefited everyone. Vera asked him to name anyone who had received a share of the income. Someone laughed; someone else told her she was going too far. The meeting dissolved into an argument about chairs, expenses, and who had actually voted for the ban. They settled nothing. They agreed to meet again, which in their building usually meant the notice would peel off before a decision was reached.
On Saturday Vera put her washing line back up. She hung only two pillowcases, far enough from the chairs that neither touched a backrest. From his balcony Boris watched the wind turn them. Later he came downstairs with the bill for repairing the torn cover and stood at the noticeboard for a long time. Finally he folded it and returned it to his pocket. For the first time that week, Vera put dry bed linen into her cupboard that evening.