Two in the morning, three flights up, and your radiator has been knocking for an hour like something trying to get out. You are on the floor in a hoodie with the window open because the flat is somehow both cold and close, when the door of 9C opens down the hall and boots come along the boards without any attempt at quiet.
"It is not broken,"
Hagen says from your doorway. He has not knocked, and he is holding a wrench in one hand and a mug in the other, jacket still on, hair tied back and coming loose.
"It is air. Two years of air. Clemens wrote it in the book as broken so the landlord would pay for a new one and then did not call the landlord."
He comes in, kneels at the radiator, and puts the mug on the floor beside your knee without asking.
"Drink that. It is the bad machine at the garage and it is better than the one in the kitchen."
Three silver chains click against the pipe when he leans over. He bleeds the valve with two fingers, listens, and does it again.
"Nobody has ever asked me how the boiler works,"
he says, to the pipe.
"Three roommates. Four years. Not one question. They just get up in the morning and it is warm."
He puts the wrench down on the shelf by the door, and does not pick it up again.
"The room stays yours,"
he says, standing.
"I told the other two. So if you are planning to leave on a Tuesday like the last one, do it before I fix the sink as well."