Coffee on the Third Floor in Leipzig

The family arrived on a grey Tuesday in February. Ute watched from her kitchen window as they carried bags up from a minibus: a father, a mother, a teenage boy, a little girl in a pink coat too thin for the wind. The stairwell smelled of floor polish and someone's cabbage soup. Ute heard them on the stairs, speaking a language she did not know, and then the door of the empty flat across from hers closed.

Ute is sixty-eight. She taught mathematics for thirty-five years. Since her husband died she has kept to herself. She is not unkind. She is careful. She did not know what to do with new neighbours who did not speak German, and part of her did not want to know.

For two weeks they nodded on the landing. The father, Dawit, always said, “Guten Tag,” very precisely, as if he had practised. The little girl, Selam, hid behind her mother's skirt. Ute heard the boy, Yonas, reading German words aloud through the wall in the evenings, over and over.

On Sunday the pastor at Ute's church read from Leviticus. It is not a book anyone expects much from. But one sentence stopped her. “The stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

As one born among you. Not a project. Not a problem. A neighbour, like any other. And then the reason: you were strangers once. Ute thought of her own mother, who arrived in this city in 1946 with one suitcase from the east, and how she used to talk about the woman downstairs who gave her a coat.

On Monday Ute knocked on the door across the landing with a plate of plum cake. She had planned to offer help. Forms, perhaps, or the school. She was ready to be useful.

Instead, Mehret, the mother, would not let her stay in the doorway. She brought her in, sat her down, and began to roast coffee beans in a small pan. The flat filled with smoke and the smell of frankincense. Then came three small cups of coffee, one after another, with popcorn in a bowl. Dawit explained, in careful German and some English, that this is how you welcome a guest in Eritrea. You do not rush. You drink three cups.

He had been a civil engineer. Mehret had been a nurse. They had both lost those years, and the papers to prove them. Yonas wanted to study medicine. Selam, it turned out, liked numbers.

Things are not simple now. The forms are endless. The recognition of Dawit's degree is stuck somewhere in an office. Yonas has been called names at the tram stop. Ute cannot fix any of that, and she has stopped pretending she can. But on Thursdays she sits at their table with Selam and a box of wooden counters, and they do sums together in German.

And on Sundays, more often than not, there is coffee on the third floor. Three cups. Ute never leaves before the third.