Happy Birthday, Mr K_____

In late October of ‘95, I flew from the UK to Rome, Italy, to begin a new job. I had secured a post with a company who had been clients of some former employers of mine. It was part of my new employers’ standard procedure to house their new starters arriving from overseas in a hotel for a couple of weeks, until such time as they could find apartments. At that time, there was a choice of two hotels: one not far from the city-centre, and a second, way out in the suburbs, but nearer to the company’s offices. This latter, marginally cheaper option was the one that I chose: the Hotel Capital Inn.

Two others arrived at the Hotel on the same day as I did: Mr L___, a Jewish Londoner in his fifties, and Mr K_____, a Marronite Lebanese in his early twenties. After our second or third day there, it became our routine to dine together most evenings in the Hotel restaurant, where, more often than not, ours was the only occupied table. Nevertheless, the food there was very good, and we were served by the attentive but rather melancholy Enzo, who seemed inwardly to lament that his tourism degree & his mastery of three languages had only led him as far as waiting on a single table in a hotel whose chief distinction was that it was ten minutes’ drive from Ciampino, the city’s second airport.

The days and then the weeks ticked by. My efforts at apartment-hunting were sporadic and half-hearted. I was kept very busy by my work, and was rawly new in a city where I knew no-one. I celebrated my twenty-seventh birthday at the Capital, with my two fellow Inn-mates, but by candle-light, as there was a local power-cut that evening. I had very soon exhausted my standard new-starters’ hotel allowance, and was beginning to run up a very large bill, even before I had received my first paycheck. I grew ever more panicked and frustrated. Mr L___ was content to remain at the hotel, as his was a fixed, short-term contract, but Mr K_____ was in the same predicament as me. Finally, after nearly six weeks, Mr K_____ approached me saying that a colleague of his was vacating a two-bedroomed apartment very near to the offices where we all worked: would I be interested in sharing the place with him?

It was a lifesaver: another week at that hotel, perfectly comfortable though it was, might have driven me to a breakdown. The apartment we moved into was nothing special, a draughty but spacious fourth-floor place with the benefit of an expansive terrace which afforded fine views out to the East toward & beyond Tivoli and Palestrina. Mr K_____ and I became good friends. We had little in common besides our shared predicament, but his was pleasant company. He told me several hair-raising tales of his experience of the civil war in Lebanon, in which he had served, although very briefly, he said, as a volunteer in an artillery unit.

It turned out that we weren’t flatmates for very long. He was unable to agree a mutually satisfactory long-term contract with the company in Rome, and left after only a couple of months. My reason for relating all this is that Mr K_____ is the only person I’ve known whose birthday happened to fall on February 29th. If I remember it right, he stayed just long enough to celebrate his ‘sixth’ birthday there. I stayed on at that apartment for another year, and I kept in touch with Mr K_____ for at least another year after that. He moved back to Beirut, and as far as I know still lives there. Wherever you are, Joe, I hope you had a great ‘eighth’ birthday today…

Posted by misteraitch at February 29, 2004 10:21 PM | TrackBack