Memoirs of "His and Her" - 4

[Continued from the last part available here]

When you see yourself in an unfamiliar situation, you normally tend to think in every possible direction.  This is exactly how his brain was working now. He had to figure out a way to find the mysterious "Whg 26". " If we find out the name of the person who used to live her before, maybe we can ask the people and find the house", he suggested. He started trying the smaller of the keys into each of the letter boxes. 

"Aljabarya" read the name the postbox which spewed, free-newspapers, pamphlets and lots of advertisements for home delivered pizza's. He had found the name of the previous tenant of the house successfully after ten minutes of letterbox-key-matching exercise. She smiled, as it looked like that they were finally going to get a roof to stay on their first day in the alien country.

He had to repeat the exercise of knocking on doors and asking the surprised inmates, this time however a different question. " Do  you know the house of the person named Aljabarya?". The success depended a lot on how he would pronounce the nine letters. 

German uses the Latin alphabet. This is where the similarity between English and German ends. The letter "J" is pronounced as "Yo" and "Y" is called "Epsilon". This makes Jaya  as Yayya and a telugu second name like makanaboyina no short of a tongue twister. Aljabarya had two of these modified letters. 

Ten minutes into the search for the unknown house to which he had the keys, he knew that asking people about this strangely named person was futile. He wasn't even sure if he was saying his name the right way and had scrawled it down on a piece of scrap paper and hopefully showed it to people. He said, "Now only one way is remaining". 

He knew that he would be seen more as a thief than as a future neighbor by doing this but he had to do it. 

German houses are very well insulated. They need this to keep the cold winds out during the winter months. The double or in this case triple glass windows not only keep heat from within the house from being lost to the outside atmosphere but also keep all kinds of sounds out. More often than not, there are huge screens covering the windows in the German houses. He knew by the strong disapproving looks that he had received by knocking at the doors at the odd time, that Germans loved their privacy; and now he was going to do the most unimaginable. With his key, he started to tried each door where he wasn't able to hear or sense any motion from within the house. He hoped, that the mysterious door, behind which lay an respite from the immediate misery showed up soon enough. 

"Let us be clever", she said after he returned from an unsuccessful round of trying different doors on the floor above. 

"If it is "Whg 26", it should be on the second floor."

"Yes", he agreed. "But where is the second floor? ". The elevator had only the buttons marking the odd numbers one and three. On the first floor all the usual suspects had been inspected. 

"May i try my luck", she took the lead now. In a problematic situation, if the regular guy has run out of ideas, it makes sense for someone else to take lead. This may hurt the ego but saves the situation. 

He looked at his friend who was telling about his job and what is where in Ulm. She had been on the "Hunt for the Whg 26" for the last 10 minutes. He expected to hear a shriek of triumph any moment. All she saw was her stepping out from the elevator. Before he could ask, she gave a report of all the doors she tried and visited. There had been two doors that had opened and one where the key had entered completely and was turning through the keyhole, though the door wouldn't budge. The doors that could be opened where the connecting different floors. 

"This has to be it", he said as he heaved against the door and pushed. Sherlock holmes stated 

"when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth".

With the typical sound of the locking cylinders opening, the door opened. She started jumping and he smiled. They where in their temporary abode in a foreign land, away from home. "Schritte-1" - Step1 in the journey was complete. 

[Here ends Chapter 1 of Memoirs of "His and Her". Based on readers comments further chapters would be written!]