After the successful opening party of the previous night Mme.
Empathy stood there glowing. However when
Mme. Landlord and I entered the restaurant Mme. Empathy looked at us as if we
were vermin.
Mme. Landlord politely explained the situation, but was
rudely interrupted. Mme. Empathy glared at me and spoke to me in
English to my surprise. She insisted that I did not hear anything.
If I did then it was me being oversensitive. She then turned to Mme.
Landlord and said in French ‘You should pay for the insulation, not me.’ Not knowing this, I naively begged Mme. Empathy
to at least refrain from using the dishwasher after midnight. She looked me straight in my eyes and said, ‘we
have no dishwasher.’ I could see one in the kitchen and pointed
at it. ‘Oh,
that is not it’. Without even once
flickering in eye. I realized that I was
dealing with a pathological liar. Logical
thing would be for me to walk away, but her command of English puzzled me. It was too good for a French. It turned out that Mme. Empathy was French
only by national. It was a typical case
of immigrants dumping on other immigrants.
I observed Mme. Landlord as we walked out the
restaurant. She was looking fragile every
day because of her cancer. She was a
good French lady, very sympathetic to immigrants and one of them is returning evil for good. What would it make me
if I abandoned her after all the compassion she had shown me? Another ungrateful immigrant, of course and I
refused to go down that path. We
Japanese maybe many thing, but ungrateful is not one of them. We would much rather wage a losing battle and
thus I declined when Mme. Landlord offered to return my deposit so I could
leave.
So, together we headed for PASU, the authority that approved
the infrastructure of the restaurant. Mme.
Landlord was sure that Mme. Empathy had lied to the authority. To be continued.
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