I'd seen him only once. He was patting down dirt in a pot plant on the communal landing; hunched over the way my Russian grandmother would be, feet wide apart, knees slightly bent, one hand balanced on the glass patio table next to him.

There were two chairs, and I hoped that meant he was married. Because the second I heard his Eastern European accent, I felt the familiar wave of sadness that comes over me whenever I meet a fellow from the Eastern Bloc.

Especially an elderly one, who, like so many had swapped a bleak reality for one safe but desolate.

My parents had no friends in Australia. Even though they were together, they struggled with the disconnectedness. People often asked them to repeat themselves, and their smiles were blank whenever someone made a joke. Later they'd ask me what it meant.

Did he have children to explain jokes to him? When did he come here? Was there a tragic backstory?

These questions flitted through my mind quickly. I had more pressing thoughts. I'd just cycled home from work. I was sweaty and hungry. The guy I liked had messaged before I left and on the way home, I'd composed the perfect response.

So I smiled kindly and hurried up the stairs. Next time I'd talk to the man properly. What did it matter when? I'd only just moved in and he wasn't going anywhere.

There's something off

The smell was putrid. It clashed with the core of me. It didn't feel like one of life's common unpleasant odours, but something that doesn't belong with life at all.

It wafted up through the kitchen sink, lingered near the stove and came out of the plughole in the shower.

Washing the dishes or showering seemed to flush it back down. But a few hot hours, and it snuck back up again, like a type of raw meat I'd never smelt before.

I couldn't remember if it had been there when I first moved in.

That night, I got up to get a drink of water and gagged as I neared the sink. Together with the darkness, it seemed evil.

The next morning, I opened the front door to two cops asking if I had known the man in the unit underneath. He had been found dead that morning.

"Do you know how long he'd been there for?" I asked

"Probably a few days, but we can't be sure."

And it hit me, as violently as the gag reflex: I knew the source of the inexplicable smell.

He'd lived alone, like me

Guiltily, I told the cops I didn't know him.

The couple in the unit adjacent to his had made the call after they also noticed a smell. But they didn't know how long it had been either.

"We hadn't seen him for a while, so we started to get worried," the girl said.

He'd lived alone, like me. No partner. And like my parents, few friends.

"The two years or so we've lived here," she said, "I think I can remember one visitor."

I asked if she knew where he was from, and she said likely Slovenia. That was the return address on one of the envelopes in his letterbox.

The French girl from the unit just above the stairs knew him a bit better. She said she'd seen him on Christmas day, "sitting on the stairs, drinking his usual aperitif". He spoke French to her sometimes, and loved French cinema.

"He told me he was Italian," she said laughing. "I think he liked to tell people different things about himself."

It appears whatever stories the man had to tell about his life he took to his grave. ( Giulio Saggin: ABC News )

A rich history kept to himself

The coffin stood at the front of the Roman Catholic Slovenian church, the wearily smiling stranger in the photo above it lying quietly inside.

I hadn't gone to the funeral when my grandmother died in the Ukraine. We didn't have the money to go back.

I counted 12 people, not including us four awkward neighbours. The service was all ritual; in Slovenian. But I caught a lot of the meaning. Mainly prayers.

"His mother was Italian," a friend of his said afterwards; the one who had made that visit.

"But his father was Slovenian. He came here in 1953."

"I think it was in the '60s," another chimed in.

Neither could decide.

Nor did they know if he had been a tailor or tram conductor. Maybe both. Maybe neither.

Everyone agreed on one thing though: he had kept to himself.

The priest had a letter from a brother in Slovenia. In the 1940s, his Roman Catholic father was murdered by Communists, another brother taken away.

So my neighbour had escaped, first to Italy, then Australia.

And here he spent half a century, watching the odd French film, maybe punching holes in tickets, maybe fixing pants, sometimes, on Christmas day, drinking an aperitif alone, while keeping a rich history of a life to himself.

And when it ended, nobody knew. Not until we caught wind of it through the pipes.

Sasha Petrova is a Melbourne writer and journalist. She is a health and medicine editor at The Conversation