Maybe This Time (6 page)

Once in a while, Father will suddenly stand up and go to the telephone in the hall, to enquire.
Although
everyone watches him, they all continue to speak, or scream, or be silent, as if they haven’t noticed a thing. After a time, he comes back into the room and sits in his chair, clearly distracted. He gazes at those around him, but says nothing. The afternoon passes, and the evening, then he taps the table with his finger and announces, Walter’s still coming. He says this as he glances around him. Who did you speak to? Who did you call? we ask.

Walter should be here by now, he replies. This from Walter’s son, who had no idea where else
Walter
could have gone. And then the doorbell rings. Mother looks around, gets up and leaves the room, closing the door behind her, and we stay put.

Walter’s wife occasionally stops by unannounced, whether out of consideration for our parents or because Walter sends her. The door opens and we see that Walter isn’t with her. She has come without him. Still, one person fewer is missing, because Ria belongs with us, even if she doesn’t count without Walter. So we wait with her, since she always insists that he intends to come. Walter will follow, she says then. She has come ahead of him because he was held up by someone at the last moment. We wait, and while waiting she becomes restless and worried, as do we and our parents. Something must have happened or he would be here, she says. She stays a while longer, then leaves. We stay behind, waiting for her call, for a sign. But there is none, ever, as if there really were no Walter, not for us.

But there is a Walter. And he’s coming. If what our parents tell us is true. Walter’s coming, they say. In a day or two, in a week, in a month. Walter will come in his own time. The door opens and he’s standing here in the room.

Mother calls. Walter was here, she says. His chair is still warm. Imagine, we almost missed him! Good thing we had a feeling he’d come. Then she says, Next time, make sure to be here. I always knew, she says then. Walter is coming, he’s looking forward to seeing you. Next time you’ll come too. Walter’s coming, he promised. Then we’ll all be together. Promise me that you’ll come. Walter would like to see you, she says. I promise, as do the others. We all promise, each of us. Yes, I promise, I say. I’ll be there and Walter will too, for sure. And at our next visit they both tell us about Walter and how it all went.

We can’t leave, we have to include him, they say, when they suspect that we might once again be
trying
to stop them thinking of Walter by suggesting an outing.

We don’t want to tempt them away, so we listen to them and their stories. Eventually it’s evening, then night, and although it’s clear to the rest of us that Walter won’t be coming this time either, they seem calmly confident, knowing they’re home and ready in case he does come.

We’re not so different, I often think. I, too, want to be available. I know that desire all too well. If someone is waiting for me, anywhere, or wants to stop in and see me, announced or unannounced, I sometimes think I consist of nothing but the desire to see that person. So I shy away from commitments, and whatever meetings I agree to, I cancel, just to be free in case anyone should decide to stop by. I make an exception for my parents, so often, in fact, that there is little time left for anyone else. Still, even on my way to their house, I worry that someone might be standing at my door and I won’t be there. The last time I came, at the very moment I opened the door, it dawned on me that I had forgotten about Winkler. I hadn’t seen him for years, and now I had forgotten about him. He was left standing at my door with his wife and children, and I couldn’t reach him, no matter how often I tried, either then or since. In fairness, it wasn’t the first time I had stood him up like that.

It happens time after time. And time after time while I am with my family at my parents’ house, sitting in the garden or at the dinner table, my mind wanders to my front door where someone might perhaps be waiting. Then I look at each member of my family in turn and think how impossible it is to escape these family ties. No one has managed it except Walter, and for him there was a price which we all must pay.

And yet, at each gathering, the moment comes when it’s time to leave, to let it go and admit that there is no point in waiting, at least this time, and Father sweeps his hand across the table and says nothing, but then, finally, he says, Walter probably won’t make it today after all. He stands up and thanks everyone for coming and, turning to Mother, says, I’ll be off to bed then. Mother follows him to the door of the room. She closes it behind him, and straightens her blouse and sits down and stays with us for a little while longer. Eventually she lowers her eyes, smiles and claps her hands cheerfully.
Tomorrow
I will give Walter your best, she says.

The stamps on the envelope were still moist. I
noticed
they were foreign. As I got to the window I realized that I was, in fact, in another country,
somewhere
unfamiliar. I didn’t know where. To confirm or dispel my sense of foreboding, I went into the bathroom. A stranger’s face looked at me from the mirror.

Finally awake, sweaty, but relieved to have
remembered
a dream after so long, I got up and found everything in order. I was drawn to the table where I had worked through the night. I looked out of the window and saw it was all as I remembered in the dream. A late afternoon in early autumn. Even the woman behind the half-open shutters in the bay window opposite, the woman who had watched me in my dream, she was still there and hadn’t lost interest in me.

A dream, I thought, and sat on the bed to finish the dream, but everything stayed the same.

Sheets had been draped over everything in the room, I now noticed. The walls were bare. The room seemed to have been abandoned long before. I closed the curtains. Darkness fell.

Several doors led out of the room. Lock them, I thought.

They were locked. The keys were on the inside. I knew I had to get to the mirror. Only then would the dream stop. I felt my way to the bathroom. The mirror was still there.

I started to wash myself. My hands
mechanically
scrubbed my body and didn’t stop. I wanted to escape from the dream. But I couldn’t wash what had happened from my skin, and my hands rubbed myself raw with the scalding water. Finally, they pushed my head under water and only relented when I realized that I could not resist them. The hands reached for a towel and used it to cool the red face that looked out at me from the mirror, as if already used to the fact that I was another.

I pulled myself together, convinced the darkness was deceiving me. But my hands throbbed with pain, and with the pain they became mine once more. I tore open the curtains and examined my hands in the daylight. They were covered with blisters. I wrapped them in the towel, which was now no longer cool enough to soothe the burning. Before long I brought the towel to my face and held it against my forehead.

The arms weren’t my arms. I looked down at
myself
and knew the mirror was after me again. It all happened more quickly this time, since I went along with it. The washing, the hands, just like before, my head held under water. But I let it happen, and, as if to reward me, the water was now cold.

The bay window opposite was wide open and the woman had gone, but I was still not alone.

I covered the mirror and burrowed into bed under the towels I had dampened to cool my skin. Like everything else in the room, I too was draped in sheets, and I tried to remember how things could have come to this.

It worked, or at least I thought it did. I
remembered
a story, my story, at least I thought it was. And the calmer I became by thinking about this story, the more sharply the pain returned, and I was pleased to be forced into alertness. The pain would pass, and I tried to distract myself by concentrating on this thought, which worked for a while, until I noticed that everything I remembered vanished the moment I thought of it, vanished permanently, as if it had never happened, as if I had never experienced it. As soon as I remembered something, I seemed to forget it. No matter what I thought. The last few hours. How I came here. There was an answer, which appeared like a familiar face in a crowd, but it immediately disappeared and was as strange as all the others.

The letter, I thought. What has been written can’t disappear. The sealed envelope was on the table next to yesterday’s notes.

I didn’t recognize a thing. Among the sentence fragments that had been cut and reassembled
without
apparent rhyme or reason, the words
origin
and
downfall
appeared again and again.
Origin
and
downfall
, sometimes crossed out and rewritten, or one replacing the other.

There was no address on the envelope. I held it up to the light and could just make out some writing on the paper inside.

They can come
, it said.
They can come and get me
.

The courtyard in front of the house was, in fact, a public square, I now realized, surrounded by iron railings, the paving stones bright and baking in the sun. Mothers sat on the benches. Their children ran from the shade under the trees out into the warm sunshine and back again. The window opened at the first touch and the cool breeze soothed my skin.

On one of the benches I noticed a girl who looked familiar. So did the dog licking her hand. I had
already
met them.

Who was to come and get me? To go where?

I didn’t dare open the letter and decided to look only at the notes on the table, but first I made sure that the door was still locked.

They can come. They won’t find me.

I picked random notes from the piles of paper, and the sentences on them seemed to be written just as randomly. They were unintelligible paragraphs in which I tried to defend or justify myself, though why it was impossible to tell, at least for the moment.

No one can escape themselves
, I read,
there is no escape from one’s self
, and I heard myself laugh in a voice that was not mine. I had escaped from myself long before.

These sentences were no help, yet some stuck with me. I couldn’t get them out of my head. It was as if they might explain what had happened. But they didn’t.
I am preparing my departure. I am leaving my name to the lies.

Next to the bed was a sheet and I pulled it over the sentences with a movement that was not mine. I hadn’t left, and the sentences couldn’t be trusted. Nor could the noise that had been coming from the next room for some time now.

The door to that room was not completely shut, I now noticed, and a draught moved the door,
opening
and closing a gap. In that room, too, everything was draped in white.

No one knew I was there and I wanted it to stay that way, so I shut the door. The knob was pleasantly cool in my hand.

At this point I also became aware of a smell that had not caught my attention before, even though it was a strong one and permeated everything. It was the smell of the elderly, of medicine.

Into whose story had I fallen, I wondered. The story had as little to do with me as the smell. Just as I didn’t fit here, so nothing here fit me, except for the notes, and I had no idea what I should do with them. I had covered them like everything else. The sentences were not to be trusted.
These are the facts
, they said,
there is evidence against me
and
who will believe me, no one
. Protestations followed reproaches, all sorts of claims that meant nothing to me, suppositions and self-incrimination, paragraphs rendered unintelligible.

Next door, the floor creaked.

It raised its head and froze in this posture as if to threaten an enemy, then resumed its march again. Its carapace gleamed in the sun. Its pincers snapped audibly on nothing. Occasionally it would grip a stalk of sturdier grass with them and, as if
searching
for a better view of its surroundings, it would hoist itself up, only to let itself drop once it had reached the top of the stalk or the upper side of a leaf, and lay motionless on the ground. It would remain almost completely immobile for a while, then suddenly continue on its way with a violent start, or it would circle around the next stalk and burrow its head in the earth at the base, or it would turn and set off in the opposite direction. Again and again, it would stop dead, perhaps sensing a threat. Then it would struggle on, its body rising and falling, towards a cluster of paving stones set in the grass and leading to a gravel path. The carapace creaked as it scraped the stones, and the animal stumbled and fell onto its back. It jerked itself back onto its feet and crawled into the cooler grass, continuing its march. The struggle seemed to tire the animal since it frequently stopped to lie full length on a stone, and each time it took a bit longer to lift its soft, defenceless underbelly. In one attempt to push itself off a stone, it tumbled over the edge onto the gravel. Its limbs waved in the air. Its underbelly was noticeably lighter than the rest of its body. It rose and fell continuously, swelled and collapsed in on itself. An ant ran across it, briefly touched its face, its jaws, and disappeared under the pebbles. Then the ant returned and crawled over the creature’s face and up to its eyes. The ant gnawed and tore at the eyes. It disappeared again and returned, biting deeper into the creature each time. The creature must have injured itself in the fall, because it was now dragging its left side. And yet, despite this handicap, it moved nimbly over the gravel, which was spread so sparsely in spots that patches of earth, the same colour as the creature, could be seen amongst the rocks. Whenever it reached one of these clearings, it tried to burrow into the ground, but soon gave up and hauled itself along towards the kerbstone from which it had fallen and which it intended to climb over. It did everything it could to get back to the grass, but its little legs foundered on the stone’s smoothness. It laboured almost obsessively along the edge of the path until it found a gap in the kerb through which it could squeeze onto the lawn. There it lay still for a time and began to tend to itself. It ran its antennae carefully over the
damaged
limbs and brushed them across its mouth. Its mandibles moved back and forth as it crouched and stretched. With a jerk it managed to flop onto one of the stones, but landed on its back. A violent trembling shook its hind legs and spread through its whole body, then abated, growing calmer until it subsided completely. Meanwhile the shovel-like forelegs banged wildly against its head. Its mouth opened and closed ceaselessly, as if begging, and its underbelly collapsed and stayed flat. Its lustre was gone except where the ants were at work. They had come out of the grass in droves and swarmed over its body. The forelegs had stopped banging and hung motionless in the grass. Its mouth was wide open. The ants crawled in and out and made off with their booty. They nibbled and gnawed at the body and hollowed it out until it was light enough. Then they carried the husk away.