Maybe This Time

by Alois Hotschnig

  Maybe This Time

  Alois Hotschnig

  "Hotschnig's stories have the weird, creepy, and ambiguous quality of disturbing dreams… It is, though, very refreshing to be confronted by stories which so firmly refuse to yield to conventional interpretation." Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian "Hotschnig's prose dramatizes the voice of conscience and the psychological mechanisms we use to face reality or, just as often, to avoid it." World Literature Today "Literary precision that has become rare in today's gossipy, discursive fiction." Neue Zuricher Zeitung "He is one of the best writers of his generation." – Suddeutsche Zeitung

  ‎"Not since Julio Cortazar's game of Hopscotch… has an author so daringly undertaken to challenge the reader." Amanda Hopkinson, The Independent "Hotschnig's stories have the weird, creepy and ambiguous quality of disturbing dreams." Nick Lezard, The Guardian "This award-winning collection by the Austrian writer Alois Hotschnig drew comparisons with Kafka. But Hotschnig's quietly terrifying voice is all his own." – Daily Mail

  Alois Hotschnig

  Maybe This Time

  I love Kafka and here we have a Kafkaesque sense of alienation – not to mention narrative experiments galore! Outwardly normal events slip into drama before they tip into horror. These oblique tales exert a fascinating hold over the reader.

  The Same Silence, the Same Noise

  Whenever I left the house, they lay on their jetty and when I came back, hours later, they were still lying there. In the sun, in the shade, in the wind and rain. Day in, day out, every day. There were two gardens of empty, rundown houses with a few trees and hedges between us. Reeds and driftwood were washed up along the shores. Their jetty was no different from the others. A fence of wooden planks protected them from the wind and their neighbours’ eyes. A pot of lobelias sat on a shelf attached to the planks. Behind it, a plastic palm tree waved above the water. This tree belonged to the little girl one jetty over. The girl couldn’t get enough of climbing up and jumping into the water, going under and resurfacing, screaming and going wild with excitement.

  My neighbours seemed as indifferent to the child’s game as they were to all their surroundings. Nor did anyone appear to take any interest in them. No one ever paid them any attention.

  They lay so peacefully on their deckchairs and for a time I assumed they must be happy. But after a while I began to wonder if they enjoyed their sedentary lives. And with each passing day I found it harder to bear the sight of their dogged indolence.

  Through my binoculars, I saw that they were younger than I had reckoned from a distance. Now they appeared not exactly young, but prematurely aged, perhaps. I wondered why these people appeared so familiar. And I wondered why I wanted to approach them, even though I never did.

  Their idleness disturbed me. But they seemed content. It was as if, having found each other, they had accepted the way things were. Evidently they had already said all there was to say to each other. They never spoke, unless it was through the signs and symbols they traced in the air with their hands. Not once, however, did the woman ever glance towards where the man pointed.

  They lay next to each other on their deckchairs, arms by their sides, legs bent or straight. For hours they didn’t move, not even to wave away the mosquitoes or scratch themselves. Every day, every night, always the same. Their stillness made me feel uneasy, and my unease grew until it festered into an affliction I could no longer bear. At first, I had thought them part of the idyll I had come here to find, but now their constant presence irritated me. When I realized how easily one could see into my house from their jetty, I felt annoyed, caught out, exposed. Under surveillance, even. Yet I was the one who never let them out of my sight. Whenever I left the house, I looked over towards them, and if ever they weren’t there when I came back, I couldn’t relax until they returned. I now thought of them more frequently and more intensely than was good for me, and I began to feel that I was intruding on their territory. They made this clear to me. Or this, at least, is what I believed I could read in the man’s expression whenever we caught each other’s eye.

  In the morning when I sat down to breakfast on my verandah, he was already staring at me. Throughout the day, not one of my movements escaped his notice. Not once, however, did he feel obliged to offer the slightest acknowledgement. His behaviour exhausted me, but it also impressed me. I even welcomed it, since I wasn’t seeking contact either. Yet, because his eyes continually scrutinized me, I was always just on the point of greeting him. But then again I was never quite sure if he was actually looking at me or simply staring into space and so I stopped myself each time. As the newcomer, I didn’t want to start off on the wrong foot with my neighbours. For a while I tried hard, no doubt too hard, to get their attention. But they gave no response. Initially I put this down to possible visual impairment, until one day I saw them waving back at someone in a boat out in the middle of the lake. Their failure to greet me was clearly deliberate. Still, I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. After all I had chosen this area and this house for peace and quiet and solitude. I had found all of this here and it did me good. But it was awful too because I wasn’t used to it. And these people ended up tormenting me, even though they also only wanted to be left alone.

  I drew closer to them because they rejected me. Rejection, after all, is still a kind of contact. To show them that I posed no threat, that I wasn’t interested in meeting them, I drew my curtains whenever the man glanced towards my house. I even closed the shutters if I thought they might be watching me from their jetty. And yet, all the while, I knew that what I took for intrusiveness was really pure indifference.

  This was their way of showing me that for them I didn’t exist and that, in truth, I was the interfering one, if there was, in fact, any interference to speak of. This indifference was fine with me. But then again it wasn’t, because I didn’t understand what I could have done to deserve such a slight. When one day a storm battered our shoreline and the two of them remained motionless in their deckchairs, without even responding to my offer of help, I finally realized that becoming good neighbours was out of the question.

  Not even a downpour could drag these two from their routine, which they pursued with determination as if they were fulfilling a duty.

  Sometimes the man bolted out of his chair, startled, and hurried down the steps that led into the water amongst the reeds. He leant with both arms on the railing, bracing himself against some unknown danger. He stopped dead and stood there for hours on end. Once in a while, something moved in the reeds, circling and creating a whirlpool in the water. Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, he turned and headed back to his chair, where he made himself comfortable and lay still until night fell.

  Behind the couple, the plastic palm swayed in the wind and the girl, laughing and screaming, jumped into the water again and again. I watched her and indulged in a secret protest against my neighbours’ lethargy.

  The sun rose and set. Nothing changed, only my agitation grew. I decided to observe them even more closely to calm my unease, as if I no longer had a life of my own but lived only through them. At night, every now and then, there was a sound of crying, like the whimpering of a child. It was carried by the wind from the direction of their house, then faded away, only to be heard again when I had stopped thinking about it. The sound was soft and unobtrusive, but loud enough to interrupt any conversation I might be having with a guest, who, from that moment, would listen intently for that strange noise.

  I didn’t want to talk about it and I couldn’t explain it, so I would leave the room under some pretext or other every time the sound started. Either that or I would noisily rearrange the glasses to cover this whimpering.

  Every once in a while, my neighbours also had a visitor. A young man lay
with them on the jetty. There was a hustle and bustle the night before as they set up a third deckchair. Then the man swept the jetty with a broom while the woman settled herself and lay still just as she always did. The man spent hours scything the reeds that had grown up between the boards. After that, he stepped down into the water and swept the bed below the surface, then climbed back out and disappeared. After a time he returned with a rake and went into the water again and gently raked the reeds, carefully rearranging anything the wind might have tangled.

  Raking the reeds seemed to calm him. When the young man lay with the couple on the jetty the next morning, he was placed between them. The young man lay on his back while they lay facing him, until they turned away. Not a single word more than usual was spoken. There was only the creaking of the chairs, nothing else until evening. Then the young man left.

  The more absorbed I became with my neighbours and the more my life merged into theirs, the fewer visitors I had. If one of my friends asked about them, I found it hard to remain calm and respond appropriately. I was too preoccupied with them and afraid to expose them to the curiosity of others.

  I distanced myself from the few friends who hadn’t already given up on me. I never went out any more. If a friend’s visit couldn’t be avoided, it was agony for me not to talk about my neighbours and follow a different conversation.

  I began inventing stories about them to make their idleness more bearable, personal histories that might explain what had brought them to their current state, lying there before me on that jetty. The stories became more inventive as my own life grew increasingly monotonous. Eventually I had to admit that for a long time I had been lying there with them on the jetty, and that my pretended busyness and feigned familiarity with these people was simply an attempt to escape my own life.

  My attitude clearly had to change. But I didn’t know how to get away from these two. I simply didn’t exist for them, and that is how they hooked me. They refused contact, yet they willingly exposed themselves to me. I had caught the scent of their lives, which obviously had reached some sort of premature end. I had fed on them, devoured them, and now I wanted more. I couldn’t resist absorbing their most fleeting emotions as my own, and so I carried them inside me and I lived out their disquiet, which was also my disquiet.

  I protected myself by writing everything down, by recording whatever I observed, when they went into the water and when they left the jetty. I noted it all down. Finally I began taking pictures of them. Now I could look at them at night too. This way they were always available to me.

  I spent most of the time on my jetty and in my boat and in the rooms inside my house which gave a clear view of them. The reports on their daily routine complemented my own. They lay on their deckchairs, I paced back and forth at home watching them. The more I learned about them, the less I was able to tear myself away.

  Ashamed at first, I only photographed them furtively from inside my house. I didn’t want them to see what I was doing. Then I swam along the shore, each time venturing a little closer. They didn’t seem to mind, although it was impossible that they didn’t notice me. But they let it happen. They pretended they simply didn’t see me, even when I rowed past and took pictures of them from my boat.

  Before dawn, the man brought out the pot of lobelias and set it on the shelf. He plucked the wilted leaves and flowers and scattered them expansively over the lake. Then he brought out the deckchairs and placed them in their proper positions, and the woman covered them with blankets so that the jetty became an altar. The sun rose and the woman lay down on her chair, where she would spend this day too, and the man went down the steps into the water and waded through the reeds. After a while, he took a rake into the water and moved it back and forth over the bed of the lake as if he were ploughing a field. He raked the ground with devotion and straightened the reeds, though a single gust of wind would undo his work. When he had finished, he disappeared and returned with a child’s watering can. He filled it with lake water which he sprinkled on the pot of lobelias.

  Exactly what kind of ritual I was witnessing I could not tell. Yet I was there every day, despite myself, craving the sight of it.

  I constantly took pictures of them. I now wanted them to acknowledge my interest. I was determined that they should see me. This, too, they tolerated, and so I couldn’t escape them. My only option was to imitate them, to let them see me copying everything they did. I cleaned and scrubbed my jetty and raked the reeds and swept the mud under the water. I pulled spiders’ webs off the branches of my shrubs and pruned their withered leaves. Before, I had been a night owl, but now when they appeared at the crack of dawn, I was already lying in wait.

  We looked at the same view, heard the same noises. We shared a common world and were separated by it. Great crested grebes nested in the reeds, ducks landed near them and near me. In the noise of children from the nearby swimming pool, my own childhood called to me. The same silence, the same noise. So much surrounded us, the waves, the fishermen going about their business out on the lake, and the water, the shore, the reeds. Did they see all this, I wondered, and if so, what did they make of it all?

  I sat on my jetty and stared over at them, only to see them staring into the reeds. They were like two beetles that had fallen on their backs, with no desire to be on their feet again. When I left my jetty after a long day, I went into the house and closed the door behind me, and closed the shutters and the curtains, and turned off the light. It was dark and I closed my eyes but I still saw them in their spot, in the sun, in the rain, in the cold and wind, as if they had become one with their deckchairs. One day, they would lie on those chairs forever. As I lay in my bed, I thought about them lying there and, through them, about my own situation. Because no matter how obsessed I had become, I had really only stalked myself. In truth, it was myself I was now looking at, and I realized that if I kept watching them, that is what I would become.

  Now I often dreamed of swimming out into the lake and letting myself drift away, anywhere the water would take me. I would lie amidst the driftwood, between the stones and the willows, buoyed by the waves. The water would be cold but I wouldn’t feel it, nor would I feel the stones that chafed my body and rubbed it raw. I would have no sense of anything, no sound, just the wind in the willow branches and the stillness. I would drift on the water without moving, another piece of wood among many, a log like any other, worn smooth by the stones, adrift on the current and at peace with what has been and what is.

  I woke from the dream with a start and knew I had to do something. I remembered the house’s previous tenant and how happy he had been to find a replacement and get away from the area. I looked him up. He was a friendly man who refused to say a word about my neighbours.

  You don’t have to stay, he said. You can always try leaving. I have a pretty good idea of how difficult that might be, though.

  And so I was on my own again. I often considered moving away, but until I understood what kept me tied to the place and what I was seeing, I couldn’t leave. That much, in any case, was clear. No one would help me and I knew that I had to cope with my neighbours on my own.

  For months I had wanted to swim over to their jetty. I wanted to look around the place from which these people held such sway over me, to lie on their deckchairs and to see it all from their perspective for once. I decided to do it. I climbed into the water and made my way through the reeds. Dawn had not yet broken, and in the darkness I realized how badly I had misjudged the distance. I kept sinking and stepping into holes, suddenly losing my footing. I used the reeds to pull myself up again. I felt my way, like a blind man. Every few metres, I found myself reaching through slime floating on the water, which I had never noticed before. It obstructed my way and I soon noted that it grew up from the depths of the lake. I cursed myself for pursuing these people. After all, they hadn’t done me the slightest harm. But I had gone too far by now to turn back. In any case, I was determined to reach their jetty and so struggled on. When the lak
e bed fell away or I sank into the mud, I held on to the reeds and pulled myself back up. The more I fought and grabbed and flailed about, the more entangled I became in the slimy growth like in a net that tightened around me with every step.

  I was about to shout for help, to draw attention to my distress despite the embarrassment, but at that moment I stumbled on a stone. It hurt, but at least I regained my footing. I stood still, relieved to have solid ground beneath my feet again. Gradually I freed myself from the slimy strands. I placed one foot in front of the other and finally arrived at my neighbours’ jetty. For a long time I stayed in the water, waiting to see if the two of them had noticed me. But everything remained quiet. I sat down on the lowest step and gazed at the mass of vegetation that had entrapped me. The waves my thrashing had set off beat against the wooden posts. I noticed a rubber duck tied to one of them with a string. The duck kept bobbing up to the surface, bumping into the post and disappearing underwater again. Finally I had reached the place that had exerted such a powerful pull over me. I climbed the steps and stood on the jetty. But I no longer felt any desire to sit on either of the chairs and I made my way home through the gardens.

  I had had enough of it all now, and for a long time I was cured of the craving to creep under my neighbours’ skin. But at night, in dreams, I kept swimming over to them.

  After one such night I went down to the jetty. The previous tenant was sitting on the steps. He seemed to have been expecting me. Or perhaps, he simply took my presence for granted. It was hard to tell. He looked over at my neighbours, as if oblivious of me. After sitting next to him for a while, I stood up and went back into the house.

  From that day on, I didn’t return to the jetty. It had become his space, and with each day it became more completely his.