I didn’t mention a word of this to my wife. I kept the encounter to myself because it was too personal to risk sharing with anyone else. At least not before I had a chance to get to the bottom of it. I contacted my school friend and apologized for not coming the other day, angling for another invitation, so that I had an excuse to walk past the woman’s house again.
From the moment I arrived at my friend’s, I found that he and I were as distant as we had been at school. I wondered why he had invited me in the first place. His wife tried hard to make up for his aloofness towards me, until I mentioned their neighbour. Then she, too, gave me the cold shoulder. The younger of their two daughters, who up to that point had sat close by me, every now and again casually brushing against me, moved away and refused to go to bed because she was afraid of the mean lady, as they referred to her. Whenever my friend and his wife got the girl to her bedroom door, she screamed and resisted with all her might. One or the other of the two girls was constantly coming into the room to be comforted by their mother, but also so they wouldn’t miss a word of what we might be saying about the old woman. She stands at her window all day, watching from behind half-drawn blinds everything that goes on outside, my friend’s wife explained. She can see everything from there, she said, and the children are afraid of her because she keeps luring them into her house. She frightens and upsets the children so much that you can’t get a word out of them.
Today she was looking at us again, one of the girls said. She was looking in here, into my room, she said, crawling onto her mother’s lap, holding onto her arm and not taking her eyes off me.
You know that’s not true, her mother said. No one can see into this room, not from over there. She tried to calm the child by telling her that the woman would soon be moving away since her house was listed for sale in the newspaper. Besides, she had no one who cared for her, and desperately wanted company. That didn’t reassure the children, so my friend’s wife promised to speak to the woman in the next day or two.
Now I really wanted to find out what was going on. Over the next few days I went and stood in front of the woman’s house several times, only to turn back each time without even entering the front garden. I always brought flowers. Then one day I was standing outside her house again and was about to give up, but this time she saw me and waved from her window on the second floor. I had trouble opening the heavy gate into the front garden and decided it must be impossible for the woman to leave the property without help.
She was waiting for me at the door. As before, she recognized me and invited me in. She took the flowers. Then, closing the door before I could enter, she was gone. I paced back and forth outside the door for a while, but this time I didn’t need to knock to remind her I was there. The door opened as if by itself and the woman stood in the hallway holding towards me a vase with the flowers. She disappeared into one of the rooms, a different one from the one she had entered when I first met her. I followed her into the house. Again she left me alone with the dolls, but I didn’t mind. Instead, I took the opportunity to look around and confirm that everything was as I remembered. And it was. The countless dolls, the shelves and cupboards, the niches. And the curtains everywhere, behind which other dolls were hidden. Even a few chests and cupboards I hadn’t noticed the first time.
I passed by the shelves and reached into the cupboards. Time and again, on retrieving one of her children, I was relieved not to find any faces I recognized.
Most of the dolls were old and some had been better looked after than others. Some were shabby, others meticulously groomed. Some were dusty, others polished and freshly brushed. Evidently they had received different levels of care over a long period of time, but they all showed signs of frequent handling. I looked at a few of them more closely. Annie and Elly and Gerda I knew from my first visit. I picked them up, one after the other, and each time I was surprised at how attentively they looked back at me. However, a sense of unease grew within me and only subsided once I had found Karl among all the dolls. I realized that all along I had actually been searching only for him. He sat in his place on the sofa, looking as if he hadn’t left it since our previous meeting. He sat there and looked at me pleasantly. I went up closer and leant over him. At the very moment our fingers touched, the woman came back into the room.
I sat down in my place, the place that had probably been kept for me from the very beginning, on my chair. I thought the woman was going to show me Karl again, but she held a different doll in her arms. She sat down and I knew this doll was also Karl, just a few years younger. He also looked like me, exactly like me, only as I had looked a few years earlier, and dressed just as I had dressed at that time.
The two of them sat before me, the three of them, actually, looking at me, looking into my eyes, and I saw myself in a clearing in a forest, standing behind myself and watching myself standing there. I see that I am not alone. Someone is standing opposite me. A woman, immobile. I don’t know her, or rather, perhaps I do. She is standing opposite me and looking at me. She is rigid, transfixed, arms at her sides. Just as I am, I note. She is standing opposite me and sees me or doesn’t see me. We stand like this for a long time without moving. Rigid, eyes fixed on each other. I see it all from behind, from my perspective, and see myself turning away, see my head turning and facing away, away from her. She is still standing and stays standing. I see the blades of grass and the tree trunks around us. I look at the ground and I sense something. I feel myself turning. And then I looked into the eyes of the old woman sitting across from me. She smiled. I felt exhausted and relieved and liberated. The woman looked into my eyes and didn’t move. Eventually she raised her finger to her lips and signalled that I should remain silent. Then she got up and left the room and was gone for the rest of my visit.
I didn’t know what I should do and had no explanation for what had just happened, but that it had something to do with me was clear, and that both repelled and intrigued me. I wanted to know more and so, from that time on, visited the woman frequently. Her house became our place. We sat there across from each other, and it always happened the same way. She sat across from me and I walked behind myself. The sensation was not completely new. Even as a child I had often had the feeling of following myself, of not letting this other self out of my sight. And this is what it was like now. I stood behind or followed myself, distant, impartial, devoid of emotion, and what I saw was both familiar, but then again not. I recognized it and knew that I had experienced it, but when the scene stopped, I couldn’t understand what had occurred.
I saw this woman and the doll on her lap and I looked at the child I once was. I follow him. We’re in a garden with a house and a path leading up to it. It’s always the same. A door opens and swings shut. A hallway, a staircase, a room. Another place, there are many of them, a meadow by a forest, a clearing. A woman is standing in front of me, she takes a step towards me. I want to leave this place, but cannot stay away. As strange as these encounters were, I kept wanting to experience them, to relive them. I could hardly wait for the woman to disappear into one of the rooms and return some time later to show me what had been. Karl sat opposite me, in her lap, sometimes younger, sometimes older. It varied. His age was as unpredictable as the story she revealed to me.
I knew I wouldn’t get any explanations, so I didn’t ask, afraid she might stop the game. I accepted that she would only sit there in silence and show me myself. Everything I witnessed I relived once more, only this time I was safe, but not entirely. And however much I saw, I knew I could not interfere. The road, the house with the garden, the hallway and staircase, the room and the wall I always ended up facing. Repeating what was, to see it once again, again and always anew.
I knocked and she welcomed me. In time she opened the door before I’d even had a chance to knock, or simply left the door ajar. I entered and sat on my chair, and got ready. I sat alone for a long time, as if she were waiting until I had made myself at home. Then she came out of one of the rooms, greeted me a
nd sat on the sofa, without a word, always the same. When it happened, when she showed me myself in the guise of the doll as I had been, it was I who was sitting on her lap, and she was the witness of what happened to me. She stroked my hair as I dived into the images, merged with them and disappeared. She never stopped looking at me, and it was into her gaze that I fell and in her eyes that I awoke hours later, hours that I could not account for.
Karl was always there with us, watching me while I remembered particular moments from my past, places and situations into which I was about to plunge, where all traces of my history had been erased. It was there that I encountered myself, as the child I once was, and I would see myself run, or sit, or walk through the trees. The same images, always in the same sequence. This house with its front garden, the room, the wall, always the same, and always someone would be picking me up, lifting me and lowering me again, lifting and lowering me, weightless. There the memory ended each time and I landed back in the present, looking into the eyes of the woman who welcomed me with a smile.
We sat across from each other, looking at each other in silence, and I remembered, though afterwards I could no longer say what it was I had recalled.
I knew very well what kept drawing me back to this woman, for she had something to offer, something I accepted. But what she could possibly gain from these meetings, I had no idea.
I became even more estranged from my wife than before. She suspected I had become involved with another woman, and while she was not wrong, it was, in fact, myself I had become involved with, in a manner I would never have thought possible.
I got increasingly used to the old woman’s idiosyncrasies, but it was a while before I realized how fragile and vulnerable she was and that our time together was running out. There was so much I wanted to know, to experience and to see once again. When I awoke to her gaze she stood up and left. I then had the room to myself for a long time and I looked at the other dolls. I often wondered how many others might have sat here before in my seat. They had come to her over the years, those who had turned away from themselves, for whatever reason, she explained. They are here, she said, and what happened to them is here too. Some of them have visited me every day for years now. Every day, every night, in their dreams, in their sleep, they come to me, she said. They can stay here. Nothing will happen to them here that has not already happened to them elsewhere long ago.
One day I opened a cupboard in which she often rummaged in search of something. I opened it and found Karl looking at me out of many faces. The dolls that showed me as a child were scuffed and old. Their clothing was tattered and threadbare but meticulously folded or hung up. I even saw my first pair of shoes, which I remembered since I had been photographed in them so often. They were there, underneath the pullovers, shirts, jackets and trousers of long ago.
The woman always referred to her children when speaking about the dolls, but she didn’t react when I asked her about her daughters. She frequently mentioned them during my early visits, and the next time I passed by one of her daughters’ hair salons, I went in. In Salon Annie a woman welcomed me and took my coat. I had to wait so I sat in a corner, picked up a newspaper and observed the place. After a while I recognized the old woman’s daughter because she looked like the doll I had seen just the day before. They were identical down to the last detail. She had the same voice as her mother, and when I stood in front of the doll the following morning, that voice still sounded in my ears.
Whether I liked it or not, I too had become one of the old woman’s dolls, or perhaps I had always been one. She sat me on her lap, and I let it happen, because in exchange she gave me something I wanted and each time craved more deeply – myself. And so I sat across from her and observed how I, as her doll, sat on her lap and had my hair stroked and was petted and cuddled. As long as I was sitting across from her, I was happy, and it did me good. And as soon as I left her house, I was drawn back there. She knew it, or maybe she didn’t. It was different each time. She was close to me but also distant. She gave me the space I needed and didn’t coerce me, but every fibre of my being was drawn to her and to this place where something of me was hidden and could ultimately be found through her. So I tried to live up to any expectations she might have of me, and I enjoyed that. I felt an affinity with her, felt understood by her, and if not understood then at least accepted. I had surrendered myself to her and continued to abandon myself to her and to the images she showed me of myself. And so I returned to her every day, and before long it was as if I lived with her.
One day my wife confronted me, but it seemed to me that she didn’t want to know the real reason why I had changed. I didn’t mention the woman since I didn’t want to destroy anything that wasn’t already over. And when, the following day, I sat across from the woman, it seemed to me that she was smiling more contentedly than usual.
It was impossible to say what bound us together. We depended on each other without knowing why. When I was with her, we didn’t leave the house. On the contrary, it was only deep within her house that we could truly be there for each other and be alone with each other. Alone, that is, apart from the local children who stalked her. They just couldn’t leave her alone. Again and again, one of the boys would sneak into the garden and venture up to the window. Using his hands to shield his eyes, he would press his face to the windowpane to see inside. I see her, he would yell, she’s inside, and he would shout, bang his fist on the glass and disappear, only to throw a handful of gravel at the house from a safe distance. Each time the woman acted as if she hadn’t noticed anything, which was not possible. Once, when the children were behaving worse than usual, I went to the window and jerked it open. Some of the pebbles flew into the room and fell onto the floor and onto a doll I hadn’t noticed before but in which I recognized the face of the boy who had thrown the gravel.
The children were afraid of the woman, and I noticed that with time they also grew afraid of me because they associated me with her. They avoided me when they saw me on the street or made a game of holding my gaze without greeting me. On my rare visits to my old school friend, his two daughters shrank from me like frightened animals. They hid behind chairs or behind their parents, who grew more reserved with each visit. Eventually I no longer dropped in to see them and changed my route when I came to visit my new friend.
Each time I left her house, a part of me remained behind, and I could feel its absence when I was not with her. I didn’t know her at all, in fact. She was a stranger to me in so many ways. Nothing bound me to her other than her knowledge about me and her ability to reveal me to myself to an extent no one else ever could. I felt secure with her, but at the same time was unsettled by the fact that I had no idea what her intentions were or why she should take such an interest in me.
A blank wall. That is what I faced every time, that’s how it begins. My eyes trace the expanse of the wall, from top to bottom, from bottom to top. Someone picks me up, lifts me, lowers me, lifting, lowering, always the same, sometimes near, sometimes from a distance, until this wakes me and I look into the woman’s eyes as she holds Karl, raising and lowering him, pressing him to her, rubbing him against her body. She was doing to him exactly what I myself had just experienced. This irritated me, but, fearing she might no longer show me myself, I pretended not to notice anything.
From then on, the woman changed. More and more frequently, she sat across from me on the sofa, hugging Karl and caressing him. She stuck out her tongue, showed it to me briefly, then ran it over Karl’s face. Then she showed me how she lifted the child and lowered him, raised him and hugged him tightly without once taking her eyes from me.
I stayed away for a while, forcing myself to keep my distance, yet I longed to go there all the more. I gave in, stopped resisting. I pretended nothing had changed, and she pretended nothing had changed, and we sat across from each other, as we had done before. She stroked Karl’s head and looked me in the eye and placed the child’s finger in her mouth, kissing it tenderly for a long t
ime and sucking on it. She slavered over the little hand, and pulled it back out of her mouth where the fingers had begun to dissolve. The more often they disappeared into her mouth the smaller they got. They melted away and became stumps, before they finally vanished. She kept licking and sucking tenderly, and eventually put the entire hand into her mouth, which melted and vanished. She seemed fully aware of herself and of what was happening. She ate with relish as I sat there across from her and I watched as I disappeared into her. At the same time she slowly deteriorated right before my eyes. Soon enough she was sitting there all but motionless, surrounded by countless dolls grabbed at random, smiling to herself and running her fingers over the head and face of each doll before it disappeared inside her. Now when I visited her, she hid behind her smile and her tongue, which flicked out of her mouth towards me again and again, and was not directed at me any more, but at everyone.
Maybe This Time Page 3
