Maybe This Time

by Alois Hotschnig

  On the street, right where the soft toy had landed, skid marks ran across the tarmac. A few metres away, arrows and numbers were drawn on the road and on the pavement.

  I went to him just once, and even then only because my regular GP was not available that day.

  Bells from a nearby church mingled with the sound of the flute. A few gardens further on, both were drowned out by shouts from a school football pitch and the roar of the crowd when a goal was scored or missed. Flags were waved. They could just be seen over the hedge. Every now and then a ball came flying out into the road. It was quickly chased down by a child and taken back or thrown over the hedge from the pavement onto the pitch, where it was greeted with cheers.

  A minor ailment had brought me to him, a scratchy throat that had bothered me for some time, nothing serious, but he took more care to examine me than any other GP I had seen.

  Occasionally a child sneaked out of the playground into the road and climbed the garden wall. He pulled himself up on the railings and then, if he managed to reach the top of the wall, eased himself down the other side. An anxious mother always followed. She scolded the child and took him back to the park.

  I stopped at the roundabout past the school and crossed to the other side to walk back from there. A removals van stood in front of a house where people were moving in and out at the same time. The van was emptied and then immediately filled again. Furniture and objects were carried out of the house and back in. A window on the top floor stood wide open. In a mirror leaning against the window, I could see the tops of the trees and the junction to which I now returned. Below the window a crow was busy picking twigs out of the gutter. Now and then it pecked at its reflection in the mirror as if trying to feed on its image, only to eventually drop every twig into the garden with a caw each time.

  It’s not angina, he said after probing my throat with his hands and his stethoscope. He stood up and went to a glass cabinet, unlocked it and took out a packet of pills.

  Behind the fences and shrubbery, the barred ground-floor windows were half opened, their curtains swaying in the breeze. In the rooms were lamps and walls covered with books, mirrors and paintings. On the façades, sunlight and the shadows of trees. Gravel and the sound of footsteps on the gravel path approaching or moving away. There were the ferns, the bushes and the poppies. The smell of herbs and clean laundry wafted over the road on the wind.

  A few streets away a roof was being stripped. A crane hovered over the rooftops, and from that direction came the sound of knocking and hammering and banging, which mingled with the yelling of the children in the park and on the football pitch. There were cars, the flute and the music from other gardens and houses. There was a whistle and a yapping dog, at which the whistle was probably directed. The school bell pealed. Screaming children answered. They poured out into the road. Some of them held hands and wandered off quickly. A girl suddenly ran out from the crowd and across the road towards me. A woman supervising the children hurried after her and grabbed her out of the road. The girl had run in front of a car. The woman now smiled apologetically at the driver who returned the smile before setting off again. The woman held the girl with both hands, shook her, hugged her, ruffled her hair and led her back to the others, who had missed the drama.

  I approached the junction again and noticed that the old woman I had avoided earlier was still walking up and down in front of the house. A nun was watching her from the convent across the road. The nun had also been keeping an eye on me for some time. She now closed the window, and soon after she joined me on the pavement. I was in no mood to talk, and so I turned away. She crossed the road and went over to the woman.

  People have been coming here for weeks, she said, nodding at the recently repaired wall.

  The woman seemed not to want to hear anything. She lowered her head reluctantly, turned and walked away in the opposite direction. Her arms were tightly crossed, and she walked more quickly than before. The nun stared after her and then finally gave up. She returned to the convent, but not without checking once more whether I wanted to talk with her.

  I went over to the junction. I waited there for a while in case the old woman returned, but she didn’t.

  Marks for laying cable glowed on the tarmac and only now did I notice the small tree on the corner. Tied to a stake, it grew crookedly out of a low hedge.

  There were the new wall, the railings, the hedge, and behind them the gravel path leading to the house and to a flight of steps. At the top of the steps a stone lion guarded the front door.

  They say his mother was in the car with him and his wife. I thought of that now, and of the three crosses he had drawn for me on the packet of pills for morning, noon and night.

  You Don’t Know Them, They’re Strangers

  On his front door, he read the name they had called him all evening. He entered the flat and it seemed familiar, but also strange, as if something had changed during the time he had spent with his neighbours. Some things were missing and some things hadn’t been there before. He couldn’t say what belonged to him and what didn’t, nor did he have the slightest idea how he could possibly work that out. The more he looked around the room, the less he could tell.

  He stepped outside the front door again and again, but the name on it remained the same.

  He rang the neighbours’ doorbell and woke them up with the excuse that he had forgotten something. What he had left behind could not be found, but they did find the pictures they had spoken about earlier. The ones they had wanted to show him. He looked through them now. They were old photographs, and the year printed on the back showed they had been taken at a time when he could not have known his two neighbours. And yet, one of the faces in the pictures exactly matched the face staring back at him from the mirror.

  He gave up and lay down on the bed. A phone call interrupted his thoughts. A stranger who claimed to be his friend absolutely had to see him that night. That very moment, in fact.

  When he walked into the bar, he had no idea whom he was supposed to meet. Nor did he know how he was meant to recognize this so-called friend. Yet the friend was there, waiting, and beckoned him over to his table.

  From the first sentence, it was clear that this man also took him for the person his neighbours believed him to be. After a while the stranger was as familiar to him as if they had been childhood friends. This friend even knew his past though they hadn’t spoken about it.

  Back at his flat, the earlier disarray had now become a familiar order. Everything was in its place, at least so it seemed. He got his bearings and closed his eyes, confident that when he reopened them, everything would be as it should.

  The next morning, he set off for the office in an area he had never been in before. Or maybe he had, it was hard to tell. He entered the office, greeted his colleagues and was greeted in return. He sat at a desk he sensed was his desk, but he was far from certain. He asked questions and was asked questions and gave answers. He made some calls, drafted letters and signed documents as if he had never done anything else.

  Hours later his neighbour greeted him as if for the first time and said that she and her husband were looking forward to getting to know him and to becoming good neighbours.

  The name on his door was not the same one he had signed on letters in the office. He went into the flat. What he discovered was new, different from what he remembered had been there that morning. Once again he looked through the wardrobes and cupboards for documents and compared his face to the picture on the identity card, which looked exactly like him.

  The doorbell rang and a woman was standing in the room. She had come to pick him up. She knew that otherwise he would have kept her waiting again or not shown up at all. She had been trying to reach him all day. They needed to talk, now. He didn’t know the woman, but they talked things out. Just when he thought she had calmed down and they were back on track, she announced that it was all over. He agreed and so they split up. He took her home and returned to his flat.

>   This happened often now. The names on his door kept changing. Each morning he left his flat and was recognized, even if not as the person he thought he was at the time. People knew who he was meant to be, or at least seemed to know. He was whoever they wanted to see in him. Without any effort or subterfuge, and no matter how he behaved, he always seemed to meet their expectations.

  For a while he responded to people only hesitantly, since they always had the better of him, but he soon overcame what seemed like memory lapses or absentmindedness. With each encounter he found it easier to adapt to every new situation. People took him to be the one they perceived, and he became the one they expected him to be. Without disguising himself, he went around disguised, if not from others then simply from himself.

  Through all the changes, his flat remained the same. At least the address stayed the same. His neighbours stayed the same, all the other people seemed to stay the same. Only his life seemed to redefine itself each day.

  More and more often, he enjoyed ringing the doorbell at a strange address to see who he would be at that moment for that particular stranger. It could go well or badly because there was no way of knowing if the door would be opened in a friendly way or slammed shut in his face. He didn’t know if he would be greeted as an acquaintance, as an unwelcome stranger or as an enemy whose presence would be considered rude or even offensive.

  When he awoke at night or in the morning and couldn’t tell whether or not the flat had changed yet, he would look in his address book for the name of someone with whom he had made plans the night before, and sometimes that person would have no idea what he was talking about.

  Once, in a sort of relapse, he was taken for the person he might have been before this all started. At least that was his impression, and he was surprised by the warmth with which people greeted him. They thought he had returned after a long absence. Still, when he went back to his flat immediately after that experience, hoping to find it restored to the way it had been, he stood there, feeling indifferent. The flat belonged to him, but at the same time it didn’t, and everything continued on its new course.

  It usually occurred at night, while he was asleep. At least it did for a long time, but then it began to happen more often during the day. And when he returned to his flat in the evening or even earlier, it was impossible to predict whether he would re-enter the flat as the salesman who had left it that morning or as the estate agent in whose guise he had just sold a piece of property, or even as the GP who had just chatted up a woman.

  A shard of memory remained each time, at least for a while, or perhaps just a sense of previous possibilities and limitations. He was at the mercy of his strengths and weaknesses because it always took him a while to recognize them as his own. They became more and more difficult to cope with. He worried that he would lose perspective and no longer be aware of what was happening to him. But he didn’t need to worry, at least not on account of others, because they knew whom they were dealing with. Or maybe they didn’t. In any case, he eventually took things as they came and no longer saw his condition as a disadvantage. He began to enjoy going out and, by meeting others, meeting in himself someone he didn’t know.

  Ever more frequently, from one moment to the next, constantly, continuously, seamlessly, no matter where he was or where he tried to hide, he was discovered, recognized and confronted, and things took their course. On one and the same day he married and stood, an old man, at his wife’s grave, only to find himself the next moment in a divorce court believing he had got off lightly. Hours later he found himself unable to cope with the loss. He became a happy father and could not bear the thought of having children. He was a student attending the school in which he taught. He performed surgery and woke from anaesthesia. He raised bees, fell in love, mourned, was afraid and frightened others, and was happy. He was finally alone and intolerably lonely. He couldn’t decide which car he wanted to buy. Then he pawned his television and wore his last frayed shirt. And so on, constantly, continuously, without interruption. It exhausted him, wore him out. He tried to cope by staying in his flat. But he went out because he had to conform to the needs, desires and aspirations of the person whose life he was living at that moment. He withdrew more frequently now, every day, every night, into his flat, his bed, burrowing himself in there and refusing to get up or to do anything other than sleep, regardless of whose dreams he would have to dream. He did not want to wake up. But he did wake up and get up, which he in fact wanted to do since there were things he had planned, even though they were thwarted by the very first encounter of the day.

  By now, he also felt at home at other addresses, and what at first had seemed to happen by chance was now routine.

  He entered a building to visit someone, but was stopped by a man who took him for a neighbour and held the lift for him. He got out one floor above the man and went to the flat where someone was meant to be waiting for him, but no one was home. He put the key in the lock, the door opened, and he realized that this flat, too, belonged to him.

  After glancing around, he left the building and went along the streets, peering into windows. When he saw windows that were dark, he went into the building and hid in the flat for a while, which then became his flat.

  He didn’t return to his own flat for a long time after that night. He moved to new areas, towns and cities, and his key fitted the lock of any door he wished to open. Yet he wanted to return to the place where it all began, to be closer to his own history. At least that is what he thought, regardless of whose flat it might have been or whose life he had lived at the time, or was living now.

  About the Author

  Alois Hotschnig, born in 1959, is one of Austria’s most critically acclaimed authors, eliciting comparison with Franz Kafka and Thomas Bernhard. He has written novels, short stories and plays. His books have won major Austrian and international honours, such as the Italo-Svevo award and the Erich-Fried prize. Maybe This Time was first published in German in 2006.

  TRANSLATOR

  Tess Lewis has been translating from German and French for two decades. For her translations of Peter Handke, Alois Hotschnig, Pascale Bruckner and Philippe Sollers she has been awarded PEN Translation Fund grants and an NEA Translation Fellowship.

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