Maybe This Time (2 page)

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 lake 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.

He sat there in my place and I watched him from the house. I didn’t take my eyes off him. I saw how he stared over at them as they stared into the water. Then I, too, looked at them. Every day, every night, always, until now.

She didn’t go the usual way. She walked more calmly and slowly than she normally did on her way home from work. He followed her. She went in and out of shops. She browsed and asked the shop assistants to show her a dress. Or she took one herself from the rail, held it up in front of a mirror, and disappeared into a changing room or behind a curtain.

In a café, she smoked a cigarette, then another, and sat musing for a while, not paying any attention to the other customers. She searched in her handbag and took out a letter that she placed on the table in front of her. She glanced over it, then read it again and again from the beginning. She put it back in her bag, stood up and left the café. She strolled on from one shop window to the next, a jeweller’s, then a bookshop. She entered the bookshop and left it with one more carrier bag. She paused in front of a café, then walked on. In a children’s clothing shop, she fingered the fabric of a little shirt and of a jacket and trousers. She moved on, then came back, only to turn again and continue on her way.

In the market she walked past the stalls and stands, trying the fruit. She greeted others and was greeted in return, picking up one apple after another or an orange, sniffing it, and putting it back. She bought vegetables and flowers and chatted with the stall-holders.

In the neighbouring park, she sat on a bench under one of the trees and watched the chess
players
, the couples lying on the grass, the children feeding the ducks and the elderly people from the home nearby. She held the letter in her lap, wrote something, then crossed it out and ripped the
letter
up with a smile.

Ducks swam towards her, hoping to be fed, but she didn’t notice them. She strolled across a
footbridge
, then past a row of houses on the other side of the stream. She stopped at one house with a
garden
. She put her bags down to catch a better view through the shrubbery.

There were children playing in the garden. She watched them for a while before ringing the bell. Then she looked at her watch and moved on quickly and with determination.

She came to a colourful area, with renovated houses, and trees and fountains surrounded by flowerbeds.

He followed her through the area to a
roundabout.
An enormous willow, its branches reaching down to the ground, towered at its centre.

Passing a café, she said hello to a few of the
customers
on the terrace and crossed the street to a shop. She stopped in front of it.

A man was closing up, pulling down a metal grille over the window. He took a coat down from a hook on the wall with a long rod and carried it into the shop. When he came back out, he spoke to her. As if realizing he had forgotten something, he disappeared into the shop again to return with a package tied with string. She accepted the
package
gratefully. He took it out of her hands and unwrapped it. He stepped back and proudly held a figurine out towards her, turning it this way and that. He showed it to her up close and from a distance, watching her face as he did so. As he rewrapped the figurine, she stroked his cheek, then said goodbye. A moment later she was closing the door to the next house behind her. The man watched her go, checked the grille over his shop window and finally left.

People came out of the café, and others entered or sat on the terrace. In her building, too, there was coming and going, the door opening and shutting with a sound he liked.

Under the cover of the willow he looked up at her flat. It was still too bright to expect a light to go on inside. Nor did she come to the window to look down at the square. But the front door finally opened and she emerged onto the street. She wore the dress she had held up in front of a mirror in one of the boutiques. Under her arm, she carried the figurine. She waved to someone on the terrace. She crossed the street towards him and passed him and the willow and walked down the street in the direction she had just come.

Used Goods
was written on the sign over the shop door,
Gold and Silver, Bought and Sold.

Wine glasses and vases and chandeliers filled the shop window. Tableware and cutlery. Behind them, in the shop itself, were tables and cupboards and display cabinets with glasses, goblets and
mirrors.
Rhinoceroses and elephants. Flower vases and crosses, a Madonna, rosaries and belts.

He scanned the names listed at the entrance to her building and pressed several buttons. The entry buzzer sounded without anyone asking his name. His hand on the railing, he climbed the stairs. On the ground floor, a dog started barking. A door opened and closed again.

The key to her flat lay in a box used for newspapers.

He had smelled fresh paint from the landing. The flat had been repainted. But the pictures on the walls, the dresser, the wardrobe and the mask above it, and the chest of drawers in the hallway with the telephone and the photographs on the wall behind it, and all the drawings, the figurines – they all seemed to be in their places.

The answering machine showed three new
messages
. He briefly ran his finger over the flashing light. The courtyard with its lime tree opened on to a park. The sparrows took dirt baths in the hollows they had formed. The wind swayed the swing that she had often watched from her window.

He opened the window and on the sill saw the blackbirds’ nest he had found one morning under a tree and had placed on the swing for her.

Over the tops of the trees, the view extended all the way to the end of the park, to the pond, which they had often circled on their walks, and to the boat they had frequently passed but never used, saving that particular excursion for another time. Since then he had sat in the boat many times,
looking
over at her flat, making up for the boat trip they had never taken.