Maybe This Time (5 page)

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 time 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.

Walter’s not coming. That would be fine with us if only our parents didn’t live in expectation of him. They constantly hope that he might just show up, that when we get together at their place again, the whole family might just be there, all of us, as if we did in fact belong together, as if we were a whole, one more time, or for the first time rather, because it hasn’t happened yet, not once.

When I visit them and suggest, as I did last time, that we all go to my sister’s house to celebrate her birthday, they’re delighted because nothing is more important to them than their children. So we agree to surprise my sister the following day, and then visit my brother, maybe even my other brother, if there’s enough time, since he lives a bit further away.

You know how much I like it when you are all together, Mother says, and tells me everything that has happened while I was gone, and we grow closer, become close even. After a while, however, she stops talking and remains quite still. Father says, Maybe it’s better if you two go and I stay at home. Maybe Walter will stop by tomorrow. And the next day we don’t go to my sister’s, since Mother doesn’t like to leave Father by himself and she doesn’t want to miss Uncle Walter, should he finally come, as she says. So they stay at home, in the house, and I stay with them. My sister comes to visit, to celebrate her birthday here, in our parents’ house, not at hers as she has wanted to do for decades.

One of them always used to stay at home. For as long as I can remember, they’ve never left the house together, and for some time now they haven’t even left separately, fearing that Walter might come and they wouldn’t be there.

If we want to see them, we have to go to their house, and we do. There are plenty of occasions: Father’s birthday, Mother’s, their anniversary, my brother’s birthday, my other brother’s birthday (the one who supposedly looks just like Uncle Walter), saints’ days, weddings and christenings, All Souls’ Day and All Hallows’ Eve, Christmas, Easter and Pentecost. Yes, there are occasions enough and we observe them. From all directions, we make our way to our parents’ house.

Besides Walter, Father has another brother and a sister who come to every occasion, along with their sons and daughters, the cousins with their children, the nephews, my great-uncle, all of them. Well, not all of them, in fact, because Uncle Walter is always missing. The more he stays away, the more my parents long for him and the more stubborn their hope that this time, today, now, he could perhaps still come after all.

But Walter doesn’t come, at least not while we are there. We don’t make up for his absence, those of us who are present, and no matter how hard we try to distract them, to make them forget about Walter, it never works. The rest of us do count for something, but not enough compared with him, since Walter’s absence makes us all invisible in our parents’ eyes and in our own. Those who are missing are noticed, but only until they come through the door, join those who are waiting and disappear into the group. It’s always the same game, who’s there and who isn’t, how many are we now, and who might then still come and who not.

The names of the others are mentioned. Yet it’s only his name everybody thinks about. However, no one asks after him, on that we silently agreed a long time ago. Not a word is said about him. But eventually our parents start talking about him and then we speak of nothing but Walter.

In the house and in the garden, we sit together and wait, pretending that we aren’t waiting. We look at each other and try to talk to each other, pretending that this is enough. But it isn’t. And how could it be, waiting as we are for another, morning, noon, evening and into the night. Whether we don’t
mention
his name once or whether we speak of nothing but him, we wait, at each and every family gathering and also the days and weeks in between, through the years and decades that our family has been around. And should we, just once, manage to be together without a single thought of him, a mere look from one of us is enough to bring us all back to him, and to our parents, for whom, once again, our presence is not enough.

With our constant glances at the door, never
intended
for the one coming through it, but
searching
for the one who is not to be found, we simply tell one another, but no, you’re not Walter. It took me years before I could interpret these looks and understood that they had nothing to do with me, but with the one who was missing, always the one who was missing.

That’s how it was, and it’s no different now, and none of us could say why it was the way it was, the way it had to be, the way it is now. In this sense, we have always lived with Walter. We know him and don’t know him. The youngest of us, in fact, have never laid eyes on him. And when photos from our parents’ or another relative’s childhood are passed around at the gatherings, there is never any trace of Walter.

We know him from hearsay and from our
parents
’ stories and expectations and their invariably disappointed hopes, which have now become ours. Should a stranger come to the door or pass by a window, which happens often enough at our family gatherings, my nieces and nephews are taken aback and look at each other, checking to see if the
stranger
could be Uncle Walter, nodding inquiringly or shaking their heads. No, it’s not Uncle Walter, for whatever reason. Uncle Walter looks different, Uncle Walter is taller or shorter, depending, since each of us has our own image of Walter. But in all the stories he’s good-natured, well-meaning and attentive, and interested in all of us. That’s what they tell us. But we don’t believe it, just as when I was a child, for years I didn’t believe he even existed. But there is a Walter. He has a wife called Ria. And she comes to our parents’ house. And he has a son, too. A
grandson,
even. Why shouldn’t he exist? He does. And he comes to visit. That’s if what our parents tell us is true, as not a soul has ever witnessed these visits. In any case, after each so-called visit, our parents’ lives are, for a time, off kilter.

He sends his best. He has a kind word for each of us. He promises to join us for the next gathering and looks forward to getting to know us, each and every one of us. That is what they say and that is what we hear. There are still a few of us who
believe
it, or pretend to for our parents’ sake, but this is not to say that we all appear to believe it or that it could possibly happen one day, maybe this time, maybe now.

Walter hasn’t come. Nor, on the other hand, have our parents ever gone to his house. He has never invited us children. From the beginning, Walter never encouraged visitors, and our parents always respected his wishes, or at least that’s what they say.

For a long time, I wanted to get away from the family gatherings. Whenever I sat with the others in the kitchen or in the garden and the waves of noise rose around me, I thought of Walter and how calm and peaceful it must be where he is, and of how much I, too, needed to escape. And I was impressed by his rejection of us. When I got into the car, on the way there and on the way home, I thought of nothing but avoiding the next gathering and the one after, of never turning up again, because our parents and all the others needed to understand that I could no longer comply with their wishes. I decided to stay away, but still ended up coming to the next event.

And then I did leave and stayed away. For a while I didn’t show up any more. But I soon realized I didn’t have the strength to stay away for good, because I spent the whole time thinking about them and wondering whether or not Walter had ever come.

While I stayed away from the family gatherings, not one of my relatives mentioned my absence. This bothered me, as I felt that they should notice I wasn’t there. I wanted them to miss me. After all, Father is old, and Mother isn’t getting any younger. How many more times would I see them, I wondered. And so I forced myself to return.

My parents cling to this person, and we in turn all cling to him. Walter haunts them and they let it happen, and so do we, as if we had to pay off a debt or atone for some unspecified offence.

As a child, I often asked my mother what we had done to Uncle Walter to make him stay away, because I assumed we must be at fault. I sensed how easily I could embarrass her with this question and what power I had over her at that moment, and so I asked it when we were not alone,
preferably
in public.

What happened with him? I asked. Why do we do this? Why do we always wait, when he never comes?

Why should anything have happened? She replied. Nothing happened, not a thing. She disappeared for a while, then returned. Walter was always that way, she said, even as a child. Always apart from the others and on his own. Crowds are not for Walter, they make him anxious. There are too many of us for him, too many at once. It frightens him. He’s afraid of us, she said, afraid of how loud we are now. It’s true. She’s right about that, we’ve always been loud. But why we should keep waiting for him when we’ve always been too many for him, to that she gave no answer.

In summer, weather permitting, we wait in the garden because the children’s rowdiness often makes it difficult to stay indoors. So we sit in the sun or under one of the trees. Only Walter’s chair sits off to the side in the shade of one of the other trees.

Walter can’t bear the sun. Too much light isn’t good for him, and draughts make him ill. So the windows and doors are all kept shut, since Walter mustn’t become ill. In summer, we wait in the sun or in the shade, and in cold weather we wait indoors. The house is not heated. The warmth isn’t good for Walter, so in winter we sit chilled in the rooms, looking at each other but with Walter on our minds. We try to get along, which we do and then don’t. We leave only to return, looking at one another again, and we wait for Walter without really expecting him. We sit together and try to forget him, and whenever we succeed or simply believe we’ve succeeded, even for a moment, when things are quiet, peaceful and calm, Mother says into the silence: And when I think that things are so good for us, and Walter is alone somewhere, I don’t think it’s right.

Walter isn’t alone. We know his wife and his son and his grandson, who are both named Walter, after him. He’s not alone, we know, but we don’t
contradict
Mother, since for her that doesn’t count. For Mother, Walter was and is alone. Ria doesn’t change anything, she says dismissively. We have each other, but Walter is always on his own, so we must think of him and take care of him. And that is no doubt precisely what Walter wanted to avoid.

When we exchange presents, there is always one for him, inconspicuous, but plainly visible for those who want to see it. After the Christmas tree is cleared away, one present remains unopened until Easter or Pentecost, or even later, when it disappears into a cupboard, only to reappear under the tree the
following
Christmas.