of her own, with her arms crossed. She kept turning the corner and heading a few steps down the street. Then she stopped and stood still and turned and retraced her steps, only to return once again to the spot where she had doubled back. She straightened twigs here and there in the hedge and strayed into the garden. She was lost in thought, distracted, and whenever anyone approached her she recoiled and abruptly changed direction. Then she backed several steps away from the wall and, after a moment, stroked it with a finger.
As she did so, she began looking across the street at me. I had been watching that spot and the woman from my vantage point for a long time, and I could sense how much my presence irritated her. I didn’t want to annoy her further. I crossed the street towards her, went right past her and strolled down the road.
The moss on the garden wall was dried out and yellowed and the paint was flaking off the railings. Behind it, the hedge stopped people peering into the partially overgrown garden. There were old villas, chestnut trees, beeches and willows, and sunbathing bodies on folding and reclining chairs under the trees. There were birds chirping and a smell of barbecue. Everything needs water, said a woman behind the hedge. From a verandah came the sound of a flute. One song, played over and over again, always breaking off at the same point with the same mistake repeated each time. A man’s voice took up the melody and hummed and sang from that point on, correcting the mistake and falling silent. Then it all started again from the beginning.
A tram turned into the street, and a dog that had been lying before an open garden gate and barking at the passers-by sprang up and ran towards it, whimpering. There were children on the tram and a girl, who had evidently been waiting for the dog, called out a name. She beckoned him over and threw something out of the window, a soft toy. The dog raced after it and sniffed and gnawed at it. Then he took off with his trophy.
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 facades, 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
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
