Maybe This Time

This memory recurred as vividly as if I were experiencing it for the first time. A noise in the next room startled me, and I suddenly realized how late it was. I had completely lost track of time. I called out and knocked on the door but there was no sound of movement behind it, so I wrote a quick note promising to return, placed it on my double’s lap and finally left the house.

It was too late to visit my old school friend, and in any case I no longer felt in the mood. Not after this. The woman obviously had no family and was lonely and forsaken. No matter how much she told me about her children, I didn’t believe a word. That is until I crossed a few streets and passed a Salon Annie that I had never noticed before, and then, a few streets further on, read the name Salon Elly on a hairdresser’s window. I was no longer so sure. In the following days and weeks I couldn’t forget the old woman. I kept remembering her even in situations that had nothing to do with her. It became harder and harder for me to resist the temptation to go back and see her, as I had promised to do. I felt sorry for her and assumed that was why I couldn’t stop thinking about her. But I soon realized that I also wanted something from her. After all, I had been in her house when I saw myself, through Karl, in a way I had never done before. And it was this encounter that drew me irresistibly to her. I thought of her at every conceivable opportunity. If I saw an old lady being helped down from a bus, I thought of her and how she could probably no longer drive anywhere alone. Or in the cafe, when the woman at the next table smiled at me, no doubt because she had seen me watching her. She had only just managed to catch the ring she had been toying with before it slipped out of her fingers. Embarrassed, she flashed me a smile which I returned, though I was really thinking of the old woman sitting at home surrounded by her dolls and holding Karl on her lap. I couldn’t decide if Karl belonged to her or to me.

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,