‘Who lives here?’ he asked.
‘Maybe a great Chinese scholar,’ joked his father. ‘You’ll read about him in a book.’
As they set off again, the girl waved goodbye to them.
He put down the model cottage and left the store. The city was living and breathing nothing but the catastrophe, yet as if it were the most important matter in hand, he was trying to remember the name of the Chinese scholar from the book he had found that time beside the sledge beneath the Christmas tree. But in vain. Once he reached home, not without some transport problems, he switched on the television, and as he watched the plane crashing into the second tower, he decided that none of it had any real meaning any more as he couldn’t tell Sophie about it.
By now he had been to a get-together with friends from his class, gone sailing in the bay, made a trip to Kaliningrad by hydrofoil, spent a week by a Kashubian lake, visited his parents several times at the cemetery, given an interview to a local newspaper, had an evening at a business club, and even seen a performance of Hamlet at the town theatre, which he was already trying to forget about before the curtain fell. He had visited his old neighbourhood several times, and the first impressions had subsided under the influence of the ones that followed, which were not as unpleasant. He took a photograph of the Chinese cottage, which had been restored by its new owners, and he took lots of snaps of the tenement house where he used to live with his parents. Just as he had decided at the start, he lived from day to day, without attaching any great significance either to renewed, or entirely new acquaintances. Just occasionally, as he gazed at the sea from his boarding house window, he wondered why he wasn’t leaving.
Towards the end of the summer an important change occurred in his peaceful, maybe by now even boring existence. He bought a flat in a small, new apartment block and had a pleasant time furnishing it. He was rather amused by the fact that he had taken the decision on impulse. The block was situated on the edge of the woods, at the head of a valley, where people used to go mushroom-picking, but now just went for walks. Fifteen minutes by taxi from the boarding house with the same, single suitcase with which he had flown across the Atlantic – that was his entire move. Gradually the rhythm of his day also began to change. He got up early and jogged around the wooded hills for an hour or so. On the way home he bought the newspapers and some bread. After coffee and a read he took a shower and sat down at the computer. He had no need to increase his money, but nevertheless, as in the days when he was earning it, he liked to check the share prices and the fund quotations. Sometimes he sent an e-mail to one of his old partners and brushed off their answers with something like: ‘What the hell are you doing, if you’re not doing anything?’ Then he would walk to the university, where he’d spend a little time in the reading room, or he’d take the tram to the seaside. Equipped with more than a dozen culinary compendia, he cooked his own dinners. If he hadn’t arranged to meet someone at a pub, he would spend all afternoon and evening reading philosophy books, which he bought with the passion of a neophyte. He found Plato, with whom he had come into contact in his student days, just as absorbing as Wittgenstein’s treatise, and he leafed his way through Pascal’s bitter truths with the same attention as the thoughts of Marcus Aurelius. He had no definite aim, and maybe that was why he derived such great pleasure from it.
One night he had a dream about Sophie by the seaside, in which all he did was tell her about what he had been reading. Quite a long time went by before he realised he wasn’t talking to her in English and that she couldn’t understand a thing, but when they shifted into their common language, she disappeared, and at that point he awoke. As he couldn’t get back to sleep, he got up, went into the kitchen, put the kettle on, and with a sweater thrown over his pyjamas, went out onto the balcony. The sun was not yet peeping out above the hill and the crest of the woods, but it was already light. Amid falling trails of mist two roe deer were nibbling the grass in the middle of the valley. He fetched his camera from the living room, adjusted the zoom and released the shutter. The animals raised their snouts and went bounding into the woods. There was a man coming down the path leading from the old oak trees, pulling a two-wheel cart loaded with a hefty package covered in tarpaulin. He could have peeked at him through the zoom lens, but as this man had scared the animals away, he stirred nothing but irritation. Half an hour later, as he was trotting along his usual route, he was sorry he hadn’t done it. The man he had seen from the balcony was now spreading out some large canvas sheets in the middle of the meadow. It looked quite like a hang-glider, or maybe a balloon being unfolded, but it was impossible to check, as he didn’t want to seem like an intruder by stopping and staring in the man’s direction.
After all, there was nothing quite so extraordinary about it.
But that afternoon, when he came back from the seaside, he changed his mind. There at the centre of the meadow stood a capacious oval tent, the kind seen in old-fashioned prints of Turkish military camps. In front of the tent, on a small colourful rug sat a Chinese man. Later, when he discreetly aimed his lens at him from the balcony, the Chinese man distinctly smiled and waved a hand. At that he withdrew inside. Yet he searched the Internet and the newspapers in vain for advertisements or information. Nowhere could he find anything announcing a miracle-worker, a folk performer or an Asian doctor who was going to pitch his tent in a suburban meadow, in a conservation area within a park. That evening, on his way out to the pub, he glanced across at the valley. The tent was standing in its place, but its owner had vanished. There were some children running around, and a dog barking outside the wind-stirred entrance flap. That night, when he came home from the city, the tent stood out like a grey stain against the black backdrop of the woods. But in the morning the meadow was empty again. He made a slight detour from the route of his run to look for traces of it. They were irrefutable: a hole left by the tentpole, an area of grass trampled flat, and some smaller holes made by the tent pegs. ‘But that’s impossible,’ he thought, ‘quite idiotic!’
He thought he ought to leave this place, but at the very thought of a journey he felt utterly despondent. He wrote a diplomatic e-mail to Dr Esterhagen, asking if he would like to take up a conversation on some completely new topics, but the analyst didn’t answer. Luckily, towards the end of November there was heavy snowfall, and a new occupation distracted him. He bought some cross-country skis and, with a map and a thermos of hot tea in his backpack, he set off on long daily outings, identifying the old routes of his suburban hikes among the forest tracks and clearings. He was particularly fond of the places that gave a clear view of the city and the bay. This was just how he wanted to spend the approaching Christmas Eve: a couple of hours on a ski run, come home, have supper, and then head off to Midnight Mass. Besides, it was better than being alone in that apartment, where everything reminded him of Sophie. But then came a sudden thaw, and there was no question of skiing. When he looked out at the meadow that morning, not a single patch of snow was covering the tawny-grey grass. Rain was drizzling out of heavy, low-drifting clouds. But in the very same spot as before, the same tent had been pitched. Calmly, as if he were just off to the corner shop, he put on his hooded jacket and boots and left the house.