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 morning, noon and night.
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 hard to tell. He entered the office, greeted his colleagues and was greeted in return. He sat at a desk he sensed was his desk, but he was far from certain. He asked questions and was asked questions and gave answers. He made some calls, drafted letters and signed documents as if he had never done anything else.
Hours later his neighbour greeted him as if for the first time and said that she and her husband were looking forward to getting to know him and to becoming good neighbours.
The name on his door was not the same one he had signed on letters in the office. He went into the flat. What he discovered was new, different from what he remembered had been there that morning. Once again he looked through the wardrobes and cupboards for documents and compared his face to the picture on the identity card, which looked exactly like him.
The doorbell rang and a woman was standing in the room. She had come to pick him up. She knew that otherwise he would have kept her waiting again or not shown up at all. She had been trying to reach him all day. They needed to talk, now. He didn’t know the woman, but they talked things out. Just when he thought she had calmed down and they were back on track, she announced that it was all over. He agreed and so they split up. He took her home and returned to his flat.
This happened often now. The names on his door kept changing. Each morning he left his flat and was recognized, even if not as the person he thought he was at the time. People knew who he was meant to be, or at least seemed to know. He was whoever they wanted to see in him. Without any effort or subterfuge, and no matter how he behaved, he always seemed to meet their expectations.
For a while he responded to people only hesitantly, since they always had the better of him, but he soon overcame what seemed like memory lapses or absentmindedness. With each encounter he found it easier to adapt to every new situation. People took him to be the one they perceived, and he became the one they expected him to be. Without disguising himself, he went around disguised, if not from others then simply from himself.
Through all the changes, his flat remained the same. At least the address stayed the same. His neighbours stayed the same, all the other people seemed to stay the same. Only his life seemed to redefine itself each day.
More and more often, he enjoyed ringing the doorbell at a strange address to see who he would be at that moment for that particular stranger. It could go well or badly because there was no way of knowing if the door would be opened in a friendly way or slammed shut in his face. He didn’t know if he would be greeted as an acquaintance, as an unwelcome stranger or as an enemy whose presence would be considered rude or even offensive.
When he awoke at night or in the morning and couldn’t tell whether or not the flat had changed yet, he would look in his address book for the name of someone with whom he had made plans the night before, and sometimes that person would have no idea what he was talking about.
Once, in a sort of relapse, he was taken for the person he might have been before this all started. At least that was his impression, and he was surprised by the warmth with which people greeted him. They thought he had returned after a long absence. Still, when he went back to his flat immediately after that experience, hoping to find it restored to the way it had been, he stood there, feeling indifferent. The flat belonged to him, but at the same time it didn’t, and everything continued on its new course.
It usually occurred at night, while he was asleep. At least it did for a long time, but then it began to happen more often during the day. And when he returned to his flat in the evening or even earlier, it was impossible to predict whether he would re-enter the flat as the salesman who had left it that morning or as the estate agent in whose guise he had just sold a piece of property, or even as the GP who had just chatted up a woman.