It was the same at the lake, no one knew a thing. Some of them hadn’t even noticed that his cabin had been standing empty for a couple of seasons already. They raised their eyebrows as if they were surprised he’d stopped coming. Mr. Robert, you say? Wait, what season was that? What season was it? Oh yes, I remember now, you’re right. And you say he also left the city?
I called him up before he moved to say I wanted to come for a visit. He didn’t seem the least bit pleased.
“Now, in the fall?” His voiced sounded dry, irritated even.
“Is it a bad time for you?”
“No, it’s just I wasn’t expecting it. You should have come in the summer.”
“I couldn’t make it in the summer, Mr. Robert. Also, I wanted to see what it’s like in the fall.”
“Winter’s right around the corner. The leaves are almost all off the trees. It’ll be snowing before you know it. Why are you so drawn to the place, eh? You might end up regretting it.”
I wondered if there was maybe something the matter with him, and I asked:
“How’s your health?”
“What you’d expect for my age,” he answered tersely. “I have an operation coming up.”
“Is it anything serious?”
“That remains to be seen. For the moment I’m waiting for an available bed in the hospital. They’ve promised me there’ll be one. It could even be tomorrow or the next day. They’re going to let me know. I already have a bag packed. I wouldn’t be able to drive down there with you. I haven’t sold the cabin yet. You can stay there.”
He told me where to find the key. Under the deck, on a nail in one of the beams. He said I should just put it back there when I left. He told me where to turn the electricity on so I’d have light and hot water. And heating of course, since it was already cold there. Where the bedding was, towels, this and that.
“When do you reckon you’ll be back from the hospital?” I asked.
“How should I know?” he retorted almost rudely, as if he wanted to bring the conversation to a close.
“Maybe I could come visit you if you’re still …?”
“What for? A hospital’s no place for a visit. Besides, I don’t like that sort of thing.”
“Perhaps I could be of help in some way?”
“You, help me? How do you like that.” His tone was so ironic it left a really unpleasant impression.
“Still, I hope we’ll meet again some time.”
“We already did meet.”
Those were his last words.
3
Haven’t we met before? But where and when? As I look at you, your face seems somehow familiar. Actually, I thought so the moment you walked in. Though maybe you just look like someone I must have met at some time. I don’t know who it could have been. If I could remember who it was I might also remember when and where. I mean, it can happen that people resemble one another, that one person can sometimes be mistaken for someone else. Especially if you were close with someone then you never see them again, you want to meet up with them again even in a stranger. Though when it comes down to it, what difference does it make whether someone looks like somebody else. As the years pass we resemble our own selves less and less. Even our memory isn’t always willing to remember us the way we once were. Let alone when it comes to other people.
I often experience that here as well. I know everyone, I have it all written down, who lives in which cabin, but at the beginning of the season when they start arriving, with some of them I have to remind myself all over again whether or not they’re the same people. I sometimes wonder, can a human face have changed so very much from one season to the next? True, there are faces that seem in general to escape your memory. With a face like that, you can look at it every day, then it’s enough not to see it till the next season and you can’t say anymore whether it’s new or whether you’ve seen it before. But there are also faces that you barely catch a glimpse of, and already they’re fixed forever in your memory.
Oftentimes I’ve been walking down some crowded city street, a throng of people, you’re constantly bumping into someone or other, and I might be seeing nothing at all, none of the buildings, advertisements, shop windows, cars, and people’s faces are just flashing by for a brief second, then suddenly amid all those glimpses there’s one face, why this particular one I couldn’t say, but it bores into my memory and remains there for good. Actually I carry inside me an infinite number of those faces that were conceived in those short flashes, as it were. I don’t know whose they are, I don’t know where or when, I don’t know anything about them. But they live in me. Their thoughts, their expressions, their paleness, their sorrows, grimaces, bitternesses — it all lives in me, fixed as if in a photograph. Except that these aren’t regular photographs where once someone’s captured, they stay that way forever. Then years later they themselves may not even recognize that it’s them. And even if they know it’s them, they’re not able to believe it. No — in the photographs taken by my memory, even from a passing glance, over the years all those faces develop wrinkles and furrows, their eyelids begin to droop. So if someone used to have big wide eyes, for example, now they’re narrowed to slits. Someone else would smile and show a row of even white teeth, now all they have left is their open mouth. Frankly, they ought not to smile any more. Or a beautiful woman, it was her beauty that struck me in the flash of seeing her face, and now you wouldn’t want to meet her. I’ve known a number of beautiful women and let me tell you, whenever my memory brings back their image to me, I wonder whether beautiful women shouldn’t die before their time.
But who on earth am I, what right do I have to them, to these faces that happen to be fixed in my memory and are with me as if my life were their life too? I feel as if those faces have left their stamp on me inside. I try to put them out of my mind, without success. I sometimes even have the impression that they themselves are asking me not to forget them. I tell you, it’s not easy living with so many faces inside yourself, not knowing anything about them.
Though occasionally the opposite also happens. For example, I’ll have been traveling by train, sitting opposite someone, and as often happens on a train, we couldn’t help talking a bit with one another, and I can remember the day and date and the time the train departed, what its arrival time was, he got out and I continued on and I even thought about him later, but I couldn’t recall his face. So you and I may have traveled one time in the same train, in the same compartment, we could have talked, I could have thought about you afterwards, and now for some reason I can’t recall your face aside from the fact that it seems familiar. Maybe we were on a plane together, or a ship. So you don’t remember me either?
No, I don’t mind. You had no reason to pay any attention to me. Why would you? Memory has no obligation of reciprocity, you didn’t have to notice me. Me, I try and remember this and that if only to maintain order, to try and keep everything neat and tidy. Maybe that’ll help me find myself also. Order isn’t only what you suppress, it’s what you allow. No, it isn’t that alone. That may not even be it at all. Sometimes I have the impression that it’s something like the flip side of life, where everything has its place and its time, things proceed not just according to their own wishes, and nothing can go beyond the limits imposed by order. I don’t know if you’ll agree with me on this, but it’s order that turns our life into fate. Not to mention that we’re merely specks in the order of the world. That’s why the world is so incomprehensible to us — because we’re nothing more than specks within it. Without order people wouldn’t be able to put up with themselves. The world wouldn’t be able to put up with itself. Even God, would he be God without order? Though people are the strangest beings in the world, who knows if they aren’t even stranger than God. And they refuse to understand that it’s better for them to know their place, their time, their limits. I mean, the fact that we’re born and we die, that’s already a sort of order imposed on us.