One year I was traveling to the sanatorium, the train pulled up at some small station, and a moment later a woman appeared in the doorway. Normally it made no difference to me who sat in my compartment, but she riveted my attention from the first. I jumped up to help her put her suitcase on the shelf, though at that time, with those hands of mine that had no strength in them, I might not have managed. I myself had to get other people to help me. Luckily someone closer to the door beat me to it. She was more or less middle-aged, though as you know, that age is the hardest to pin down. She was dressed smartly and with good taste. She radiated a mature beauty that was beginning to wane. Or the impression may have come from an intensity of being that suffused her beauty and drew out its depths. Faces, even young ones, that are merely good-looking are only so on the outside as it were, till the intensity of being reveals that extra something in them. But that wasn’t what took possession of me, though it wouldn’t have been surprising if it had been that alone. The thing was, the longer I looked at her, surreptitiously of course, the more certain I was that we’d met once before. But where and when — I racked my brains. It even occurred to me that she might have been the woman in the black veil covered in tiny knots of lace like little flies, as we were standing around the pile of dry potato stalks in the dream. I spent the whole of the rest of the journey trying to remember.
She got off at the same station as me. On the platform I nodded goodbye, investing the gesture with all of my feeling of regret that we’d probably never meet again. I doubt she read it that way. She nodded back without the faintest smile. So I was all the more certain that was the last time I’d see her.
Then one day, would you believe it, I was sitting on a bench in the park smoking a cigarette, I look up and all of a sudden I see her coming towards me. She was dressed differently, more the way you do at a sanatorium, more casually, but with equally good taste. I recognized her from far off. She’d been constantly in my thoughts since the time we’d shared a compartment on the train. Often, in between procedures I found myself wondering where we could have met and when, that I should know her at once like that. She came up to the bench I was sitting on. She didn’t so much as smile to show she remembered me. She simply asked if she could sit down, because she felt like a cigarette, and she saw I was smoking.
“No one else is smoking on any of the other benches,” she said. After she finished her cigarette, as she was about to leave she said: “Thank you.”
That was all. Again I tried to figure out where I knew her from. Because by now I had no doubt it had been a long, long time before the train. In the park, in the sunshine you could see a lot more clearly, you could see as if from the most distant time. But how long ago it could have been, I strained to recall. I smoked one cigarette after another. One by one, as if looking through a photo album I went through all the women I’d ever known, but I didn’t find her. Perhaps she’d been much younger then, perhaps she’d changed a lot. Yet that intensity of being must have marked her beauty even back then, because that must have been how I remembered her.
A few days later, after my walk I stopped by a cafe. I was sitting there drinking my coffee and reading a newspaper when something made me glance up. The cafe was packed, all the tables were taken, and here I see her coming into the place the way she’d come into the compartment in the train. She took a few steps, looking around for a free table. Without thinking I followed her gaze, but it didn’t seem as if any table would be available for a while. It didn’t occur to me to invite her to sit at my table. I was probably afraid she’d say no, since on the bench in the park she hadn’t seen fit to even smile, let alone ask if we hadn’t once shared a train compartment. That’s right, I remember you, she could have said. I buried myself in my newspaper again. All at once I heard her voice right next to me:
“Would you mind if I sat at your table? All the other seats are taken. One might free up soon, so it won’t be for long.”
“You’re welcome to,” I said, perhaps a little too stiffly. It was just that I resented the fact that back then, on the bench, she hadn’t recognized me as the person she’d shared a compartment with. Now it would have been easier to start a conversation. Yet I couldn’t for the life of me think of anything to talk about with her, while it would have been wrong to continue reading my paper. As you know, though, women have a preternatural gift for seeing through things, even when you hide it deep down. Before sitting she hesitated and asked:
“Or perhaps you’re expecting someone? If that’s the case …”
“You’re welcome to sit,” I repeated, much more warmly this time. And in the way of the few words one has to utter at such moments, and which as it happened she’d already put in my mouth, once she took her seat I added half-jokingly: “Though the truth is, we may always be expecting someone, even if we’re not always fully aware of it.”
She was visibly embarrassed.
“Oh, I’m terribly sorry.” She was all set to jump up again.
“Please, sit here,” I said to stop her. “I was just talking in generalities.”
“In that case, I’ll have some cake and be going,” she said. “Sometimes I can’t help myself, though I shouldn’t,” she added apologetically.
In order to set her completely at ease, I said:
“In any case please don’t pay any attention to what I said, because you might not enjoy the cake, and I wouldn’t want that to be my doing. I was just talking.”
“That’s how I took it,” she said.
She still seemed uneasy, though. It showed in the nervous way she looked for the waitress, who a moment ago had disappeared into the back.
“Don’t worry, she’ll be out any minute.”
“I’m not worried,” she replied abruptly. “Why would I be …”
I had the feeling I’d touched a nerve, though I’d only meant to talk about the waitress. It may have been in an effort to make up for my faux pas, or for some other reason, that I said:
“Though we can never be sure in any situation that chance isn’t making use of us.”
“What do you mean, chance?” she asked with a start.
“For example, the fact that when you came into the cafe there weren’t any free places. Thanks to which, we’re sitting together at the same table.”
“Chance?” she repeated, as if pondering.
“Years ago, another man and I nodded to each other on the street by mistake, he took me for someone he knew and I did the same, but it turned out we didn’t know one another. I apologized to him, saying it had just been by chance. But he disagreed, and invited me to have a coffee with him.”
“Can it be that cafes turn chance into destiny? Is that what you mean?” Her tone was bantering.
“It’s possible,” I replied, giving my own voice a hint of irony, though I had no intention of being ironic. “It all depends on what we take things to be. So why should we not take it that you came here because I was expecting you.”
“Really?” She feigned surprise, but a certain wariness had appeared in her eyes.
“Would that be so impossible? So much against common sense? All the more since we actually already know one another.”
“Really?” Her eyes widened. I thought she’d burst out laughing. Yet instead she quieted down a little, as if she were thinking about it. “You must have me confused with someone else,” she said after a moment. “I don’t remember you at all.”