The stamps on the envelope were still moist. I noticed they were foreign. As I got to the window I realized that I was, in fact, in another country, somewhere unfamiliar. I didn’t know where. To confirm or dispel my sense of foreboding, I went into the bathroom. A stranger’s face looked at me from the mirror.
Finally awake, sweaty, but relieved to have remembered a dream after so long, I got up and found everything in order. I was drawn to the table where I had worked through the night. I looked out of the window and saw it was all as I remembered in the dream. A late afternoon in early autumn. Even the woman behind the half-open shutters in the bay window opposite, the woman who had watched me in my dream, she was still there and hadn’t lost interest in me.
A dream, I thought, and sat on the bed to finish the dream, but everything stayed the same.
Sheets had been draped over everything in the room, I now noticed. The walls were bare. The room seemed to have been abandoned long before. I closed the curtains. Darkness fell.
Several doors led out of the room. Lock them, I thought.
They were locked. The keys were on the inside. I knew I had to get to the mirror. Only then would the dream stop. I felt my way to the bathroom. The mirror was still there.
I started to wash myself. My hands mechanically scrubbed my body and didn’t stop. I wanted to escape from the dream. But I couldn’t wash what had happened from my skin, and my hands rubbed myself raw with the scalding water. Finally, they pushed my head under water and only relented when I realized that I could not resist them. The hands reached for a towel and used it to cool the red face that looked out at me from the mirror, as if already used to the fact that I was another.
I pulled myself together, convinced the darkness was deceiving me. But my hands throbbed with pain, and with the pain they became mine once more. I tore open the curtains and examined my hands in the daylight. They were covered with blisters. I wrapped them in the towel, which was now no longer cool enough to soothe the burning. Before long I brought the towel to my face and held it against my forehead.
The arms weren’t my arms. I looked down at myself and knew the mirror was after me again. It all happened more quickly this time, since I went along with it. The washing, the hands, just like before, my head held under water. But I let it happen, and, as if to reward me, the water was now cold.
The bay window opposite was wide open and the woman had gone, but I was still not alone.
I covered the mirror and burrowed into bed under the towels I had dampened to cool my skin. Like everything else in the room, I too was draped in sheets, and I tried to remember how things could have come to this.
It worked, or at least I thought it did. I remembered a story, my story, at least I thought it was. And the calmer I became by thinking about this story, the more sharply the pain returned, and I was pleased to be forced into alertness. The pain would pass, and I tried to distract myself by concentrating on this thought, which worked for a while, until I noticed that everything I remembered vanished the moment I thought of it, vanished permanently, as if it had never happened, as if I had never experienced it. As soon as I remembered something, I seemed to forget it. No matter what I thought. The last few hours. How I came here. There was an answer, which appeared like a familiar face in a crowd, but it immediately disappeared and was as strange as all the others.
The letter, I thought. What has been written can’t disappear. The sealed envelope was on the table next to yesterday’s notes.
I didn’t recognize a thing. Among the sentence fragments that had been cut and reassembled without apparent rhyme or reason, the words origin and downfall appeared again and again. Origin and downfall, sometimes crossed out and rewritten, or one replacing the other.
There was no address on the envelope. I held it up to the light and could just make out some writing on the paper inside.
They can come, it said. They can come and get me.
The courtyard in front of the house was, in fact, a public square, I now realized, surrounded by iron railings, the paving stones bright and baking in the sun. Mothers sat on the benches. Their children ran from the shade under the trees out into the warm sunshine and back again. The window opened at the first touch and the cool breeze soothed my skin.
On one of the benches I noticed a girl who looked familiar. So did the dog licking her hand. I had already met them.
Who was to come and get me? To go where?
I didn’t dare open the letter and decided to look only at the notes on the table, but first I made sure that the door was still locked.
They can come. They won’t find me.
I picked random notes from the piles of paper, and the sentences on them seemed to be written just as randomly. They were unintelligible paragraphs in which I tried to defend or justify myself, though why it was impossible to tell, at least for the moment.
No one can escape themselves, I read, there is no escape from one’s self, and I heard myself laugh in a voice that was not mine. I had escaped from myself long before.
These sentences were no help, yet some stuck with me. I couldn’t get them out of my head. It was as if they might explain what had happened. But they didn’t. I am preparing my departure. I am leaving my name to the lies.
Next to the bed was a sheet and I pulled it over the sentences with a movement that was not mine. I hadn’t left, and the sentences couldn’t be trusted. Nor could the noise that had been coming from the next room for some time now.
The door to that room was not completely shut, I now noticed, and a draught moved the door, opening and closing a gap. In that room, too, everything was draped in white.
No one knew I was there and I wanted it to stay that way, so I shut the door. The knob was pleasantly cool in my hand.
At this point I also became aware of a smell that had not caught my attention before, even though it was a strong one and permeated everything. It was the smell of the elderly, of medicine.
Into whose story had I fallen, I wondered. The story had as little to do with me as the smell. Just as I didn’t fit here, so nothing here fit me, except for the notes, and I had no idea what I should do with them. I had covered them like everything else. The sentences were not to be trusted. These are the facts, they said, there is evidence against me and who will believe me, no one. Protestations followed reproaches, all sorts of claims that meant nothing to me, suppositions and self-incrimination, paragraphs rendered unintelligible.
Next door, the floor creaked.