Maybe This Time by Alois Hotschnig Page A

area and this house for peace and quiet and solitude. I had found all of this here and it did me good. But it was awful too because I wasn’t used to it. And these people ended up tormenting me, even though they also only wanted to be left alone.
    I drew closer to them because they rejected me. Rejection, after all, is still a kind of contact. To show them that I posed no threat, that I wasn’t interested in meeting them, I drew my curtains whenever the man glanced towards my house. I even closed the shutters if I thought they might be watching me from their jetty. And yet, all the while, I knew that what I took for intrusiveness was really pure indifference.
    This was their way of showing me that for them I didn’t exist and that, in truth, I was the interfering one, if there was, in fact, any interference to speak of. This indifference was fine with me. But then again it wasn’t, because I didn’t understand what I could have done to deserve such a slight. When one day a storm battered our shoreline and the two of them remained motionless in their deckchairs, without even responding to my offer of help, I finally realized that becoming good neighbours was out of the question.
    Not even a downpour could drag these two from their routine, which they pursued with determination as if they were fulfilling a duty.
    Sometimes the man bolted out of his chair, startled, and hurried down the steps that led into the water amongst the reeds. He leant with both arms on the railing, bracing himself against some unknown danger. He stopped dead and stood there for hours on end. Once in a while, something moved in the reeds, circling and creating a whirlpool in the water. Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, he turned and headed back to his chair, where he made himself comfortable and lay still until night fell.
    Behind the couple, the plastic palm swayed in the wind and the girl, laughing and screaming, jumped into the water again and again. I watched her and indulged in a secret protest against my neighbours’ lethargy.
    The sun rose and set. Nothing changed, only my agitation grew. I decided to observe them even more closely to calm my unease, as if I no longer had a life of my own but lived only through them. At night, every now and then, there was a sound of crying, like the whimpering of a child. It was carried by the wind from the direction of their house, then faded away, only to be heard again when I had stopped thinking about it. The sound was soft and unobtrusive, but loud enough to interrupt any conversation I might be having with a guest, who, from that moment, would listen intently for that strange noise.
    I didn’t want to talk about it and I couldn’t explain it, so I would leave the room under some pretext or other every time the sound started. Either that or I would noisily rearrange the glasses to cover this whimpering.
    Every once in a while, my neighbours also had a visitor. A young man lay with them on the jetty. There was a hustle and bustle the night before as they set up a third deckchair. Then the man swept the jetty with a broom while the woman settled herself and lay still just as she always did. The man spent hours scything the reeds that had grown up between the boards. After that, he stepped down into the water and swept the bed below the surface, then climbed back out and disappeared. After a time he returned with a rake and went into the water again and gently raked the reeds, carefully rearranging anything the wind might have tangled.
    Raking the reeds seemed to calm him. When the young man lay with the couple on the jetty the next morning, he was placed between them. The young man lay on his back while they lay facing him, until they turned away. Not a single word more than usual was spoken. There was only the creaking of the chairs, nothing else until evening. Then the young man left.
    The more absorbed I became with my neighbours and the more my life merged into theirs, the fewer visitors I had. If