Maybe This Time by Alois Hotschnig Page B

one of my friends asked about them, I found it hard to remain calm and respond appropriately. I was too preoccupied with them and afraid to expose them to the curiosity of others.
    I distanced myself from the few friends who hadn’t already given up on me. I never went out any more. If a friend’s visit couldn’t be avoided, it was agony for me not to talk about my neighbours and follow a different conversation.
    I began inventing stories about them to make their idleness more bearable, personal histories that might explain what had brought them to their current state, lying there before me on that jetty. The stories became more inventive as my own life grew increasingly monotonous. Eventually I had to admit that for a long time I had been lying there with them on the jetty, and that my pretended busyness and feigned familiarity with these people was simply an attempt to escape my own life.
    My attitude clearly had to change. But I didn’t know how to get away from these two. I simply didn’t exist for them, and that is how they hooked me. They refused contact, yet they willingly exposed themselves to me. I had caught the scent of their lives, which obviously had reached some sort of premature end. I had fed on them, devoured them, and now I wanted more. I couldn’t resist absorbing their most fleeting emotions as my own, and so I carried them inside me and I lived out their disquiet, which was also my disquiet.
    I protected myself by writing everything down, by recording whatever I observed, when they went into the water and when they left the jetty. I noted it all down. Finally I began taking pictures of them. Now I could look at them at night too. This way they were always available to me.
    I spent most of the time on my jetty and in my boat and in the rooms inside my house which gave a clear view of them. The reports on their daily routine complemented my own. They lay on their deckchairs, I paced back and forth at home watching them. The more I learned about them, the less I was able to tear myself away.
    Ashamed at first, I only photographed them furtively from inside my house. I didn’t want them to see what I was doing. Then I swam along the shore, each time venturing a little closer. They didn’t seem to mind, although it was impossible that they didn’t notice me. But they let it happen. They pretended they simply didn’t see me, even when I rowed past and took pictures of them from my boat.
    Before dawn, the man brought out the pot of lobelias and set it on the shelf. He plucked the wilted leaves and flowers and scattered them expansively over the lake. Then he brought out the deckchairs and placed them in their proper positions, and the woman covered them with blankets so that the jetty became an altar. The sun rose and the woman lay down on her chair, where she would spend this day too, and the man went down the steps into the water and waded through the reeds. After a while, he took a rake into the water and moved it back and forth over the bed of the lake as if he were ploughing a field. He raked the ground with devotion and straightened the reeds, though a single gust of wind would undo his work. When he had finished, he disappeared and returned with a child’s watering can. He filled it with lake water which he sprinkled on the pot of lobelias.
    Exactly what kind of ritual I was witnessing I could not tell. Yet I was there every day, despite myself, craving the sight of it.
    I constantly took pictures of them. I now wanted them to acknowledge my interest. I was determined that they should see me. This, too, they tolerated, and so I couldn’t escape them. My only option was to imitate them, to let them see me copying everything they did. I cleaned and scrubbed my jetty and raked the reeds and swept the mud under the water. I pulled spiders’ webs off the branches of my shrubs and pruned their withered leaves. Before, I had been a night owl, but now when they appeared at the crack of dawn, I was