Alois Hotschnig - Maybe This Time

Now I really wanted to find out what was going on. Over the next few days I went and stood in front of the woman’s house several times, only to turn back each time without even entering the front garden. I always brought flowers. Then one day I was standing outside her house again and was about to give up, but this time she saw me and waved from her window on the second floor. I had trouble opening the heavy gate into the front garden and decided it must be impossible for the woman to leave the property without help.

She was waiting for me at the door. As before, she recognized me and invited me in. She took the flowers. Then, closing the door before I could enter, she was gone. I paced back and forth outside the door for a while, but this time I didn’t need to knock to remind her I was there. The door opened as if by itself and the woman stood in the hallway holding towards me a vase with the flowers. She disappeared into one of the rooms, a different one from the one she had entered when I first met her. I followed her into the house. Again she left me alone with the dolls, but I didn’t mind. Instead, I took the opportunity to look around and confirm that everything was as I remembered. And it was. The countless dolls, the shelves and cupboards, the niches. And the curtains everywhere, behind which other dolls were hidden. Even a few chests and cupboards I hadn’t noticed the first time.

I passed by the shelves and reached into the cupboards. Time and again, on retrieving one of her children , I was relieved not to find any faces I recognized.

Most of the dolls were old and some had been better looked after than others. Some were shabby, others meticulously groomed. Some were dusty, others polished and freshly brushed. Evidently they had received different levels of care over a long period of time, but they all showed signs of frequent handling. I looked at a few of them more closely. Annie and Elly and Gerda I knew from my first visit. I picked them up, one after the other, and each time I was surprised at how attentively they looked back at me. However, a sense of unease grew within me and only subsided once I had found Karl among all the dolls. I realized that all along I had actually been searching only for him. He sat in his place on the sofa, looking as if he hadn’t left it since our previous meeting. He sat there and looked at me pleasantly. I went up closer and leant over him. At the very moment our fingers touched, the woman came back into the room.

I sat down in my place, the place that had probably been kept for me from the very beginning, on my chair. I thought the woman was going to show me Karl again, but she held a different doll in her arms. She sat down and I knew this doll was also Karl, just a few years younger. He also looked like me, exactly like me, only as I had looked a few years earlier, and dressed just as I had dressed at that time.

The two of them sat before me, the three of them, actually, looking at me, looking into my eyes, and I saw myself in a clearing in a forest, standing behind myself and watching myself standing there. I see that I am not alone. Someone is standing opposite me. A woman, immobile. I don’t know her, or rather, perhaps I do. She is standing opposite me and looking at me. She is rigid, transfixed, arms at her sides. Just as I am, I note. She is standing opposite me and sees me or doesn’t see me. We stand like this for a long time without moving. Rigid, eyes fixed on each other. I see it all from behind, from my perspective, and see myself turning away, see my head turning and facing away, away from her. She is still standing and stays standing. I see the blades of grass and the tree trunks around us. I look at the ground and I sense something. I feel myself turning. And then I looked into the eyes of the old woman sitting across from me. She smiled. I felt exhausted and relieved and liberated. The woman looked into my eyes and didn’t move. Eventually she raised her finger to her lips and signalled that I should remain silent. Then she got up and left the room and was gone for the rest of my visit.

I didn’t know what I should do and had no explanation for what had just happened, but that it had something to do with me was clear, and that both repelled and intrigued me. I wanted to know more and so, from that time on, visited the woman frequently. Her house became our place. We sat there across from each other, and it always happened the same way. She sat across from me and I walked behind myself. The sensation was not completely new. Even as a child I had often had the feeling of following myself, of not letting this other self out of my sight. And this is what it was like now. I stood behind or followed myself, distant, impartial, devoid of emotion, and what I saw was both familiar, but then again not. I recognized it and knew that I had experienced it, but when the scene stopped, I couldn’t understand what had occurred.

I saw this woman and the doll on her lap and I looked at the child I once was. I follow him. We’re in a garden with a house and a path leading up to it. It’s always the same. A door opens and swings shut. A hallway, a staircase, a room. Another place, there are many of them, a meadow by a forest, a clearing. A woman is standing in front of me, she takes a step towards me. I want to leave this place, but cannot stay away. As strange as these encounters were, I kept wanting to experience them, to relive them. I could hardly wait for the woman to disappear into one of the rooms and return some time later to show me what had been. Karl sat opposite me, in her lap, sometimes younger, sometimes older. It varied. His age was as unpredictable as the story she revealed to me.

I knew I wouldn’t get any explanations, so I didn’t ask, afraid she might stop the game. I accepted that she would only sit there in silence and show me myself. Everything I witnessed I relived once more, only this time I was safe, but not entirely. And however much I saw, I knew I could not interfere. The road, the house with the garden, the hallway and staircase, the room and the wall I always ended up facing. Repeating what was, to see it once again, again and always anew.

I knocked and she welcomed me. In time she opened the door before I’d even had a chance to knock, or simply left the door ajar. I entered and sat on my chair, and got ready. I sat alone for a long time, as if she were waiting until I had made myself at home. Then she came out of one of the rooms, greeted me and sat on the sofa, without a word, always the same. When it happened, when she showed me myself in the guise of the doll as I had been, it was I who was sitting on her lap, and she was the witness of what happened to me. She stroked my hair as I dived into the images, merged with them and disappeared. She never stopped looking at me, and it was into her gaze that I fell and in her eyes that I awoke hours later, hours that I could not account for.

Karl was always there with us, watching me while I remembered particular moments from my past, places and situations into which I was about to plunge, where all traces of my history had been erased. It was there that I encountered myself, as the child I once was, and I would see myself run, or sit, or walk through the trees. The same images, always in the same sequence. This house with its front garden, the room, the wall, always the same, and always someone would be picking me up, lifting me and lowering me again, lifting and lowering me, weightless. There the memory ended each time and I landed back in the present, looking into the eyes of the woman who welcomed me with a smile.

We sat across from each other, looking at each other in silence, and I remembered, though afterwards I could no longer say what it was I had recalled.

I knew very well what kept drawing me back to this woman, for she had something to offer, something I accepted. But what she could possibly gain from these meetings, I had no idea.