By Wolfgang Hermann
After weeks in the hospital, nothing is as it was. He takes pleasure in everything he sees. He can’t get enough of watching people, of the smells around him. Only now does he realize that every woman has her own walk and that her way of walking speaks. It doesn’t just say: I’m walking. Usually, she doesn’t even notice she is walking. Some seem so caught up in their day they are absentminded— their body is on the sidewalk, but they are somewhere else. Hurrying people with their cell phones glued to their ear are nothing but arrows. They take no notice of their surroundings and automatically cross the street when the light turns green. He notices that many, many people are somewhere else. Was it really so many before he went to the hospital? He never noticed it back then. Often, he’d been one of them. People who signal to others they aren’t there. Those who wave away the newspaper offered by the vendor without leaving the other place they are at. Where is this place, he wonders. This place is everyone here in the crowd, every person with a phone glued to their ear. They’re all someplace else for someone who is also someplace else. But then who is here? Human shells on their way somewhere.
But there are still a few of the slower ones, here and there. A time-thief, a time-haver, whose relaxed movements testify to their pride of possession. The possessor of an invisible wealth known only to few. Those who know how to look can see their ease of mind and manner.
In the city in which his apartment with the stairs is located, there is little time for the few who know how to appreciate it. They’re the ones nobody speaks to; they blend in with the background. They are—which is hardly ever the case these days—idle. They don’t try to hide the fact that they have nothing to do. They display it for everyone to see, yet hardly anyone notices, for it’s not very interesting to those who live in the absence of their cell phone. The time-thieves are beautiful, each in their own way. The one has eyes that detect every movement in the street, eyes that capture everything. Another stands on the corner with an ease no one here can imitate. It’s an ease that comes from far away. He has brought it with him overseas from his country. The time-havers are not hunters. They don’t stand around ogling young women or accost them as they hurry past with their phones pressed tightly to their ear. Although it does happen that the silhouette of a sidewalk-beauty turns the head of one or the other of them. And when, then for real. No sneaky glances, none of that lusting and leering. As a time-haver, they have a right to the view. There are women in this city, as there are all over the world, for whom it would not only be stupid but a crime not to watch as they walked past. For what is the work of a time-thief if not to rejoice in the beauty of a woman walking by. She thanks him with a tiny bat of her eye as she whispers meaningfully into her phone. She knows about his work. She knows she is a treat for his eyes. She gladly bestows on him the sight of her flawless hips in her low-cut jeans. The gropers and the gapers, the pocket-poolers and the perverts she recognizes without looking their way. She makes herself small, revealing only the tiniest fraction of her appearance, and then she is gone.
He has his secret life, which belongs to him alone. With his wife, he has a different life. His life on the street, as a time-thief among time-thieves, she wouldn’t want. Her first word would be “why,” quickly followed by the words “waste of time.” Only the unemployed have time for such things. And other losers. They should try working a day like hers. That would put an end to all their loitering.
And their beauty would vanish with them. They would start to walk faster from day to day until they were no longer distinguishable in the river of telephoning pedestrians and subway sprinters.
He hasn’t had eyes very long—he’s still just learning to see. He has only been on the streets a couple of weeks now. In the weeks prior, in the darkness of his room, chained first to his bed, and then his chair, he forgot the world outside existed. He forgot it because it made sense to forget it. The street no longer existed even if he sensed that everything except him went along as usual. That outside the guerilla warfare of everyday life waged on. But the mere thought of the bustling of the street exhausted him. His daily routine consisted of taking his meds and eating his meals. In the rising and the setting of the sun. He was cut off from the light of the street, only a dim glow penetrating to his chair. It was half-light when his wife left the apartment and half-light once again when she returned from work. She set her bag down, poked her head in, and greeted him with the same reserve she had maintained toward him since she had started nursing him a couple of months ago. His accident was an additional burden because she had increasingly distanced herself from him, and he sensed that she wanted to leave him. But she couldn’t abandon him now in his hour of need. So she went into autopilot. She did the grocery shopping and cooked dinner for him, something she hadn’t done in a very long time. She looked at him as if she saw through him, as if he’d staged the accident to keep her from leaving him. He was reduced to being a burden. He was angry at himself for being so weak. Was it possible to be so weak? He would’ve never guessed it.
He did the exercises his physiotherapist had shown him and increased the number of sets a little each day. He had to get out of his chair, get out of the apartment. He mustn’t be dependent on her anymore. Her face showed him it was time to get back on his own two feet. He didn’t tell her about the progress he’d made. He didn’t tell her he was now ready to try the stairs.
He waited until she’d left the building. He waited another five minutes just in case she’d forgotten something and came back. Although she never forgot anything. She wasn’t the kind of person to forget things.
Quietly, he shut the front door, walked to the stairs, held on tight to the handrail, and walked backward down one step, and then another, and then another. He then turned around and walked backward up the stairs. He placed one foot on the next step higher and pulled the other one even. Then the next step. When he reached the top, he felt woozy. His legs were weak, the muscles having atrophied completely. His heart seemed to hang crooked on a hook. It would be a while before he could manage the steps.
He tried it several times a day. Every time, a few steps more. After a week, he managed to make it down to the next floor and back up again. Four days later, he made it down to the floor below that one. He stood on the landing and held on tight to the handrail. It was fear that made his legs shake. He was alone on the stairs. What if he couldn’t make it back to his apartment? Eventually, someone would come and help him. He was going to make it; he had to make it. He had to overcome his fear. He had to lock it away in a tiny box and bury the box in his closet. He had the choice: fear and dependency, or courage and freedom.
He didn’t say a word to his wife about his training. He would be sitting in his chair in the half-light as usual when she came home. She always made the same face when she saw him, the expression she put on specifically for her return home. He would have liked to have seen her office face. It must have looked a lot different than the one she showed him. Otherwise, she would have been fired long ago.
While she was busy in the kitchen, he turned on the television, which absorbed the wordlessness between them.
For a few days, he’s been able to go outside. He hadn’t known how beautiful the city is. The city is a stage for the theater of the everyday. Every person who walked past was reflected inside him, for a moment, as he was in each of them. Most of them weren’t aware of his presence. Thus, his training over the last few weeks, to remain invisible to his wife, was not for nothing.
The city beats to the rhythm of work. In the morning, the white-collar traffic. Agitated faces, phone calls with a paper cup of cold coffee in hand, briefcase clutched under the arm. Around nine o’clock, when they’re all sitting in their offices, there is the first moment of silence. Amidst the noise of the cars, the city holds its breath. The city, this metallic animal, breathes. If you look long enough, you can see gaps on the sidewalk filled by the outlines of the absent people. In the park, retirees take their dogs for a walk. Two dog walkers greet each other and point at the other’s dog—it’s easy to talk about their dogs. You can see they’re relieved to have established ties without having had to reveal anything about themselves.
The park is there for those who are tired of the street, who have seen enough of it and expect nothing more of it. The park is a place of retreat, an admission of weakness.
Before noon, the street gains speed, the sidewalks fill up, and the hunt for a lunch table begins. The horde of white-collar workers pours out of the offices in groups. Here and there, a loner, a phone pressed to their ear. Last-minute plans before they go to the restaurants and cafeterias.
This is a real test for the time-thief. What should he do when everyone is eating and talking about their problems? The office workers are too nervous for him—he avoids their restaurants. The time-thief is out of place next to a group of business people at a working lunch.
The time-thief sits with a sandwich on the bench next to the empty playground. The last mother pulls her child out of the sandbox, who is trying to hang on. The child screams until he realizes that his efforts are futile. The mother ignores her child as she packs him in the car. She drives away—on the back seat, the child’s head is bright red, and his face is contorted.
He eats his sandwich and realizes he’s free. He chews more slowly because nobody is rushing him; he has no meetings, no briefings, no pitches. The sandwich wanders around his mouth—each ingredient stands out clearly and melts on his tongue. It’s the best sandwich he’s ever eaten.
When the white-collar workers stream back to work from their lunch tables, the city gathers speed. But this increasing acceleration is nothing in comparison with the morning traffic rush. It’s as if the sluggishness of satiation permeated every movement. The afternoon offers an unclear picture. It’s hard to say which of the passers-by has taken time off for a visit to the doctor, an excursion to the municipal woods, or a child’s birthday. Of course, there is a direction to their step and, in contrast to that of the time-savorer, a focus on an invisible goal. But even time-savorers sometimes appear to be so absorbed in their work of killing time that they’re barely distinguishable from those being released early from their offices. In the afternoon, spaces open up here and there, islands of condensed time, invisible up until then. The cobbler’s cave with shelves full of handmade leather shoes waiting on their owners. An old clothes shop in a side street with a yellowed frill dress in the window whose potential customers probably live secluded somewhere in a sheltered area of the city, making it highly unlikely that the old dress will find its way to them. On the docks along the river, there sit and recline young couples, students with their lecture notes to camouflage their idleness, and a man with dark skin and the fire of a southern land in his eyes. He recognizes this man, but from where? Was it a soiree? Is it a face, as one says, of public interest? Or is it possible that he only associated with him during the twilight of his weeks-long house arrest? But hasn’t this been happening to him repeatedly since his new freedom? Fragments of faces flash up here and there, in the turn of a head after a passer-by blocking his view steps aside, revealing the pedestrian waiting at the light. What memory does this face belong to? What words left this mouth? This keeps happening, often enough that it makes him suspicious. Don’t they say that when you suddenly see nothing but familiar faces in the crowd, it’s probably a sign of psychosis? An old friend or famous stranger walks past him, they exchange glances, but they don’t recognize each other. Not every face in the crowd is familiar to him, but several are on his long walk through the city. The closer he comes to the big boulevards, the more traffic there is. In front of the impressive-sounding boutiques, his head turns as if on its own from time to time to watch a woman strolling down the street with an incomparable walk. He avoids the vicinity of his wife’s workplace. What if he meets her unexpectedly on the street? His secret life would come to an abrupt end. He doesn’t want to think about it further. His forays are borrowed time; one day he’ll have to resume the daily grind of the white-collar workers who pour out of the subway exits in spurts and blindly disappear into the crowd.
It’s not the store windows in the shopping malls, nor the large display windows of the luxury goods shops that captivate his eyes, it’s the unending stream of people on the sidewalks. He reads their faces without staring at them. A batting of an eye, a glimpse out of the corner of an eye. And yet his glances do not go unnoticed. The men raise their eyes with a confused look on their face, whereas the women seem to come alive when his eyes brush them. They are noticed, without being stared at, without being harassed by this somehow absent, daydreaming eye-man who doesn’t seem to be made for the harshness of the city. They do not return his look directly, but stand up a little straighter and put a sway in their hips. He lets them walk past, each one with her own story written on her face, each one with her own walk.
It’s late; he has exceeded his time. There is a growing trembling in the air from the after-work traffic on the quays. The patios of the cafes and restaurants fill up; someone waves from over there and, with a few acrobatics, crosses the street between the cars stuck in traffic.
It would take too long to walk back. He goes down to the subway, descending into the long-not-seen bowels of the city. He gets off the subway near his building. He doesn’t have time anymore to look at the faces around him, catching merely a glimpse from the corner of his eye of the two men in the bar on the corner, the one gesticulating with a beer in his hand. The walls of the building are already bathed in half-light, which will continue to resonate for a while in the falling darkness. Perhaps his wife is running late, has lost track of time like he has, like he is allowed to do? He climbs the stairs, not too fast, step by step, for the stairs show him the weakness still sitting in his limbs. He puts the key in the lock and turns it without making a sound. Not a peep in the hall. He closes the door quietly. He is lucky; she isn’t home yet. His glance falls on his suitcase which, strangely, is standing next to the wardrobe. His wife stands in the door with her arms folded across her chest. Her eyes flash with a metallic gleam.
Translated by Mark Miscovich
The Importance of Arts, Culture & The Creative Process
Reading books means entering new worlds. There have been times in my life that I have only survived through literature.
What was the inspiration for your creative work?
I wrote this story during a serious health crisis.
Tell us something about the natural world that you love and don’t wish to lose. What are your thoughts on the kind of world we are leaving for the next generation?
When I lose the ground under my feet, I walk barefoot through the grass. Then I feel life again.
