Maybe This Time Read Online Free PDF Page A

friend’s wife promised to speak to the woman in the next day or two.
    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