Read Online Maybe This Time by Alois Hotschnig - Free Book Online

be, he never once took his eyes off me. He seemed to be using me as a means of following his boy’s trail, even finding him. I didn’t want this and tried to avoid him, but couldn’t. Next time he had changed and asked me about school, about my classmates and friends, their likes and dislikes. He wanted to know everything. Occasionally, he managed to convince one or the other of my friends to row out to the island with him, and he would stare at them just as intently, searching for something or maybe just remembering his son, thinking of what he might have looked like now. Whatever the reason, it was as if he had identified and understood something in each of us, so we were glad when our parents forbade us to go near him again.
    He almost always had in his boat one of the children who even now and so many years later still made this area feel less safe. He taught them how to fish, something they willingly took up, and in winter he taught them to ice skate. That way he could spend time with them throughout the year. They weren’t shy with him, and they trusted him. At least they appeared to. They sat in his boat with their fishing rods and let him help them up when they slipped on the ice. Yet I got the impression they tolerated rather than liked him, because more than once I saw them duck into the reeds and hide when he rowed past. He was, in any case, the inevitable witness of their secret expeditions to the island, or at the very least an accessory, since it is inconceivable that they could have slipped past him unnoticed. So they obviously agreed to sit with him in his boat every now and then to keep him from telling on them.
    He would never have kept quiet about us, though. On the way out to the island we already had water in the boat, more than usual. The boat didn’t belong to any of us, so no one bothered to take care of it. It had been abandoned years before, tied to a tree trunk that rose from the water. On that day the boat rode lower in the water than usual. We rowed out anyway, probably because we had the new kid with us. He had come to our school a few weeks earlier, and we took him with us to the spot where we always landed, an opening in the reeds, a clearing where we tied up. That is where I always picture him, standing there in the reeds, looking at us, wondering what we had planned for him.
    All summer long they searched for the boy. They found his bicycle not far from where we had set off.
    I have not set foot on the island since then, and since then the boy’s father has not left the lake, and I have watched him all the years since.
    We never said a word about the incident. Life went on and we still met up, but we no longer went out to the island.
    I turned on the light and sat on the bed. The next morning, there were children creeping around the house. The light’s on in his room, I heard one say. A moment later they were standing in the doorway and in my room, looking straight at me, bright-eyed and happy. One of them held out a box with a kitten. It had adopted them, they said. They asked for milk for the cat, and when I came back into the room, they were standing at the window. They were looking across the lake over to the island in the reeds.

Morning,
Noon and Night
     
     

     

 
     
    The wall in front of the house had been replastered and the moss had not yet regrown to cover it like the other walls in the area. The railings were freshly painted and the hedge behind them was sparse. On top of the wall stood some candles. Streams of wax trickled down the new cement and pooled on the pavement in little puddles. Children jumped over the puddles as if they were obstacles.
    Old limes and oaks lined the street. Women and children walked in their shade. Dogs roamed between the trunks followed by their owners, who stopped and waited, examining the trees’ craggy bark. Then they continued on their way. Sometimes a car would brake and stop at the junction before driving on. The sound of its engine