The Stranger's Woes (80 page)

I’m still not sure what I did while traveling throughout the planet. My memory still can’t cope with the chaos of things that happened to me during my wanderings. It is unable to sequence the episodes and put the elements of the mosaic into a single, coherent picture that it can store away. What is clear is that it is much easier for me to recollect the events that happened after I had the Strammer Max and began to take notes.

That day I built the first flimsy rope bridge that connected me to my past. The mosaic pavements of Echo slowly began to take shape as objective reality, however unreachable. I no longer needed to dash away from a TV screen showing another installment of
Mad Max
. I no longer needed to stare at the neon sign of the Max Men’s Clothes department to remember that it had once been my name. Now I didn’t forget for a second who I had once been. And that was a lot.

More and more often now I paid attention to the obvious fear in the eyes of my random interlocutors. What’s more, I derived less and less pleasure from it. I felt weary of my strange obligations. But for the time being I wasn’t able to retire. Once you take the place of a Tipfinger you’ve set free by mistake, you are obliged to travel the world with a whole pack of intimidating personas. And quit whining—this isn’t the worst thing that can happen. Some only get to wander around the dank basements of some ancient castle as ghosts. Would you rather do that?

I learned a great deal about human fears. The most ridiculous and ludicrous of my discoveries was connected with bicyclists. My own bitter experience proved that most bicyclists are afraid of hitting pedestrians. They rarely realize the true depths of their fear, but feeding fuel to their panic was part of my job. Once I was outside, some bicyclist always hit me. I don’t think that anyone or anything could really hurt me in those days, but the regular collisions with bicyclists were extremely annoying. Thank goodness automobile drivers didn’t have such fears. Well, they did, but far less frequently. I was run over by a car only four or five times, not more.

Sometimes I got into bigger trouble. I will never forget one tall, blond girl from the
Red Elephant
restaurant in the center of Erfurt, Germany. A force, which it was best not to antagonize, enticed me to follow the young woman into a dark alley. The alley was so narrow that two people couldn’t walk through it if they were holding hands. They could only walk single file. I had to kill the blond girl because for the entire evening she had been possessed by the thought that the man she was staring at through the thin walls of her glass would follow her into the alley and kill her there. Blood, she thought, would clash with her light-green jumper.

Sometimes, though, I think that I remained seated on the barstool on the second floor of the
Red Elephant
, and that she just dreamed the assault. I don’t know how I managed to crawl into her nightmare, but it seemed quite plausible. At least I like to think it was.

Nevertheless, that bloody sacrifice—real or imaginary—did me a great deal of good. It was that night, when I was having a dinner on the second floor of the
Red Elephant
, that I first sensed that my incredible but meaningless new life was coming to an end. I had almost finished my notes. I reread them, and recalled Echo and the people who were waiting for me there with piercing clarity. There was no doubt that good old Sir Max had woken up and was now groping around, bewildered, in the farthest reaches of my inner being. He still needed time to shake off the sweet and perilous stupor, and time was something we both had. We could frivolously squander this precious treasure, the way he—no, the way
I
—had squandered the crowns I had earned at the service of His Majesty King Gurig VIII, wandering in and out of the antique shops of the Right Bank. I was even more heedless about time than I was about money, for you always feel it’s easier to spend something that doesn’t belong to you.

One day I was in New York again. I took a short walk around the evening streets of SoHo and stared at the illuminated windows of picture galleries. I felt like having a cappuccino and went to the nearest Italian restaurant. That night everything was a little different. Something had changed in my life, and I liked the change. At least the black-eyed bartender looked at me with an indifferent smile. My face didn’t touch any strings deep in his soul.

What are you doing here? I thought. How much longer do you think you’re going to be here? Until Mommy calls you back home because the dinner’s ready?

I laughed with relief. My internal monologue sounded a lot like Sir Max’s confused thoughts. Were we together again?

Suddenly someone bumped into me, and my barstool started teetering. I couldn’t keep my balance and tumbled off it into the embrace of a nice elderly gentleman. The gentleman wore an elegant gray hat, which was strangely in keeping with his foppish, dark-brown leather jacket.

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I was staring at my reflection in the mirror. I can’t decide whether I look like a World War II pilot or not. More likely I just look like a lunatic.”

I smiled. God only knew what was going on in the head of this eccentric stranger. Nice guy, I thought. I really like him.

“You knocked me down like a true flying ace, that’s for sure. You can paint another cross on your plane. But you should exchange the hat for a headpiece with goggles.”

“You’re absolutely right. We pilots don’t wear hats like this. Here, you take it. It’ll go well with your coat,” he said. He took off his hat and placed it on top of my disheveled head.

I blinked, slightly taken aback. Gosh, I’d forgotten what it was like to be taken aback. It was a strange but, quite frankly, pleasant feeling.

“Gee” was all I could say.

The stranger nodded and took a few steps back to enjoy the view.

“I like it,” he said. “Keep it, young man. This hat suits you. When I left home this morning, my wife told me, ‘Ron, I’m sure you’re going to lose something today, and my premonitions have never failed me. You know that. So go ahead and lose something, but for crying out loud, lose something that’s not worth much.’ Now she’ll be happy because I have fulfilled her wish. Have a nice day, young man. Drink your horrible black drink with cream. I can imagine how much caffeine there is in it.”

I watched him as he was leaving, and then sat back down on the tall barstool to drink my coffee. The young bartender smiled at me.

“Ron is an eccentric, like most artists. But he’s a good man,” said the bartender in a conspiratorial tone. “He’s a regular here.”

“That’s good, because you’ve got great coffee,” I said.

“Oh, no. He never drinks coffee. Only a little bit of a good wine.”

“Well, there’s no caffeine in wine, that’s for sure.”

I paid for my coffee and slid down off the stool. I walked out and found myself in Rome just before dawn. I had come here a few times, to the great joy of the local pigeons, which I fed almost everything that happened to be in my pockets. Did the name of that restaurant have the word
Rome
in it? I thought. And then I thought that it would be great to get some rest. For the first time during my wanderings I felt tired and sleepy. I sat down on a bench by a fountain and lit up a cigarette. Then, it seems, I dozed off.

I woke up because I was cold. I looked around and saw that I wasn’t sitting on the bench but standing on a large stone bridge. The cold wind from the river chilled me to my bones. Drat, just a moment ago I was hot, I thought. My coat was way too heavy for taking walks through Rome. Even in the winter it was too warm for the Eternal City.

Clearly, I wasn’t in Rome. But where was I? The town felt vaguely familiar, especially the cold wind that so resembled the minty wind of Kettari. What if . . . ? I thought.

But of course I wasn’t in Kettari. I was in Nuremberg. I had been there once, right at the start of my crazy odyssey.

“I really have to go home now,” I said to a seagull flying past me.

The bird shouted something back in a harsh, raspy voice. It looked like it was agreeing with me and was saying, “Fine. Scram, then.”

I unstuck myself from the stone railing and walked slowly across the bridge toward the sad-looking figures, green with age, of beasts guarding the plaque with the name of the bridge. I looked at the plaque and laughed. It turned out I had just been standing on the Max Bridge, or the Bridge of Max, translated literally.

“It sure is nice to be so popular,” I said to a solemn-looking bronze Chimera. “What don’t they name after me these days!”

Someone laughed a tinkling laugh behind me. I turned around and froze. There stood Tekki. She looked much older than I remembered her, but I didn’t notice it right away.

A hurricane of thoughts rushed through my head. Of course, Tekki was the daughter of Loiso Pondoxo himself. She could easily pull a trick like this. But why did she look so old? Had I been away from Echo for
that
long? How long? I wondered. Two, three hundred years? A thousand?

I froze in horror. Could it be that the lives of people who at one time couldn’t do without me
did
somehow go on without me? While I was wasting precious time hanging out in stupid cafés and restaurants, drinking gallons of coffee and absorbing other people’s fears, the people who needed me were living, feeling sad and happy, and
dying
, without ever having seen me again. Time had played a dirty trick on me. It had carried off all my colleagues, and now everything was over for me, because . . . Because it was not they who couldn’t live without me, but
I
who couldn’t live without them!