The Man Who Walked Away

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It was as though he had always been there, haunting the landscape, if only you were paying attention.

“If it were possible to see the final movement of Beethoven’s string quartet Number 16 in F major. That’s what he was like,” said the violinist from the Leipzig Orchestra. The man he saw walking along the Weisse Elster River reminded him of the note Beethoven wrote on the score underneath those eerie opening chords: Muss es sein? Muss es sein? And the note he wrote under the joyous faster chords swelling in response: Es muss sein! The walking man was the question and the answer. Must it be? Must it be? It must be!

It wasn’t unusual to see a man out walking; even as the railways spiderwebbed their way across Europe, people still walked to get somewhere and to get nowhere. But the people who claimed to have seen him — this was later, after he became known as le voyageur de Docteur, after he disappeared altogether — agreed there was something different about this man. Everyone who saw him said so. “Oh, yes, I’ve seen him,” said the woman in the lowlands who spotted him making his way along a ridge as she hung wash out to dry for her brothers away carving Tournai stone into baptismal fonts. The coal miner in Liège, blinking into daylight, saw him walking in the valley; the baker in Coblenz saw him cross two of that village’s four bridges; the hotel maid in Mulhouse, that Alsatian city of a thousand chimneys, glimpsed him from the window walking through the public square as she snapped a clean sheet across a bed. “Even when he was right there,” she said, “he was somewhere else.” He shimmered, on the cusp of appearing. Or was he disappearing?

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