Days in the History of Silence

Начало книги

I was the one who let him in.

Later I called him the intruder, but he did not break in. He rang the doorbell as anyone at all might have done, and I opened the door. It unsettles me still when I think about it. Really that could be what bothers me most. He rang the doorbell, and I opened the door.

So mundane.

Perhaps I had caught a glimpse of him that very morning at the bottom of the garden when Simon went to work. Standing down there between the trees. A young man, nineteen or twenty years old.

When I opened the door, he stood on the stairs just waiting to be let in. Anyone at all, he could have been anyone at all.

Good day, he said. I’d like to use the telephone.

There was something about good day. Nowadays there are not so many people who say that, it was more common at that time, in the middle of the nineteen sixties. But all the same he did not say it as if he meant it, as if there were something good about the day, or he wished me that. I felt it seemed like something he simply said, meant for everyone and no one.

Читать дальше →