The Sweet Indifference of the World by Peter Stamm & Michael Hofmann

Author:Peter Stamm & Michael Hofmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2020-01-20T16:00:00+00:00

NINETEEN

And you had the feeling the whole time there was someone on your tracks? Lena interrupted my thoughts. To begin with, it drove me crazy, I was furious with him, maybe I was jealous. But after a while I began to feel sorry for him. Because he didn’t have any choice, the whole course of his life was set, pre-lived by me. I felt responsible for him. If everything you do happens twice over, and each decision you take affects not only you but someone else as well, who is helpless to do anything about it, then it’s better to think twice before you act.

A strange notion, said Lena, that somewhere there might be another person like me. Not just someone who looks like me and is living the same life, but who thinks and feels like me as well. I think I like the idea. It’s like having a best friend who knows all there is to know about you and who you know all about, without your needing to talk about it at all. No, I said, it’s as though you’re not a whole person anymore, as though you were dissolving. It’s an awful thing. Perhaps everyone has a doppelgänger somewhere, said Lena. You were just unlucky enough to meet yours. I don’t know why, I said, but I sometimes have the feeling he only exists on account of me. If I hadn’t happened to meet him, he wouldn’t exist now. As though he’s a child of my memory, a memory that became reality.

Were you never tempted to take a hand in our life together? asked Lena, to correct mistakes you made, to give our life a different turn? Or simply out of curiosity, to see what happens? I’m scared of doing that, I said. Who knows what would happen?

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