I was provided with a small home in the area called the Officials’ District.
The house was equipped with only basic furniture and household goods. A single bed, a round wooden dining table, four chairs, a few built-in shelves, and a small wood-burning stove. That was it. There was also a small closet and bathroom. But no desk to work at, no sofa to relax on. Nothing decorative inside. No vases, no paintings, no ornaments, not a single book, and, of course, no clock.
I could prepare simple meals in the kitchen. I could use the small woodstove if I wanted to cook something, but there was no electricity or gas. The plates and chairs were simple and mismatched, as if they’d been hastily assembled from various places where they’d been used before. There were slatted shutters at the window. I closed them during the day to keep out the sunlight (a necessary accommodation for my weakened eyes). There was no lock on the door. People in this town didn’t lock their doors.
In the past, this area must have been a quite elegant part of town. With little children playing out on the street, a piano ringing out from somewhere, dogs barking, and, in the evening, the inviting smell of a hot dinner wafting from open windows. Gardens in front of the houses must have been filled with lovely seasonal flowers. A sense of that still lingered in the district. And as the name indicated, most of the people must have been government employees in local official offices. Or military officers.
I woke just before noon and made a simple meal with the food provided, the only real meal I had each day. People in the town didn’t seem to have to eat very much. One simple meal a day seemed to suffice. And my body adjusted surprisingly quickly to this lifestyle. After eating, I took care of the plates, closed the shutter, and stayed put in the darkened room, spending the day resting my eyes, which were not yet healed completely. Time gently flowed by.
I sat in the chair and untangled my consciousness from the cage of my physical self, so that I could run freely in a broad meadow of thoughts, like a romping dog off his leash. I lay down on the grassy field, my mind blank, and stared vacantly at the white clouds passing in the sky. (A metaphor, of course. I wasn’t actually looking up at the sky.) Time passed by as I basically did nothing. Only when necessary would I whistle to call it back (this, too, a metaphorical expression. I wasn’t really whistling).
As the sun began to set and it grew darker, around the time when the Gatekeeper prepared to blow his horn, I would “whistle” and call my consciousness back to my body and set out from my house and walk to the library. I’d wind my way down a hill and then upstream along the river. The library was just beyond the plaza. In the plaza, in front of the Old Bridge, loomed the clock tower, with its clock without hands, like some sort of symbol.
No one else ever visited the library other than me. So it was always just you and me.
Yet I didn’t see any improvement in my skill at Dream Reading. My doubts and anxiety only increased. Was it a mistake appointing me Dream Reader? Maybe I didn’t have what it took to do the job? Maybe I was doing the wrong thing, in the wrong place? One time, during a break in work, I told you my doubts.
“Don’t worry,” you said. You were seated across the table from me, gazing into my eyes. “It will take a little time. Just go on working as you are. You’re in the right place, doing the right thing.”
Your voice was gentle and calm, but also full of confidence. Sturdy and unshakable, like the bricks that made up the high wall in the town.
In the intervals between reading dreams, I drank the thick green herbal tea you prepared for me. You took your time, your sober expression like a scientist conducting an experiment as you painstakingly prepared the tea, using a small mortar and pestle, a pot, and a cloth strainer. In the narrow garden behind the library, there was a small vegetable garden with all kinds of herbs, and one of your duties was taking care of these. I asked you the names of the herbs, but you didn’t know either. Like so many other things in this town, these herbs might never have had a name.
After I finished work for the day, and we had closed up the library, I walked with you on the road along the river, going upstream, seeing you back to the communal housing in the Workers’ District. This became a daily routine.
The autumn rain looked like it would never cease, a light drizzle without beginning or end. There was no moon that night, no stars, no wind. And no cries of night birds. The only sound was the drops of water plopping down from the tips of the thin branches of the river willows on the sandbank.
As we walked down this nighttime road, side by side, we mostly stayed silent. But I never found this silence hard to bear. In fact, I might have welcomed it, since silence activated memories. You didn’t mind silence either. Just as most people in the town didn’t need to eat much, likewise they didn’t need to say much.
When it rained you wore a thick, stiff yellow raincoat and a green rain hat. I took an old, heavy umbrella with me, something I found at my house. The raincoat you had on was about two sizes too big for you and rustled like you were balling up wrapping paper in your hands. For some reason it was a sound I had missed. I wanted so much to put an arm around your shoulders (like I did in the past), but here I couldn’t.
You came to a halt in front of the communal housing in the Workers’ District and, in the poor lighting, gazed at me for a time. Small frown lines formed between your brows, as if you were starting to remember something important. But in the end, you couldn’t remember a thing. The possibility never materialized—it was sucked away and vanished.
“See you tomorrow,” I said.
You nodded silently.
Even after you disappeared and all sound had faded, I remained standing there, silently savoring your lingering presence. Then I walked away, in the still-falling drizzle, toward the western hill where I lived.
“There’s nothing to worry about. It just takes time,” you said.
But I wasn’t so sure. Could I really trust time that much—or what we understood as time in that town? After this seemingly endless autumn, what would come next?