beaufort street
The following are excerpts from a diary I found while walking down near the river embankment.
When I say it was a diary, I mean, it was a sort of journal. It was as if someone had been keeping notes for something, a novel, a paper, something they were planning to write.
It was a Sunday in late January. I had nothing much to do, and thinking I needed some exercise, decided to take a walk. On seeing it lying in the grass I first thought it nothing special. It looked to be nothing other than a bundle of three A4 writing pads held together with some elastic bands and covered in a piece of clear plastic. I was almost about to pass it by when something caught my attention.
Beside it lay one of those photocards. You know the type, rail or public transport, or some other such amenity. It was a picture of a young man, probably in his late twenties or early thirties. He had a somewhat familiar to his face. I immediately felt I had seen those eyes before. I felt, for a moment, that it was someone I knew.
The card was partially damaged, presumably by rain and sun, as it was bleached and faded. I lifted up the bundle of writing pads. They were relatively unscathed. Perhaps the plastic saved them. Apart from some mud and dirt on the cover, a little yellowing along the edges of pages, their contents appeared generally well preserved.
I assumed the card had some relation to the diary. Both were lying on the same patch of ground, one on top of the other. I searched around for any other items I could find. There were none. Only some rubbish. The kind one always finds in these places; papers, cigarette boxes, discarded tickets, plastic wrappings, dented soft-drink cans.
It would be a strange irony if the photocard had in fact nothing to do with the diary; a coincidence that they lay there together. What for instance would I have thought had the face been surly, heavy-set, the rough face of a labourer, or a beer drinking thug? Or what would I have thought had I seen a sallow face, dark hair slicked back with just a little too much oil, smooth skin, a pencil thin moustache, the look of a dubious intellectual?
Would I have been as interested?. Would I then have read the same meaning into the lines I later read so carefully? I cannot be sure.
Enough speculation. I began to leaf curiously through the pages. I glanced quickly over their contents. I was about to throw them back on the ground when something grasped my attention.
It was a description of an event, a happening, something that seemed to carry with it an uncanny resonance, an uneasy sense of knowing. I read it there and then, somewhat shaken, going back again and again over the words.
I confess then to taking everything, card and writing pads, home, and guiltily, compulsively, reading into the small hours of the morning. Yet who wrote them and where the author came from was never made clear. It is still not clear.
When I reluctantly reported my find to the local police, they had no record of such a missing object. Indeed they seemed rather annoyed I would attempt to take up their time with what they evidently considered a question of little importance. I did manage to convince them to try and trace back the numbers on the card, still just about readable, but they too turned up a blank file.
The effort of trying to make sense of the text, of trying to impose some sort of coherency on it, has not been too difficult. Yet though dated for day and month, the year of all entries has been omitted.
I have worked from extensive photo-copies that the police were kind enough to permit me to make before taking the documents into their custody.
I have presented it in its apparent order, that is how I have come to read it. I have preserved, where possible, the original names or place names.
The period most reproducible spans forty-one days, all of which take place from mid November to late December. Where necessary I have drawn upon my powers of interpretation. I hope it shall be read, bearing these factors in mind.
november 12. I awoke early this morning to the sound of lightly falling rain. It seemed before I was even conscious, I could feel it in every cell of my body. It was soft and fine, and penetrated the morning.
As I lay in the dark, I was aware of my aloneness. I could imagine how it looked outside. The paving stones dark-grey, the leaves piled up against the edge of the building, their colours of yellow, gold and brown enriched by the damp. Already there must have been people about. Yet the silence of the building was overpowering.
I got up and walked to the window. I pulled back the curtains and saw the black shape of the fire exit. I could see no-one, and hear no-one. Only the sound of the rain dripping from the metal steps. It was as if I had woken in another world. There was nothing except my memories from the previous day. There was nothing except my memories of other times looking out this window to reassure me it was in fact a living world. I pulled up a chair and sat.
The trees were nearly bare and the narrow path that wound its way around the back of the building was deserted. The shapes of other buildings, curtained windows, furniture no longer used left to age in back gardens, all stood silently in the morning's greyness.
I thought then of the size of the city. How it spread like a great tentacled organism, gradually acquiring all that stood in its path. Buildings upon buildings. Roads upon roads. Everywhere its accidental shapes and circles, all awaiting the animating touch of its inhabitants.
november 13. It has been bright and sunny all day. The sort of sun you get in November. It is as if the sun was somehow frailer, and this in turn contrasted with the pale blue of the sky.
I walked in the park at lunch time. The grass was very green and still damp after the light morning frost. The richness and the quantity of fallen leaves were almost unbelievable. I walked under the trees and felt as if I became somehow weightless by just being there.
Coming home this evening, along the street, I was intrigued by the pattern of lights, the density of bodies. Everywhere people were walking, hurrying, stepping in or out of buses. Yet nowhere could I distinctly hear the sound of footsteps. It was like a vast army of insects with only the traffic as a backdrop against which they all moved. I went to a phone-box to call Anna. There was no reply. She must still be away.
november 14. I do not like returning to the emptiness of my building. Sometimes after a difficult day, the aloneness that greets me when I open the door seems to laugh mockingly in my face.
I went to the station and bought a newspaper, thinking, I would sit in a bar and have something to drink while reading.
november 15. I took a half day from work. I felt I had enough. I came home early and made something to eat. Afterwards I sat listening to music. I feel asleep on the sofa and woke about two in the morning, stiff and cold.
november 18. Going down the stairs to the Underground this morning, stepping over papers, discarded tickets, following the crowd, all seemingly with the same edgy faces, I suddenly felt sick to the stomach. The station seemed so grimy and dirty. The tiles on the wall were old.
As I waited for the train to rush out of the tunnel I was aware of a heaviness in the air. The sound of so many commuters echoed eerily through the tunnels and up and down the escalators. I was still sleepy and wanted to smoke a cigarette. When the train appeared, the rush of its motor diminished everything else. Watching it I was aware of the sweat on my forehead. I was aware of my own discomfort.
november 19. No work today. Called in sick. It is cold and frosty this morning. I am writing over breakfast. In front of me is a half-drunk cup of coffee, two pieces of toast with marmalade, some fruit and a hard-boiled egg. I have not shaved, neither have I showered.
I am sitting with my feet against the table. The heating is on full so I am comfortable in just my shorts and a t-shirt.
Earlier I listened to the radio, to the morning news. There was nothing much to report. The usual things. Public-spending cutbacks, minor incidents, local occurrences, and a civil war that threatens the stability of the eastern part of Europe.
I wish I was more interested. I wish I could take it more seriously. Instead I follow it rather offhandedly from the comfort of my kitchen. Here I am sitting half-dressed listening to what for someone, somewhere, must be nothing short of disaster. What am I really thinking about?
I am wondering if Anna is back from the north. I want to see her. I need to see her. I have missed her.
november 20. About six this evening a friend phoned and asked me if I wanted to go for a drink. I had nothing planned so we arranged to meet at eight in a café in the city’s west-end. He was already there when I arrived. We decided to go a bar he knew behind the opera. It was much quieter there. We ordered two beers and sat down in a corner to talk. He seemed agitated.
november 21. Anna is back. She left a message on my answering machine.
This morning I walked along by the river. In a city this vast, one would expect to see more shipping traffic. It is not so. Now this long and famous river is a stage for the ever expanding tourist industry. Now it appears there are only tour companies, each one offering their unique own special view. I cannot say I am impressed.
To know this city one must live here. One must experience its myriad frustrations. One must walk its streets day in, day out. No visit, no guided tour can ever come close to revealing its core.
This is a city with two hearts. It is mean and generous, garrulous and withdrawn. It offers much and denies a lot. Its history is one of commercial expansion and political drive. Alongside its grandeur, its elegance, exists squalor and poverty. Its largeness belies its smallness. To walk its streets, to ride its Underground, one cannot but be aware of its past. No short visit can reveal that.
Only on the fringes, in the hidden areas, does one begin to approach the contradictory energy that has made it what it is today. To live here, to come home each evening in its rush hour, the collar of your shirt already grimy, your hands sweating, staring into the eyes of a stranger, is to understand it. It is neither splendid nor squalid. It exists and it breathes in its own crowded way.
It unexpectedly inspires and frustratingly disappoints.
This morning it was quiet. The river seemed timeless. It stretched out to either side of me, wide and lined with buildings old and new. Its achievements, the successes were there to see. Then the sun coming up, silhouetted the buildings, created an impression of great complexity. There was no running from it. It surrounded one on all sides.
Crossing a bridge, a train rattled noisily. It headed out to the suburbs. The city was already beginning to come alive. Under my feet leaves crunched. Here and there papers and bits of rubbish lay on the pavement. The benches on the embankment were empty. The cold was touchable.
I walked, thinking of the river flowing every day to sea. I thought of how many billions of lives have taken place along this river’s banks. I imagined my footsteps tracing a path, that though itself unique, was lost and obscured by the billions of other paths that could be traced along this embankment. If I could pick one of those lives out of time, what would I find?. What similarities would there be?. Would I find a life that paralleled mine in any way?.
Lives swallowed by history. Each city, each documentation of its past carried out at the expense of the individuality of its inhabitants. Would the telling of one life reveal anything other than that I already know?. Is it that when we get down to the details of individual lives, we find their particularity goes beyond that of cities? Is a city only what we make of it in our minds?
november 22. Talked to Anna on the phone this evening. I wanted to call her all day. Each time I went to the phone I was distracted by something at work.
When I left this evening I went straight to the nearest call-box. I kept bumping against a bag of books I had left on the floor. Our conversation was marked by long silences. There was no tension, just a frequency of spaces. I knew what I wanted to say. And she knew what I wanted to say. We both knew I should not say it. We skirted around this issue with a number of vague comments and questions.
I could imagine her mouth against the receiver, the unusual way she had of putting her tongue up against her corner teeth. I wondered if she was sitting the way she sometimes did, her hand playing with the lobe of her ear. What were her eyes doing?. What things were they also longing to say?.
We took our time. We let our phone conversation meander slowly through forty units. We arranged to meet in a café tomorrow. We did not know how to say goodbye. It somehow seemed so formal. In the end we agreed just to put the phone down and wait till three pm tomorrow.
november 23. At first it was raining. Cloudy and misty. It seemed to hang about the city. Looking out the window, I did not feel it was a day for going out. About eleven thirty it began to clear a bit.
I had a couple of things to do. I went to the supermarket and bought some groceries. I cleaned up the flat and generally got things into some kind of order. Living alone one tends to get lazy, thinking no-one else will see the mess. I did not know whether I would spend the night here or at Anna's.
I walked slowly to where I was to meet her. I was thinking about us, of how long we had known each other, of the days we had spent in this city.
There are many places we consider ours, that for us have a personal meaning. Yet we probably share them with many others.
She was sitting looking a little lost. Her hair was falling across her face and she was wearing that funny raincoat she sometimes wears.
She did not see me coming in, so I stood for a minute or two watching her. The fairness of her face, the sort of nervous way she has of moving, graceful and yet a little awkward, seemed so familiar then, so normal as if she had always been standing beside me.
There is always this space, this slight distance when we have not seen each other for some time. It seems she grows apart, or she becomes vague, something that threatens the ease with which I feel I can be myself with her. Perhaps this is one of the things I love most about her. This feeling of not having to assume an attitude or role.
Then she saw me. She smiled suddenly and spontaneously, but with a trace of shyness. I kissed her cheek. I smelt her perfume. I felt the reassuring softness of her skin and the warmth of her body.
She asked how I was, and I asked her how her work had been. She answered it had been alright, a little tiring, and that the language had been a problem, but she had done what she went to do.
We held hands across the table. I told her I had not been doing much, just reading the newspapers, going to work, sleeping and waiting and that everything was about the same. She laughed and said she had only been away for a week.
We talked a bit longer and decided to take the bus to the north of the city where there is a large heath, where one can almost pretend one is in the country. Getting up, I watched her walk on ahead of me. I thought of how her movement, how when she had smiled at me, it destroyed any of the doubts I had begun to feel. I felt reassured and suddenly happy.
As we walked out onto the pavement I took her arm and pulled her close to me.
november 24. We woke late this morning. The sun was streaming in the window. I lay for a while and then got up and went out to pick up the Sunday papers. Anna made some breakfast, and we stayed in bed till noon reading.
november 26. The radio is on. I am listening carefully. It is an old song I remember from when I was younger. I am catapulted out of the present and into the past. I am standing and listening to how I once was. I am standing again in the living room of my parent's house. I can see the leaves of the willow tree in the garden in the morning sun. I can see the shadow of the buddleia on the grass, its orange blossoms bright against the green, its branches swaying beside the pebble-dashed wall. I can hear the chatter of birds from the bushes that line the garden wall. There is a feeling of nostalgia. The song finishes. I wait a couple of seconds. I instinctively expect to hear the next song that was on the recording I owned. I am back there, back in the living room of my parent’s house.
Then I realise there is no other song coming. The voice of the radio announcer brings me back to where I am; in the kitchen of Anna's flat in some non-descript section of this large city.
The juice squeezer is squeezing the oranges. The toast has popped from the toaster. The frost is thawing on the windows; and I am standing grappling with a sudden feeling of loss.
november 27. Quite day at work. Itching all day to get home.
november 28. Week nearly at an end.
november 30. Yesterday evening, Friday, we went to the cinema and later to eat. We drank a lot of wine and took a taxi home.
Driving through the city at two in the morning it looked like a great half-empty ship. Its roads, ring-roads, were the decks, and the centre with its complex of old streets and squares, the bridge.
Everywhere people stood cold and pale, huddled into their winter clothing under the night sky. Old newspapers mingled with the bodies and blew in scurries down the streets. One could understand, looking at this, the electronic scream which permeates the airwaves.
At night this city floats on a great sea; the collective sea of a planet. Its energy, its drives are tangible. The merest change of weather, the merest change of posture, is enough to communicate a shift, a sensitivity to a new direction in its unending voyage.
This sea chatters endlessly in bleeps and scratches, in pulses and non-pulses. It babbles into the black vacuum of space. Air waves that once carried only birds, prevailing winds, the pollination of pastures, cackle with voice and counter voice, with snatches of music, advertisements, rumour, gossip. They build like a great electro-magnetic wall over which it is sometimes difficult to hear.
Strange to sit in a taxi and watch this slip by like a clip out of someone else's movie. Two in the morning, and a little drunk. Anna lying asleep against me on the back seat.
december 1. We went walking in the park this morning. A windy and raw day.
december 2. Sat on the Underground this morning, squashed in against the window. It was a typical Monday morning, neutral and grey, with that air of sullen acceptance. In front of me the headlines of a newspaper. Continuing violence on streets that as a child I knew. Streets where I spent happy carefree summers, now stained with blood and hatred. Patrolled by Armoured Personal Vehicles; scanned by radar and high-tech listening devices. Electronic ears in place of human ears. The voices drowned by sound bite. By politicking. Words wrenched from their context.
It was about five hundred to six hundred kilometres from where I sat hurtling underground at that moment, but, it felt a lot closer. Distance somehow diminished by personal memory.
december 3. A busy day. Christmas approaching. The lights are now going up on the streets. I do not like it. There is always something lacking. I feel it is somehow out of touch with reality.
We would like to go away for a couple of days in the new year. It depends on Anna's papers. She does not know how she stands with her visa.
december 4. I came south and she came west. We met here on an April evening when we both got into a lift taking us from the Underground to the street. She dropped her passport and I ran after her. When she turned around she looked so beautiful, so sad. I stood looking at her and rather stupidly said, I had never met anyone from there before.
december 5. If I talk to her about home and how she feels about it, she becomes rather wistful. She does not say much, but I sense there is still a deep attachment.
She describes it in terms of heavy, foggy days in winter, made heavier by industrial pollution, and yet the beauty and freshness of arriving spring. If I try to imagine her there, I see her as if still in a dream.
She paces the cobblestone square in front of the famous clock-tower. Or she sits in her cramped office looking longingly through an ochre tinted window. She is already wearing that funny raincoat that sits so oddly against her lightly sun-burned neck. She is moving in the dream as if the dream itself was moving somewhere. I feel I am looking at her through a glass sphere or a stretch in the fabric of space. I can see the blue-green ovals of her eyes set so delicately in her face.
december 6. If she talks to me about where I was born, I can only describe it as a presence. I do not think of it much yet it is there. On days when I feel the impersonality of the city wear me down,
I find myself walking in places I knew when I was young. It seems I have become a stranger again, right within the centre of all that has become familiar, all that has become home.
I tell her about the mountains and the sudden shifts of light. I tell her about the tiny back streets and the rain sweeping in off the sea. I tell her about the cranes and the shipyards. I tell her about a city torn apart on its own bitterness; a city that is no longer my city yet refuses to lie down and go away.
december 7. If she asks why I left, what can I say?. As a boy I watched the boats leaving port to cross the short, difficult sea. Somehow I always felt the necessity. Felt I was born to leave. It seemed the only step. I would walk along the coast and gaze expectantly into the horizon. What did I imagine, what did I expect to see?. What voice told me I would not find myself till I left?
december 8. If I ask her why she left she answers with passion. All her life there was a frontier across her mind. She felt she lived in a lost city. She always dreamed one day the barriers would fall. With her camera, she crossed three countries on a night train.
december 9. Anna sitting by the window in the morning sun. Her face is not made up. Her eyes are bright and soft in the cold winter light. Her hair is uncombed and she is curled up, her feet underneath her, reading a magazine. She looks at me and says she is glad to be here.
december 10. Anna sitting in the park on a winter’s day. The bright green of the grass and the bare trees are the only backdrop; there is the red of her lips, her light, brown hair.
Her hands are gloved and hold the book she has nearly finished reading. A leather shoulder bag, a bag that looks as though it has grown here with her is on her knee. I see her leather shoes, now wrinkled, and a loose floppy hat is pulled down over her eyes.
On her coat is a piece of jewellery inset with an amethyst; subtle and elusive, clear and direct. Her legs are crossed. She is sitting at the far end of a park bench lost in the words she is reading.
She does not hear my footsteps on the smooth stone path. She is not aware of the ducks in the nearby pond.
When I sit beside her on the bench, she looks up a little surprised. She smiles and kisses me on the mouth.
december 11. Anna close up. The elasticity of her lips. The spray of light freckles across her nose. Her teeth, white and close together. The slightly round end of her nose.
december 12. Anna at three in the morning sleeping quietly, her breathing deep, her hair loose, the sheets only half covering her. Lying beside me with her arms around me, her mouth slightly open. On the streets nothing but quietness.
december 13. I went to the train station this morning to check on tickets. It was raining heavily. Anna called me at work. We met later and had lunch.
december 16. It is raining again today. I sit and look out the window of my office to the street below. There is the usual stream of traffic. An old woman is looking through a rubbish bin on the side of the pavement. The taxi drivers blow their horns at the slightest provocation. The old red buses trundle by more or less regularly. Umbrellas scurry here and there. People disappear in and out of doors. The rain falls continually. It runs down the windows, across the pavement and into the gutters at the side of the street.
december 17. Staying in my own flat. Anna will come over tomorrow evening.
Slept badly during the night. Strange dreams. At one point I seemed to be drifting down a river on a small boat.
I awoke about four and could not get back to sleep. I lay there, trying to get a hold of how I felt about things, trying to get a hold on that sense I sometimes have of the ground moving from beneath my feet. Something about my life here is a point of reference for that, is the core of where I am actually going. I stayed in bed for about another hour and then got up and had an early breakfast.
Snatches of the dream remained with me for the rest of the day. A strange echo of relevance, meaning.
december 18. It snowed yesterday evening. The city is sombre and bitterly cold this morning.
december 19. I am home early from work today. It is now late afternoon. Already the streets are changing into shadow, into pin-points of light, made and unmade. The sky to the east has cleared.
It is dark blue and flecked with violet clouds. Yesterday’s snow is still on the streets.
Sometimes I am struck by a strange sense of living backwards. I feel I am somehow stepping outside the world and yet immersing myself in it all the more intensely. It is as if I have experienced this scene, somewhere else, at some other time, in some other way. My footsteps echo like they were echoing across another time.
If I open the window and look into the street below, the murmur of the distant traffic assumes an expression of its own. It seems to be talking with a sadness, as if each car were a voice, and each voice were saying something, speaking to me. Yet when I listen I cannot catch what is being said. Instead I am aware of a sense of aloneness, of estrangement.
In the kitchen the darkness descends. The light bulb burns harshly from its place in the wall. I stand in the middle of the room, my arms stretched out, my hands reaching into the air.
All around I am surrounded by people and yet the spaces between us seem as vast as lifetimes. Now and then I hear a radio, a step on the stairs, an opening or shutting door, the voice of a child. Yet everything seems to come from afar. I feel I am wrapped in a cocoon of silence.
On the floor is a pair of Anna’s shoes. Her book and perfume are on the table. In the bedroom the bed is unmade, and a suitcase lies half open beside the wardrobe. Newspapers lie here and there, after-shave, a magazine, socks, a couple of scribbled lines on some foreign notepaper, little things that in a way define me, but are also the common currency of many others. The feeling of threads of life interweaving and intertwining across many lives is one I cannot easily shake off.
Each life is a history and each history is the accumulation of the events, illusions, fallacies, and facts of all lives. I carry within me my own history. Am I at each moment of the day, at each turn of the corner, creating new possibilities for myself? Each time I kiss Anna, each time I pull her close to me, am I returning to a thread, a vein to which I have returned many times before?
Are those decisive moments in my life, the dropping of a passport on the street, the running after a complete stranger, only infused with the sense of meaning I choose to give them? Do I write my own history from some deep inner sense of what I feel it should be. Or do I construct it in retrospect, demanding it fit the pattern that most vindicates my present position?.
december 20. I have been living in this flat for two years now and still I live out of a suitcase. To see me walk on the street, my shirt, my tie, my raincoat, my leather shoes, one would probably place me in another world. I live a double life.
Each morning I walk past the porter of my office building to the fourth floor. Each morning as I enter the lift, I alter a part of my personality. I mask myself and assume the face of my colleagues.
december 21. This city that I can almost taste, this city in which I have spent years, is it only a part of a journey? I envy the permanence of others. Their lives are solid, their blindness something to be rewarded. I live in a continual state of flux and influx.
If I grasp too hard, that which I want slips away. If I chase, that which I pursue becomes invisible.
When I look at Anna I ask myself what it is we have in common. What is it, other then those personal things, that holds us together? We both belong to a time when the roots of much have been pulled clean from the ground.
When she tells of her journey here, she tells me how she looked out of the window as the train raced through the night. Then she saw the lights of towns and cities, towns and cities that for her were once only dreams. All the time she was struck by the sense of unreality. The dream was coming true, yet, somehow it had always been true.
When she stepped off the train that April morning she was suddenly struck by a feeling of intense hunger. The space she had once been sensed was now real, was about to fill itself up with a life that previously could only have been guessed at.
She tells me how she sat on a bench, her baggage at her feet, and looked about her. She saw the light filtering through the glass ceiling of the station, the pigeons, flying, trapped, nesting in the great steel girders above her. She saw the dirt on the ground, the electric trolleys picking up the mail. She heard the whistle of porters as they went to and fro between the platforms. She saw commuters, oblivious to the presence of tourists or travellers. She slowly began to feel she really was somewhere else.
Then, she says, she felt sad as she realised that a step once taken is always taken; even if gone back on, it has been taken.
Coming out of the station she saw a city busy and moving. She tells how she found a hotel room. She describes the smell of coffee and toast in the reception as she set her bags down; the desk a little worn, the furniture having seen better times.
In her room she opened the window and lay on the bed. She listened to the sounds coming from the street. For a moment she wondered if it was all true, the unfamiliarity, the strangeness.
She realised she was on the crest of a wave. This city she had chosen was a vortex of influence. She tried to imagine herself living in it day to day, tried to see herself finding a way through its linguistic and social maze.
Her life, she says, suddenly seemed short. She was suddenly aware, that like many of the city’s other inhabitants she would become a mutation, a product of her interaction with it. What she would find, was not a new life, but a new aspect of her particular life. The barrier had fallen, the frontier was crossed.
december 22. A friend of Anna’s called and asked if we would like go and eat with her and her partner next weekend. Sometimes I enjoy this, sometimes not. It is outside the city, an hour's journey. I like the travel, the train swinging out through the spreading suburbs. I am always refreshed by the smell and touch of the countryside, its contrast with the streets of the city. I always look for the flight, for the poised movement of birds over the fields.
december 23. It was raining again this morning but cleared up later. This evening as I walked up the path behind the flats, I noticed how completely bare all the trees had become. They were hard and jagged in the ghostly glow of the street-lamps. Their tips disappeared into the clear night air. Overhead an airplane was crossing. Its lights appeared like a short line of white beads moving though the sky.
I looked toward the window and saw a light on in the flat. It was the only one burning on our floor. I figured Anna must be already there. It seemed all the warmer for the coldness outside.
I stood for a moment listening. The city was turning over. It was still busy. It was still involved in its endless permutations.
Then I saw Anna come to the window. I stopped for a moment and watched her. She put her hand up to drop the blinds. I could just make out the details of her face in the light from the room. Then she shook her hair back from her face. Then I wanted nothing more than to be upstairs and with her.
The entry for December 24 is unclear. It starts with a statement about a poem the author appears to be attempting to write. However the text here is quite damaged and just how it pieces together is uncertain. There are some sparse entries for December, but, it is not till January the author again appears to have much interest in writing. The entry concerns the beginning of a journey. He appears to be alone. There is no reference to any of the previous entries. I have not included it above.
As already stated the identity of the author is still a mystery and will probably remain so. I have resigned myself to this fact, though it must be said I still entertain the occasional hope of further discoveries.
Anyone with information concerning the above or with anything they feel may help in this strange matter, should contact me at the address given below. Or, if they prefer, refer the matter to the police at Battersea Bridge station.
Andrew Dubrovsky.
Beaufort Street,
London.
June 1992.
Copyright ( C ) Peter Millington. Amsterdam. May 1993.
