The Way of the Dog by Sam Savage Page B

appearance, his graceful build (like a bullfighter or a dancer, she might have thought in her typically romantic way), his shock of black curls and his pinched, concentrated features, but she did not turn her head. After a time she left the German books and went over to a table displaying travel guides to European countries. The young man, passing behind her, went to the rear of the store and took down the book he had seen her reading. Holding it against his jacket, in case she turned, he carried it to the cash register. It was only then, when the clerk was folding brown paper around the book to protect it from the sleet outside, that he saw the title: it was Büchner’s Woyzeck. And that, it seemed to him now, was exactly the book he had imagined her reading. He left the shop. Stopping on the sidewalk outside, he opened the book and wrote in German under the name of the author: “Meet me at six this evening in front of the cathedral.” Then he waited. He pretended to study the books on display in the shop window. He stamped his feet on the snow-layered pavement. He was very patient, and very cold. When, after almost an hour, she stepped from the door, his teeth were chattering. He rushed at her, muttering, “Bitte, ein Geschenk,” and tried to shove the book into the gloved hand she thrust defensively in his direction. Startled, she clasped the book, but then, recoiling, let it tumble to the pavement at her feet. Overcome by embarrassment, he spun on his heels and walked rapidly away without looking back. The woman picked up the book from where it lay open in the wet snow. She held it away from her body so as not to dirty her clothes and returned to her hotel, where she put it on a chair to dry. Two days later, packing to leave, she was placing the book in her suitcase when she noticed the inscription and slipped it in her handbag instead. She was checking out, and she showed the inscription to the clerk and asked him to translate it. She did not leave that day, and in the evening she went to the cathedral. She had not hesitated, she had not debated with herself about whether to go. Not for a second had she wondered why she was going. She was compelled to go by the logic of a story she was beginning to tell herself, a story that began somewhere in her childhood and ran on unseen into the future in front of her. She went before dark, and she stayed until there was no one else in the street, but two days had passed and he failed to appear. The following day she went again, and a third time as well. On the fourth day she left. She never saw the man again. She never learned his name, but he poisoned her life. The lost possibility of that man and the life path he represented poisoned her life. In the core of her being she was constantly aware that somewhere out of sight her true story was unfolding, that her true life path was running on without her. She had many lovers, she had husbands and children. She led a rich, cultured, cosmopolitan life. She became wealthy and a patron of orchestras. She even published a small book of stories. But she was always dissatisfied, always conscious of a hollow within. At every check and turn in her rich, eventful life, in the depth of every crisis, she would remember Strasbourg and her failure to open a book until it was too late. It became for her an ever-present emblem of loss. She once said to her daughter, “I was given the book of life, and I failed to open it,” but the daughter thought this was just a metaphor and failed to understand.
    A story is like a path through a wood. It is marked by a series of signs, like directional arrows that say, “Go this way.” A story compels us to go that way.
    A story is a puzzle in which the pieces instead of fitting together in space fit together in time.
    Either way, the result is a picture.
    I sometimes imagined, hopelessly imagined I think now, a different kind of story, one for our time, that would be the wood itself, without any path