You can't go home again.

- title of a novel by Thomas Wolfe

They were standing in the garden of the Villa Atterton and looked silently at the big building in front of them. Ten years had passed since they had seen it the last time. Ten years for them, but only one year of the villa. But still there were a few, subtle changes: windows had been replaced, parts of the roof repaired and there was new flower bed in the garden.

The door to one of the balconies opened and Bill exited. He saw them immediately, but it took him several moments to recognise them. “Alice? Alex?”, he cried in surprise. “You... have grown old.”

“You look well too”, Alexander answered after a moment's hesitation. “How are you?”

“Fine, fine”, said Bill.

“Is Mowgli there?”, Alexander asked.

“Mowgli? No, he is... well, right now he is probably still in London, but he should be getting on the ship in a few hours”, Bill told him. “He wants to go to India.”

“And Sarina?”, Alice wanted to know.

“She got a job at an excavation site”, Bill informed her. “Somewhere in France, if I remember it correctly.”

“And what are you still doing here?”, Alexander said.

Bill just shrugged as an answer. “Come in, the kitchen door should be open!”, he told them.

“For the others, we had only been gone one year, but a lot can and did happen... and change during that time”, Mr Tuniak told me. “New people were living in the Villa Atterton and on the Island Leviathan now, the next generation had taken over, so to speak. Of course, if we had wanted to, there would still have been a place for us at either of these locations.”

“But you didn't want to?”, I asked.

“Yes... no”, Mr Tuniak said. “At first we did want to go back. We, Alice and I, we wanted to just go back and pick our lives up just where we had left them. We thought we could pretend that our absence had never happened. We were of course wrong.”

“Because you missed a whole year. Couldn't you just have returned earlier?”

“The problem wasn't the missing year”, Mr Tuniak corrected me. “The problem was that a lot more time had passed for us. We were not only ten years older than all our friend, we also had lived through a lot of things during that time.” “He looked at me. “You are too young to have experienced this, but I'm sure one day you will. If you have a friend, a good friend, and you haven't seen him for a very long time and then suddenly you meet him again... the best case you can hope for then is that you will talk about what you have done since you last met. If the worst case happens, you will discover that you have nothing in common any more.”

“And that's what happened to you?”

“Yes.”

“Did... Bill and Mowgli and the others... did they know what you did?”

“No, only Sarina really knew”, Mr Tuniak said. “The others thought that we had just been travelling through time. Without aim or purpose. Just for fun.”

“So, what did you do then?”

“We are here”, Alexander announced, after the time machine had landed.

“And where is here?”, Alice asked. A week had passed since they had returned to the Villa Atterton. Fourteen days during which they had tried without success to get back to their former lives. Finally, they had had to admit that too much time had passed and had decided to once again enter the time machine.

“Where to?”, Alice had asked.

“That's a surprise”, Alexander had promised.

And so they had entered the time machine again and departed. Saying good-bye to the villa and its inhabitants had been surprisingly easy.

“Take a look outside”, Alexander suggested and opened the door of the time machine.

Alice did, as he had said. She saw that they had landed close to a big city. Trained by her countless travels through time Alice was able to pinpoint very quickly when and where she was. Small details (like the architecture of the buildings, the plants that were growing, noises she heard) combined in her mind to offer a full picture of where she was.

“It's the beginning, no the middle of the twentieth century... America”, she said to herself. “Oh, of course! That's New York!”

“Yes, New York, and the year is 1946”, Alexander told her. “I thought you might want to visit someone who lives here.”

“Whom do I know who lives...”, Alice started, before the penny dropped. “My parents”, she whispered, barely audible.

“I asked Louis”, Alexander said. “He told me when and where to find them. One year ago your parents met and it will be another two years before they move to England.”

Alice turned around to face him. “Why?”, she asked.

“The first time you asked me why I hadn't tried to change history, I thought you were only asking because of your parents”, he explained. “I thought that maybe you wanted to see them or maybe you wanted to bring them into the future. But in all our travels you never mentioned them. Not once.”

Alice was quiet for a few minutes before she answered. “I cannot remember them. But I do think about them. I do imagine who they were, what they did... Louis has of course talked about them a lot. Over the years my image of them has become... quite defined. But it is still only my imagine of them and not who they really are. In reality it is quite probable that they were very different from what I thought them to be.“

Alexander was nodding. “I imagined it was something like that. When you talked about Kingsleigh, I was convinced you were feeling the same thing about something.”

Alice started to laugh. “Oh, that is great. You are using my own words against me.”

“Not against you”, Alexander said. He was holding an envelope in his hand. “I have got the address of the place where your parents are working. It's a small circus that's currently doing performances in the city. We can go there or not. I leave that up to you.”

Alice took the envelope form him. “Let's go”, she said without hesitation.

“Alice decided to stay with the circus”, Mr Tuniak explained. “For two years, until her parents left America. There was no way she could ever get her childhood back with them, but it was some sort of compensation. At least, she had finally met her parents and she never regretted it.”

“She never told them that she was her future daughter, did she?”, I asked.

“No, of course not”, Mr Tuniak said.

“Did you stay with them the whole time?”

“No”, he said. “I journeyed on. We agreed that Alice would send a letter when she wanted to be picked up again. A letter to an apartment that Philip owned and where I could pick it – and then her – up. When we parted she told me that she wanted to stay a few months, but in the end she stayed two years.”

“And you just jumped two years into the future?”

“I wanted to do that but – to my own surprise, I must admit – I discovered that I wanted to spend some time alone”, Mr Tuniak said. “Nowadays you would probably say: I wanted to find myself or something similar.” His gesture made it clear that he didn't think much of that phrase. “Actually, I just needed time to think. I couldn't change history and I no longer had any desire to do so. But loosing that idea meant that I also lost what had driven me the last few years. If you want to put it that way: I had lost my purpose and was looking for a new one.”

Philip was walking with measured steps along the small path. From time to time he was leaning on his hiking stick, because he was feeling tired. He had walked a long way and the thin air exhausted him further. But his goal was finally right in front of him: an old monastery, which he had visited several times before. One day, he thought, he would build his own similar place of recluse.

He was walking through the field that surrounded the monastery and where monks were working. It had been several decades since he had last been here, but it seemed as if time had stopped at this place.

One of the men on the fields stopped his work and started to come over to him.

“Alexander?”, Philip said in surprise.

The man smiled. “Hello, Philip,” he said.

“What are you doing here?”, Philip wanted to know.

“I was looking for a quiet place to think”, Alexander told him. “And someone I know very well had suggested this place to me.”

Philip immediately knew that sometime in the future he himself would be this someone. “Did I also tell you that life here can be quite hard?”, he asked.

“I have already experienced that for myself”, Alexander said. “And I'm not sure if my old bones can actually stand it much longer.”

“If my old bones can stand it, it should be no problem for yours”, Philip said. “How old are you?”

“A bit over forty, I think”, Alexander said. “The work on the fields, I can manage. It's exhausting, but manageable. And if something is broken, I can repair it, no problem at all. But the fitness program they practise here...” He was shaking his head. “Every day there are new exercises. I'm the worst in my group, but I can't really tell you why. I do the same things as all the others. Honestly, sometimes I get the feeling they are secretly practising in their sleep. It seems impossible otherwise.”

“They do practise while sleeping”, Philip said. “They can control their dreams to a certain extent, so they can repeat their exercises in their sleep. And surprisingly, it does have an actual effect on their muscles.”

“Really?”

“Yes”, Philip said. “Didn't they tell you?”

“They may have, but I've been here for three weeks and I am still having troubles with the language”, Alexander admitted.

“Three weeks? And how long do you plan to stay?”

“I stayed for nearly a year there”, Mr Tuniak explained. “It was the most quiet year in my whole life. I never used the time machine, not even once, during the whole time.”

“You did not tell me where this monastery was located?”, I said. “Not even the continent.”

“I was there two hundred years ago, I doesn't exist any more”, he answered.

Since he apparently didn't want to divulge any further information regarding the monastery's location, I changed the subject. “And what did you do, once the year was over?”

“I decided to return to my family... to my friends”, Mr Tuniak said. “The last time I had returned to the Villa Atterton, I had expected to find everything the same way I had left it. That way my mistake. We all change and there are some place not even a time machine can take you. But it had also been a mistake that I did not try to start something new. A mistake I had decided to remedy.”

NEXT WEEK

Das Schönste, was wir erleben können, ist das Geheimnisvolle.