Forty horns, then I stopped

Written in Hamburg, June 2020. Typed up today.

The first horn reached the kitchen window sometime after dark. A long note, low enough to sit in the floorboards. I was eating bread and had not turned on the light. The streetlamp outside was enough to see the shape of the table.

I was in the flat on the third floor, the one with the window that faced the harbour. The street below had been empty for days. No cars. No voices.

Not the stillness of a Sunday. Something else. You could hear things that had no business reaching a kitchen three floors up. The gulls were arguing on the roof. Water hit the embankment below. A man on the opposite balcony coughed into his fist and it sounded like he was standing beside me. He wore a dressing gown and slippers and stood there a long time. He was holding a phone to his ear but I do not think anyone picked up.

I started counting the horns. One, two. By the eleventh I had lost track and started again. A ship going out. A ship coming in. I could not tell which was which. There were gaps between them. Some short, some long enough that I thought I had missed one. The cup had gone cold. I think I was counting because there was nothing else to do with my hands. The bread was dry but I kept tearing pieces off it.

Something about the silence reminded me of another afternoon in this same kitchen, when the street had been full of people and I had not heard a single horn. I got to forty. I stopped. Not because they stopped. The man on the balcony went inside and shut his window. I put the cup down and sat there. The streetlamp threw light across the ceiling.

The forty-first came while I was washing the cup. I heard it through the running water and did not count it. I turned off the tap.

That’s all I wrote down.