Speaker 1: Hello, I'm welcomed stories all the time. The glad you
Speaker 1: are here. Let's get into it. The day after my
Speaker 1: official retirement, which I had marked not with a champagne toast,
Speaker 1: but with the luxury of waking without an alarm, I
Speaker 1: set out on one of my habitual prowling strolls. It
Speaker 1: was a Wednesday, and the port side ere carried a
Speaker 1: hint of salt fell to press through the crooked stones
Speaker 1: and narrow back lanes that pleaded the old district into
Speaker 1: a soft, persistent labyrinth. My walking loop wound by instinct
Speaker 1: and curiosity as much as familiarity. I told myself I'd
Speaker 1: finally visit the marina or see the exhibition at the
Speaker 1: War Museum, but instead she was pointed of their own will.
Speaker 1: I found myself threading the twisted lanes behind the cock
Speaker 1: repair shop, hands in my pockets, sunglancing off old brick
Speaker 1: in an unassuming alley beelly of corridor between the backs
Speaker 1: of shops and the crumbling finish of apartments. I was
Speaker 1: drawn up short by an odd object fixed to the
Speaker 1: wall across from a batted kitchen door. Bronze, rectangular, about
Speaker 1: the length of two hands and bordered in a walled
Speaker 1: almost art nuba flourish. It was conspicuous, clean, polish, nearly
Speaker 1: to glee, catching and returning what lithe light made it
Speaker 1: past the overhadding laundry, a shot contrast to the walls
Speaker 1: pale scoffs and graffiti ghosts. What arrested me, though, was
Speaker 1: its detail. The plaque was filled edge to edge with
Speaker 1: meticulous and raving. At its center a cluster of elegantly
Speaker 1: stylized numbers and letters, encircled by compass roses and ouglass motifs.
Speaker 1: An inscription in a font evoking an era with few
Speaker 1: maled certainties declare forty five point three billion, six hundred
Speaker 1: twenty one million, seven hundred forty eight thousand, three hundred
Speaker 1: twenty six degrees N fourteen point one hundred eleven million,
Speaker 1: eight hundred forty three thousand, two hundred seventy one degrees e,
Speaker 1: almost absurdly precise. There was no dedication, no donor's name,
Speaker 1: not even a date of installation. The numbers were crisped, unweathered. End.
Speaker 1: As a mathematician accustomed to indicate her digits, it couldn't
Speaker 1: help myself without glancing up. I took my phone free
Speaker 1: and thumbed open a map app ignoring a faint kind
Speaker 1: gro of city sounds just beyond the ali's drone of
Speaker 1: quite the first app blinked, locating the numbers. It painted
Speaker 1: a pin point coinsdent with my current blue dot, then
Speaker 1: labeled it quite plainly Raijcat Croatia. Yet when out of
Speaker 1: habit I opened my preferred navigation app, the same cord
Speaker 1: in its drew a new result. Fifteen hundred meters to
Speaker 1: the northwest trist Italy. If possible, there was not centimeter
Speaker 1: of share terrain between these two cities, even the boundaries
Speaker 1: incoherently snaked as they were over decades of treaties, never
Speaker 1: overlapped at this location. Confused, I total to a third app,
Speaker 1: one favored by runners and near the pin landed still
Speaker 1: further north squarely within the inner margin of Graz, Austria,
Speaker 1: though no train would get either before tomorrow. I double
Speaker 1: checked the actual numbers. They matched exactly down to the
Speaker 1: final decimal. I felt my own internal Marquiu shift, the
Speaker 1: coal snap of proper curiosity, like a teacher's favorite riddle
Speaker 1: taken home for private fund. It wasn't a typo, it
Speaker 1: wasn't a rounding error. Side by side, three reputable sources
Speaker 1: cleaned this alley belonged to three different countries, none adjacent,
Speaker 1: each absolute in their declaration. No signs on the walls
Speaker 1: revealed the alll's name, only sun bleached posters, A weathered
Speaker 1: pipe alone by skull lock to a metal Above me,
Speaker 1: someone's laundry sway gently, a pair of shirts pale with
Speaker 1: repeated washings. But the ticking sound a clock steady beat
Speaker 1: somewhere nearby, possibly from the clock maker shop up the laney,
Speaker 1: gave the moment an oddly ceremonial hush. I ran my
Speaker 1: fingers along the bronze surface, half expecting to find a
Speaker 1: hidden speaker or cure code some modern bank. Nothing. The
Speaker 1: mounting bolts holding the plaque were greened with age, almost
Speaker 1: seized with corrosion, but the bronze itself was free of
Speaker 1: even a spot of tarnish. I stepped back, even with
Speaker 1: the rest of the world as background clamored deliveries trundling,
Speaker 1: a cat darting behind a dust being the coordinate rooted
Speaker 1: me in a moment I could not place on any map.
Speaker 1: There was nothing frightening in it, not even a trace
Speaker 1: of chill, but I lingered, feeling rather as if I
Speaker 1: stood outside a familiar house whose FASD had over night
Speaker 1: become unexpectedly incorrect there but not precisely mine. As I
Speaker 1: left the alley, the fainticking might have grown louder, or
Speaker 1: my mind simply more returned, But either way I was
Speaker 1: left carrying a question where exactly was I. Retirement is
Speaker 1: a myth, as any teacher knows, he simply changed the
Speaker 1: topics they keep you at night. For forty three years,
Speaker 1: I had navigated the pleasures and perils of secondary mathematics, proofs, games,
Speaker 1: prize puzzles when students eye glazed to theory, teaching the
Speaker 1: elegance that emerges from pattern and contradiction. My life outside
Speaker 1: of school was gently geometric morning walks, tea at the square,
Speaker 1: afternoons perusing the city's older sections with a notebook in hand.
Speaker 1: I live alone, quite by choice, in an apartment perched
Speaker 1: above the Old Market Promenade, a vantage I preferred precisely
Speaker 1: for its subdued civic drama. Wedding procession here A parayed there,
Speaker 1: always just oudible above the grind and cliff trolleys. The
Speaker 1: city at off part Mediterranean, part Middle European part. Something
Speaker 1: ineffable arrested like a stack of transparent sheets, colonnaded hours
Speaker 1: that spoke Italienate ambitions, iron street markers hinting at Austrian exactitude,
Speaker 1: with curly Gothic latters, scattering of Yugoslavira mural's offers by
Speaker 1: city ordinances, now fading under sun and time, yet remaining
Speaker 1: stubbornly visible. The city was famous, in its infinitesimal way
Speaker 1: for confusing signposts. For restaurant men used to offer three
Speaker 1: languages at once, for cobs repainted in a palete that
Speaker 1: seemed to respect nobody's state decree. There was an endurance
Speaker 1: tension between precision and ambiguity, between what was supposed to
Speaker 1: be and what was subbornly practiced by those who actually
Speaker 1: lived here. I loved those tensions for the same reason
Speaker 1: I'd relish mathematical paradoxes. Each declared that, no matter how
Speaker 1: tidy the law care for the mapping, live reality had
Speaker 1: ways of wriggling free. Each morning, I'd stop to greet
Speaker 1: the city's goose, Missess Valenty, whose bakery sought the world's
Speaker 1: best wallut bread, the man at the bookstall who'd sell
Speaker 1: me volumes in whichever language matched my greeting. The city's clocksmith,
Speaker 1: mister Kovack's, a man of bristly mustached sly silences, and
Speaker 1: the permanent center oil and brass, whose window displayed not
Speaker 1: just clocks, but every manner of temporal curiosity, raies, anemometers,
Speaker 1: even a tiny sand glass shaped like a tower. Mister
Speaker 1: Kovack's greeted everyone by name and adjusted prices to seat
Speaker 1: the length of their hand shake. His shop was a
Speaker 1: maze of ticking, chattering, and in a far corner a
Speaker 1: large antique wall clock whose pendulum never seemed to sink
Speaker 1: perfectly with its hands border. As for factories, he'd once
Speaker 1: told me, but here in the city, it is timing
Speaker 1: we measure. That is different. We Sisual bureaucracy drifted through
Speaker 1: our streets like pollen. Government workers in adjustable uniforms, some
Speaker 1: with Trist's City seal, some with Ryjkiz, some bearing of cure.
Speaker 1: Austrian crests were seen now and then, repainting zebra crossings
Speaker 1: or replacing road signs one after another like chess piecesly
Speaker 1: by an invisible hand. These changes never seemed to trouble
Speaker 1: my neighbors, with says Valante, for instance, claimed to Baker's
Speaker 1: paperwork was like a ticket in a bad lottery, fluttering
Speaker 1: between free government departments. Her son, meanwhile, worked under a
Speaker 1: permit issued from the regional authority, which she referred to us.
Speaker 1: Whichever building answers first. The price of Brookolinia shifted weekly
Speaker 1: receipts Cayman, free languages, and next to my building an
Speaker 1: agent fountain bore three bronze plates, in Italian to the
Speaker 1: water carriers, in creation to those who thirst, and in
Speaker 1: German for the citizens of this place, each slightly out
Speaker 1: of alignment, each professionally engraved. Outsiders occasionally complained, but locals
Speaker 1: never did. They grow an expert at collecting their pensions
Speaker 1: from whichever window was open, with whichever signature would be
Speaker 1: honored that week. Precision, then was a form of gracious cusi,
Speaker 1: rather than a state expectation. I kept maps and records,
Speaker 1: partly as anchor partly it sport, my own way of
Speaker 1: honoring lived contradiction. But the platte coordinates had moved something
Speaker 1: old and quitely sacred in me. The wish for puzzle
Speaker 1: who solution, if not elegant, at least left one wiser
Speaker 1: than before. On Thursday, compelled by a growing sense of
Speaker 1: odd order, I returned to the alley, prepared, this time
Speaker 1: clutching a batter GPS unit and the small tourist map,
Speaker 1: purchased from a stand man by a man who insisted
Speaker 1: in Italian corration and English that all maps were guaranteed
Speaker 1: up to interpretation. The alley, innocent in morning light, looked
Speaker 1: just as before. Two shop doors painted contrasting shades of blue,
Speaker 1: a trash bin printed with the city's tree emblem, a
Speaker 1: fresh bray of laundry sagging between window sills. The bronze
Speaker 1: plaqawaited radially out of place. First, I used my phone again.
Speaker 1: Two map apps, now loaded with offline overlays, each declared
Speaker 1: Daali stood in a different city, repeating yesterday's results. Patient
Speaker 1: I switched on the old GPS. After several minutes of
Speaker 1: blinking calculation, it pinned me to the ventist at a
Speaker 1: district reference to only in antiqustro Hungarian survey books. The
Speaker 1: co ordinates, unchanged, now appeared under German spelling. Curious, I
Speaker 1: unfolded the tourist map, thick glossy stock with everything from
Speaker 1: bus Rout's two points of mysterious interests signaled by exclamation marks.
Speaker 1: The alley did appear marked faintly by hand and dotted
Speaker 1: pencil not print near it. A border lion seemed to
Speaker 1: have been erased and re drawn several times. The faintest
Speaker 1: choice of her previous demarcation running across the block, ghosted
Speaker 1: like a sense of deja vu, but never committed. An
Speaker 1: ink scribbled next to the alice's name were two smaller letters,
Speaker 1: quickly smudged before I could scrutinize the symbol's further footsteps
Speaker 1: announced to passer by a young woman in bright sneakers
Speaker 1: wheeling her bicycle, breaking my long standing roll against odd
Speaker 1: questions to strangers, I gestured to the plaque, pardon, do
Speaker 1: you know which city this alley belongs to? She checked
Speaker 1: her quick sidewise glance, then smiled, lifting one eyebrow. Depends
Speaker 1: on the day, doesn't it. She balanced her bicycle as
Speaker 1: if weeying possible cities in her mind. The Italian note
Speaker 1: sports were up last week, but now she pointed down
Speaker 1: the lane, where a mute green sign in German suggested
Speaker 1: a new reality of their changing again. She seemed to
Speaker 1: me used, not irritated, and mounting her bike, She called
Speaker 1: over her shoulder, if you want official, give it a
Speaker 1: week and try I again. Her laughter echoed un fossy
Speaker 1: around the bend. I stood gps, still blinking, as the
Speaker 1: plaque absorbed daylight on its clean and harnished field. My
Speaker 1: attempts at locating myself, once a habit, now I how
Speaker 1: befelt less like simple air and more like an answer
Speaker 1: to a riddle I hadn't yet learned to ask correctly.
Speaker 1: It was not confusion, not even careful ambiguity. It was
Speaker 1: a contradiction so firmly routed that even the numbers, the
Speaker 1: language of certainty, could not take hold. Some small, heated
Speaker 1: part of my teacher's mind rebelled, surely this was just
Speaker 1: administrative failure at large. But the rest of me, the
Speaker 1: child with the pocket magnifier, felt only the kindling of delight.
Speaker 1: My feet carried me home, but my mind stayed in
Speaker 1: the alley. I had to know was I moving through
Speaker 1: a city or for a story that had borrowed the
Speaker 1: city shape. The momentum of curiosity once begun as hard
Speaker 1: to break. That afternoon, I resolved to approach the oddity directly,
Speaker 1: easing the tools at hand, direct observation, comparison, documentation, and witness.
Speaker 1: Over the next days, I conducted a quiet, systematic survey
Speaker 1: of the alley and its immediate borders. I logged each
Speaker 1: doorway if the one nearest the plaque showed hudoor buzzes,
Speaker 1: one labeled in Italian as Studio Medico, one in Croatian
Speaker 1: as thou jackon at each of a different set of arrows.
Speaker 1: Fliers posted beside the alley's entrance alternated a language by weeks,
Speaker 1: sometimes even within the same cluster. An Italian poetry reading
Speaker 1: scheduled next to Croatian job fare, a German language hiking
Speaker 1: group stapled in between. I examined the trash bins. Some
Speaker 1: bore the tree crest and community tryst. Others showed stat
Speaker 1: grass or ops and a raijka, each municipality's brownding stamped
Speaker 1: with equal authority, yet cohabiting the same pavement. A Troy
Speaker 1: street paint at my feet and saw that were faded
Speaker 1: blue lines used locally to denote official Italians city parking
Speaker 1: round beneath the dusting of chip yellow the Austrian standard.
Speaker 1: Both had been overlaid in places by temporary white stickers,
Speaker 1: now peeling away, revealing all and une. Beneath my next test,
Speaker 1: conspicuous commerce. There was an antique shop in the alley,
Speaker 1: one whose window displayed pocket watches and postcards. I bought
Speaker 1: an old keynscribe with the date in nineteen twenty four,
Speaker 1: nothing extraordinary, and collected a receipt fresh print out list
Speaker 1: to euros and bore an Italian address stamped to day's date.
Speaker 1: I examined a week old slept left lazily on the
Speaker 1: shop counterprinted in Kunez reference in Croatia, out of sight
Speaker 1: of the proprietor. I leaf through an older sales lock,
Speaker 1: this one listing transactions in Austrian shillings, with grass as address,
Speaker 1: three currencies, three cities, nun matching the alice dubborn geography.
Speaker 1: The shopkeeper, when I press, shrugged, apologetic. I just use
Speaker 1: what prints, what the customers expect. A day later, a
Speaker 1: missus Valenti's bakery inquired about paperwork for the Bakeri's rental.
Speaker 1: She produced, with small snort, my uncle's papers, an ornate
Speaker 1: official page stamped in triplicate Italian name, Italian seal, Italian
Speaker 1: tax ide. But my son, she added, rolling her eyes,
Speaker 1: his job from it comes from Croatia, same address. You
Speaker 1: see new papers every time. Isn't that confusing? A press
Speaker 1: testing her patience, she shrugged one shoulder. You get used
Speaker 1: to it. I pay, who asks, feed? Who pays? There
Speaker 1: are worse games in life. Here the contradictions weren't weeds
Speaker 1: in the civic fabric. They were woven into routine. Yet
Speaker 1: instead of fermenting anxiety, they seemed to nurture a gentle,
Speaker 1: even indulgent flexabil I brought my questions to the local library. There,
Speaker 1: old newspapers carried dust in metal drawers, headlines marked by
Speaker 1: border disputes, broad arguments, or minor static about demarcations, yet
Speaker 1: none directly referenced the alley in question. Always disputes were
Speaker 1: bust out to other, more newsworthy places. The librarian, a
Speaker 1: middle aged man with a slight grin, assured me nobody
Speaker 1: in their right mind would print a map for only
Speaker 1: one city. Now new detail emerging. I began to notice
Speaker 1: a pattern on the street. Government agents, sometimes alone, sometimes
Speaker 1: in twos of threes, appeared regularly on the alley, carrying
Speaker 1: metal plates, buckets of pain, or new signs. One day,
Speaker 1: a man in a navy jumpsy replaced two signs in
Speaker 1: rapid succession, first swapping trace Italian black Procroatian one, then
Speaker 1: an hour later returning quietly to install a small stamped
Speaker 1: metal bar reading stat graz the German word misspelled. Within
Speaker 1: twenty four hours, all have vanished. When I asked locals
Speaker 1: about the flurry of activity, I was met with the
Speaker 1: same try hequonimity that them play tomorrow, Maybe new signs come. Commerce,
Speaker 1: too yielded further oddities. Local poster workers delivered letters addressed
Speaker 1: in up to three different country systems, each envelope properly stamped,
Speaker 1: all directed to the same handful of names. When I
Speaker 1: asked a postwoman, she smiled in genuine amusement. You should
Speaker 1: see my sorting Beignett looks like United Nations, but everyone
Speaker 1: still gets their mail. Every time I thought, I put
Speaker 1: my finger on the cause the details would multiply a
Speaker 1: tangle scape. Easy theory. I wonder then less about who
Speaker 1: was doing this, and more about why nobody seemed to mind.
Speaker 1: How could shops issue triple with seats, mail flow in
Speaker 1: three directions, and government agents change signs daily, all without
Speaker 1: revolt or even friction. The more I traced these contradictions,
Speaker 1: the more resistant, they became to simple explanation. Yes, the
Speaker 1: stone itself was real enough beneath my shoes, and the
Speaker 1: bread at a bakery was reliably fresh. But every official record,
Speaker 1: every sign or sticker or printed urer note, disagreed with
Speaker 1: its neighbor, an official version of reality, write in law,
Speaker 1: currency in ink was less certain than the day's weather.
Speaker 1: And all the while, the unwavering bronze plaque in the
Speaker 1: alley gleamed indifferent to my efforts, its numbers so firmly precise,
Speaker 1: refused to belong to a single city, and deep in
Speaker 1: the background, the faint taking beat on as though measuring
Speaker 1: something other than mere seconds. That night, I paged through
Speaker 1: my own records, walking logs, neighborhood sketches, maps worn at
Speaker 1: the creases, and realized that my puzzle was not about
Speaker 1: entangling the pass. The contradiction was not just a reunant
Speaker 1: of shifting borders or the bureaucratic churn of old empires.
Speaker 1: It was a living, breathing, on going negotiation. There in
Speaker 1: the alley, and perhaps in the city at large, the
Speaker 1: present was as unresolved as the past, maintained with all
Speaker 1: the purposeful absurdity of a teacher who changes the rules
Speaker 1: for a brighter outcome. I slept fitfully, questions multiplying like
Speaker 1: numbers in a fibnaccio spiral. Every answers, suggesting a thousand more.
Speaker 1: I no longer aim to solve. I aimed only to
Speaker 1: understand enough to participate. Friday, I brought my gentle inquiry
Speaker 1: to mister Kovak's, settling on the mismatched wooden chair in
Speaker 1: his bric a bract clutter shop. The air was thick
Speaker 1: with the elderly panic of clocks in varying stages of rehabilitation.
Speaker 1: Mister Kovacks himself, must as braced for the day, met
Speaker 1: my curiosity with a knot, the corners of his mouth
Speaker 1: angling toward a knowing smile. I described the plaque, its coordinates,
Speaker 1: and the mapping co he listened had tilted as if
Speaker 1: hearing a melody. He'd nearly forgotten this end of man.
Speaker 1: Every year, he said, in a slow, measured way, to
Speaker 1: ask whose clock I repair? Always a different man. I
Speaker 1: tell each it mixed three times, never one. He let
Speaker 1: the statement bounce in the room like the echo in
Speaker 1: an empty bell. Not the answer I expected, and yet
Speaker 1: I found it oddly clarifying for whom does a tick, then,
Speaker 1: mister Kovacs, he winked, It depends who listens. The tick
Speaker 1: tells one story, the hands another. Some clocks, my friend,
Speaker 1: are admired for running, even when not telling time. He
Speaker 1: turned the subject to practical matters, repairing a tiny French
Speaker 1: carriage clock. He has showed me belonged to nobody, at
Speaker 1: least officially. But the idea stock perhaps place here. It
Speaker 1: was more contingent than I allowed. Not a matter of
Speaker 1: whose borders, but of whose stories won the day. Later
Speaker 1: that afternoon, riffling through a bat of creative city directories
Speaker 1: a flea market onnut an early twentieth century edition, false
Speaker 1: battings of the Alice name co existed across four entries,
Speaker 1: each labeled by a differing national government or regional authority.
Speaker 1: Some years it was labeled Italian, some Croatian. In others,
Speaker 1: if floated between Austrian, German and a retrofitted local dialect.
Speaker 1: No pattern link the changes. Some entries flipped year on year.
Speaker 1: Others reference categories as broad as administrators. I showed this
Speaker 1: to missus Valente while buying another loaf. Ah, yes, she said,
Speaker 1: When I was at school, our book flipped every year.
Speaker 1: One year, Catholic holidays, next eyuxlosport winners, after that, folk
Speaker 1: songs in German. I thought all children had new countries
Speaker 1: in their school books every semester. She laughed, slicing bread
Speaker 1: with brisk efficiency, but only the dose stayed the same.
Speaker 1: Her anecdote floored me. It was not just a bureaucracy
Speaker 1: at fall, nor the memory of treaties sketched on tired
Speaker 1: Dipomat's tables. Somehow of the city the alley really had
Speaker 1: been and was still three places at once. A week ago,
Speaker 1: I'd have shrugged it off as bureaucratic innosher, laughed at
Speaker 1: the slap dash of a lapping of stamps and signs.
Speaker 1: Now it fell closer to something intentional, participatory, not an accident,
Speaker 1: not even a rivalry, a kind of quiet consensus arrived
Speaker 1: at not by decision, but by habit, by the practical
Speaker 1: need to belong to a place that history itself refused
Speaker 1: to fix on any man. The alley, with its black
Speaker 1: extenciled lines, even its air, seemed no longer a borderal
Speaker 1: and but a point of venique communal contingency. One afternoon
Speaker 1: in the sunlit back room of a tidy corner apartment.
Speaker 1: I met miss es Stein, an elderly local historian trusted
Speaker 1: enough by three generations to record births sintess in whatever
Speaker 1: ledger was in use. She accept in my questions with
Speaker 1: poetic patients and a thick bundle of family wrecker's birth
Speaker 1: certificates property deeds spread across her table. The records offer
Speaker 1: the same small stretch of alley were a spectrum, one
Speaker 1: in ornate Italian's grouped, another in Austro Hungarian bureau crites,
Speaker 1: a third and crisp modern Croatian. She ran a careful,
Speaker 1: tremulous finger over their seals. My mother was born upstairs,
Speaker 1: she said, pointing to an address. Different numbers in each document,
Speaker 1: same apartment in reality. This one Noustrian nineteen thirteen lists
Speaker 1: our kitchen as No. Eight and turregus, but when she
Speaker 1: was married, the same kitchen was in envied Mezzo fourteen.
Speaker 1: She trace dates, sometimes only three years passed between regimes.
Speaker 1: Sometimes the names changed twice in a decade. Each document's urgency, stamps, seals,
Speaker 1: signatures was absolute, but none agreed. I picked up a
Speaker 1: letter from a much lighter paralleomo from Canada, postmarked in
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties, addressed to the alley with an Italian
Speaker 1: city name, local district and the familiar house number. This
Speaker 1: misses Stein confided is for my aunt, she always wrote,
Speaker 1: as if we were in her own country. Never mind
Speaker 1: the stamps. The truth is we were, at least to her.
Speaker 1: She poured tea and produced a battered folder. Inside were
Speaker 1: minutes of local council meetings dating back beyond living memory.
Speaker 1: Again and again, inning brown by time was repeated, single
Speaker 1: phrase in each year's language, deliberation to confirm the current
Speaker 1: status of the coal de Mesa alley. In none was
Speaker 1: the actual status specified, No ruling, no declaration, Only the
Speaker 1: same careful in vocation, year after year, regime after regime.
Speaker 1: On my way home, mister Corvacs waved me in from
Speaker 1: the street. Wait, he said. Rummaging in a back cupboard,
Speaker 1: he handed me a map ole fraid marvelously detailed for scalos,
Speaker 1: he insisted, the alley was indicated not by a name,
Speaker 1: but by a bracketed phrase in all three languages, Terror
Speaker 1: and Cognita, dotted rather than solid lines mat the paths,
Speaker 1: the borders softly penciled in, not committed. As I made
Speaker 1: my way past the square at a shop keeper sidled
Speaker 1: up confidential mentioning that whenever major events occurred, to treaties, wars,
Speaker 1: even an especially rare astronomical conjunction, the alley updated overnight.
Speaker 1: It's always been that way. Ask anyone he grinned, and
Speaker 1: yet nothing else changes. Missess fallany over a coffee confirmed
Speaker 1: during the big football championships. Sometimes the official signage flips overnight,
Speaker 1: new flags and windows, but the bread stays the same.
Speaker 1: Returning to my borrowed library table, I come through in
Speaker 1: a large sheaf of local papers. I found small notes,
Speaker 1: once a minor protist, another time official document referring to
Speaker 1: reconciliation of contested administrative units. But always elsewhere, at never
Speaker 1: this place. The city was improbably maintaining a living contradiction,
Speaker 1: not out of confusion, but out of preference, out of practicality,
Speaker 1: out of quiet communal habit. The records did not show chaos.
Speaker 1: They showed routine. I found myself for the first time
Speaker 1: swept by nart electric excitement not felt since my first
Speaker 1: impossible proving grind budgets skull. Perhaps in rare places, reality
Speaker 1: bends itself into consents is not by force, but by
Speaker 1: layered collective agreement, one in which the borders are recalculated,
Speaker 1: not on paper, but in lived narrative, silently renewed each
Speaker 1: time the world's focus shifts. The alley and its plaque
Speaker 1: were not just oddities, I realize, nor accidents of time.
Speaker 1: There were somehow little monuments to the possibility at certain contradictions,
Speaker 1: if embraced, might at last even the most determined of bureaucrats,
Speaker 1: the regulars that Massess Valenty's vickery started greeting me as
Speaker 1: if had grown a new kind of seriousness, one that
Speaker 1: looked past pastry to the underlying weave of things. It
Speaker 1: was not a change I protested my walks these days,
Speaker 1: narrowed to a triangle, mister Corvax's door, the bronze plaque's
Speaker 1: cold certainty, and Massess dines over crowded parlor, as if
Speaker 1: some shape of insight might be triangulated from enough crossings.
Speaker 1: Yet with every circuit it became harder to believe in
Speaker 1: any stable center. Only intersections. Crossings are harmony, composed from
Speaker 1: discordant songs. Invitation in the city. It is rarely formal.
Speaker 1: It's a wedge of bread, a glance, a phrase drop
Speaker 1: with just enough weight that ener you are meant to
Speaker 1: pick it up and examine it from all anger. Misses Stein,
Speaker 1: repotting basil on her window, Ledge told me if he
Speaker 1: want answers, go out when attention is thick, when everyone
Speaker 1: is looking, That's when it matters most. She gestured toward
Speaker 1: her tiny television set, team constantly to international soccer, and
Speaker 1: so on. The next match we heated with flags, few vizillies,
Speaker 1: and the scent of anticipation. I set myself the task
Speaker 1: of watching not teams, but the city's granular details. The
Speaker 1: city was in the fever of the tournament. Banner's flapped
Speaker 1: and balconies in a running commentary, the colors shifting as
Speaker 1: quickly as their owner's allegiances. My alley, unremarkable to those
Speaker 1: racing through it became my theater. I stood beside the plaque,
Speaker 1: notebook in hand, as the day's match played out in
Speaker 1: square behind me, cheers rising and fading with the undulations
Speaker 1: of chance. The changes were both minute and profound. At
Speaker 1: half time, a banner of green white rehadam felt over
Speaker 1: a second floor balcony. Eight minutes later, after Miss Pennaty,
Speaker 1: an old man in a vester merged briskly folding the
Speaker 1: flag away and replacing it with the red white of Austria.
Speaker 1: He did so with no apparent irony. Indeed, a small
Speaker 1: group beneath the plot of the efficiency. I wandered into
Speaker 1: the cafe at the alley math, the one that always
Speaker 1: offered three menus but never enough seats on the wall.
Speaker 1: The Wi Fi password are quietly shifted. When I connected
Speaker 1: it told me you were browsing as a Croatian user.
Speaker 1: I glanced at the German speaking couple at the next table.
Speaker 1: One pointed to her phone and said softly Ween, as
Speaker 1: if the device had whispered her breathless tore. The Albanian barrister,
Speaker 1: who claimed to be from the North of Everywhere, smiled
Speaker 1: as he served espresso. It changes for tax, he explained,
Speaker 1: relevant to who wins to night I press. The address
Speaker 1: changes too, he leaned him with the weight of accumulated shrugs.
Speaker 1: Every festival, newer seat December. We are Italian, summer oft
Speaker 1: in Croatian, but the drink's always strong. It was both
Speaker 1: dazzling and dissing. I took a seat near the wall.
Speaker 1: The sort workeys are hooked for absent landlords and watched
Speaker 1: the regulars fall in a digital nurmad all wires and hardware,
Speaker 1: set himself by the window. I watched as he lobbed
Speaker 1: onto his VPN, and a small smile flickered at the screen.
Speaker 1: I caught his glance and he offered, yesterday I was
Speaker 1: Austrian today, Croatian tomorrow. Who knows depends on the seat,
Speaker 1: the hour, the mood, We laughed. There was no despair,
Speaker 1: if anything, a conspiratorial delight. To test the shifting ground,
Speaker 1: I purchased a couassaw. The receipt spat out with a
Speaker 1: van fare of beeps, listed an Italian address to day's
Speaker 1: date and a veaty code. I didn't recognize the vendor marking.
Speaker 1: My skepticism only winked you keep at souvenir for next week.
Speaker 1: That afternoon, as Italy teen scored, a postal van rolled
Speaker 1: through the alley three visits ten minutes apart, each foun
Speaker 1: evidently identical but carrying a different state run logo. The
Speaker 1: first in a tidy navy of the Croatian post, the
Speaker 1: second a battered Italian post van radio blurring Verdi, the
Speaker 1: third a yellow striped Austrian vehicle driven by the same man,
Speaker 1: now wearing a different cap. I forced myself to cross
Speaker 1: the street, curiosity emboldening me. May I ask to you
Speaker 1: deliver for all three? He grinned and embarrassed. One posts,
Speaker 1: one city, one country, on rotation, he said. He tapped
Speaker 1: his cap the pens whose stamp weighs most this hour.
Speaker 1: His Croatian accent was light, tinged with the clicked confidence
Speaker 1: of some one who had answered this question a hundred
Speaker 1: times as many variations for here, for now I and
Speaker 1: who they need? I stood outside the vintage electronic shop
Speaker 1: on the Alice corner, watching the you compliant trash bins,
Speaker 1: sitting companionably with Bin's labeled statcras a pension as olting
Speaker 1: how laundry in the soft afternoon air, addressed me in
Speaker 1: a mixture of Italian and something Slovac, Perhaps as unsure
Speaker 1: of my expectation as her own. She remembered the alley
Speaker 1: turning Italian just after a World Cup final years ago.
Speaker 1: I bake a cake for both, one side chocolate, one apple,
Speaker 1: she recounted. Neighbors came and ate what they liked. We
Speaker 1: use what comes Nowhere else in the city did the
Speaker 1: flock swarmed so densely, so literally ere The rules seemed
Speaker 1: to mutate in plain view, triggered not by decree, but
Speaker 1: perhaps impossibly by the ordinary operations of notice, pride, mood, attention.
Speaker 1: If you surveyed three doorways, you'd get three allegiances. If
Speaker 1: you chotted them over weeks, the colors and seals would
Speaker 1: rotate like the numbers on a lottery drum. The rules
Speaker 1: elsewhere resulted from policy. Here it was more kind of
Speaker 1: civic weather forecasted, perhaps never control. My notebooks became a patchwork, contradiction,
Speaker 1: but never chaos. I tended to get the owl's outlined
Speaker 1: on a tourist map, measuring carefully against street markers and
Speaker 1: compass bearings, but the lines wavered, the ink refusing to
Speaker 1: anchor itself. When I tried to mark the platt's exact position,
Speaker 1: pressing the point of my pen deliberately into the page,
Speaker 1: it left us much more than a mark. Later, at home,
Speaker 1: I inspected the map again. My notes had faded, the
Speaker 1: pencil scribble erasing itself like a dream bound away by sunlight.
Speaker 1: I held the paper close, ran my fingers along its fibers,
Speaker 1: and realized, with a quiet jolt that nothing in my
Speaker 1: record would ever convincingly fix this place. The alley was
Speaker 1: perpetual motion and civic form, so settled in its contradiction
Speaker 1: that it couldn't be boxed. Its very identity relied on
Speaker 1: the impossibility of anchoring it to any single prisent. It
Speaker 1: wasn't just this week, nor this alley. I began to
Speaker 1: notice the subtle expansion of uncertainty. Other streets, too, bore
Speaker 1: ambiguous names, other doors their addresses had scraped another address
Speaker 1: sdenseled over. But nowhere else did the contradiction stance so
Speaker 1: exposed as here. Perhaps, I thought, the alley drew its
Speaker 1: resilience from enduring beneath the gaze of so many, becoming
Speaker 1: harder to resolve, precisely because it had drawn attention for
Speaker 1: so long. The sense grew unsettling and exhilarating that the
Speaker 1: contradiction may not be local at all, but a phenomenon
Speaker 1: radiating outward, tied to something larger and more generitive and
Speaker 1: simple oversight or local tradition. Among my trove of documents
Speaker 1: and stories, it was misses Steine who provided the key.
Speaker 1: I returned to her apartment in the eddy of the
Speaker 1: match week bodded notebook in hand, Her window was open,
Speaker 1: the ere fresh, her basal thriving. I described the play
Speaker 1: of flags and receipts, the shifting postal vans and digital addresses.
Speaker 1: She listened, sifting through her stack of records with the
Speaker 1: smooth assurance of some one who'd found herself at the
Speaker 1: waterfall of history's recurring forgetfulness. You know, my husband used
Speaker 1: to say. She offered that countries are most real the
Speaker 1: morning after a victory or a loss. On those days,
Speaker 1: everyone agrees for just one breath on the flag, what
Speaker 1: ant them? Even the mood After that it blurs again.
Speaker 1: I wondered if that meant the alley shoppened into clarity
Speaker 1: at moments of focus, only to dissolve back into gracious,
Speaker 1: lived ambiguity. I think there are places, masses, Steine continued,
Speaker 1: where the story is so layered, so contested, so wished
Speaker 1: for and rewritten, that it simply cannot belong to one
Speaker 1: telling each news. A layer does not erase the old.
Speaker 1: It just its top, waiting its turn some of us.
Speaker 1: She straightened the fitted document, preferred it that way. That
Speaker 1: echo of stories, consensus, and the impossibility of perfect definition
Speaker 1: began to form a thread through my notes What if
Speaker 1: this was not merely a civic tolerance for ambiguity nor
Speaker 1: a bureaucratic missap What if the alley itself operated as
Speaker 1: a folcym it's reality to into the frequencies of shared attention,
Speaker 1: narrative mood. On Sunday, with the city cap between games,
Speaker 1: I arrayed every map, receipt and document I had onto
Speaker 1: my kitchen table, a scroll timelines, and on a whim,
Speaker 1: began overlaying lists of major events. Wars concluded, a treaties signed,
Speaker 1: switches in daylight, saving local holidays eclipses even the years
Speaker 1: in which international sports draws reached fever pitch. A pattern emerged,
Speaker 1: a mirror chain of local and global events, each coinciding
Speaker 1: with somemmerset in Alice's identity. It was too regular, too
Speaker 1: clean to be random. I brought my suspicions to the
Speaker 1: local university, lugging my maps and curious receipts to the
Speaker 1: geography department under the pretense of wanting to discuss boundaries
Speaker 1: and GPS variants. The young geographer I met a woman
Speaker 1: with rings on every finger and hair. Licacy Storm raised
Speaker 1: an eyebrow at my sheaf. We've seen oddities she admitted,
Speaker 1: but mostly were computations. Fuzzy old maps were unded co ordinates,
Speaker 1: So sometimes location is less math than memory. She surveyed
Speaker 1: my collection, then said, but this is persistent. I've never
Speaker 1: seen a place defy not just projection but intention. She
Speaker 1: explained in brisk sentences that mapping systems sometimes allocate ambiguous
Speaker 1: or lost points of data arbitrarily. Especially were multiple survey
Speaker 1: authorities of a lay map century of a century. Generally,
Speaker 1: she said, these geta raised resolved, never so visible, and
Speaker 1: definitely not in a place with this much daily used,
Speaker 1: not without people wanting it that way oppressed. So what
Speaker 1: decides were places? Her reply was both sharp and gentle.
Speaker 1: The maps, yes, but more of the people who believe
Speaker 1: the map when they stand there, The city clerks who
Speaker 1: filed the paperwork, the shopkeepers who use the address that
Speaker 1: suits the moment, consenses more than coordinates makes a place real.
Speaker 1: She spoke of other places, tiny islands, border towns, lost
Speaker 1: villages where a postal code had at lasted a landed reference.
Speaker 1: But urally, she pointed a ringed finger're at my photos
Speaker 1: is an illusion so persistent it has become real, more
Speaker 1: real than the maps themselves. It was an error, nor category,
Speaker 1: nor accidental layering my alley. This tangle of doors and
Speaker 1: clocks and street markers was an example of something subtler,
Speaker 1: the power of sustained gently contradictory stories, never fully reconciled,
Speaker 1: but always re enacted in low ritual receipt flag I
Speaker 1: left pages under my arm, the geographer's words echoing somewhere
Speaker 1: deeper than theory. Not just over lay, then, but a
Speaker 1: kind of memetic borderland, the place tuned always to the loudest,
Speaker 1: most recent, or most needful story. This meaning, perhaps eve
Speaker 1: it is physical address, was contingent on the very act
Speaker 1: of shared noticing. That evening, after another rand of government
Speaker 1: agent swap signs at desk, I waited in the half
Speaker 1: flight by the plaque, watching for the first time as
Speaker 1: three men arrange metal panels in heated yet civil debate.
Speaker 1: Their uniforms mismatched in ways that seemed choreograph to side
Speaker 1: patch sewn over another, name plates in three different languages.
Speaker 1: I couldn't place their language, though it seemed to borrow
Speaker 1: phrases from all three nations. They set up a ladder
Speaker 1: affixed a plaqu whose colors shimmered and distinctly between the
Speaker 1: metallic in the wooden, and after a pause, stepped back
Speaker 1: to admire their handyrick. Their discussion melted between laughter and
Speaker 1: exacting care, as if mounting the sign was a form
Speaker 1: of ritual as serious and necessary as anything done in
Speaker 1: public view. I caught their eyes and nodded, feeling the
Speaker 1: peculiar sense of being simultaneously invisible an address. One of them,
Speaker 1: a man with a close cropped beard and an Austrian badge,
Speaker 1: winked in pantomime. The sording hat with his cap as
Speaker 1: they left the alley seemed to exhale its certainty, washing
Speaker 1: into the dust, like tied through a breach. I found
Speaker 1: my way up the alley to mister Kovacs, who stood
Speaker 1: in a shop stoorway twiddling a long handle keyp between
Speaker 1: his fingers. You know, he said, as if we'd been
Speaker 1: in the midst of conversation. Clocks are not for minutes,
Speaker 1: but for meetings. The time and they keep here is
Speaker 1: the one everyone agrees to use. I pointed to the
Speaker 1: wall clock above his bench, its pendulum swinging with a
Speaker 1: nonchal on hesitation. But if no one agrees, he shook
Speaker 1: his head. Agreement does not have to be declared it
Speaker 1: is made again and again by stepping inside at an
Speaker 1: hour that feels right. The clocks, the signs, even your receipts,
Speaker 1: they are only the surface. What matters is the consensus beneath.
Speaker 1: He set the key into a heavy brass clock, and
Speaker 1: with a thoughtful ay at wounded, the ticking resumed, not
Speaker 1: quite matching the beat of the others. Listen, we stood
Speaker 1: in silence, only the layer pulse of his clocks filling
Speaker 1: the air. I pressed him gently this time, do ye
Speaker 1: know why this continues? Why not decide once and for all?
Speaker 1: Kovac shrugged, a magician with holding an unnecessary explanation. The
Speaker 1: every one, officials, neighbors, post men, children. They preferred the flexibility.
Speaker 1: Or perhaps they have learned that impossible places are needed
Speaker 1: when everything else is argued to dust. Here is somewhere
Speaker 1: to practice being generous with contradiction. He tapped the clock.
Speaker 1: Perhaps we all have a need for places that are
Speaker 1: sometimes and always more than one thing. The clocks forgive
Speaker 1: their own errors, so does this alley A leap heart
Speaker 1: commed in ways that could not be tied to any answer.
Speaker 1: I returned to miss Esstein to share what I gathered
Speaker 1: this story and considered my findings face luminous and lamp light,
Speaker 1: amid the clutter of her archive and living room. Would
Speaker 1: ye want to fix it? She asked, not really as
Speaker 1: a challenge, but as a kindness. No, I realized, or
Speaker 1: at least anymore. Maybe this is the only stable thing,
Speaker 1: A refusal to resolve what must remain her open, a
Speaker 1: share of permission not to choose, she smiled. You see, then,
Speaker 1: it is a kind of home, not for one story
Speaker 1: or another, but for them, all stacked, not erased, whispering
Speaker 1: over each other, like these records. She gestured to an
Speaker 1: array of mismatched birth certificates, each true in its own breath.
Speaker 1: I thought of her Anne's letter, posted from Canada, but
Speaker 1: naming the alley as Italian, Croatian, Austrian, all in one line,
Speaker 1: and felt the strange pulse of reality bending, not in
Speaker 1: confusion but an invitation. Here was the climax, a contradiction,
Speaker 1: not as air, but a structure at the impossibility, not
Speaker 1: as glitch, but as quiet civility, a living monument to
Speaker 1: coexistence without resolution. I found myself walking the alley at dusk,
Speaker 1: no longer counting signs or measuring paint, but simply part
Speaker 1: of the drift trailing the soft echo of clocks and conversation.
Speaker 1: The ambiguity was not closed. It was open, stretched into
Speaker 1: daily practiced by the people who had unconsciously or not
Speaker 1: chosen ever to force their stories into competition. Suddenly, the
Speaker 1: city's other ambiguities appeared less like failures and more like strategies,
Speaker 1: a way of refusing any reduction of lived complexity to
Speaker 1: sinkle lines. I saw kitchens where grandmother's blendid recipes renamed
Speaker 1: each year, bakeries that changed holiday cookies with the times,
Speaker 1: children's skipping in invented dialects knew each generation. The ambiguity
Speaker 1: was as real and nourishing as the bread. I would
Speaker 1: never record the alley perfectly. No ledger or map could
Speaker 1: fix what was deliberately left and fixed. Instead, I began
Speaker 1: to notice my own pleasure at ambiguity, a kind of
Speaker 1: humility I respect for the lay mesthods belonging. It was
Speaker 1: not that the need for order had vanished, sronly that
Speaker 1: it was now less urgent, less jealous certainties. Once the
Speaker 1: reigning glory of my teacher's heart had shifted to partnership
Speaker 1: with wonder, one could do worse in retirement than deserved.
Speaker 1: He to misses Stein, collect fresh bread from Missess ballanty,
Speaker 1: and bow to mister Kovax's clocks. The alley had not changed,
Speaker 1: but I had opened out into a world where precision
Speaker 1: walked hand in hand with story, and contradiction was not
Speaker 1: a threat but a quiet, sustaining ritual. As the evening
Speaker 1: closed in, I found myself again before the bronze plaque,
Speaker 1: the cisy reathed in the lavender hush of oncoming night.
Speaker 1: I ran my fingers along the impossible cord and its
Speaker 1: numbers that belonged no were precisely, but every word gender.
Speaker 1: The ticking steady now felt less like a summons than
Speaker 1: a quiet reassurance. The plaque was not a puzzle to solve,
Speaker 1: but a threshold and invitation to enter a place, if
Speaker 1: not on any map, then authentically in the sever changing
Speaker 1: ever true. Now beneath the numbers, the alley pressed on
Speaker 1: three cities, three stories, infinite agreements made each other anew
Speaker 1: and I wondered if this place could exist so vividly
Speaker 1: contradictory and still remain intact, how many other allos, corners, fields,
Speaker 1: kitchens and lives board the mark of impossibility, unnoticed except
Speaker 1: by those willing to see how much of the world
Speaker 1: is held steady not by definition, but by the shard
Speaker 1: of story that endures when nothing else quite fits. As
Speaker 1: I turned for home, I heard the clock chining the hour,
Speaker 1: each on their own time, all perfectly, impossibly in consensus.
Speaker 1: And that is the end. Thank you for listening, and
Speaker 1: I will see you in the next one.