Can I help you?

My suitcase is missing.

Ticket, please.

What?

Your ticket, please.
The Paris flight? What was in it?

Personal belongings. Clothes, shirts.

75 kilograms?

... To tell the truth, my friend was in it.

I'm leaving tomorrow. I wanted to say goodbye.

Goodbye.

I'd like you to tell me in more detail about the dream you had.

You were fifty years old... and you were happy.

And in this dream, was there someone else?

There was.

Who?

You woke up... and you smiled at someone next to you. I don't know who.

That's what will happen? In twenty-five or thirty years?

Yes.

What else do you know? Who are you?
I feel something important is happening around me. It scares me.
... I was wondering why you mentioned that sailor.

Do you know why?

Yes.
Because you didn't want to tell me something more important.
About the woman that you loved.
She betrayed you.
She betrayed you and you never understood why. And you kept on loving her.

How do you know all of this?

It wasn't hard to guess.
What was she like?

She graduated two years before me.
She was blond, delicate, radiant... with a long neck.
Her clothing and her furniture were all light-colored. In the foyer there was a mirror in a white frame. It was in that mirror, one night, that I saw her white legs spread... with a man between them.
I stopped believing.
Maybe I met the woman.
Maybe you're the woman I never met.

The story doesn't end there.

No.

One, two, three. Four, five, six. Seven?

Seven.

Why did you do it?

Why did I turn myself in?

Yes.

To see what you'd do once you saw it in your paper.

You thought I would come?

After our last conversation, I thought so.

Why?
Do you expect something from me?

Yes.
Before you left, you mentioned pity. Afterwards, I realized it was disgust.
Will you sit down a moment?
Will you smile for me?
The day you left, you cried.

I cried.

And I shut off my radio. I sat down at my desk.
The fountain pen I'd used all my life ran out of ink, so I took a pencil and wrote letters to my neighbors and to the police. I mailed them that evening, while you were sleeping soundly.

I wasn't sleeping. I'd gone bowling.

Bowling?
Do you remember that couple's conversation? The boy and the girl?

I remember.

They wanted to go, too, that same evening. Maybe you were right next to them.

Maybe.
You didn't like her.

It's almost over. I was right.

You seem happy about it.
Did you provoke it?
... Yes or no?

Because of my eavesdropping and my trial, the girl met another man.

Since then, she's been alone. I asked my sister to go see her. She stayed three days.
In one week I'm going to England. I'm abandoning my mother and sister. Every day she gets a little worse. I shouldn't leave.

You can't live their lives for them.

I love her. If only I could help.

You can. Be.

What do you mean?

That's all- be.
Do you like it? Today is my birthday.

I didn't know.

35 years ago today, at about the same time, 5:00, I acquitted a man. A sailor.
It was a tough time in my life. I've since realized that I made a mistake- he was guilty.

What happened to him?

I did my own investigation. He's married with three children. A grandson. Living in peace.

So what you did was necessary. And you did it well.
... Don't you understand? You saved him.

Perhaps. But how many others could I have acquitted? Even guilty?
Deciding what is true and what isn't now seems to me... a lack of modesty.

Vanity?

Vanity.
I wonder what I'd do in their place... the same thing.

You'd throw stones?

In their place? Of course.
And that goes for everyone I judged.
Given their lives... I would steal, I would kill, I would lie. Of course I would.
All that because I wasn't in their shoes, but mine.

Is there someone you love?

No.

Have you ever loved?

Yesterday I dreamt... I dreamt of you. You were forty or fifty years old and you were happy.

Do your dreams come true?

It's been years since I dreamt of something nice.

Sasha at Warehouse, Manchester.