This third volume of Balle’s novel departs from the first two installments in that Tara discovers that she is not alone. “In the eighteenth of November, people follow patterns, and as long as you don’t draw them out of their established routines, they will stay in their allotted places. They don’t walk down the steps one day and up the steps the next…. As the man in the green shirt was going up the steps, now wearing blue, it began to dawn on me that I might not be the only one at odds with the eighteenth of November.” She meets Henry Dale and they trade stories and commiserate. “I have met someone who remembers. This sentence has been buzzing around in my head since this morning, and now I am typing it here…. Now there are two of us. Two of a kind: remembering, trapped in the eighteenth of November and no longer alone.”
Eventually, Henry moves in with Tara and they discuss how they have been spending their eighteenth of Novembers, “He says he understands my interest in the Romans. That it’s no surprise the Romans brought us together—with a bit of help from coincidence, of course. We had both landed on the banks of the Rhine, at the border of the Roman Empire. We had both lost the futures which once stretched out before us: the nineteenth
and the twentieth and all the weeks and months we had imagined lay in store, but little by little had been erased. It’s hardly surprising that one turns to the past…. Henry believed that anyone paying attention to the world around them would inevitably become interested in the Romans—or at least in the fall of the Roman Empire…. When you inhabit the same day for so long, you start to see all the cracks. There’s nowhere to hide anymore. We have come to a standstill in a time that is starting to crumble. Europe in freefall. The final days of the West. It’s no wonder one feels compelled to
follow in the Romans’ footsteps. One wants to know what led them to their downfall…. We were bidding farewell to the Western world. Goodbye, aufWiedersehen, ciao, adieu. Buona sera, Evening Lands…. I had never been interested in the mechanics of history, in patterns and progress and necessity, periods and waves, glory and decline. I had been interested in
what brought the Romans to a halt…. It had always been about the things, I said. The objects. The material. I was interested in what existed. What had been carried through the centuries.”
At the end of this volume, Tara and Henry discover that it is not just the two of them who are stuck in the eighteenth of November. At first, they meet Olga Periti and Ralf Kern. “We’ve held a meeting about our future and where we should live. We are sticking to the agreement that we meet every hundred days. That we belong together. We have had a meeting about belonging together, and we do. We belong together when we agree and when we no longer agree…. Now we are searching for a place to live. We’ve looked at apartments in the city and houses on the outskirts. It isn’t easy, as we are four people who need to reach an agreement. Four people in the eighteenth of November. Who knows if there are others? Maybe we are five, or eight, or sixteen. Maybe even more. People who wake up every morning to the eighteenth of November. It’s not difficult to imagine. Not anymore…. Ralf has calculated the probability of there being others, and the odds are greater than you’d think. If there are only four of us, it’s a miracle that we managed to find each other…. And then suddenly there they were. Yesterday. As in, five people at the gate. They had parked their car, climbed out and buzzed the intercom…. This was an insistent noise, and the eighteenth of November doesn’t have any insistent noise from the buzzer at our gate. And yet it did.”
