Three o’clock in the morning, Delfshaven. The old harbour is black and still, and the gabled houses along it are mostly dark. I walk the length of the quay and back, counting the windows that are lit.
The count
Forty-one. Forty-one windows. Forty-one reasons to be awake. A kitchen with a single bulb and somebody moving slowly at the sink. A top-floor room with the blue flicker of a television. A narrow window above a shop where a figure sits at a desk, perfectly still, reading or writing or simply thinking. A bathroom, briefly, then dark again.
I have no idea who these people are. That is the point. At three in the morning a city stops pretending to be a crowd and becomes a scatter of separate lives, each one lit by its own small lamp.
The guesses
It is impossible not to guess. The kitchen: a new parent, warming a bottle. The television: somebody who cannot sleep since a loss. The desk: a student with a deadline, or a translator in another time zone, or a novelist who only works at night. The guesses say more about the guesser than about the lit windows, but they make the walk feel less solitary.
At half past three a light goes out in a house by the bridge, and another one comes on two doors down, as if the city were passing a torch along the quay. I walk home past forty windows, and then thirty-nine.
Forty-one windows. Forty-one reasons to be awake.
