This is Paul Auster’s famous story: "Auggie Wren’s Christmas". Enjoy.

I heard this story from Auggie Wren.  Since Auggie doesn’t come off too well in it, at least not as well as he’d like to, he’s asked me not to use his real name.  Other than that, the whole business about the lost wallet and the blind woman and the Christmas dinner is just as he told it to me. Auggie and I have known each other for close to eleven years now.  He works behind the counter of a cigar store on Court Street in downtown Brooklyn, and since it’s the only store that carries the little Dutch cigars I like to smoke, I go in there fairly often.  For a long time, I didn’t give much thought to Auggie Wren.  He was the strange little man who wore a hooded blue sweatshirt and sold me cigars and magazines, the impish, wisecracking character who always had something funny to say about the weather, the Mets or the politicians in Washington, and that was the extent of it. But then one day several years ago he happened to be looking through a magazine in the store, and he stumbled across a review of one of my books.   He knew it was me because a photograph accompanied the review, and after that things changed between us.  I was no longer just another customer to Auggie, I had become a distinguished person.  Most people couldn’t care less about books and writers, but it turned out that Auggie considered himself an artist.  Now that he had cracked the secret of who I was, he embraced me as an ally, a confidant, a brother-in-arms. To tell the truth, I found it rather embarrassing.  Then, almost inevitably, a moment came when he asked if I would be willing to look at his photographs.  Given his enthusiasm and goodwill, there didn’t seem any way I could turn him down. God knows what I was expecting.  At the very least, it wasn’t what Auggie showed me the next day.  In a small, windowless room at the back of the store, he opened a cardboard box and pulled out twelve identical photo albums.  This was his life’s work, he said, and it didn’t take him more than five minutes a day to do it.  Every morning for the past twelve years, he had stood on the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Clinton Street at precisely seven o’clock and had taken a single color photograph of precisely the same view.  The project now ran to more than four thousand photographs.  Each album represented a different year, and all the pictures were laid out in sequence, from January 1 to December 31, with the dates carefully recorded under each one. As I flipped through the albums and began to study Auggie’s work, I didn’t know what to think.  My first impression was that it was the oddest, most bewildering thing I had ever seen.  All the pictures were the same.  The whole project was a numbing onslaught of repetition, the same street and the same buildings over and over again, an unrelenting delirium of redundant images.  I couldn’t think of anything to say to Auggie, so I continued turning pages, nodding my head in feigned appreciation.  Auggie himself seemed unperturbed, watching me with a broad smile on his face, but after he’d seen that I’d been at it for several minutes, he suddenly interrupted and said, "You’re going too fast. You’ll never get it if you don’t slow down."

He was right, of course.  If you don’t take the time to look, you’ll
never manage to see anything.  I picked up another album and forced
myself to go more deliberately.  I paid closer attention to the details,
took note of the shifts in weather, watched for the changing angles of
light as the seasons advanced.  Eventually I was able to detect
subtle differences in the traffic flow, to anticipate the rhythm of the
different days (the commotion of workday mornings, the relative stillness
of weekends, the contrast between Saturdays and Sundays).  And then,
little by little, I began to recognize the faces of the people in the
background, the passers-by on their way to work, the same people in the
same spot every morning, living an instant of their lives in the field of
Auggie’s camera.

Once I got to know them, I began to study their postures, the way they carried
themselves from one morning to the next, trying to discover their moods from
these surface indications, as if I could imagine stories for them, as if I could
penetrate the invisible dramas locked inside their bodies.  I picked up
another album.  I was no longer bored, no longer puzzled as I had been
at first.  Auggie was photographing time, I realized, both natural time
and human time, and he was doing it by planting himself in one tiny corner
of the world and willing it to be his own, by standing guard in the space
he had chosen for himself.  As he watched me pore over his work,
Auggie continued to smile with pleasure.  Then, almost as if he’d
been reading my thoughts, he began to recite a line from Shakespeare.
  "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow," he muttered under his breath,
"time creeps on its petty pace."  I understood then that he knew
exactly what he was doing.

That was more than two thousand pictures ago.  Since that day, Auggie
and I have discussed his work many times, but it was only last week that
I learned how he acquired his camera and started taking pictures in the
first place.  That was the subject of the story he told me, and I’m
still struggling to make sense of it.

Earlier that same week, a man from the New York Times called me
and asked if I would be willing to write a short story that would appear
in the paper on Christmas morning.  My first impulse was to say no,
but the man was very charming and persistent, and by the end of the
conversation I told him I would give it a try.  The moment I hung
up the phone, however, I fell into a deep panic.  What did I know
about Christmas? I asked myself.  What did I know about writing
short stories on commission?

I spent the next several days in despair, warring with the ghosts of
Dickens, O.Henry and other masters of the Yuletide spirit.  The very
phrase "Christmas story" had unpleasant associations for me, evoking
dreadful outpourings of hypocritical mush and treacle.  Even at their
best, Christmas stories were no more than wish-fulfillment dreams, fairy
tales for adults, and I’d be damned if I’d ever allowed myself to write
something like that.  And yet, how could anyone propose to write
an unsentimental Christmas story?  It was a contradiction in terms,
an impossibility, an out-and-out conundrum.  One might just as well
imagine a racehorse without legs, or a sparrow without wings.

I got nowhere.  On Thursday I went out for a long walk, hoping the air
would clear my head.  Just past noon, I stopped in at the cigar store
to replenish my supply, and there was Auggie, standing behind the counter
as always.  He asked me how I was.  Without really meaning to, I
found myself unburdening my troubles to him.  "A Christmas story?" he
said after I had finished.  "Is that all? If you buy me lunch, my friend,
I’ll tell you the best Christmas story you ever heard.  And I guarantee
that every word of it is true."

We walked down the block to Jack’s, a cramped and boisterous delicatessen
with good pastrami sandwiches and photographs of old Dodgers teams hanging
on the walls.  We found a table in the back, ordered our food, and
then Auggie launched into his story.

"It was the summer of seventy-two," he said.  "A kid came in one morning
and started stealing things from the store.  He must have been about
nineteen or twenty, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more pathetic
shoplifter in my life.  He’s standing by the rack of paperbacks along
the far wall and stuffing books into the pockets of his raincoat.  It
was crowded around the counter just then, so I didn’t see him at first. 
But once I noticed what he was up to, I started to shout.  He took
off like a jackrabbit, and by the time I managed to get out from behind
the counter, he was already tearing down Atlantic Avenue.  I chased
after him for about half a block, and then I gave up.  He’d dropped
something along the way, and since I didn’t feel like running any more,
I bent down to see what it was.

"It turned out to be his wallet.  There wasn’t any money inside,
but his driver’s license was there along with three or four snapshots. 
I suppose I could have called the cops and had him arrested.  I
had his name and address from the license, but I felt kind of sorry
for him.  He was just a measly little punk, and once I looked at
those pictures in his wallet, I couldn’t bring myself to feel very angry
at him.  Robert Goodwin.  That was his name.  In one of
the pictures, I remember, he was standing with his arm around his
mother or grandmother.  In another one he was sitting there at age
nine or ten dressed in a baseball uniform with a big smile on his face.
I just didn’t have the heart.  He was probably on dope now, I figured.
  A poor kid from Brooklyn without much going for him, and who
cared about a couple of trashy paperbacks anyway?

"So I held on to the wallet.  Every once in a while I’d get a little
urge to send it back to him, but I kept delaying and never did anything
about it.  Then Christmas rolls around and I’m stuck with nothing to
do.   The boss usually invites me over to his house to spend the day,
but that year he and his family were down in Florida visiting relatives.
  So I’m sitting in my apartment that morning feeling a little sorry
for myself, and then I see Robert Goodwin’s wallet lying on a shelf in the
kitchen.  I figure what the hell, why not do something nice for once,
and I put on my coat and go out to return the wallet in person.

"The address was over in Boerum Hill, somewhere in the projects.  It was
freezing out that day, and I remember getting lost a few times trying to
find the right building.  Everything looks the same in that place, and
you keep going over the same ground thinking you’re somewhere else.
Anyway, I finally get to the apartment I’m looking for and ring the bell.
Nothing happens.  I assume no one’s there, but I try again just to
make sure.  I wait a little longer, and just when I’m about to give
up, I hear someone shuffling to the door.  An old woman’s voice asks
who’s there, and I say I’m looking for Robert Goodwin.  ‘Is that you,
Robert?’ the old woman says, and then she undoes about fifteen locks and
opens the door.

"She has to be at least eighty, maybe ninety years old, and the first thing
I notice about her is that she’s blind.  ‘I knew you’d come, Robert,’
she says.  ‘I knew you wouldn’t forget your Granny Ethel on Christmas.’
  And then she opens her arms as if she’s about to hug me.

"I didn’t have much time to think, you understand.  I had to say something
real fast, and before I knew what was happening, I could hear the words
coming out of my mouth.  ‘That’s right, Granny Ethel,’ I said.
‘I came back to see you on Christmas.’  Don’t ask me why I did it.
I don’t have any idea.  Maybe I didn’t want to disappoint her or something,
I don’t know.  It just came out that way, and then this old woman
was suddenly hugging me there in front of the door, and I was hugging her
back.

"I didn’t exactly say I was her grandson.  Not in so many words, at
least, but that was the implication.  I wasn’t trying to trick her,
though.  It was like a game we’d both decided to play – without having
to discuss the rules.  I mean, that woman knew I wasn’t her
grandson Robert.  She was old and dotty, but she wasn’t so far gone
that she couldn’t tell the difference between a stranger and her own
flesh and blood.  But it made her happy to pretend, and since I had
nothing better to do anyway, I was happy to go along with her.

"So we went into the apartment and spent the day together.  The place
was a real dump, I might add, but what can you expect from a blind woman
who does her own housekeeping?  Every time she asked me a question about
how I was, I would lie to her.  I told her I found a good job working
in a cigar store, I told her I was about to get married, I told her a hundred
pretty stories, and she made like she believed every one of them.
‘That’s fine, Robert,’ she would say, nodding her head and smiling.
‘I always knew things would work out for you.’

"After a while, I started getting pretty hungry.  There didn’t seem to be
much food in the house, so I went out to a store in the neighborhood and
brought back a mess of stuff.  A precooked chicken, vegetable soup,
a bucket of potato salad, a chocolate cake, all kinds of things.
Ethel had a couple of bottles of wine stashed in her bedroom, and so between
us we managed to put together a fairly decent Christmas dinner.
We both got a little tipsy from the wine, I remember, and after the meal was
over we went out to sit in the living room, where the chairs were more
comfortable.  I had to take a pee, so I excused myself and went to
the bathroom down the hall.  That’s where things took yet another turn.
  It was ditsy enough doing my little jig as Ethel’s grandson, but
what I did next was positively crazy, and I’ve never forgiven myself for it.

"I go into the bathroom, and stacked up against the wall next to the shower,
I see a pile of six or seven cameras.  Brand-new thirty-five-millimeter
cameras, still in their boxes, top-quality merchandise.  I figure this is
the work of the real Robert, a storage place for one of his recent hauls.
  I’ve never taken a picture in my life, and I’ve certainly never
stolen anything, but the moment I see those cameras sitting in the bathroom,
I decide I want one of them for myself.  Just like that.  And
without even stopping to think about it, I tuck one of those boxes under
my arm and go back to the living room.

"I couldn’t have been gone for more than three minutes, but in that time
Granny Ethel had fallen asleep in her chair.  Too much Chianti, I
suppose.  I went into the kitchen to wash the dishes, and she slept
through the whole racket, snoring like a baby.  There didn’t seem
any point in disturbing her, so I decided to leave.  I couldn’t even
write a note to say goodbye, seeing that she was blind and all, so I just
left.  I put her grandson’s wallet on the table, picked up the camera
again, and walked out of the apartment.  And that’s the end of the
story."

"Did you ever go back to see her?" I asked.

"Once," he said.  "About three or four months later.  I felt so
bad about stealing the camera, I hadn’t even used it yet.  I finally
made up my mind to return it, but Ethel wasn’t there any more.  I don’t
know what happened to her, but someone else had moved into the apartment,
and he couldn’t tell me where she was."

"She probably died."

"Yeah, probably."

"Which means that she spent her last Christmas with you."

"I guess so.  I never thought of it that way."

"It was a good deed, Auggie.  It was a nice thing you did for her."

"I lied to her, and then I stole from her.  I don’t see how you
can call that a good deed."

"You made her happy.  And the camera was stolen anyway. 
It’s not as if the person you took it from really owned it."

"Anything for art, eh, Paul?"

"I wouldn’t say that.  But at least you put the camera to
good use."

"And now you’ve got your Christmas story, don’t you?"

"Yes," I said.  "I suppose I do."

I paused for a moment, studying Auggie as a wicked grin spread across
his face.  I couldn’t be sure, but the look in his eyes at that moment
was so mysterious, so fraught with the glow of some inner delight, that
it suddenly occurred to me that he had made the whole thing up.  I
was about to ask him if he’d been putting me on, but then I realized he’d
never tell.  I had been tricked into believeing him, and that was
the only thing that mattered.  As long as there’s one person to
believe it, there’s no story that can’t be true."

"You’re an ace, Auggie," I said.  "Thanks for being so helpful."

"Any time," he answered, still looking at me with that maniacal light
in his eyes.  "After all, if you can’t share your secrets with your
friends, what kind of a friend are you?"

"I guess I owe you one."

"No you don’t.  Just put it down the way I told it to you, and
you don’t owe me a thing."

"Except the lunch."

"That’s right.  Except the lunch."

I returned Auggie’s smile with a smile of my own, and then I called out to
the waiter and asked for the check.