As time went by, part of his memory of the eleven missing years came back. A few weeks later, he even remembered his years in Australia. But the two years of his life just before the accident were still a complete blank. Three weeks after his injury, he went back to the village where he had been living for those two years. Everything looked unfamiliar and he did not recall ever having been there before.

Despite this, he was able to take up his old job again in the village and go to do it satisfactorily. But he often got lost when walking around the village and found it difficult to remember what he had done during the day. Slowly, however, his memory continued to return so that, about ten weeks after the accident, he could even remember most of the previous two years. There remained only one complete gap in his memory: he could remember absolutely nothing about what he had done a few minutes immediately before the accident or the the accident itself. This part of his memory never came back.