by Peter Stamm
Thomas felt his shoulder being shaken, and for an instant it was as though that was the only thing there was in the world, this mild motion that was spreading like a wave, eventually going through his entire body. When he opened his eyes, a young man was standing at his table. He had curly black hair and a wide contemptuous sneering expression. Tired? he asked. Just a bit, said Thomas. He must have been asleep because the bar was almost empty. You’d better go home then, said the man, come back to us when you’re feeling a bit more like it. Although the man’s tone wasn’t unpleasant, he made it sound like an order. Thomas went up to the bar and paid with his card. He had only had two bottles of beer, and yet he was staggering slightly. When he turned to leave, he saw the young man still had his eyes on him. In the cloakroom he hesitated briefly before taking a coat at random off the peg, it was a dark green waxed jacket, and quickly left the premises. Only now did he look at his watch, it was already past one. The rain had stopped, but the streets were still wet. There were no lights on in any of the village houses, just a couple of streetlamps giving a murky illumination. Thomas walked down the main street and quickly left the village behind him. After a few hundred yards, he stopped and went through the pockets of the jacket he had picked up. He found a lighter and a ballpoint, a packet of herbal sweets, a couple of receipts, some loose change, a pocket calendar, and an empty spectacle case. He held on to the calendar, the ballpoint, the money, and the lighter, and dumped the rest of the things.
After about half an hour he was on a wider road. Now he knew where he was. Once he had made his way through the little town he was on the edge of, he would enter sparsely inhabited woodland, where he would feel safe. From time to time a car came along, but it was so quiet that Thomas could hear the sound of the motor a long way off and was able to conceal himself behind a hedge or the corner of a building.
He followed the road into the town center, where there was a small pedestrian zone. He walked down a shopping street, looking for something to eat. Some time ago, he had come across an article in the newspaper about people who lived perfectly well from scavenging the trash containers of supermarkets, but all there was here were fashion and shoe shops, a jeweler’s, a sports and fitness store, and a bakery. When he finally saw a supermarket, he found the niche with the ramp where the containers stood locked behind a grate, like the entrance to a fortification.
The dead town had something ghostly about it. Thomas had a notion that all the inhabitants had hit the road as he had and left everything the way it happened to be. He was reminded of a book he had read as a child and never forgotten. In it, almost everyone on earth had been turned to stone, the only survivors a group of children, and they were traveling around the world in an airship. After some time they ran into another group of survivors and fought them to the death. Thomas remembered how the ending had disappointed him. If it had been up to him, then the journey around the deserted planet could have gone on forever and ever.
At the station, there was a vending machine, and Thomas bought himself candy bars, bags of chips, and sugary drinks until he had no more change. He bundled up his purchases in his sweater. Next to the machine was a display of a map of the town, plus a hiking map of the surrounding area. He memorized the way he needed to take as well as he could.
The road led him out of town through an industrial zone, over fields and meadows and through a couple of small villages that had almost grown together. His feet were hurting him by now, but Thomas carried on. The valley narrowed, and after a while he reached a group of buildings, a psychiatric clinic he knew of by name. Here too everything was dark and silent. In the middle of the buildings, there was a solitary light next to a small pavilion. He saw a plan of the institution, with all the various wards and workshops and dormitories marked in. But all the paths ended at the edge of the map, as though the clinic was on an island that no one could leave. Thomas remembered the road he had seen on the station hiking map, and walked through the institute and up a slope toward a wood, even though the little road was marked as a dead end. As he passed a multistory building, he saw a light on in a ground-floor window. A woman was sitting in front of a computer, presumably on night duty. She had her head lowered, maybe she was reading, in a world of her own. The first time Thomas met Astrid, in the bookstore, she had kept on recommending books to him that he read for her sake, but he was never really a reader, the artificial world of books had never really come alive for him. In fact, the older he got, the less he seemed to feel the need to be diverted or entertained.
At the edge of the wood, the asphalt road became an unpaved forest track that was wide enough for him to be able to follow it easily in the dark. Thomas had the sensation of entering a different sort of space. He could hear the pouring of water, which first grew louder, then, as the track started to climb, softer again. He heard an occasional cracking sound, otherwise there was silence. In the middle of the wood he discerned the outline of a massive concrete structure, presumably an army munitions dump. The terrain flattened out. Thomas felt relieved when he emerged from the wood; he had the sense of having escaped a danger. For some time already, he had heard cowbells. Now they were very close, and he saw the dark forms of cattle on the pasture. The sound came closer, the animals must have sensed him, and now they came bounding up to him in wild leaps. Thomas worried the clanging bells might wake the farmer, but when he passed the house, there was no light. Not even a dog barked at him.
Walking felt easier now, though his feet still hurt. The little track led slightly downhill through fenced-in pastures and then up toward a round knoll. Thomas decided to stop there and rest. The grass was cut short, but it was wet either from rain or early dewfall. He felt the moisture through his shoes. At the summit was a group of trees. He sat down in the grass and looked around. The stars were densely packed in the wide sky. Lights flickered in the distance. Only when Thomas made out mountain peaks at the edge of the horizon did he get his bearings. He ate two bags of potato chips and a candy bar. The mashed-up food made a disgusting pulp in his mouth. He swilled it down with a Coke. He pressed and carefully folded the packaging, and put it with the empty bottle back in the bundle with the rest of his provisions.
In the east the moon was rising, a dark orange disk looming very close. The higher it climbed, the smaller it seemed to get. At the same time its illumination grew stronger, and before long, a milky shimmer lay over the whole landscape. Thomas was too tired to be able to go on. He lay down in the grass and rolled himself up like a kid. It wasn’t cold, but the damp got into his clothes. He thought of home, of Astrid and the sleeping children, who already seemed to be so far away, it was as though he had been gone for weeks.
The children came home from school a little after four, first Ella and a little after her Konrad, who tended to dawdle. Ella was already sitting at the living-room table doing her homework when he walked into the kitchen and mutely hugged his mother. Astrid liked those moments when he was as affectionate as he’d been as a small child. In spite of that, she freed herself from his hug and asked him if he had any homework. I’m hungry. Then eat an apple, she said, and called into the living room, Do you want one, Ella? She cut up two apples in slices, put them on two little plates, and handed Konrad one, taking the other to Ella. She looked over Ella’s shoulder and read the opening lines of the piece she was writing in her exercise book. Something that happened during my holidays, was the title, but Ella was writing about the stray dogs she had seen on the beach. One of the dogs was very sweet and terribly affectionate. I don’t know what breed he was. My father said he’s a mungrel, which are the best kind of dogs, because they’re a bit of everything. I badly wanted to take him home with us, but my mother said we weren’t allowed to take dogs across the border.
One of the many untruths she had recourse to every day with the children, thought Astrid. At lunch, she had claimed that Thomas was eating with a client, and the children didn’t even ask, as though they had failed to notice that their mother’s explanations we
re contradictory. They had been unusually quiet, in fact, almost somehow inhibited. Astrid took an apple slice off Ella’s plate and put it in her mouth. Hey, said Ella, that’s mine. Mongrel has an o in it, said Astrid, the first vowel.
While she got dinner ready, she thought she wouldn’t be able to fob the children off with such threadbare versions for much longer. But what was she going to say to them instead? Your father has disappeared? And anything beyond that? She herself didn’t know what had happened. Surely nothing had befallen him. He just had to go, leave. Maybe that was the explanation. He didn’t have another woman, hadn’t embezzled any money, hadn’t run up debts he was unable to repay. He hadn’t done himself an injury, he had simply walked away. It was an urge she had felt herself. When Ella was very young and colicky, and hadn’t slept through a single night, when she stayed up screaming for hours, and Astrid was tired to the point of exhaustion, she had sometimes walked out of the house, leaving the baby all alone for half an hour or even an hour sometimes. She had gone to the station and sat down on a bench on a platform and just taken deep breaths. A train arrived, people got on and off. Astrid stood up, walked toward the train. The doors closed, the train moved off, and Astrid sat down again. Then she imagined coming home, it was silent, ghostly silent. Finally she had gone home, and Ella was still screaming, red-faced with exertion, and Astrid had picked her up out of her crib, and carried her around the house, and whispered to her until she calmed down a little. Astrid had never said a word to Thomas about these escapades; she was ashamed of them. Maybe he had such fantasies of flight as well, and needed time alone to collect himself in the din of their normal day. The policeman was surely right, Thomas would come back soon, and they would resume their previous life, only a little unsettled by the knowledge that there was nothing natural or inevitable about it, and that sometime one or other of them might get lost for a while or even forever.
For once, the children set the table uncomplainingly. Over dinner, they were silent again. Finally Astrid said, Your father’s gone away, I have no idea where he is or when he’ll come back, but I’m sure he won’t stay away for much longer. Is he dead then? asked Ella. Astrid looked at her in alarm. No, of course he isn’t, how could you say that? Ella jumped up from the table and ran away. Astrid followed her upstairs and found her rolled up on her bed, crying. She lay down behind her and wrapped her in her arms and said, I’m quite sure your papa’s fine. He just needed some time by himself after the holiday. I’m sure he’ll be back soon. Quite sure. Ella didn’t say anything, but she seemed to calm down gradually. After a while, Astrid said, I’d better go downstairs and see what Konrad is up to. Are you all right now? Ella nodded.
Konrad was still sitting at the table, on his plate was a piece of bread that he had cut up into little cubes. Why did Papa go away? he asked. Astrid sat down beside him and laid her hand on his shoulder. Sometimes people just want to be by themselves. You’re like that sometimes too, remember? When you lock yourself up in your room. Now finish your dinner. Can I play my computer game then? asked Konrad.
It was daybreak when Thomas awoke. The moon was high, but it didn’t shed much light in the brightening sky. The group of trees that Thomas had seen as an outline the previous night were just a few sick specimens with leafless crowns, their trunks a tangle of ivy. A sweetish smell hung in the air.
Thomas’s clothes were sodden, but he didn’t feel cold. He rubbed his hands on the damp grass and wiped the sleep from his eyes. Then he picked up his bundle and headed on in a southerly direction. There was no one around anywhere, and he walked along field tracks, always mindful not to lose his bearings.
The track he was following led along the edge of a meadow, getting steadily fainter, until it finally came to an end in a rough and ready turning circle at the edge of a wood. Thomas carried on into the wood, which consisted mainly of conifers. The sweetish scent was even more pronounced here—it was as though the air was suffused with honey. The gradient fell away steeply. He thought he could still make out the path a short distance away, zigzagging down into a gully, but then even these last vestiges of it disappeared, and Thomas made the bulk of the descent on the seat of his pants. At the bottom of the gully he had to force his way through thick ferns and bushes. He had spiderwebs smeared on his hands and face. He recognized some plants and was surprised he could remember their names, which his father had taught him when he was a boy: horsetail, herb paris with its blue-black fruit, stinking storksbill, and woodbine with its doubled-up red berries that looked almost like red currants but that he knew were poisonous. He heard a loud rushing sound, and farther below him he saw a waterfall that tumbled a few meters over a pile of conglomerate into a small pool.
Directly above the waterfall was a shallow where Thomas was able to get across. He took the opportunity to wash again and drank some of the water, scooping it up with his hands.
The opposite side of the gorge was even steeper. Thomas had to pull himself up by roots and little saplings. He kept losing his footing. By the time he finally reached level ground, his pants were filthy and he had lost an hour without very much to show for it.
The sky, which had previously been no particular color, now turned blue. A few little clouds burned a reddish yellow in the slanted low light, and when its beams touched the woods and meadows, the whole scene began to glow. Thomas sat down in the grass at the edge of a small, unmown meadow, surrounded on three sides by trees, and finished the provisions he had bought at the station.
When he emerged from the shelter of the trees, he saw not far away a village consisting of a score or so of farmhouses. There was no one to be seen, and a little nervously he approached and walked through it. The gate of one of the cowsheds stood open. Inside, a woman was connecting the cows up to the milking machine. A transistor radio was going, and Thomas heard the perky voice of the host, and the opening bars of a country tune. He walked on quickly, past a cheesery, from where he heard a clatter of metal and the rushing sound of water, over the same tune he had just heard from the cowshed. The narrow street led up to a height, from where Thomas had his first view of the peak of Säntis and the Churfirsten mountains, gleaming in the morning sun. He turned to look back at the idyllically tidy little village below him. How much sweat was needed to maintain this tidiness, to get up early every morning and do the same unvarying tasks, to milk the cows, to clean their shed, to fertilize and mow the pastures, and to bring in the hay. The work might have gotten easier through the mechanization of the past hundred years, but it wasn’t the physical effort he was thinking of so much as the optimism, the faith, the conviction that it was the right thing to do. He too had once formed part of this quiet consensus, he had functioned in the way that was expected of him, without it ever having been discussed. He had gone to school for nine years, completed a traineeship, done his military duty, and then gone back to being a trainee. He had married Astrid, had kids, moved into his parents’ old house, and slowly, over time, done it up. It had taken persistence and willpower, but now they were living there in the house, which was slowly falling down, imperceptibly but unstoppably. He had read somewhere that a building wasn’t finished until it had collapsed into ruins. Perhaps the same was true for human beings.
Every day Thomas went to the office and did his job; he kept the books for his clients, produced their year-end accounts, and filled out their tax returns. Some of the businesses failed; either the market changed or the people made mistakes or they lacked entrepreneurial spirit, but most of them managed to get through life without any major calamities, achieved a certain degree of comfort, and eventually went into retirement. Then they would sit in his office — the carpenter or the auto mechanic or the butcher and his son, who was to take over his father’s business. They would talk about money, about accommodations and inventories and investments that needed to be made, but never about what really mattered. What was it all for? In the course of their daily exertions, there was never a moment when they could ask themselves such questions; m
aybe they were scared of them, or they had understood that such questions were impossible to answer and hence should not be asked at all. Thomas was unsure whether to admire or despise them.
In the next village, which was a little bigger, there was already a fair amount of activity, cars driving through the streets, children headed off to school, and outside the general store stood a supply van. Thomas tried to steer clear of the center. Hikers were nothing out of the ordinary in these parts, but the thing was he probably looked like a tramp — he was unwashed, his clothes were filthy, and he didn’t have anything like a rucksack or trekking poles.