by Peter Stamm
On weekends Priska took off into the lowlands, and even though Thomas only ever saw her at mealtimes during the week, he would miss her. When he heard her returning late on Sunday night, going up to her room and then the bathroom that the three of them shared, he had a sensation of safety and warmth.
In the mornings, Thomas was always the first to use the bathroom. He hadn’t shaved since his departure, and by now his beard was so long that his face looked strange to him in the mirror, and older than he thought it ought to be.
He had taken the half-full bottle of träsch with him out of the hut. It was in his closet, but he didn’t touch it. He no longer drank alcohol, not from any resolution, he simply had no desire to intoxicate himself. He had given up reading too, even the paper. He didn’t switch on the portable radio that was in his room, even music struck him as basically a distraction. Work at the carpenter’s he enjoyed, repetitive though it was. He liked the monotony of the days, the set procedures, the morning rides out to the building site in Urserental, lunch with his colleagues, always at the same table in the same restaurant, and the evening rides down the Schöllenen Gorge into the sunless valley.
At the end of November Priska had her birthday. She announced it quite casually over dinner: By the way, it’s my birthday today. Everyone offered congratulations, and after dinner the widow fetched a carton of vanilla ice cream out of the freezer, full of ice crystals and tasting of cardboard. That seemed to be the end of it. But after they had all taken their plates into the kitchen and stacked them in the dishwasher, and the widow and the retiree had installed themselves in the living room in front of the TV, Priska asked if Thomas felt like going out for a beer with her. Her treat. They crept out of the house, as though they were doing something illegal.
Thomas was no longer used to making conversation. Apart from the carpenter and his colleagues, who gave him instructions and passed comments on his work, he didn’t tend to speak much. At mealtimes too he preferred to listen. At first Priska seemed not to notice his silence, she had so much to say herself, but after ordering the second round of beers, there was a moment of silence. Then she asked, Are you always this quiet? I don’t know, said Thomas. I don’t have much to say for myself. You’re from the east of the country, aren’t you? Yes, from Thurgau. Have you got family? He hesitated, as though he had to think about it. Yes, he said then, with a little crack in his voice, as though he was surprised by his answer. He saw in Priska’s eyes that she wanted to ask him more. What about you, he asked her, have you got a boyfriend? Sort of, she said reluctantly. Guess how old I am? It was her thirtieth birthday, so they had to drink three beers each, one for each decade. Or shall we make it one for each year? asked Priska laughing. The alcohol was getting to Thomas. It wasn’t even ten o’clock when he said he had to go, he had to get up early.
On the way home, Priska was telling him her hobby was kitesurfing, and since Thomas hadn’t heard of that, she had to explain to him what it was. All the lights were out in the pension. They spoke in whispers and crept through the dark house to their rooms. Last year I went kitesurfing in Ireland, Priska whispered quickly. On Achill Island, off the west coast, do you want to see pictures?
They sat together on the bed, Priska had her laptop on her knees and showed him photographs of a bleak-looking landscape. A lake with surfers on it, hanging on to dirigible kites, being towed over the surface, most of them so far away you could barely make them out. Other than that, there were no people in the pictures, just scruffy-looking sheep with black faces and splotches of color on their fleece, whole herds of them or else single mothers with their lambs. Little white cottages dotted the outsize landscape, ruined barns, cobbled-together fences, high cliffs, and at the foot of them the sea, an endless plain that lost itself on the horizon against the brightness of the sky. The landscape attracted Thomas, it seemed to be a place of farewells and arrivals, both.
Although it wasn’t warm in the room, Priska had taken off her sweater. Underneath she was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt. The lace trim of her bra showed through the thin cotton. Thomas could feel the pressure of her upper arm against his and her hand, holding the laptop, on his thigh. He could smell Priska’s hair, her body, a hint of soap. He turned to face her. She didn’t take her eyes off the screen, but in her poise there was tension, as though she was expecting a powerful movement. He kissed her throat and felt a shiver go through her.
Thomas lay in bed. It was past midnight, but he couldn’t sleep. He thought about Astrid, about how they had met and then lost each other from sight. The time he first walked into the bookstore, he had fallen instantly in love with her, and from then on he had regularly gone to the shop to see her. He had never been a great reader, but the pleasure of their conversations was recompense for the labor of reading. To begin with, she recommended thrillers for him, but over time she trusted him with harder books as well, classics, or new novels and stories that he read conscientiously to be able to talk about them with her the following week. He had been pretty shy at the time, and never dared ask her to go out with him, or even to go for a coffee. Perhaps he was satisfied with their meetings in the usually empty bookstore, and they were in a sense more intimate than encounters in any public space could have been. When the owner saw Thomas walk in, she would call Astrid, who was usually working in the back room. It’s your customer, she would call out with a smile, before disappearing into the back room to leave them alone. Sometimes Thomas had the impression the bookstore only existed for him and Astrid, a cryptic meeting place in a world that otherwise was far too bright and loud.
With their reading, their conversations changed. After they had both read Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, they spent weeks discussing love and relationships. Thomas would have liked to think that mature love wasn’t based on sex, and that it wasn’t love for a single being but for the whole world, but everything in him was at odds with the views of the distinguished psychologist. You love what you take trouble over, and you take trouble over what you love, said Astrid, and to him that was like a secret message he wasn’t sure he understood.
Things could have gone on like that for ages if Astrid hadn’t one day told him about a boyfriend she was going to Italy with for the summer holiday. He had always thought it was too soon to declare his love; now it was too late. All through the summer he thought about what he would say to Astrid when he saw her next, but when he finally saw her again at the end of August, tanned and fresh and laughing, he didn’t manage to say anything at all. Instead, he bought the book she recommended to him, The Beautiful Summer by Cesare Pavese, and scoured it in the following week for secret messages.
For a time they both moved in the same circle of friends. Thomas suffered when he saw Astrid with her boyfriend, but when he didn’t see her, he suffered worse. Then he finished his traineeship and had to do his national military service. When he returned to the village, Astrid had moved to the city with her boyfriend. Thomas started working for the company where he had been a trainee. He was loosely in touch with Astrid; they wrote each other postcards on holiday and from time to time short letters full of ordinary day-to-day stuff and phrases. When Astrid was in the village visiting her parents, they would sometimes run into each other at parties or just on the street. By this time, Thomas was involved with someone himself, a halfhearted thing with a woman in the handball club he had joined. He tried without much success to justify his lack of love by Erich Fromm’s philosophy. When the woman moved on after a year or so, he still suffered like a dog.
On her twenty-fifth birthday, Astrid had a party and invited Thomas. That evening he learned that she had broken up with her boyfriend and was single again. He took the plunge and asked her out for dinner.
There were good days and bad days. The grief didn’t get any less, but it came over Astrid less often. Sometimes she wouldn’t think about Thomas for whole days at a time, only at night in bed, when she imagined sleeping with him. It was always the same scene, she was lying on the bed, Thomas kneeling be
side her. Neither of them spoke. He carefully undressed her, as though unpacking a sensitive instrument. He would keep stopping to look at her or touch her, as though to convince himself that she was real. They were both smiling. Then he took his clothes off and lay on top of her. Their movements were slow, it was as though they were talking to each other, not alternatingly in a dialog but in a language in which they spoke the sentences together, and the sentences were at once question and answer. When Astrid shut her eyes, she had the sensation of being utterly filled by Thomas. As her excitement gradually ebbed, his image dulled, dissolving in the darkness until all that was left of him was a kind of halo, and once that was gone too, a vast emptiness that seemed to draw everything out of her.
The very first time they slept together, Astrid had come, even though they had both been wound up. They had gone to the movies and then to a pub. They hadn’t had much to drink because Thomas was driving, and even so in the car Astrid had felt drunk. It was after midnight when Thomas drew up outside her apartment and then simply went up with her. The tension between them was so great there was no other possibility than touching, than holding on to each other. Everything else had happened perfectly naturally. Really? said Thomas. Do you always come as quickly as that? Astrid smiled and shrugged. She didn’t feel like talking, and without turning a light on went into the kitchen for a glass of water. Thomas followed her. As she stood by the sink, he put his arms around her from behind and she felt that he was still aroused. Hurry, he said. She turned, took a sip of water, with her arms crossed in front of her, then passed him the glass. He set it down on the counter, took her hand, and led her back to the bedroom. That was the enduring image Astrid had of their first night together: walking through the apartment hand in hand, and naked.
Later on, Thomas told her that he had loved her from the very beginning, was eaten up with desire for her. He told her without pathos, more with the pride of a successful long-distance runner, describing the torments of a recently finished marathon. From his tone, Astrid could tell he was also interested to hear whether that had been the case with her as well, if she had been in love with him in the same way, dreaming of him, sending him hidden signals. She was so tired she kept drifting away, and sometimes couldn’t be sure whether she had been sleeping or had heard Thomas speaking or just dreamed of it. You still there? he asked. Yes, she said. Nothing more. She listened to him describing their first meeting in the bookstore, a masked ball in the Traube, going to a concert with her and her boyfriend in the city. She remembered the occasions, but Thomas’s version was so different from her own, a story full of love and despair and hope, in which every word, every facial expression, every gesture had its significance. Had she not noticed anything then? No, she would have had to say. I liked you, but I wasn’t in love with you and I didn’t feel your love either. So why did she take him up to her apartment that time? Not everything you did had a reason. It was no big thing, more a sequence of small decisions, aimless in themselves, part negligence, part giving in. Not to take her hand back when he took it in his, not to turn her head away when he tried to kiss her, to stay sitting in the car until he turned off the ignition, not to say anything when he got out with you, went up the stairs behind you, walked into your apartment with you. I could never picture you in a sexual situation, said Thomas, with his head in her lap. I don’t know why, I just couldn’t. I couldn’t even picture you naked. She didn’t know whether his words were a compliment or just a simple statement of fact, and whether he expected an answer from her and if so what. It had never even occurred to her to picture Thomas naked or in a sexual situation. Not that she was someone who pictured things to herself anyway, she didn’t plan ahead or obsessively rehash the past. When Thomas talked about their relationship, even later on, when they’d been together for a long time, she was always surprised how complicated everything was in his head. But she liked the stories, and the feeling that their history was deep and complicated and inevitable. You’re so beautiful when you come, he said. Your smile, your movements. He wouldn’t stop talking. Are you still there? Yes. I love you. I need to sleep now, said Astrid. Your arms, he went on, you have beautiful arms, your shoulders, your back, the lovely dimples over your bottom. Is that right, said Astrid. She switched on the light to set the alarm, then turned it off, and rolled away from Thomas. In the darkness she could feel his hands, his warm body, his kisses. They made love again, more vehemently than before, like a silent tussle, as though they couldn’t get close enough to each other. Astrid no longer felt her body as a whole, only in parts, in Thomas’s touch, his weight, the force with which he held down her hands over her head.
She lay in the dark, with a smile on her face at the thought of that first night with Thomas. The mixture of tenderness and force with which he explored and took her. It had still taken quite some time after that before they became a couple.
Thomas got up early and packed his rucksack. He didn’t have many more possessions than two months ago, when he moved in. The widow was already up and about, reading the local paper in the kitchen. Thomas said he needed to be moving on. She made difficulties, said he should have told her sooner, she couldn’t find another tenant at the drop of a hat. She looked reproachfully at him. He suggested paying half of next week’s rent, and she finally accepted his offer, though not without complaining again about the difficulties he was creating by suddenly moving out. In the end, she offered him coffee — perhaps she hoped to hear why he was going. He declined, paid her, and left.
The carpenter wasn’t pleased about his leaving either. He praised Thomas’s work and application and even offered him a raise. What will you be going on to? he asked, once he’d accepted that he couldn’t change Thomas’s mind. I need to be moving on, said Thomas.
The distance that took less than fifteen minutes in the carpenter’s car took him more than two hours on foot. The footpath was covered in snow, so he was obliged to walk along the highway, which switchbacked up the narrow coulee and kept plunging into galleries and tunnels. In some places there was no sidewalk, and Thomas was forced to press himself against the side of the tunnel as a hooting tourist bus swept past him. Shortly after Thomas had emerged from the last gallery, and the upland valley opened out in front of him, a police patrol car drew up alongside him. The officer in the front passenger seat wound down the window and asked if everything was all right. Not exactly hiking weather, he said, and asked to see his ID. He gave it a cursory look and wished him a nice day.
For the rest of the winter, Thomas was employed as kitchen assistant in a restaurant where he was also given accommodations. The chef, an Israeli man who had married the daughter of the owner and later took over the business, paid him accordingly, though he upped his wages as Thomas took on more demanding tasks from week to week. You might have made a chef, you know, said David. Sometimes Thomas could feel himself under observation, but his boss’s motivation seemed to be less curiosity than simple liking. Then David told him about his early time in this area, how difficult it was to establish himself and get used to the people, the landscape, and the weather. He and his wife had two boys, a seven-year-old and a five-year-old, who often hung around the kitchens or the restaurant. Then it was Thomas’s turn to watch David and marvel at his tender, almost motherly way with the boys.
By the time the ski season wound down in April and the number of visitors declined, Thomas had managed to put away a bit of money. David asked him what his plans were. Thomas said he thought he would cross the Gotthard Pass and continue south.
The highway service had been working on removing snow for several weeks now, but the pass wouldn’t be open until Pentecost at the earliest. Thomas spent a couple of rainy days waiting, for the most part in his room. The day it brightened up, he set off. David had prepared an elaborate lunch, and he and his wife and even the boys had embraced him outside the restaurant when he left, quite as though he were family.