by Peter Stamm
Shortly before the turnoff to the pass there was a little wayside chapel. Here is the parting of the ways, friend, which way will you take? it said over the entrance. Do you want to go to the Eternal City? Down to Holy Colonia on the German Rhine, or westward to the Franks? After months in one place, Thomas felt the high of being on the road again, the anticipation of a future that was not prescribed and that could, with every step, be altered.
The pastures in the valley were green already, but not far above the village the pass road was barred. The higher he climbed, the more snow he came upon, first only in hollows and on the shady side of valleys, but farther up it was an unbroken sheet. While it had been raining for the past few days in the valley, up here the road that had been cleared was snowed shut again. A little way before the head of the pass, Thomas encountered workmen who were just eating lunch in the sun, beside great gouged-out piles of snow. He asked them about the state of the path, and they warned him about one spot where a retaining board had worked loose, that wasn’t yet shored up. They seemed unsurprised to see a hiker. Maybe there were a lot like himself, thought Thomas, maybe he was one element of a brotherhood of wanderers spread over the five continents. He thought about the migrations of animals, the movements of birds and fish from continent to continent, movement all over the world. It struck him as a more natural mode of being than settlement in one place.
The road ran along between walls of snow that were several yards high. On the slopes he kept seeing the traces of avalanches, in some places the hard icy chunks had almost made it down as far as the road.
At the head of the pass a strong cold wind was blowing. The sky was a deep blue, and Thomas could feel the burning warmth of the sun in his face. He spread out his coat on the snow and sat down to eat. He was looking south, the view ringed by a blaze of light.
By now, Astrid had to reckon up the time when someone asked her how long it was that Thomas had been dead. He went away two years ago, she would say, or three years, or six years. But she still wore her wedding ring, the phone book contained both their names, and when she was called upon to define her legal status, she would always check married. Each time, without asking, the tax official would change her entry to widowed, a word that Astrid could no more get used to than fatherless for the children.
Konrad had done the legally required minimum time at school and landed a traineeship at an insurance firm. In the summer he wanted to temp, to save up for a motor scooter. He had recently started asking about his father. Then Astrid would tell him this or that, but each time she felt painfully aware how little she knew about Thomas, and how little what she did know was able to convey about him. Each story was a betrayal of him, each account a tacit decision, this is the way it was, this is how it would always be remembered. Or perhaps it wasn’t like that at all, she said. She said, You take after him, and that seemed to make Konrad happy.
Ella had passed her leaving exam and was going on to college to study Romance languages. She would have loved to go to France for a month or two to brush up on her French. She had written for information from various language schools, and showed her mother the glossy brochures, where cheerful young people were shown sitting in classrooms, or riding on horseback, or on surfboards. Astrid just looked at the prices. We can’t afford that, she said, why don’t you try and get a job as an au pair? After Thomas’s disappearance, she’d had to tighten their belts, in spite of the pension. In the early years she was often asked by friends whether she didn’t want to go back to work. There was a job going here, or someone was looking for a person to help out in the office. When her onetime boss gave up the bookstore for reasons of age, she asked Astrid if she had any interest in taking it over. But even after the children had gotten older and more independent, she wasn’t interested in working. She didn’t apply anywhere. It wasn’t that she was depressed, as Manuela supposed when she came to mind the children for a day or two from time to time, so that Astrid could go away somewhere. Perhaps it’s just that I don’t want anything to change, she said. That would be tantamount to acknowledging that your husband is dead, said Patrick. Stop playing the amateur psychologist, said Astrid, I liked you better when you were a policeman. Anyway, you don’t want anything to change either. Then we’re agreed, said Patrick.
Later they went for a walk along the lakefront, talking about their children like two old friends. It’s no bad thing if Ella appreciates that we can’t afford everything, said Astrid. We’re not badly off. I can understand her disappointment, said Patrick. At her age, you just want to blend in. But that doesn’t excuse her language, said Astrid. Ella had called her father an asshole. Just because that asshole dumped us, she said, now I can’t go to language school. Then she had run off upstairs and locked herself in her room. Astrid had canceled her pocket money for the next month. You can be terribly hard sometimes, you know, said Patrick. Basically Ella’s right, even if she should have said it some other way. Now don’t you start too, said Astrid, and walked faster, as though to run away from him, or the things he was saying. Patrick sped up too. You won’t hear a word against him, he said, admit that he behaved like a son of a bitch. Astrid made no reply.
Eventually the contact with Patrick came to an end; there wasn’t any particular time or reason, Astrid didn’t even know which of them had stopped calling. She bought herself a dog.
The weeks passed, and the months and years. Konrad completed his traineeship and moved to the city. Ella went to Lyon to do a second degree. This was the time when Astrid sometimes wondered if it wouldn’t have been better if she’d never met Thomas and had married someone else who would still be around. But she rejected that thought after a while; it wasn’t possible to take Thomas out of her life like an object that had lost its utility, he was a part of her, just as she was a part of him, no matter what had happened and would happen.
Ella came back from Lyon pregnant by a man she didn’t want to live with. She took a job as a schoolteacher. After not being in touch with Astrid for a long time, she was glad now that she was there to mind the baby. Emilie spent two days a week with her grandmother, then when she started kindergarten, just two afternoons. Konrad married a woman who was seven years older than him and didn’t want children. They went on an around-the-world tour that must have cost a fortune. He always used to call his mother every week. Before he set off, he fixed her up with a Skype account, but after a couple of times, Astrid asked him to go back to standard phoning, he felt closer to her that way. How are you? You all right? he asked. Yes, she said. I’m fine.
The years had no particular chronology, the journeys no direction, the places stood in no discernible relation to one another. Thomas took on casual work that got him through the times when he earned nothing or rested or moved on. In Italy he worked off the books until he was caught and had to go; in France he got a new set of papers from people he would sooner have had nothing to do with. He worked as a janitor in a discount mall in the middle of nowhere, then as a janitor in an autobahn rest stop. When he had enough of the countryside, he went to Lyon and delivered bread for a large bakery. He had to get up extremely early, but it meant he got the afternoons off. Once he was involved in a minor accident, nothing grave, but the police ascertained that he had no driver’s license, and he was out of a job. For a time then he didn’t work at all, drank too much, and lived in ever shittier rooms. Then he got a grip, first helped out in a homeless kitchen, and got another job in a restaurant. He spent a year on the Irish island the teacher had shown him photographs of, at any rate he was pretty sure it was the same place. He had never forgotten those pictures of the landscape, the cliffs, the black-faced sheep, the endless sea that made him feel nostalgic and secure at the same time, only the name of the island, like that of the teacher, had slipped his mind. When there was no more work, he returned to the Continent, first to France again, then Germany. He had occasional affairs with women who tended to be just as lost as he was. At brief moments of arousal he sometimes managed not to think of Astrid. But as soon as t
he women were gone, he would think of her again, and he would feel ashamed of himself for his infidelity and clear off. He got along with almost everyone he worked with but felt no desire to be closer to any of them. Best of all he got along with children, because he could tell them anything. The thought that his own were by now grown up felt strange to him; he didn’t feel anything for their maturity, on the contrary it was as though they had taken something from him. When he thought of them, it was always the way they were when he had left. He remembered the last vacation they had all taken together, and he remembered the feeling that had kept sneaking up on him then, that he could never get close enough to them, that they were inevitably distancing themselves from him, as though following a law of nature.
For a couple of years he had a dog, a stray like himself, who had followed him and whom he kept with him, even though it made for a lot of difficulties. One night his dog died after not eating for several days. Thomas buried him in the bushes at the side of the road. This was in Greece somewhere. That was the farthest away he got; he didn’t want to leave Europe, the rest of the world felt somehow too remote to him, and too far from home.
In his choice of places, he followed his instincts. Sometimes he went south, then north, sometimes closer to home, sometimes farther away. In all those years he never crossed into Switzerland, but it wasn’t a decision as such, it just happened that way. Not everything you did had a reason.
It was the end of May, two months after Thomas’s birthday; he had now reached retirement age, though in his false passport he was two years younger. When the forgers had asked him for his date of birth, he had given them Astrid’s— he had no idea why.
He had spent that winter in Spain, minding a holiday home north of Barcelona that belonged to one of his previous employers. Two weeks ago, he had gone into the city and hopped on a bus, the first one going, and that had taken him to Freiburg im Breisgau. Although he had a bad back and could no longer lift heavy weights, he needed money after the months of idleness in Spain and took a job as a house-painter, as there was nothing else going just then.
It was a cold, rainy day. Thomas stood up on the scaffolding, painting under the eaves of a single-family home. Below him, the others were applying an undercoat to the front. Thomas heard a car draw up. In turning to see who it was, he took a step back and knocked against the bucket, sending some of the paint splattering onto the asphalt below. The boss had climbed out of the truck, looked up, and called out, You fucking idiot, can’t you watch what you’re doing. Thomas draped himself over the rail, and the cold and rain and the gray asphalt and the green of the grass took him back twenty years to the edge of the grike he had fallen into. A wind splashed a few raindrops into his face, and while his boss was still effing and blinding down below, his voice seemed to be getting quieter, and Thomas had the feeling that the rain was letting up, and there was a break in the clouds, and he was falling into a sky full of dazzling light.
Astrid stood in the kitchen, washing up from lunch. The day before, Ella and Emilie had been to visit, and Astrid had baked a cake because it was Emilie’s first day at school. She had given Ella what was left of the cake, and at her insistence kept a little piece for herself. She took the cling wrap off the plate and set it down on the kitchen table. The window was open over the sink, all around it was peaceful, just a blackbird was breaking the silence with its irritated twitter. Astrid went outside to put the vegetable peelings into the compost. She shooed away the cat that was slinking about around the plum tree. Back inside, she put on water for coffee, tipped some grounds into the filter, and stood there to watch small and larger bubbles forming in the water. Her dog, an old Labrador, came trotting into the kitchen and sniffed at its empty dish. Astrid saw him lift his head and prick up his ears even before she had consciously taken in the squeak of the unoiled gate. Then she knew he was back. She gave no thought to the hurt and the offense, or to what had been and what might be. She ran into the living room and through the window caught sight not so much of the man as of his movements, his typical walk, slightly leaning forward, slightly stiff, but swift and resolute. She heard his footsteps on the gravel, then they stopped, and Astrid had the sensation that her heart had stopped with them. He might still turn back and disappear forever. But he was only hesitating or perhaps savoring the moment. With a bewildered smile he looked around at the blooming garden, taking stock of the changes, marveling at the huge rhubarb patch, the plum tree that twenty years ago when he left had been a little sapling. He noticed that the elder bush was gone, that the wire-mesh fence had been removed and the adjacent gardens had been allowed to grow together, as though they belonged together, that new people had moved in next door, who had left their own traces too, a swing set and a small wooden sandbox, the tricycle by the door and the ball on the lawn. His stopping felt unendingly long to Astrid, in the complete silence she could hear the rushing of the blood in her ears. Then there were his footsteps again, labored, as though he found it difficult to go up the stairs. And suddenly Astrid felt perfectly convinced that in all those years Thomas had led no other life, that he’d had no other relationship, not fathered any children, not even practiced his profession, further qualified himself or grown in any way. Just like her he had been awaiting this moment, this brief moment of happiness in which he would put out his hand and turn the doorknob. This moment of the door opening, when she would see his indistinct form in the dazzling noonday light.
PETER STAMM is the author of the novels Agnes, All Days Are Night, Seven Years, On a Day Like This, and Unformed Landscape, and the short-story collections We’re Flying and In Strange Gardens and Other Stories. His prize-winning books have been translated into more than thirty languages. For his entire body of work and his accomplishments in fiction, he was short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013, and in 2014 he won the prestigious Friedrich Hölderlin Prize. He lives in Switzerland.
MICHAEL HOFMANN has translated the work of Gottfried Benn, Hans Fallada, Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, and many others. In 2012 he was awarded the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His Selected Poems was published in 2009, and Where Have You Been? Selected Essays in 2014. He lives in Florida and London.
You might also enjoy these titles from Peter Stamm:
AGNES
In this unforgettable and haunting novel, Stamm incisively examines the power of storytelling to influence thought and behavior, reaching a chilling conclusion.
“A kind of parable…simple and haunting.”
—New York Review of Books
“Agnes is a moody, unsettled, and elusive little fable — and it’s always interesting.” —Wall Street Journal
ALL DAYS ARE NIGHT
In unadorned and haunting style, this novel forcefully tells the story of a woman who loses her life but must stay alive all the same.
“[A] complex, psychological tale…riveting…intensely moving.” — Wall Street Journal
“[An] engrossing story of recovery.” —New Yorker
“A postmodern riff on The Magic Mountain…a page-turner.” —The Atlantic
SEVEN YEARS
Torn between his highbrow marriage and his lowbrow affair, Alex is stuck within a spiraling threesome.
Seven Years is a bold, sobering novel about the quest for love.
“Seven Years is a novel to make you doubt your own dogma. What more can a novel do than that?”
—Zadie Smith, Harper’s Magazine
Also recommended:
UNFORMED LANDSCAPE
A sensitive young woman is led to the richer life she was meant to have and is brave enough to claim. Her story speaks eloquently about solitude, the fragility of love, lost illusions, and self-discovery.
“Like the landscapes of his novels, Stamm’s prose is spare and graceful.” —New Republic
ON A DAY LIKE THIS
On a day like any other, Andreas changes his life. Consumed with longing for his lost love and blinded
by the uncertainty of his future, he is tormented by the question of what might have been.
“What Peter Stamm has done with this novel is recreate life in all of its quiet banality — this is art — Stamm’s achievement isn’t the mere weaving of a story, it’s the report of a life in quiet crisis.”
—Review of Contemporary Fiction
WE’RE FLYING
This short-story collection is a superb introduction to the work of Peter Stamm and its precise rendering of the contemporary human psyche.
“The situations depicted in We’re Flying…evoke the negative spaces of Raymond Carver or the quiet menace of Shirley Jackson, but with Walser’s light touch.” —Seattle Times
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