The Sweet Indifference of the World

by Peter Stamm

  There was no sales staff to be seen anywhere, and it felt eerie to be walking through this sequence of unlived-in projections of possible lives that all looked alike in their sterility. In the next bay were rustic pine items, and Lena turned into a gifted mother and housewife, explaining to me in fantasy Swedish how easy it all was to assemble and keep clean, and how we could turn the bunk bed into two singles once our children were old enough, and each wanted a room of their own. How many kids have we got again? I asked. Two, of course, she said, a boy and a girl, as is only right and proper. The next bay saw her as a businesswoman, praising the cool design of the tubular steel furniture, and testing all the drawers for ease of use and fit. Then last of all she was the beguiling seductress, settling herself on the red velvet coverlet of a bedroom that was all black lacquer and mirrors, beckoning to me with one finger. I sat down next to her and asked which of these women she most resembled. Which one would you like? she asked. Before I could answer, she said, But they’re all clichés, just like the respective bedrooms. If there was a bra lying on the floor and a cat on the bed and a book of crossword puzzles on the bedside table and a packet of sleeping tablets, that would make a story. You could hear the water rushing in the shower, I said, and through the open window, the sounds of the city beyond. It would have to be a different city, said Lena, it had better be America. The curtains would billow in the wind. And when did we kiss for the first time? she asked. That wasn’t till months later, I said.

  FIFTEEN

  Now I was collecting Magdalena after the show as often as I could. Each time she chose a different route, and it wasn’t unusual for us to lose our way in quiet residential districts, going on long detours, and taking an hour longer than the night before. But since at that time I was working as a freelance copywriter for an advertising agency and didn’t have to get up early, I didn’t care how late it got. If we happened to pass a bar on the way that was still open, we would have a beer or a glass of wine, and sometimes fell into conversation with some night birds, loners, or drunks who would tell us their stories. Once, we even blundered into a wedding party, and a couple of drunken guests who had stepped out to smoke took us back inside with them, introduced us to the bride and groom, and didn’t let up till we had eaten a piece of wedding cake. When we finally left, one of the guests made a present to Magdalena of the bride’s bouquet, but she gave it back, saying she didn’t feel like getting married, and they should find another victim.

  Magdalena didn’t let me into her apartment until one time in spring, when she was sick. She had just started rehearsing a new play when she called me one morning and said she had a cold, and did I feel like visiting her.

  She opened the door in her nightie, and asked me in. Her cheeks had this hectic red, as though she’d put on too much rouge, otherwise she looked perfectly normal. Will you make me a cup of tea? she asked, and led me down a dark corridor to the kitchen. You will find everything by yourself, won’t you? Just look around, she said. I’m going back to bed. When I started opening the cupboards, I had the sense I was doing something unlawful. I found what I needed, put water on to boil, and went into the living room. Her furniture looked like it had come out of charity shops, but it was well chosen and well matched. It was all in the style of the Fifties and Sixties, only her big bookcase was a cheap standard product, the kind of thing you see everywhere. I was amazed how many books Magdalena seemed to have. They were arranged alphabetically by author, most of them hardback, and presumably, again, secondhand. There were a lot of classics, entire editions of Goethe and Gottfried Keller and others, but some more recent stuff too, tattered paperback copies of Celan and Bachmann, Hemingway and Kafka.

  I could hear the kettle whistling in the kitchen, and I went back and made the tea. I went into the bedroom with two steaming mugs, and there was Magdalena sitting bolt upright in bed, looking expectantly at me. Once again, I was struck by her red cheeks and her voice, which sounded breathy and a little lower than usual. I don’t know why, but I had the sense she was just pretending to be ill. The whole setup seemed to me to be a sort of game I didn’t understand the purpose of. At the same time, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Magdalena was testing me. She watched my every move, occasionally correcting me or adjusting something, as though there was only one way of moving the books on the bedside table or drawing the curtains; as though the mugs had to be on one particular spot, and in a certain fixed relation to one another. At last she let herself fall back into the pillows with a satisfied expression. Is everything the way you like it now? I asked.

  She said she had her new part to learn, but she had a headache, and her concentration was poor, and could I perhaps help her? She reached under the bed and pulled up a sheaf of paper and passed it to me. There, you read the man. Only the parts where he’s talking with Julie. We don’t need the rest. What about stage directions? She shook her head. Okay, begin.

  Miss Julie’s gone mad again tonight, completely mad! I read. No, not that, said Magdalena, he says that to Christine. She took the script out of my hand, turned a couple of pages ahead, and pointed to a place. Here.

  Have you ladies secrets to discuss? I read. Magdalena took a paper handkerchief out of the packet next to her on the bed and swished it around in front of me. Don’t be inquisitive! Ah! Charming, that smell of violets, I read. Impertinent! said Magdalena flirtatiously, So you know about perfumes, too? You certainly know how to dance…She got up, walked around to the back of my chair, and laid her hands on my shoulders. Come now, and dance a schottische with me, Jean. I don’t wish to seem disrespectful…, I read. I am the lady of the house, said Magdalena, and when I take the floor I want to dance with someone who knows how to lead. That’s not what it says here, I said, looking up at her. She looked as though she was utterly furious with me, and she was gripping my shoulders so hard it hurt.

  SIXTEEN

  Lena had lain down on the bed and shut her eyes, and she looked like a little girl daydreaming. I grazed her shoulder, and she sat up and asked me what I was thinking. About Magdalena, I said. What about you?

  A man in a blue uniform walked down the passageway. He seemed astonished to see us, said something in Swedish, and when we looked at him uncomprehendingly, in English. The store was about to close, hadn’t we heard the announcements? He escorted us to the elevators and stood there till we had got into one. Too bad, said Lena, as we descended. It really was cozy up there. Have you ever written for the theater? Television, I said. Lena led the way to the exit, where the sales assistant stood whom we’d seen before. As he unlocked the door for us, he wished us a pleasant evening and all the luck. Perhaps he had really believed Lena when she said we were newlyweds.

  The first time we kissed was back at her house, I said, once we were standing outside the store. She was unwell. I helped her learn a part, Miss Julie, by August Strindberg. Lena said nothing.

  We walked on down the street, more slowly now than before, it felt as though we were in a dream world in which all things were possible, but nothing mattered. I still love you, I finally said, quietly. First I thought Lena hadn’t heard me, but after a while she said: You love your Magdalena, not me. We don’t even know each other. I said, the Magdalena I was in love with was like you, young and beautiful and carefree. If a man finds me young and beautiful and carefree and nothing else, then I’d better start running, said Lena. I don’t know what she’s like today, I said, what she looks like. Perhaps she’s long since forgotten me. Nonsense, said Lena, she won’t have forgotten you, whatever transpired between the two of you. I wanted to talk to you yesterday, I said. I stood outside your hotel, but when I saw you, I felt so overcome that I couldn’t do it. It was even more of a shock than when I first saw my doppelgänger. I followed you all afternoon, for at least a couple of hours I wanted to live in the illusion that I was young again and could give my life a different turn.

  SEVENTEEN

  Even when I saw Lena onstage, I was shocked by her r
esemblance to Magdalena. But when she walked out of the hotel and stopped a few feet away from me, it took my breath away, and I felt paralyzed. She hesitated briefly, looked up and down the street, then, seemingly at random but nonetheless purposefully, she struck out for the center. She was walking fast and, barely stopping to think, I set off after her. She looked just like my Magdalena when she accompanied me to Stockholm sixteen years ago now, with a swaying, almost skipping walk, and the same facial expression, a mixture of astonishment and amusement. Sometimes she would suddenly crane her neck and look up, as though she had heard something or was looking for something, then her expression became serious, and for a moment it was as though she was listening out for something only she could hear.

  We had been together for three years, sometime I had left my old apartment and moved in with her. By now she wasn’t attached to a particular theater anymore, and I was only rarely turning out copy for the ad agency and was starting to write for newspapers and magazines instead. I had never quite given up the desire to write seriously, though I didn’t do much to realize it either. The text about Magdalena and my life hadn’t seemed to lead anywhere. Eventually I told her about it, claiming our life was too uneventful for it to be made into literature. Why write it all down? I asked, after all, we’re living it. In reality I was afraid of Magdalena becoming a stranger to me again, and that the fictive Magdalena could supplant the real one. Magdalena seemed to be happy that I’d given up the idea. She encouraged me instead to write dramatic texts, with parts in them that she could play. But I didn’t seem to be able to manage that either. I like you best when you’re not playing a part, I said. It was true, I didn’t enjoy seeing her onstage, because I didn’t want to have to see that she was capable of being a completely different person, that our love was not the only possibility in her.

  Even when we were alone together, I sometimes had the sense that she was playing a part, maybe not deliberately, but because she couldn’t help it. Perhaps it was that that wouldn’t let me go, the feeling I could never get really close to her, never see through her, never possess her. I puzzled over what I might be to her. The only certain proof of her love was that she stayed with me. When we went to parties or premieres together, she was swarmed by men who were better-looking than me, who were cleverer and funnier and above all more successful and had more to offer her than I did. She would flirt a little with one or other of them, but sooner or later she would always come to me and say she had had enough, and could we go home now. There was something painful and consuming about my love for her. Even when we were living together, I sometimes had palpitations when she came home later than she’d said, and suddenly stood there in the apartment, as though setting foot there for the first time.

  One day Magdalena showed me an advertisement in the paper. They were looking for television writers for a new series. That would be something for us, don’t you think? You write the scripts, and I’ll play the leads. We’ll be rich and famous, like Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller. Well, you know what happened to them, I said, but nevertheless I applied. I devised a couple of plots, wrote some trial scenes and sent them to the producer. I was invited to meet them, and was told my ideas were not filmable, but they saw some potential in my writing anyway. I got to work again, and proposed a series set in a meteorological research station in the Alps. For a few months, I was in regular back-and-forth with the TV people. They kept pressing me to more commercial subjects, sent me examples of screenplays they liked, and gradually cut everything from my scenes that I thought was original or clever. At least I wasn’t badly paid for the work, and eventually, along with a director and an editor, I got an invitation to participate in a master class in Stockholm, to be led by an American TV writer.

  I had hoped to maybe see a bit of the city, instead I spent whole days with writers from half of Europe cooped up in the conference room of an anonymous hotel, listening to the American hold forth about story lines and plot points, and trying to get us going with his phony enthusiasm. No one can stop you now except you yourselves, he said, and passed around memos of tips and tricks and claimed that if you only followed his advice you would become a celebrated TV writer. I asked myself what such a man was doing leading workshops in so-so hotels in Sweden if he was that clued into the secrets of successful scripts. Everything was getting me down, the yammering American, the participants who eagerly took down his every word, the two TV people there with me who treated me as the tyro I suppose I was. Magdalena spent her days in the city and when we met up at the end of the afternoon, told me what she had been up to. In the evening all the workshop participants, plus leader, ate dinner together. The first evening Magdalena joined us, but she seemed to be even more bored than me, and when we got up to our room at midnight, told me one author was plenty for her, she would eat dinner alone tomorrow, and maybe take herself to the theater or the cinema.

  * * *

  —

  While I was trailing Lena, I had asked myself whether someone might have followed my Magdalena sixteen years ago; if not only did I have a doppelgänger, but I might be someone else’s, links in an endless chain of identical lives running through time. I tried to remember what Magdalena had told me about how she spent her days, whether she had visited the forest cemetery with a man who had told her some crazy story. But would she even have told me? Would she have believed him? Did Lena believe me?

  She went into a few stores, looked at dresses, shoes, furnishings. She bought a red rocking horse, a couple of glass candleholders, and a T-shirt bearing the legend I ♥ SWEDISH GIRLS. She ate her lunch at a small café. Afraid to lose her from sight, I waited outside and watched through the window as she conducted a laughing conversation with the waitress, who then gestured, as though to point her the way. After lunch, Lena chose her direction with even greater purpose, and led me to the Nationalmuseum, a classical building facing the water.

  There were very few visitors, and I followed her through the quiet rooms. The pictures were hung densely, often one over the other, and some of the rooms contained sculptures and partition walls with even more paintings hung on them. Lena didn’t seem to be that interested in art. She crossed the rooms without stopping, as though absolving a show-jumping course, or on the lookout for something or someone. The only time she stopped was in front of a few still lifes. After she had moved on, I stopped to look at the pictures, which were by a Dutch seventeenth-century master, and depicted the cannily arranged booty of successful hunting expeditions, dead foxes, game birds, and hares. One picture showed a couple of hounds, and another a cat stretching out her claws in the direction of the dead birds.

  Lena had gone on, but I caught up to her quickly enough. She had sat down on a bench a couple of rooms farther on, looking abstractedly in front of her. She seemed not to have noticed that anyone else was in the room. I went into a corner and pretended to be examining a painting, a nude by Bonnard, but all the time I was peering around at her. Finally, she stood up, turned on her heel, and marched back through all the rooms, out of the museum, and back to the hotel. I was completely exhausted, not so much by the rapid pace as by my feelings. I scribbled a brief note in the lobby and asked the porter to take it up to Lena’s room. Please come to the forest cemetery tomorrow, two p.m. I have a story I want to tell you.

  EIGHTEEN

  How odd, said Lena, I didn’t see you in the museum yesterday. And the rest of the day I didn’t notice anyone following me either. I’d have every reason to be furious with you, she said, but I can’t manage to blame you for anything, I don’t know why. Sometimes it does feel to me as though we’d known each other for a long time. What was it that interested you about those hunting scenes? I asked. I don’t know, she said, maybe the feeling of peace they radiate. Quiet after the hunt. Or the quiet after death? I asked. She seemed to think about that. After a while she said, But how can that be? If he’s like you, and I’m like your Magdalena, and we’re leading the same life as you both, fifteen or
twenty years before, then surely our parents would have to be the same and our friends and the buildings we live in, the productions in which Magdalena and I appeared, and the texts that you and Chris write. Then the whole world would be a kind of double world. And it’s not. No, I said, it’s not. There are distinctions, variations. Those are the mistakes, the asymmetries that make life possible in the first place. I once talked to a physicist who explained to me that the whole universe is based on a tiny mistake, a minute imbalance between matter and antimatter that must have occurred at the time of the big bang. But for that mistake, matter and antimatter would long since have canceled one another out, and there would be nothing. Wouldn’t any tiny asymmetry have to multiply, though, asked Lena, any decision that he or I made differently from you and Magdalena, wouldn’t it have to diverge more and more from your pattern? That’s what you’d think, I said, but you keep returning to the proper way. As though the things you do had no effect on what actually happens. It’s like having a play put on by several directors. The scenes look different, even the words can be changed or cut, but the action follows its unvarying course.