The Sweet Indifference of the World

by Peter Stamm

  Lena said nothing. She too seemed to be lost in thought. I was silent, I probably couldn’t have got it across to her in any case what I felt like after that meeting. The next day I called the school and canceled my classes. I walked around as in a dream and tried to recall my life. That’s when I noticed that my memories had changed, that, when I evoked scenes from my own life, I was in Chris’s skin, in his world, in his clothes, speaking his words. It felt dimly as though I could remember our Barceloneta meeting, not from my point of view but his. An older man had told me his life story, and to begin with I had listened in disbelief that turned into the agitation you feel when patterns are crystallized out of life’s chaos, and stories emerge. Hadn’t this conversation in fact been the beginning of everything?

  My fury with Chris kept growing, it was as though he was stealing my life from me by living it himself, blotting it out and thereby blotting me out. Suddenly I was convinced that it would take his death to free me and reinstall me in my rightful place.

  I didn’t go into school on any of the following days either, instead I walked around looking for Chris. I asked after him in hotels in the old center, but it was hopeless, there had to be hundreds of lodgings. I went around the various sights, to shops that tourists frequented, trotted up and down the Ramblas. All this time, I was making plans for removing Chris without being caught. There was no chance of being suspected, because apart from him and me, no one knew of the secret connection between us. My greatest fear was that he had given me the slip, and already left the city. Astonishingly, all this time I never had the least moral compunction about committing such an act, it was as though he belonged to me, and it was my right to put an end to his life, which was mine. If I had happened to encounter him, God knows what I might have done.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Lena and I had reached a narrow lake, whose shore was inaccessible behind a wire fence. On the far side of it, made fast to a dock, was a long line of little sailboats. The boats were rocking in the wind, their wires jangled against the masts. We walked along beside the fence on a footpath dimly lit by lanterns. It was a while since either of us had spoken.

  I thought of the days of great confusion in Barcelona. If the book didn’t exist, what else about my story and my memories could possibly be true? What had my life been? Where had I sprung from? My head reeled, and I was close to going insane. Finally, still without going back to the school, I gave in my notice and packed my case.

  After eight years in Barcelona, I was returning to effectively a foreign land. I didn’t even try to pick up the threads of my former life. I had run away from it, and now I wanted to start afresh, not see anyone I had known then, and avoid the places where I had spent time. I didn’t even call to pick up the belongings I had left with a friend.

  On the Internet I had found a tiny furnished sublet, nothing wonderful, but good enough for a beginning. The tenant was an Austrian physics student who was spending a semester abroad. I never met her, when I moved in she was already gone. We communicated by letters and emails, she had left the keys with a neighbor.

  The apartment was on the top floor of a Sixties tenement building, the rooms were coolly furnished in pine. On a mattress in a niche there was a clutch of soft toys, by the window was a large desk with a computer. The bookshelf contained a few textbooks and computer manuals, nothing else. In the kitchen was a bulletin board with sayings and Bible verses and snapshots. Most of the photos had been taken outdoors, laughing women in meadows, throwing their arms around each other’s shoulders. They were wearing jeans, and tracksuits, bathing suits in one of the pictures. A few of the faces were represented several times, none of them was in any way remarkable. I wondered which one of them was the tenant, or perhaps she was the one who had taken the pictures. She had written to tell me she was leaving all her things in the apartment and I was to make myself at home. But for all the snapshots and the cuddly toys, the rooms felt somehow deserted, as though no one had been there for months. Maybe that’s why I felt so much at home there now, as my life was an empty space, with only the occasional shadow on the walls to indicate that it had once been lived in.

  It was the beginning of summer, and I sent out a few halfhearted applications to high schools. I wasn’t surprised that other applicants were preferred. At the employment agency I was advised to look for supply jobs, and after some more time looking, I finally got a short-term job filling in at a boarding school in Engadin, not far from the place I’d first met Magdalena.

  My memories of that first summer of my return are a blur. I didn’t do much; even when the weather was fine I stayed in the small apartment; it took me a long time to recover myself. The more I thought about the story, the more convinced I was that it wasn’t me who had been mistaken but Chris, and that he was, possibly maliciously, concealing from me the traces of my life with Magdalena. I didn’t need evidence for a life I had lived and could remember. Even so, I didn’t embark on any further research, perhaps I was secretly afraid Chris might be right after all and that my whole life might be a lie, a figment. I preferred to think back to the time Magdalena and I had gotten to know each other, had gone up into the mountains together, had playful conversations, how I used to go and pick her up from the theater, how we kissed for the first time, and slept together. In my mind I was reliving the beginning of our relationship, and my yearning for Magdalena was as strong as it had been when she left me. Without any particular plan, I sat down one night and wrote out the first sentence of the book I had written sixteen years before, and that Chris claimed didn’t exist. By all means, let Chris meet his Lena, and fall in love with her and be loved by her, he would never be able to take my Magdalena and my book away from me.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The path had left the lakeside and led through a thin copse of trees. After a couple of hundred yards, we were back beside the water. Apart from us, there was no one around, and the sounds of the city were only dimly audible. Lena spoke first. Do you remember, she asked in a quiet and very soft tone, how we went to France three years ago? Nineteen years, I said, yes, how could I not. We had borrowed a car from friends and just set out without any particular plan or destination. Those were our best holidays, said Lena, I’ve never felt as unencumbered as that either before or since. We didn’t even have a map, there was no place we were going to, so it was impossible for us to get lost. We drove across country, avoided the bigger towns, and ended up in sleepy villages that looked as though nothing had happened in them for decades. We took recommendations for hotels and restaurants from locals, spent a day or two in a place, and drove on. It’s a huge country, said Lena. That was how we first got to know each other.

  I was surprised to hear her say that. At the time I was very much in love with Magdalena, but it was during those very holidays that I became aware of how alien she was to me. Sometimes, when I looked at her, I had the feeling I had never seen her before. I see an unmade bed, I said, and Magdalena in her underwear in front of the mirror, looking at herself. There’s a knock. Will you open? she asked. I’m not wearing anything and call out to the maid to just leave breakfast outside. When she’s gone, I bring the tray in and set it down on the bed. Croissants and little plastic cups of butter labeled LE PRÉSIDENT, and apricot jam and milky coffee that tastes bitter and burnt. Magdalena sits down cross-legged on the bed opposite me. She smiles at me and I lean forward across the tray and kiss her.

  You see, said Lena, and no one can take that away from you. She had stopped still and was facing me. We stood very close looking at each other, in the feeble light her eyes looked black and opaque. Then she kissed me on the mouth, just quickly, it felt like the memory of a kiss. Before I could say anything, she had turned away and walked on.

  TWENTY-SIX

  I had thought I had my novel in my head word for word and scene for scene, but when I started writing it out again, the memory dissolved, and I realized how much I had forgotten. It was like a dream, where everything
seems to be perfectly clear, but which recedes at once, the moment you try and look at it hard, concentrate on it. My recollection of the book didn’t consist of words and sentences, but feelings, which are much more precise than any thought could ever be, but at the same time elusive.

  The book I wrote at that time wasn’t really the story of Magdalena and me. After she had suggested I might write about her, I soon realized I wouldn’t be able to do that, that I was too compromised to see her or write about her clearly. The fictive Magdalena had covered the real one, as a mask covers a face. That was the subject of my book, the images we have of one another, and the power these images have over us.

  I remembered the Stockholm workshop, where the American script doctor had told us how to construct a scene, tell a story, write a screenplay, that would hack it on the market. I sensed at the time that living texts could never be written this way, texts that had anything to do with me and the things I was interested in. I saw my career ahead of me as a TV writer who wrote exactly those technically flawless screenplays that the stations wanted, who kept regular hours and had no financial worries. I would write Magdalena the parts she wanted, no deathless scenes, just entertainment fodder for which the market was much greater than it was for literature. Life is good, people are kind, and any conflict can be resolved by the end of the episode, or at the very latest the end of the series. And so we lived. We led a good, pain-free life, lived in a tastefully decorated apartment, were popular attendees at premieres and openings. We were recognized on the street, the successful actress and her writer husband, a perfect couple.

  We were sitting at a long table in a smart restaurant in the inner city, everyone was talking and laughing together. Next to me the director was talking to me about one of my characters and whom he could imagine playing the part. I had meant to suggest Magdalena, but I couldn’t do it, it was bad enough that I had written such crap, I really didn’t want her playing it.

  Dinner was a long time in coming, and in spite of the prices, we had drunk a fair amount of wine already. We’ll put it on the bill for dinner, said the director, laughing. He had ordered elk steak, but when the food came, he pushed his plate away after the very first bite and summoned the waiter. I wanted my meat saignant, he said furiously, do you call this saignant? He jabbed his fork into the meat and waved it under the waiter’s nose. Do you even know what saignant means? Bloody, red, got it? He dropped the meat on the plate and told the waiter to take it back. With the prices you charge, you can surely expect the cook knows how to fry a steak to order. The scene seemed to embarrass the waiter, who apologized in quiet tones and took the plate back. The director went on speaking to me, as though nothing had happened, but I no longer heard him. I got up and left.

  It took me a long time to find the hotel. We had gone to the restaurant in a group, and I hadn’t paid any attention to the way. But I didn’t want to take a taxi, I needed fresh air and time to reflect. By the time I found the hotel and walked into our room, Magdalena wasn’t there.

  I didn’t ask myself later whether the decision that night in Stockholm had been the right one or not. It was one of those decisions after which you can’t imagine an alternative. To go was the only possibility, to keep going on, without stopping, and without knowing where to.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The summer vacation was over, and I turned up for my new job in the Engadin. The boarding school had something of the atmosphere of a sanatorium, a secluded world far away from everything else. I was given a small furnished attic apartment in a building where the janitor had once used to live, and that was now given over to temporary teaching staff.

  The pupils seemed to like me, I didn’t make any very great demands of them and gave them better grades than my predecessor had done. On my days off I went for hikes in the vicinity and worked on the revised version of my novel. I wasn’t in any particular hurry, I was writing it out in longhand, to slow the process down, and to get a sense of every word. Time in the book passed barely any faster than it did in real life. As I wrote, all my feelings came back to me, my love for Magdalena, the mingled sense of alienation and proximity when we were together, my fear of losing her, and then my grief at the loss. Sometimes I would lose myself in daydreaming, sit there for hours in my little attic, look out of the window at the landscape which, even before my eyes, merged into the scenes of my recollection. There were things now that I had a superior understanding of, things Magdalena had said or done, and I could see how difficult I had made things for her. With youthful pathos, I had believed I had to decide between her and my writing, between freedom and love. Only now did I understand that love and freedom were not mutually exclusive, but mutually entailed: the one wasn’t possible without the other.

  I had intended to write the exact same book again, but while I was working on it, it turned imperceptibly into a different one. I groped forward through a world that created itself before my eyes, found different routes, saw and heard my characters say and do different things, and situations that had originally seemed intractable to me suddenly seemed to offer ways out of them.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  It was the end of September, a cool, sunny day. I had the afternoon off, after lunch most of the pupils took off on the train to St. Moritz or God knows where. I went on one of my usual long walks, taking the same paths as always. I wasn’t interested in variety, I was happy to have each day like the one before. Sometimes Magdalena took my hand, but she never stayed by my side for long. She would stoop to pick up a blade of grass or walk backwards in front of me, teeter along fallen tree trunks when we were in a forest, or point out a leaf that was caught in an invisible spider’s thread and seemed to be hanging in midair. She seemed barely any older than when we’d first met, many years ago.

  Do you know those moments in autumn, when you suddenly think it’s spring? I asked, as we emerged from the forest. I don’t know what causes it, a smell or bird song, the low position of the sun. It’s a feeling of transitoriness that suddenly emerges, and as suddenly disappears.

  On a bench at the edge of the forest were a boy and girl from my class, sitting close and holding hands. They greeted me sheepishly, barely raising their eyes to look at me. Even though they were doing nothing forbidden, it suddenly seemed embarrassing to be seen by me. I had stopped, wanting to say something to them, warn them of mistakes I had made at their age, encourage them or simply wish them good luck and say how nice it was to see them sitting there like that. In the end I only smiled at them and wished them a good afternoon. Only when I moved on did I notice that Magdalena had disappeared.

  TWENTY-NINE

  We were walking along the side of a six-lane highway, with a board fence and an enormous building site behind it. A cold wind blew in our faces, but Lena didn’t complain, she walked along at my side as though she had never done anything else. Finally, we got to a brightly lit crossing, with a gas station on it, and on the other side an entrance to the university campus. The university buildings were soulless and modern, but the warm light at the windows seemed to radiate security. Shall we warm up in there? asked Lena, as we passed in front of a student dorm. Not here, I said, and led her around the complex of buildings. There was a constant roar of traffic from the highway. The campus lawns had more snow on them than other parts of the city, but the footpaths had been swept clean.

  Do you know your way around here then? asked Lena. Sure, I replied, I was here once a long time ago. With me? she asked. No, I said, holding open the door to the library for her.

  The entrance was deserted, only at the information center was an employee sitting, twiddling around with his phone. We walked up a wide flight of stairs. There was an open section with long wooden shelves and tables. On the walls were signs enjoining the patrons to silence. Not many seats were occupied. None of the patrons had a book in front of them, they all were working on laptops, some of them with headphones, their expressions were closed off, as though their consciousn
esses were somewhere else. When I was a student, I said, we used to go to the library to get acquainted. Our eyes met, and we went to the cafeteria or met outside the door for a smoke.

  We walked through the densely clustered stacks. The books were arranged following some inscrutable system. Lena pulled a thick volume off one of the shelves and flicked through the pages, it was a rather tattered copy of an anthology of English poetry. Did you ever write poems? she asked me. Someone once said prose writers write about the world, poets write about themselves, I said. Do you think that’s true? asked Lena. I shrugged. Maybe the opposite’s just as true.

  I took the volume from her and looked for a Robert Frost poem in the index that I wanted to read her, but when I found it, I saw another, that seemed still more apposite to me. I read the first few lines to myself. When I looked up to show Lena the poem, she had already moved on, and I returned the book to the shelf.

  Lena walked along ahead of me, I couldn’t see her face, only heard her halting voice. Did it ever occur to you that it might all be your imagination? I’ve long since stopped asking myself that, I said. I don’t think I’m crazy, but if I were, how would I know it? I do what I have to do. I’d like to believe you, she said. I don’t want to know what the future has in store for me, but I like the idea that it’s already written down, and that everything that happens to me has happened to someone else and fits in a pattern and makes sense. As though my life were a story. I think that’s what I always liked about books. The fact that you can’t change them. You don’t even have to read them. It’s enough to own them, and pick them up, and know that they will always remain the way they are. She sat down at one of the desks and I sat down diagonally across from her. What time is it? she asked. I think the library’s closing soon, I said, getting up. Of course I’ve doubted myself. This whole story drives me crazy. But what should I do? Presumably it was the doubting it that caused me not to let the thing alone. In Barcelona I told Chris so much about Magdalena that it would be a simple matter for him to find you. If he really is my doppelgänger, there is nothing I can do to stop him. But if everything is purely imagination, then I played you into his hands the moment I told him your name. That makes me responsible for what will happen.