We're Flying

by Peter Stamm

  Why are you doing that? Why not? The pictures are good. You know how good they are. You love your pictures more than anything. Your little sketches. The walls of your studio are covered with them. And you love working in the open, being outdoors, contemplating landscapes, painting. Nothing but the changes in the light, the slow, almost imperceptible movement of the shadows. How irritating it always was, when you drew the street urchins in Rome and they ran off before you were finished. They left you with a load of unfinished sketches. Landscapes don’t run away.

  You don’t paint them to show them off. You don’t exhibit your sketches. When your friends call on you in your studio, they want to see the big pieces you will exhibit, the landscapes with mythological or biblical scenes. They pass judgments that are baffling to you. You ignore them. You’d rather do it wrong in your way than do it right according to the prescription of those twenty people. They all know better, give you advice, as if you didn’t know that you can’t pull off the big things, and why you can’t. The biblical figures, the mythological figures, basically they don’t interest you. Your true love is for the sketches, the little mood pieces.

  If you could manage to depict the moment in just the way you sensed it, so that the boy in Trouville would recognize his village. That he might see the beauty of the village, the beauty of the moment. But who cares about such things?

  Old Sennegon loved sunsets. In Rouen he went walking with you every evening. He told you Bible stories, always the same ones. It was as if he needed some pretext to be with you. The stories didn’t interest you. Stories and the past—they never interested you. What interests you is the present, the moment. Father Sennegon walked two paces ahead of you, his hands crossed behind his back. He spoke slowly and thoughtfully, and suddenly he stopped and said, Look, look at the colors of the clouds. As if you had been looking at anything else anyway.

  You sat down on a bench and silently watched as the sun went down. Very slowly it grew dark. The changes were barely perceptible. Then, the second the sun dipped below the horizon, everything was different. That terrible moment in which the light seems to die. You kept painting dusks, as if you wanted to stop time, to escape the certainty of death.

  YOU ARE TWENTY-NINE YEARS OLD. Soon you will leave your parents and travel to Italy. You must travel to Italy, if you are serious about becoming a painter. You are looking forward to the journey, but you’re a little afraid of it too. Everything will be different. You will meet new people, sleep in strange beds, learn another language. You are thinking about the women in Rome. You have visited the rue du Pelican once or twice, but the women in Rome are different. Michallon told you stories about them. And on that occasion you were interested in stories.

  You’ve bought a suitcase and clothes for the journey, a broad-brimmed hat, paints and brushes. You are prepared. In a couple of days you will leave. When you walk through Paris now, everything looks completely different. It’s as though you were seeing it for the first time, it looks fresh and exciting. The beauty of the city is frightening to you. The last look is like the first.

  You paint a self-portrait. Your father requested it. He wanted you to leave a picture of yourself. He will get on better with your picture than with you. He won’t lose his temper with you for not getting up in the morning, for being absentminded, for wandering around aimlessly.

  For the first time you look at yourself in the mirror with a painter’s eye. You’re not good-looking, but you like yourself. You smile. You will paint yourself smiling, with that smile with which you seduce women and drive your father white with rage. When he shouts at you and tells you to get on with it. You smile, and no one can do anything to you. You don’t shout, you just smile.

  You sketch your face. You capture your likeness. You have always clung to pictures. When you were sent out on errands during your apprenticeship, you stopped in front of galleries and looked at the pictures, always the same pictures. Once, when one of them was suddenly not there—it was a study of Valenciennes—in your excitement you walked into the gallery to ask after the painting, to see it one last time. It was as though you’d lost a loved one. But then you didn’t dare. You said you’d gone in the wrong door, and you blushed and ran off.

  You cling to pictures, your pictures. You don’t really want to sell them. You’ve been known to buy pictures back. They are part of you, part of your life. You look at them. They don’t change. When you put out the lights at night, you know they’re there in the dark.

  If only you’d drawn Victoire, while she was alive. You’d never have been a painter without her. It broke your father when she died. After that he didn’t care what happened. He gave you the money he’d set aside for her. If you’d drawn her, she would still have been there. But drawing people, that was something you only learned to do afterward. Once you’d learned to see.

  You learned: the world is flat, space is composed of blurs, shadows. Gradations. There is no time.

  Long after you’ve died, long after the boy you saw on the field above Trouville will have died, your pictures will still be around. They will have barely changed. If only you’d said that to him: Once we’re both dead, this picture will still be there and show your village the way it has long since ceased to be. But who will look at it, once we’re both dead? Children always put you in mind of death, of your death, of the passage of time. Perhaps that’s why you never wanted a family.

  All I really want to do in my life is draw landscapes. That’s what you wrote to Abel Osmond from Italy, shortly after you’d turned thirty. Draw landscapes. I won’t change from that. That resolution will keep me from entering into any firm bonds, such as marriage.

  As if the one excluded the other. Were you kidding him, or only yourself? You’re a sketch artist, that’s the reason. Whether it’s a landscape or a woman, you’re incapable of deciding. A fleeting touch, a brief glance, that’s enough for you. So brief that nothing changes. The eyes, the shoulders, the hands, the bottom. Pictures of women. But such brief moments come with a price. Even in Rome.

  Your passion is seeing. The act of love for you is painting. The other, the physical thing, is tedious for you, it just distracts you from work. You make love the way you eat, when you’re hungry, quickly, without concentrating. You were never especially picky. For your bed the lovely Italians, for emotion the lovable French. And as a painter, as you wrote Abel, I prefer the former. Roman prostitutes. They do their work for a fixed price, and when it’s done they leave with a smile.

  You never really loved people, you were afraid of loving them, of losing them, of dependence on them. Love makes you vulnerable. Perhaps that’s what makes you so popular: because you don’t expect anything from people, you’re indifferent to them. You were always generous. You helped lots of them without making a fuss. You buy your freedom. You want to be left in peace.

  You don’t like people for the same reason you don’t like the sea. Back then, on the field in Trouville, you looked out at the sea, and it became clear to you that you don’t like it. Because it keeps changing. It’s dangerous. You can drown in it. You need terra firma underfoot. You wish the world would freeze over. Strange that you never painted snow.

  YOU WOULD HAVE TO BE ABLE to take the moment of love into yourself, and live from the memory. But memory is deceptive. You remember the feelings, not the appearance of things. Once you tried to draw Anna from memory, your dear, sweet Anna. But as soon as you had the pencil in your hand, her face blurred. Your recollection was just a feeling. A feeling has no nose, no cheeks, no mouth. You can’t trust your feelings, they’re too inexact. Whereas exactitude was always your commandment. When you paint, you can’t leave anything unresolved.

  Memory cheats you, and you cheat memory. You paint it over, you destroy it. The world has no colors. Colors are interrelated, one entails the other. You obey colors. This green, this brown, this blue, you saw them for the first time when you mixed them on your palette. Your world is made up of lines and surfaces and colors. Your light is white
lead.

  How frightened you were the first time you painted your own likeness. How your face changed under the brush. It became a landscape, an approximate landscape, a surface. For a moment you were afraid you would lose your face.

  I paint a woman’s breasts no differently than I paint cans of milk. The forms and the contrasting tonalities: that’s what matters. When you said that, did you think of Anna’s breasts?

  Her love only makes you impatient. You would have to sleep with her to free yourself of her, you would have to paint her. Why won’t you paint me, she once asked in jest. Why does she want you to paint her? She thinks it would be proof of love. She doesn’t know that it would destroy your love, that it could do nothing else. What you contemplate changes, becomes a picture. When you contemplate her, her face freezes. However much you fight it, you see lines, planes, colors. If you were to paint her, you would discover her beauty anew, the beauty of her picture. You would love the picture. Anna would be nothing in comparison.

  YOU COULD HANG IT UP in your studio. Then you’ll always have me with you.

  You know that modeling is hard work. You have to keep still for a very long time.

  I don’t mind that. It’s what I’ve done all my life.

  I can’t paint you, because I can’t see you. My feelings for you cloud my eye. I can’t paint what I love.

  She laughs. She’s flattered, but then she looks at you with an expression of reproach.

  If you loved me …

  She doesn’t get to the end of the sentence. It’s up to you. But you just kiss her hand. No one can keep silent like you. She reflects.

  Don’t you love the landscapes you paint?

  I love my pictures. The landscapes don’t mean anything to me.

  VIEW OF VILLENEUVE-LES-AVIGNON, View of the Church of Saint-Paterne in Orleans, The Woods at Fontainebleau, Trouville, The Mouth of the Touques. You give your pictures titles, as if that’s what they were for: one particular church, a bridge, one village rather than another. You love these villages, these landscapes, but when you paint them, you have to be indifferent to them. You said it in jest, but it’s true: you work out of a passionate indifference.

  It’s hard to explain and hard to understand. You paint what you see with the maximum of precision, but you don’t care about the precision of the depiction. You try to capture the feeling, the inexact feeling, as exactly as you can. What counts is decisiveness.

  Your regard is cold, but not unfeeling. The coldness of the regard is an absolute precondition. You mustn’t be moved when you want to see clearly. To see something with cold regard means being nothing but eye. Otherwise it’s not possible to feel your way into a landscape or a person. To feel your way means above all to forget yourself, to be beside yourself. It’s not proximity that’s your objective. The foreground is always messed up, if you don’t wholly disregard it. You have decided against nearness. Nearness is warmth, nearness is when you’re in love.

  WHEN YOU WERE IN TROUVILLE the next time, you climbed up on the hill again, to check over a few details. You have to go out into the fields, not to the paintings, how often you used to say that to your colleagues, the ruminants, who copied the great pictures in the Louvre and reckoned that doing it made them great too. Bertin had sent you there, with a commission to copy some of the canvases, but you only ever drew the painters, those pathetic creatures, contorting their features, doing their best. Go out into the fields …

  You climbed up the steep hill. It was chilly, but you were sweating. You were still tired after your lunch. In the distance you heard the breaking waves and a dog barking. This time you walked along the edge of the field, so as not to muddy your shoes. Then you had that view again of the village and the river mouth and the sea.

  And suddenly you had the extraordinary feeling that the landscape was wrong, that it didn’t accord with the reality you had created. Later on, you will paint this feeling over and over again. The young reader. She interrupts her reading, looks up from her book, and no longer knows the world. You will paint the wonderment in her eyes. Her smile is your smile. She knows that she is invulnerable. She lives in her own world, a world in which no time passes, in which there is no death.

  YOU ARE STANDING at the edge of a field above Trouville. It is your field, and you look down at your village and your sea and your sky, at the lead white light.

  When you go back to the village in the evening, you see the boy you saw before. He is squatting on the ground beside the path, playing with a piece of wood. He pushes it around on the ground, a cow, a pig, who knows what he sees in it. You ask him. He looks up at you in apprehension, as though you’d caught him doing something forbidden. Perhaps he doesn’t recognize you.

  A coach, monsieur.

  As if you were able to see it.

  Where is it going?

  To Paris.

  That’s where I’m going soon. Do you have room in your coach?

  He laughs. He’s laughing at you. You’ve fallen for it.

  It’s just a bit of wood.

  A bit of wood, a piece of paper, a canvas. Call it a coach, a bridge, a landscape. Call it a person. It’s a game. Any child knows that.

  What are you doing it for?

  He looks at you with that expression of utter blankness of which only children are capable. Then he stands up and runs away. He has left his toy behind at your feet. You stoop to pick it up. It is just a bit of wood, a wretched piece of wood.

  Summer Folk

  WILL YOU BE coming alone? the woman on the telephone asked me again. I hadn’t managed to catch her name, and couldn’t place the accent. Yes, I said. I’m looking for somewhere quiet where I can work. She laughed a little too heartily, then asked me what my work was. I’m a writer, I said. What are you writing? An article about Maxim Gorki. I’m a Slavist. Her curiosity bugged me. Is that right? she said. She seemed to hesitate for a second, as though not sure whether to pursue the subject or not. All right, she said, come. Do you know how to get here?

  In January I had taken part in a symposium on female characters in Gorki. My presentation on Summer Folk was to appear in a Festschrift, but I hadn’t managed to find time in my crowded university schedule to take it out and polish it. I had kept my calendar free for the week before Ascension and was looking for a place where I could hope to remain completely undisturbed. A colleague recommended the Kurhaus. As a child he had spent many summer vacations there. The then-owner had gone out of business, but he heard the hotel reopened a few years ago. If you’re looking for somewhere really quiet, that will be perfect. I used to hate it when I was a kid.

  Buses only went up to the Kurhaus in summertime. She wouldn’t be able to meet me, the woman said on the phone, without giving me a reason, but I could walk up from the nearest village, it wasn’t far, no more than an hour or so.

  THE BUS WOUND UP through steeply terraced farmland. There weren’t many passengers, and when we reached the end of the line, I was the only one remaining, apart from a couple of schoolboys who quickly disappeared into various houses. I had packed just a couple of changes of clothes, but with a stack of books and the laptop, my backpack still probably weighed forty pounds. What have you got in there? asked the bus driver, dragging it out of the luggage bay. Paper’s heavy, I said, and he looked at me doubtfully.

  In front of the post office were a couple of signposts pointing in various directions. I followed one little lane, which turned into a path crossing a steeply inclined meadow, and then down into a narrow wooded gully. At the edge of the wood were larches and oaks, the interior was all spruce. All over lay felled trees, dried-up skeleton pines, with a few last traces of snow under them. The ground was boggy, and my feet sank deeply into the black mulch. I repeatedly felt spiders’ webs catching on my face and hands. I saw no signs of other hikers, presumably I was the first this year.

  After a while, I realized it was quite some time since I’d last seen a signpost, and sure enough, the path soon lost itself among the trees. I didn’t
feel like turning around, so I headed down the slope, which grew steeper and steeper. In places I had to grab hold of roots or branches, once I slipped a few yards and tore my pants. The rushing of the stream below grew louder, and when I reached it, I found the path again. The stream was a rapid mountain brook, with gray water. Its broad bed of gravel and light-colored stones looked like an open wound cut into the dark of the rest of the landscape. I was making better headway now, and after about half an hour I came to a little boardwalk. The ground below the supports had been washed away, and a fallen tree had come to rest squarely across the boardwalk. The impact had sheared off the rails and smashed some of the planking. I cautiously made my way over it. On the far side of the ravine, the path climbed sharply up, and I started to sweat, even though the air in the forest was cool.

  It wasn’t for another two hours till I saw the Kurhaus looming through the trees. Five minutes more and I was standing in front of an impressive art nouveau structure. The valley ground was already in shadow, but the hotel, standing a little higher, caught the full evening sun and was dazzling white. All the shutters except one on the ground floor were closed, there was no one to be seen, and only the rushing of the brook to be heard. The double doors at the front were open, and I walked in. The lobby was almost dark. Through the colored glass of the inner door panels a few rays of sun fell on the worn Persian rug covering the flagstones. The furniture was sheeted over.

  Hallo-o, I called softly. There was no reply, and I walked through a pair of swing doors that had the words Dining Room over them in old-fashioned script. I found myself in a large room with two or three dozen wooden tables, all with upturned chairs on them. In the far corner of the room was an illuminated table with a woman sitting at it. Hallo-o, I called out, a little louder than before, and walked across the room toward her. Even before I got to her, she was standing up and coming to meet me with hand outstretched in greeting, saying, Welcome, my name is Ana, we spoke on the telephone.