We're Flying

by Peter Stamm

  She had to be about my age, dressed like a waitress in black skirt and white blouse, with sleek, shoulder-length black hair. I asked if the hotel was closed. Not anymore, she said, and smiled. On her table was a plate of ravioli, half-eaten. Just one moment, said the woman. She sat down and, gulping it down, finished her dinner. It didn’t seem to bother her that I was standing there watching her eat. I hadn’t had anything to eat since lunch, and was starting to feel hungry, but I wanted to go to my room first, shower, and get out of my clothes. When she belatedly gestured toward a chair, I sat down facing the woman. Tell me about your work, she said. I told her once again what I was doing here. She wiped her mouth on the napkin and asked, What do you find so interesting about that? I shrugged my shoulders and said, I had been invited to the conference. Gender studies was hot at the moment. And why always women? she asked. I said I didn’t know, I supposed men were less interesting. She took a sip of wine and washed down the last of her food. I’ll show you to your room now.

  In the lobby she disappeared behind the front desk and rooted around inside it. After a while she pushed a pad across to me and asked me to fill in the form. I wrote in my details. When I turned the page to look up the last few entries, she took the pad from my hand and put it away. Would you mind paying in advance? I said that was fine. Seven days full board, she did the math, that makes four hundred and twenty francs, including tax. She took the bills from me and said she would give me the change later. And a receipt please, I said. She nodded, emerged from behind the desk, and walked toward the wide stone staircase. Only now did I notice that she was barefoot. I picked up my backpack and set off after her.

  She was waiting for me on the second floor at the start of a long, gloomy passageway. Do you have any special requests? she asked. When I said I didn’t, she opened the very first door and said, Then why don’t you just take this one here? I stepped into the room, which was smallish and without much in the way of furniture, except a poorly made bed, a table and chair, and a dresser with an old china basin on it containing a jug full of water. The walls were whitewashed and bare, except for a crucifix hanging over the bed. I headed straight for the French window that opened onto a tiny balcony. You shouldn’t go out there, said Ana from the corridor. I asked her where she slept. What’s it to you? I just wondered. She looked at me crossly and said just because she was on her own here didn’t mean that I could walk all over her. I hadn’t had any ill intentions, and stared at her in surprise. I asked what time dinner was. She frowned, as though concentrating hard, then said I should just come when I was ready. Then she vanished, only to reappear briefly in the doorway and drop a set of sheets and a towel on the table beside me.

  THE BATHROOM AND TOILETS were at the far end of the corridor. I got undressed and stood under the shower, but when I turned on the tap, there was nothing but a faint gurgle. The toilet didn’t flush either. I went back to my room in my underwear, and washed with water from the jug and put on some clean clothes. Then I went downstairs, but there was no sign of Ana. Opposite the dining room was a somewhat smaller room, with Ladies’ Saloon over the door. There were a few armchairs in it—sheeted as well—and a big pool table. There was a white ball and a couple of reds on the green baize, and a cue leaning on the table, as though someone had just been playing. The next room, called Smoking Room, seemed to function as a library. Most of the books were old and dusty, by authors I’d never heard of. Then there were a handful of classics, Dostoyevsky, Stendhal, Remarque, and in amongst them some tattered paperback American thrillers.

  I went back out to the lobby and from there to the ballroom, which was bigger than all the others and completely empty, except for a rolled-up carpet. An old brass chandelier hung from the ceiling, which rested on fake marble pillars. It felt cool everywhere, and not much light came in through the closed shutters. In the kitchen downstairs it was even darker. There was a massive cast-iron stove that evidently ran on wood, and a sideboard loaded with dozens of used wineglasses and stacks of dirty plates, as though there had just been a banquet at the hotel. I went back up to the ground floor and then headed outside.

  The shadows of the tall old pines that stood some distance away from the Kurhaus had grown a little longer by now, and were just grazing the white walls. I walked once around the building. On one side was a small graveled area with a few metal tables and folding chairs lying about, and some deck chairs. There I finally saw Ana. I sat down next to her and asked her how she was enjoying the last few rays of sunshine. It’s been a long winter, she said, without opening her eyes. I looked at her. She had unusually heavy eyebrows and a strong nose. Thin lips gave her face a hint of severity. Her legs were folded under her, and her skirt had ridden up a little. The top two buttons on her blouse were undone. I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that she was displaying herself to me on purpose. At that point she opened her eyes and ran her palm over her brow, as though to wipe away my gaze. I cleared my throat and said, The showers don’t work. Didn’t I tell you? And the toilet doesn’t flush either. You’ll just have to improvise, she said with a friendly smile, at least the snow has mostly gone by now. When does the season begin here? I asked. She said that depended on various factors. For a time we sat silently side by side, then she pulled herself up, straightened her clothes, and said, I thought you were looking for somewhere quiet to do some work. I’m not so sure about that anymore, I said, and when she stared at me questioningly, I wouldn’t mind getting something to eat. She said dinner was at seven, and she got up and left.

  I WENT TO MY ROOM to try to do some work. Distracted by my hunger, I went out on the little balcony to smoke a cigarette. I remembered that Ana had warned me not to use it, but it looked sturdy enough, only the iron railings were corroded and in some places rusted through. The gorge was directly under my feet, and I could hear the loud rushing of the brook. When I turned, I saw Ana lying on the deck chair again, in the graveled area.

  I was down in the lobby on the dot of seven. Shortly afterward, Ana came in from outside. Oh, it’s you, she said, you’d better come along. She led the way into the kitchen, lit an oil lamp, and led me into a small pantry stacked with cans of ravioli. Ravioli all right? she asked. Is that all you’ve got? Quickly she spun around, as though to see what the choices were, and then she listed them by heart anyway: Apple sauce, green beans, peas and carrots, tuna fish, artichoke hearts, and sweet corn. I said I’d take the ravioli. She reached down one of the cans and pressed it into my hand. Back in the kitchen, she showed me where to find silverware and plates, and handed me a can opener. Don’t lose it, we’ll be needing it. Is there anywhere I can heat it up? She furrowed her brow and said, Do you expect me to light the stove for the sake of that one single can? Anyway, I wouldn’t know how. What about some wine, then? I asked. She disappeared and came back with a bottle of Austrian white, which she set down in front of me. That’s extra, she said. Now enjoy your dinner, I’ll be upstairs.

  She left me the lamp and walked confidently off into the darkness. I shook the cold ravioli out onto a plate and went upstairs to the dining room. It tasted truly awful, but at least it filled me up. I returned the empty plate to the kitchen and left it on the side, with the other dirty dishes. I thought about leaving, but by now it was too late. So I sat in the library to work, with my laptop and bottle of wine. I found an outlet, but there was no power. The light didn’t work either. Luckily my laptop battery was full. I read back over my talk and saw that it needed less work than I thought. I tried to concentrate on the text, but I was tired from the long walk, the wine, and the unfamiliar altitude, and I kept dropping off. At ten o’clock I stumbled upstairs to bed through the pitch dark building, without having seen Ana again.

  I RAN INTO HER the following morning in the dining room with a plate of apple sauce in front of her. Help yourself, she said, and pointed to a big jar of the stuff on the table. I said I hadn’t managed to find a working outlet for my laptop and the lights weren’t working either, perhaps there was a fuse somew
here that had blown. We don’t have any power, said Ana, as though it was the most natural thing in the world. While I was still eating, she got up and left the room. A little later, I saw her disappearing between the trees with a towel and a roll of toilet paper.

  My battery was dead, and seeing as I didn’t have a printout of my talk with me, there wasn’t much more I could do. I read around in Summer Folk and in Gorki’s correspondence, and jotted down a few notes, but it didn’t make much sense. The sensible thing would be to leave as soon as possible. But instead of packing and looking for Ana, I went into the Ladies’ Saloon and played billiards. At noon, there was a table laid for two in the dining room. No sooner had I sat down than Ana came in with a can of ravioli. I put it in the sun to warm it up a bit, she said. It didn’t seem to be any warmer than the day before. Don’t you like it? she asked.

  I said I couldn’t do my work without electricity. She looked at me as if I was some kind of weakling and said, Surely you’ll find something to occupy yourself with. I have to hand in the manuscript in two weeks, I said. Why do people write such things, she said, who’s really interested? That’s not the point. I have a deadline, and I have to stick to it. She smiled mockingly and said, But you don’t even want to leave. Ana was right. I wanted to stay here, I didn’t know why, maybe it was for her sake. Don’t get your hopes up, she said, as though she’d read my mind.

  FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS the weather remained fine, and I often lay out and dozed on one of the deck chairs. I read a lot, and played billiards or solitaire. Ana was around, but each time I asked if she wanted to play cards with me or practice cannons, she would shake her head and disappear. When I went into the library, I would find her sitting there, staring out the window. I pulled a book off a shelf at random and started reading. If I happened to get to a bit I liked, I would read it out loud, but Ana never seemed to be listening.

  After the jug in my room was empty, I washed in the stream every morning, the way Ana did. I hung back in the dining room until she was finished, and then I headed out. I had found a good spot, where the banks were flat and the stream had a quiet flow. In the soft earth I saw traces of bare feet, and assumed it was the same spot that Ana used as well. When I dipped my head in the ice cold water, it felt as though it was exploding, but after that I would feel refreshed for the entire morning. Only the noise of the rushing brook was starting to bother me a little. There was nowhere you could avoid it, even inside the hotel you could hear it everywhere. I kept thinking of Ana, the whole day we circled one another restlessly, to the point that I was often unsure who was tracking whom.

  She didn’t cook and she didn’t clean, I even had to make my own bed. The only services she performed were opening cans and setting the table. One time I remarked that I wasn’t exactly getting my money’s worth. Ana’s face darkened in a scowl. She said it would be better if I stopped wasting time on Maxim Gorki and started thinking about my own attitude toward women. That has nothing to do with it, I said, surely you can at least expect running water and electricity in a hotel. You’re getting much more than that, Ana snapped back. I didn’t know what she meant, but I was careful to stay off the subject in future.

  I tried to imagine what the place would be like with visitors in summer, with the dining room packed, someone playing the piano, and children running up and down the corridors, but I couldn’t manage it.

  The stack of dirty plates in the kitchen grew. One time I counted them. If Ana used three plates a day, then she must have been here all winter. I asked her if she was some kind of housekeeper. If you like, she said. I didn’t believe her, but by then it was a matter of some indifference to me why she was here.

  FOR LUNCH WE usually ate tuna with artichoke hearts, in the evening we lit a fire outside and heated a can of ravioli on a stone. The sun left the valley early and it got cold quickly, but even so we sat by the fire a long time in the evening, drinking wine. We had barely exchanged a word all day, and while Ana wasn’t any more talkative than before, she did at least listen to me. I didn’t feel like talking about myself, I didn’t want to think about my home life, which seemed remote and irrelevant. So I started telling her about Summer Folk. She responded to the various characters as if they were real people: she got annoyed with Olga for complaining all the time and called the engineer Suslov a bastard. Varvara and her ravings about the writer Shalimov left her cold. How could she fall for such a man, she said indignantly, he’s just a bad seducer. What would a good seducer be like, then? I asked. He would have to be honest to the woman and himself, said Ana, and shook her head disapprovingly. Her favorite was Maria Lvovna. I knew the famous monologue from Act IV pretty much by heart, and was asked to recite it several times by Ana. We are summer folk in our country, we’ve traveled here from somewhere. We bustle about, look for some comfortable niche in life, we do nothing and we talk all the time. Yes, said Ana, we all need to change. We need to do it for our own sakes, too, I said, so that we don’t feel our awful solitude so much. Ana looked at me suspiciously, and said I wasn’t to start getting any ideas. You would fit well into the play, I said. In a letter, Gorki said all his female characters hate men and all his men are rotters. Then you would fit into the play yourself, said Ana. By the flickering firelight I couldn’t be sure of her expression.

  I never found out where Ana slept. When we went back inside at night, each of us with an oil lamp, she said I should go on ahead, she would be along in a while. Once I waited for her in the corridor outside my room. I had turned my lamp off, and listened in the darkness for a long time, but I couldn’t hear anything, and in the end I just went to bed.

  Half dreaming, I imagined Ana coming into my room. In the middle of the night I awoke and saw her silhouette in the pale moonlight. She got undressed, pulled aside the covers, and climbed on top of me. It all happened in complete silence, the only thing that could be heard was the distant rushing of the brook through the thin windows. Ana was rough with me, or perhaps I should say she treated me like an object she needed for a particular end, but for which she had no particular regard. When she had satisfied her hunger, she left, without a word passing between us.

  IN THE MORNING, as usual, Ana was already sitting at the breakfast table when I walked into the dining room. Not really thinking what I was doing, I stroked her hair on my way to my seat. She gave a jump and cringed. I tried to start a conversation, but Ana didn’t answer, and only looked at me with a grim expression, as though she knew about my dream. As she always did, she gulped down her food and got up as soon as her plate was empty.

  After breakfast I browsed through some illustrated volumes in the library, and later I went along to the Ladies Saloon and knocked billiard balls around. There was no sign of Ana, and she didn’t come in for lunch either. I ate downstairs in the kitchen, and then I went back up to the library and started reading one of the American thrillers. In the early afternoon I heard a car outside. When I looked out the window, I saw a couple of men getting out of an old Volvo in the driveway. For a moment I thought of hiding somewhere, but then I just stayed put and went on with my book. It was maybe an hour later, and I had just thrown aside my thriller in irritation, when the double doors swung open and the two men walked in. They looked at me in amazement, and one of them—not replying to my greeting—asked me what I thought I was doing. I’m reading, I said. And how did you get in? asked the man. Through the door, I said, and got up. I’m a guest at the hotel. The Kurhaus has been closed since last autumn, said the man. The owner has gone bankrupt. The hotel is going under the hammer next month.

  And then he introduced himself, his name was Lorenz and he was the official receiver in the next-door community. The other man was a prospective buyer, an investor by the name of Schwab, who already owned a few other hotels in the area. I told them about Ana, and went to the lobby with them, and in a drawer behind the front desk retrieved the guests’ register with my own entry. Even so, the receiver remained suspicious. Had I not suspected anything was amiss? he asked. A
hotel with no running water and no electricity. True, he hadn’t canceled the telephone, how was he to know that someone was going to squat in the building? I didn’t say anything, what could I have said? And where is this enigmatic woman? he asked. I said she would be here at seven, seven was when we always had dinner. The receiver looked at me doubtfully, and said he would be grateful if I would pack my things. I would be able to get a ride with them later. They would take another hour or hour and a half to finish what they were doing. I said I had paid until tomorrow, but he didn’t respond, and said to the investor that he would now show him the basement floor. I went up to my room to pack.

  When I was done, I climbed up to the higher floors for the first time since I was here. They looked exactly like the one I was staying on. I opened the doors to all the rooms, but none showed any sign of occupation. From the top floor, a narrow staircase led up to the attic, which was crammed full of old furniture, Christmas decorations, cardboard boxes full of envelopes and toilet paper. A stack of straw wreaths lay next to an old sign with Yuletide Ball written among painted icicles. I found a dozen horn sleighs and big dusty Chianti bottles, but no sign of Ana. Even so, from the time I started searching the building for her, I had the feeling she was around, and would pop up somewhere at any moment.

  After I had searched the whole building without finding anything, I sat down in one of the chairs in the lobby, not bothering to pull off the sheet. Eventually the two men emerged from the dining room. Herr Lorenz had a paper roll under one arm. He looked at his watch and made a gesture of impatience. Six o’clock, he said to his companion, I don’t want to keep you any longer. If you want to wait, replied Herr Schwab, I’m not in any particular hurry. I’m curious about this woman myself. He turned to me and said, surely I knew where they kept the wine, and couldn’t I bring up a bottle for us? I’ll do that, said Lorenz quickly, and vanished downstairs. What do you think of the place? asked the investor, is it bearable? He wasn’t quite sure himself. Two bankruptcies in short order didn’t exactly bode well, but perhaps it had just been badly run.