by Peter Stamm
We sat in the dining room, and drank the bottle of Austrian white that Lorenz had brought up. At a quarter past seven, Schwab said he didn’t think the woman would appear, presumably she had seen the car parked outside and had panicked. If she even exists, said Lorenz. She exists, I said. Lorenz nodded and said, It’s all right, I believe you. We sat fifteen minutes more. The receiver locked the door, and said he would send the police up here tomorrow, to keep an eye on the place. While we drove down the valley on the winding road, I thought about Ana, and wondered what she would do now, what she would eat, where she would spend the night. I was certain that it wasn’t the car that had frightened her away, but me, with my thoughtless contact that morning.
I spent the night in a little bed-and-breakfast that the receiver recommended. In the morning I went home. I had a week left to finish my paper, and I worked hard on it for the next few days, often thinking of Ana. Only now did I understand what she meant in saying that what I got from her was much more than electricity and water. After I had sent in my contribution, I called the receiver. It took him a moment to place me, then he said the police had been up to the hotel and looked everywhere, but apart from the empty cans and the dirty plates, they had found no sign of a woman anywhere.
The Natural Way of Things
I’M NOT SAYING they tricked us, said Alice, but they didn’t tell us the truth. That’s what always happens, said Niklaus with a sigh, and he put a finger in the pages of the guidebook he had been browsing. It’s always different from what you imagine. You mean, it’s always different from the way the travel agents describe it, said Alice, and it’s always worse. Whatever, said Niklaus. They had had this conversation at least five times since they got here. Alice had expected the rental to be bigger, better equipped, and with a better-kept garden. She expected life to be different, thought Niklaus, that’s the problem, no sagging sofas or grimy ovens. And the oven is filthy, said Alice. Five minutes to the beach! she said with a sarcastic laugh. You hardly ever use the oven, said Niklaus. And as for whether it’s five or eight minutes to the beach, what difference does it make, we’re on vacation. Of course it wasn’t just about the five minutes. It was about Alice feeling cheated, duped, and about Niklaus being passive and not sticking up for her. You let them get away with anything, she said. He changed the subject. What do you think about driving to Siena?
ORIGINALLY, SIENA WAS an Etruscan settlement, said Niklaus. Under the Romans its name was changed to Sena. The high point of its development was in the thirteenth century. That was when the university was founded and the town hall built.
Trying to avoid the hordes of tourists, they had gone down little alleyways and had gotten lost. Niklaus was reluctant to take out the little map in the guidebook, even though it was obvious to anyone that they were tourists. When he finally did, they had long since left the historic district and were standing on a busy traffic street that wasn’t featured on the map. Normal life, he said. Makes an interesting change, don’t you think? But Alice had seen everything she wanted to see, the Palazzo Publico, the Art Museum, the Campo, and the Cathedral. Normal life was something she could see at home. Now her feet were hurting, and the rain could begin again at any moment. You don’t have a clue where we are, do you? I think, said Niklaus, turning the map in his hands, we must be somewhere around here. Alice hailed a taxi. It didn’t even slow down.
On the way back, Alice moaned about the tourists choking the old town, just to buy a few ugly souvenirs. They had no idea of the treasures in the museums or the beauty of the architecture. If you don’t know something, how can you have any feeling for it? she said. You don’t know what they’re looking for, said Niklaus, I expect they’ll derive some good from it, otherwise why would they all have come here? They come because they come, said Alice. And when they return home, they’ll go on about the toilets being dirty or clean. And the food expensive or cheap. That’s what life is reduced to for them, eating and excreting. She laughed bitterly. I know, you’re right, said Niklaus. He was sorry he’d suggested the outing.
THE NEXT DAY it rained buckets. Alice and Niklaus read all morning. When the rain eased up around noon, they went to the beach, but it was full of noisy families and games of beach volleyball. They hadn’t been there long when it started raining again. Alice handed Niklaus his umbrella and put up her own. They watched the bathers hurriedly packing their things and racing past them laughing to take shelter under the awning of the beach restaurant. Serves them right, said Alice. Her mood seemed to have brightened slightly.
On the way back they shopped for groceries at a little store on the main strip. Afterward, on the street, Alice made fun of the other customers who had addressed the storekeeper in loud German and seemed perplexed that he didn’t understand. They could at least learn pane and prosciutto and hello and thank you.
Outside the cottage next to theirs was a shiny black SUV with tinted windows and Stuttgart plates. The trunk stood open. On the road were suitcases and bags, a kid’s bike and a tricycle. A man emerged from the house and walked toward them. Alice greeted him in Italian. The man didn’t reply. Perhaps he didn’t hear you, said Niklaus as they crossed the garden into their own house. Alice shrugged her shoulders. I only hope the kids make as little noise.
Inside it felt humid, and there was a smell of old furniture and cold cigarette smoke. There should be a law against smoking in vacation villas, said Alice. If the chimney worked, we could at least have a fire. They got the quilts out of the bedroom and spent the afternoon on the sofa reading.
OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS they didn’t really get to see much of their new neighbors. The weather had cleared, and when Alice and Niklaus had their breakfast on the terrace in front of the house, the SUV was already gone, and they didn’t see it until they returned from dinner at the end of the day, and there were lights on next door. Alice and Niklaus hadn’t so much as laid eyes on the woman and children. Maybe they don’t exist, suggested Niklaus. Once they spent all day in the hills, touring wine estates, and bought a lot of wine and olive oil. When they returned at around five o’clock, the black Hummer again wasn’t there, but an attractive young woman was lying in a deck chair in the garden. She had on a skimpy flowered bikini and was doing sudokus. Buona sera, said Alice, but the woman didn’t respond any more than her husband had a few days earlier. After Niklaus and Alice had freshened up, they went out into the garden too, to read before dinner. No sooner had they sat down than their neighbors’ car pulled up, and the man and two small children got out and went into the garden. Niklaus saw the man bend over the woman in the deck chair and give her a kiss, before vanishing inside. The children didn’t greet their mother, they had been quarreling as they stepped out of the car and were still bickering over something or other. The mother seemed to have no intention of intervening. She lay on her deck chair, puzzling over her numbers. Once, with an angry hissing tone and in broadest Swabian, she called out, Cut it out, the pair of you, but she didn’t even look up, and the quarrel went on as heatedly as before.
Alice lowered her newspaper and looked up at the sky. Niklaus pretended to be engrossed in his book. After a while, she threw it down and went inside. Niklaus waited a moment, then followed her. He found her sitting at the living room table, staring into space. He sat down opposite her, but she avoided his gaze. She was breathing fast, and suddenly she fell into a furious sobbing. Niklaus went around the table and stood behind her. He thought of laying his hand on her shoulder or stroking her hair, but in the end he only said, Just imagine if they were our children.
Alice had never wanted children. When Niklaus found that out, his first reaction had been relief, and he saw that it was only convention in him that had assumed he would one day start a family. On the occasions they had talked about it, it had been to assure each other that they had come to the right decision. Perhaps there’s something wrong with me, said Alice with a complacent expression, but I find children boring and annoying. Perhaps I have a wrong gene somewhere. They both work
ed hard and enjoyed their work, Alice in customer service at a bank, Niklaus as an engineer. If they had had children, one of them would have had to sacrifice his career, and that was something neither of them was prepared to do. They traveled to exotic countries, had been on a trekking holiday in Nepal and a cruise to the Antarctic. They often went to concerts and plays, and they went out a lot. All that would have been impossible with children. But sometimes Niklaus wondered if having a family might entail not just a loss of freedom, but perhaps a certain gain as well, perhaps he and Alice might have been more independent of each other, without the exclusivity of love and irritation.
Alice had grown up as an only child, while Niklaus’s siblings had no children themselves, so he and Alice knew only other adults. When friends of theirs came to have children, they usually lost contact soon after. If families came to visit, Niklaus and Alice were usually tense and impatient, and reacted clumsily to the clumsy efforts of the children to make friends. Then Niklaus would feel ashamed of himself. He had never regretted not having children, but sometimes he regretted that he had never even felt the desire to have any.
FROM NOW ON, the Stuttgarters were often in their garden. Half the time the children would be squabbling, and the rest of the time they contrived to be just as noisy. The older of the two was a girl of about six. Every so often, for no evident reason, she liked to issue a piercing scream. Her brother was maybe half her age. He was capable of keeping himself amused for fully a quarter of an hour at a time by bashing two objects together. He would only stop when his father yelled at him. Then the mother would yell at her husband, and he would shout loudly back. The coarse dialect didn’t exactly improve matters. At other times Niklaus would see through the shrubbery between the two properties how the man knelt in the grass beside the woman in her deck chair, and rubbed her with tanning lotion. She would have her bikini top off, and he was kneading away at her breasts, seemingly unconcerned whether anyone could see him. Eventually the two of them would disappear, and a quarter of an hour later, Niklaus would hear one or another of the children banging on the front door, calling for the parents.
Alice could stand the noise for ten minutes at most. A few days later, the mere sight of the neighbors in their garden made her turn on her heel. They took their meals indoors now, when they didn’t go to the local trattoria. Niklaus would propose trips, but Alice turned them all down. She was at war, and had to guard the terrain. Why don’t you say something? she demanded. Niklaus looked blank and shrugged his shoulders. What can I say? If they were playing music outside, or making noise at night, then I could complain. I can’t tell them not to talk. Children can’t help being noisy. A rotten upbringing isn’t punishable. Common is what they are, said Alice, and Niklaus nodded thoughtfully.
WHEN NIKLAUS WAS SITTING alone on the terrace, he would catch himself repeatedly looking across to the neighbors’ garden. The woman lay out on her deck chair all day long, doing her puzzles. She had taken to sunning herself topless. She had small firm breasts that reminded Niklaus of those of the Polynesian women in Gauguin’s paintings. He felt a desperate desire to go over and touch them.
Sometimes the man would take the children to the beach, and Niklaus would prowl restlessly around the property, imagining how he might get into conversation with the woman. He would make some casual remark, and she would ask him where he was from. Oh, Switzerland, we only ever drive through it. Then she would realize the laundry was still in the machine. She would put on her top and he would follow her inside, where it was cool and quiet. She would look him long in the eye. Well, what about it? she would say, and take him by the hand.
When Niklaus turned around he saw Alice standing at the window. She seemed to be observing him. He went inside. Alice hadn’t stirred, she was still standing by the window, as though he were still outside. He laid one hand on her shoulder; she tried to shrug it off, but he wouldn’t let her, and spun her around to face him, and kissed her. It took a while before Alice responded, and after a bit she freed herself, and said with a sarcastic laugh that the laundry must be finished. Niklaus followed her into the little room off the kitchen where the washing machine stood and watched as she took out their clothes, giving each individual item a shake. He followed her into the garden and helped her hang up the wet clothes. She kept the underthings separate, and draped them indoors on a little rack, as she did at home. I have the feeling nothing gets properly dry here, she said. Her voice sounded softer than usual. That’ll be on account of the high humidity, said Niklaus. And they don’t get properly clean either, said Alice. This time she didn’t resist when Niklaus kissed her.
THEY LAY SIDE BY SIDE in silence. Alice had covered herself with a sheet, even though it was hot. Her expression kept changing, switching among the most diverse feelings: surprise, mockery, tenderness, grief. She seemed unable to decide on any one of them. Niklaus tucked his hand under the sheet and stroked her breasts, which were satin soft and had grown fuller over time. They hadn’t slept together in ages, in fact he couldn’t remember the last time. If you think …, he began, and stopped. Alice turned to him quickly, smiled affectionately, and looked away again. He wanted to talk about what had just happened, wanted to use the intimacy of the half hour to influence the day ahead of them, but in the end he just asked Alice what she felt like doing. Should we drive somewhere? She said she was hungry, but to Niklaus it was as though she had said, That felt so good. We still are a couple. I’m glad. We could have something to eat in town, he suggested. No, said Alice, I feel faint, I need something right away. She took a deep breath and stood up. For a moment she remained standing by the bed, looking down at Niklaus. He liked lying in front of her like that, naked and relaxed and vulnerable. Alice often made comments about his weight, and he knew she went for slimly built men, but she was looking at him with devotion. I’ll just have a quick shower, she said. Niklaus got up too. He heard cries from outside. He went over to the window and saw the Stuttgarters evidently on their way to the beach, weighed down with bags and inflatable toys and a cooler. All four of them had on colored clogs and ridiculous sunglasses, the mother had put on a skimpy beach dress and the father was in shorts and a T-shirt with BABEWATCH on it in big letters.
IN THE AFTERNOON Alice and Niklaus set out on a trip for the first time in almost a week. They were going to the nature reserve, not far from their village. They were most of the way there when Alice realized she had left the binoculars behind, so they turned back.
Only a few of the parking spots at the visitors’ center were taken. With this heat, everyone was at the beach—who but they would think of going birding? They followed a dusty gravel path, with bushes on one side and a narrow creek on the other, toward a wood. Niklaus felt tired from lunch and he was sweating, but he was in good spirits, whistling away to himself. Alice didn’t speak much, not even to complain about the heat. When they reached the wood, it was barely any cooler than it had been out in the open. Niklaus kept stopping to consult a brochure about the reserve he had found in their house. If we keep heading in this direction we should reach the sea in half an hour or so.
In fact it was an hour later when they finally reached the sea. Alice kept herself to a few ironic remarks about Niklaus’s sense of direction. There were supposed to be nightingales in the park, but they didn’t see anything except a common buzzard and a few gray herons and moorhens on a pond.
There were lots of pieces of driftwood on the sand, limbs, sometimes whole trees, worn smooth by the wind and the waves and bleached silver by the sun. Alice took her shoes off and paddled in her bare feet. Do you fancy a dip? asked Niklaus. Alice looked at him questioningly. I’m sure there’s no one around.
They quickly undressed and ran into the water. They were both excited, and kept glancing around at the shore. Imagine if someone steals our clothes, said Niklaus. Then we’ll have to stay in the woods, said Alice, and eat berries and hunt wild boar. And I’ll break into remote farmhouses at night, and steal eggs and the odd bottle of Chianti,
said Niklaus.
After their swim they lay in the sun to dry, then they brushed the sand off each other. Alice giggled when she saw Niklaus had an erection. Not that as well, she said. She left her hand on his thigh a moment, as though thinking about something, but then she got dressed.
It was getting dark when they returned to the visitors’ center, their car was the last one in the parking lot. Since they didn’t feel like cooking, they thought they would have a bite in town. It was midnight before they got back. Next door, the lights were still on.
THE FOLLOWING DAY Alice and Niklaus had breakfast outside. There was no sound from next door. They spent the entire morning reading. It was quiet. The SUV was out on the street, their neighbors had to be home, but they didn’t put in an appearance in the garden, not even in the afternoon. Maybe someone complained, said Alice, or maybe they’ve got food poisoning, and they’re all lying in bed with stomachaches. The silence didn’t seem quite real to her, she kept looking up from her book. Just be glad, said Niklaus. I never said they had to shut themselves away in the house, said Alice, of course kids need to run around and let off steam. It’s just a matter of how they do it. At one point a man in a suit showed up on the property and went inside; a little later he went away again. Later on another man came, but he didn’t stay long either.
I wish it was always this way, said Alice when things continued quiet the next day. They sat in the garden and played Scrabble. Alice had brought the dictionary from home so that they could look up any contentious words, but there were none. They both seemed a little distracted. Once, Niklaus saw someone walking past the windows next door, but he couldn’t quite make out who it was. I keep thinking about them, said Alice, it’s almost as though they were less intrusive when they were noisy. At least I could tune it out.