by Peter Stamm
“Do you want to be a Buddhist?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I don’t want to be reincarnated.”
Eiko said, according to Shinran’s precepts it was enough to say the name Amida Buddha to be admitted to the pure land.
“Do you think there is a pure land?” I asked.
“Switzerland,” said Eiko, and laughed. Then she shrugged her shoulders. “Life would be simpler if you could believe in such a thing.”
“I don’t know,” I said. And Eiko said: “More hopeful.”
My departure was now so close that it somehow paralyzed me. I had a few last days off, and toured the city with my camera, taking pictures of the places I wanted to remember, my neighborhood, my regular bar, the ferry to Staten Island, and the midtown area where I had worked. But it was as though the city was slipping away from me even while I clicked, as though it were stiffening, flattening, into a photograph, a memory, before my eyes.
All at once I had the feeling of being at home here. At first I couldn’t explain why, then I realized that, for the first time since I’d been in New York, I was hearing church bells.
On the day before my departure, it snowed. In the space of a few hours, a thick blanket of snow covered the city. The radio was full of news of closed subway lines, and jams on the main exit roads. There were reports of flooding in Monmouth and Far Rockaway. Chris, who had gone to a party with Eiko, called to say they would have to stay the night there, and so wouldn’t be able to say goodbye to me.
“I’ll visit you,” I said.
“Sure,” said Chris. “Good luck.”
I had packed my bags, and was watching TV to kill the time. Every station had reports on the flooding and the snow. Eventually I sat down in the window once more, and smoked. There was no light on in the dancer’s window, nor in Margarita’s either. Down on the street, some kids were playing in the snow. I watched them, and thought about my own childhood, and how we used to play in the snow. I felt happy to be going back to Switzerland.
Then one of the kids spotted me, and lobbed a snowball up in my direction. The others all looked up as well. They interrupted their game, and now all of them were throwing snowballs at me. It was too high up for them, but one of the snowballs hit just below me, and some of the snow splattered in my face. I shut the window, and took a step back into the shade. The children went back to whatever game they had been playing before. They seemed to have already forgotten all about me.
* National holiday in Switzerland.
BLACK ICE
I was amazed to see how small a heart was. It was lying in the patient’s opened chest, beating quickly and regularly. The ribs were pinned back by two metal clamps. The surgeon had had to cut through a thick layer of fat, and I was surprised that the wound wasn’t bleeding. The operation took two hours, and then the green cloths surrounding the patient were taken away. In front of us was an old man lying naked on the operating table. One of his legs had been amputated above the knee, and he had three large scars on his belly, from previous operations. His arms were spread wide, and tied down, as if he wanted to embrace someone. I turned away.
“Was it interesting for you?” asked the surgeon as we drank coffee together later.
“A heart’s such a small thing,” I said. “I think I’d rather not have seen that.”
“It’s small, but it’s tough,” he said. “Originally, I was going to go into psychiatry.”
I had come to the clinic to write up the case of a young woman patient. She had tuberculosis, and, in the course of her treatment at a different lung clinic, had contracted an incurable form of the illness.
At first, the patient had agreed to be interviewed, but when I came to the clinic she changed her mind. I waited two days, walked in the park, looked up at her window, and hoped she would agree to see me. On the second day, the consultant asked me whether I’d like to see an operation, to shorten my waiting time. On the morning of the third day, the tuberculosis specialist called me in the hotel, and said his patient would see me now.
The TB ward was in an old, separate building. There was no one to be seen on the large, glazed balconies. There were Christmas decorations up in the windows and the corridors inside. I read the information on the notice board, the business card of a hairdresser who did home visits, television rental offers. A nurse helped me into green scrubs that buttoned at the back, and handed me a mask.
“Larissa isn’t actually infectious,” she said, “as long as she doesn’t cough in your face. But it’s best to be safe.”
“I would like to talk to you as well,” I said, “if you have any time on any of the next few evenings …”
Larissa was sitting on her bed. I wanted to shake hands, hesitated, and ending up just saying hello. I sat down. Larissa was pale, and very thin. Her eyes were dark and she had unkempt thick dark hair. She was wearing a tracksuit and pink fluffy slippers.
We didn’t talk very long on our first meeting. Larissa said she was tired, and feeling unwell. When I told her about myself and the magazine I was working for, it seemed hardly to interest her. She no longer read much, she said. To begin with, she had, but not anymore. She showed me a doll without a face and just one arm.
“She’s for my daughter, a Christmas present. I wanted to give it to her on her birthday, but I couldn’t get it together. I feel like knitting, but instead I watch television, or the doctor comes, or it’s mealtime. And the evening comes, and I’ve gotten no further. And every day is like that, and every week, and every month.”
“She’s pretty,” I said.
The doll was ghastly. Larissa took it out of my hands, hugged it, and said: “I can only knit when I’ve got company. If I have company, then I can knit.”
Then she said she wanted to watch a film with Grace Kelly and Alec Guinness. She had seen it the day before, on a different channel. Grace Kelly played a princess who was in love with the Crown Prince. To make him jealous, she pretended to be in love with her tutor. And the tutor had been in love with her for a long time.
“The professor says to her, you’re like a mirage. He says you see a beautiful-looking picture in front of you and you rush toward it, but then it vanishes and you’ll never, ever see it again. And then she falls in love with him, and kisses him on the mouth. Just once. But the priest—he’s an uncle of hers—he says, if you think you’re happy, then your happiness is already over. And in the end she marries the Crown Prince. And the professor leaves. Because he says you’re like a swan. Always on the lake, majestic and cool. But you’ll never come ashore. Because if a swan comes ashore, it looks like a silly goose. To be a bird and never to fly, he says, to dream of a song but never be able to sing it.”
The clinic was some way out of the city, in the middle of the industrial park, right on the highway. I had taken a room in a hotel in the vicinity, an ugly new construction in rustic style. So far the only time I had seen the other occupants had been at breakfast time; most of them seemed to be sales reps. Later on, while I was reading the paper, a couple walked into the dining room. She was much younger than him, and he seemed so besotted with her I assumed he must be married, and she was his lover, or else a prostitute.
The hotel had a sauna in the basement, and that evening I put the fifteen marks on my bill, and went down. I found myself in a large, unheated room, empty except for a couple of exercise machines, and a ping pong table. “Roman Baths,” it said on a door. Inside, there was soft music coming from loudspeakers in the ceiling. The walls and floor were covered with white tiles. There was no one else around. I sat down in the sauna cabin. I sweated, but then, as soon as I went out to take a shower, I shivered.
The following day I went out to see Larissa again. She said she was feeling better. I asked her to tell me something about herself, and she talked about her family, her home in Kazakhstan, the desert there, and her life. I avoided asking her any questions about her illness, but eventually she got onto the subject herself. After a couple of hours, she said she was tir
ed. I asked if I might come again the next day, and she said yes.
Before I left the room, I looked around and wrote down: “A table, two chairs, a bed, a washbasin behind a yellow flowered plastic screen, everywhere used paper tissues, pictures of her daughter on the wall, and a chocolate Advent calendar, empty. The TV on throughout. Sound off.” Larissa looked at me questioningly.
“Atmosphere,” I said.
When I got back to the hotel, the photographer had arrived. I had made a date for that evening with Gudrun, the nurse on the TB ward. I called her to ask if she had a colleague she could bring along. The four of us ate in a Greek restaurant, the photographer and I, and the two nurses, Gudrun and Yvonne.
“How long have you been smoking?” Yvonne asked me, as I lit up after supper.
“Ten years,” I said. She asked me how many I smoked, and together we toted up the number of cigarettes I had smoked in my life.
“Well, it’s still better than TB,” I said.
“TB is no problem,” said Yvonne. “You can be cured in six months. And it heightens desire. Your sex drive.”
“Is that really true?”
“It’s what they say. Maybe it just used to. In the days when people still used to die of it. A kind of terminal panic.”
“He’s writing about Larissa,” said Gudrun.
“That’s a bad case,” said Yvonne, shaking her head.
I liked Yvonne better than Gudrun, who seemed to prefer the photographer. Once, I winked at him, and he laughed and winked back.
“What are you doing, winking at each other?” said Gudrun, laughing as well.
When I went in to Larissa the next day, with the photographer in tow, she insisted on getting changed. She pulled the yellow curtain rather carelessly, and I saw her pale, emaciated body, and thought she must have gotten used to changing behind curtains. I turned away and went up to the window.
When Larissa came out from behind the curtains, she was wearing jeans, a loud patterned sweater, and black patent leather pumps. She said we could go out on the balcony, but the photographer said the room was better.
“Atmosphere,” he explained.
I could see him sweating under his mask. Larissa smiled as he took her picture.
“He’s a good-looking man,” she said, after the photographer was gone.
“All photographers are good-looking,” I said. “People only want to have their picture taken by good-looking people.”
“The doctors are good-looking as well,” said Larissa, “and healthy too. They never get sick.”
I told her about the high suicide rate among doctors, but she refused to believe me.
“That’s something I would never do,” she said, “take my life.”
“Do you know how much longer …”
“Half a year, nine months maybe …”
“Can’t they do anything?”
“No,” said Larissa, and she laughed hoarsely, “it’s spread all over my body. All rotten.”
She talked about her first spell in a clinic, and how she had left thinking she was cured. Then she had become pregnant, and had got married.
“I would never have dared before. And when I was in the hospital for the birth, that’s when it all began again. Slowly. They treated me at home for six months, and then they said it was too dangerous. For my baby. I was so afraid, so afraid they might catch it from me. But they’re healthy. Thank God. They’re both healthy. I was still living at home this Easter. My husband cooked. And he said, in six months the doctor said you’ll be better. By the time Sabrina has her first birthday, in October, you’ll be home again. In May, on my birthday, he came with a ring.”
She slid off the ring she had on her finger. She held it in her fist, and said: “We had no money before, we bought furniture, a television, things for Sabrina. The ring wasn’t a priority, we told each other. In May he brought me the ring. Now we need it, he said.”
Then Larissa said she wanted to see my face. She tied on a mask, and I took mine off. She looked at me for a long time in silence, and only then did I notice her beautiful eyes. Finally she said, all right, and I tied my mask back on.
That evening we went to the sauna with the two nurses. When the photographer suggested it, Gudrun giggled, but Yvonne agreed straight off. I hardly broke a sweat during the first session, and remained sitting long after the sand timer was empty. The photographer and Gudrun had left in quick succession.
“Shall I pour on more water?” Yvonne asked, and, without waiting for my agreement, poured water on the heated stones. There was a hiss, and a smell of peppermint. We sat facing each other in the dim sauna. In the low lighting, Yvonne’s body glistened with sweat, and I thought she was beautiful.
“Don’t these mixed saunas bother you?” I asked.
“Why?” she asked. She said she belonged to a gym, and often used saunas.
“I don’t like it,” I said. “Being naked, as though it didn’t signify anything. We’re not wild beasts.”
“Then why did you agree to come?”
“There’s nothing else to do here.”
As we finally left, Gudrun and the photographer were just returning. And from then on, we took turns. While we rested, they sweated, while we sweated, they rested and showered. I lay next to Yvonne on one bench. I turned to the side, and watched her. She was flipping through a car journal, whose pages had gotten dulled and wavy with the moisture.
“Somehow I can’t reason myself out of it,” I said, “a naked woman is a naked woman.”
“Are you married?” she asked rather indifferently, without looking up from her magazine.
“I live with my girlfriend,” I said. “What about you?”
She shook her head.
After three goes, we had had enough. When Yvonne got dressed, she seemed more naked to me than she had in the sauna. Then we played ping pong, and the photographer and Gudrun sat down on the exercise machines to watch. Finally, Gudrun said she was getting cold, and the two of them went upstairs to the bar. Yvonne was a good player, and beat me. I asked her for a rematch, and she beat me again. We had built up a sweat, and so we had another shower.
“Shall we have a drink?” Yvonne asked.
“Men are so straightforward,” I said, and I had the feeling my voice was trembling.
“How do you mean?” she asked, coolly doing up her shoes.
“I don’t know,” I said. And then I asked her: “Will you come upstairs with me?”
“No,” she said, and looked at me with disbelief, “absolutely not. What’s going on?”
I said I was sorry, but she just turned and walked off. I followed her upstairs to the bar.
“Are you coming?” she said to Gudrun. “I want to go home.”
When the two of them had gone, the photographer asked me what had happened. I told him I had asked Yvonne to come upstairs with me. He said I was a fool.
“Did you fall in love with her?”
“I don’t know. How should I know? What are we doing here?”
“So long as you don’t fall in love with your beautiful patient.”
“Do you think so?”
“Yes, she’s got something. But don’t expect a writer to see that.”
He laughed, threw his arm around me, and said: “Come on, let’s have another beer. We can enjoy our evening even without those two.”
The following morning, the photographer left. The nurses on the TB ward were less friendly than they’d been before. I didn’t see Yvonne, but I assumed she’d talked. I didn’t care.
“How many more times do you plan on coming?” asked the head sister.
“Till I have enough material,” I said.
“I hope you’re not taking advantage of your situation.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Frau Lehman has been in isolation for the past six months. She is very receptive to any kind of attention. If she experienced a disappointment, it might affect her adversely.”
“Does she
not get any visitors?”
“No,” said the ward sister, “her husband’s stopped coming.”
Larissa was wearing her jeans again. She had combed her hair, and was wearing make-up. I looked at her, and thought the photographer was right.
“That’s the worst thing,” said Larissa, “the fact that no one ever touches me. Not for six months now. Except in rubber gloves. I haven’t kissed anyone in six months. I sensed … when my husband brought me here, I sensed he was scared of me. He kissed me on the cheek, and said in six months … It was as though that was the moment that I got sick. The night before we slept together. That was the last time. Though I didn’t know that then. And when we arrived here, he was suddenly afraid of me. I can still picture him shaving in his shorts, while I’m packing up my toilet articles. And he says to me, take the toothpaste with you, I’ll buy a new tube. And I took it.”
She said she sometimes kissed her hand, her arm, the pillow, the chair. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. Larissa lay down and cried. I went up to her bed, and put my hand on her head. She sat up and said: “You must disinfect your hand.”
I had enough material for my story. That evening, I went downtown for supper. But I couldn’t stand the racket, and soon took the bus out to the industrial park. As I got out at the terminus, I thought of Larissa. She told me she had tried running away one evening. When a nurse had forgotten to lock her room. She had gone as far as the bus stop. She had stood a little separately, and watched the people arriving from the factory. They must have imagined she too had come from there. Was on her way home. Would pop into a store on the way, and get home and fix dinner for her husband and child. That they would watch television together afterwards. And then she had gone back to the clinic.
It was still early. I walked through the industrial park. In among the ugly factories were a few new homes. They were dwarfed by the structures around them, as if they had been built to a different scale. Outside one of the homes, a man was hanging electric lights on a tree. In the doorway, a woman and a little child stood and watched him. The woman was smoking. A man in an apron was setting the table. I wondered whether he was expecting guests, or if he was cooking for himself or for his family. In the distance, I could hear the traffic on the highway. Then I went back to the hotel. It had gotten cold. Yvonne was sitting at the bar. I sat down next to her and ordered a beer. For a while we didn’t speak, and then finally I said: “Do you come here often?”