by Peter Stamm
“I’ve come to see you,” she said.
I said I hadn’t meant it unpleasantly.
She said: “I’m not like that.”
“I’m not either. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. All those sick people … I had the feeling that nothing that happened here counted. That everything was excused. And that we had to hurry. Because there’s not much time.”
Yvonne said we could go back to her place, if I liked. She said she lived in a village a few miles from here. Her car was parked outside.
Yvonne drove far too fast. “You’ll kill us both,” I said.
She laughed and said: “My car is my favorite thing. It spells freedom for me.”
The furniture in Yvonne’s apartment was all chrome and glass. There were some red weights in a corner. In the hall there was a little cheap frame, with a piece of paper in it that said: “You can get it if you really want it.”
“It’s cold in your place,” I said.
“Yes,” said Yvonne, “I expect that’s the way I like it.”
“Do you believe that,” I asked, “that you can get it if you really want it?”
“No,” said Yvonne, “though I’d like to. What about you?”
“I didn’t get you.”
“You don’t ‘get’ people,” she said. “If you really wanted … And if you were patient …”
I said I didn’t have much time. Yvonne went into the kitchen, and I followed her.
“Water, orange juice, wheat grass, or tea?” she asked.
We drank tea, and Yvonne told me about her job, and why she had gone into nursing. I asked what she did in her time off, and she said she was into fitness. In the evenings, she was usually too tired to go out. On the weekends, she visited her parents.
“I’m all right,” she said, “I’m doing fine.”
Then she took me back to the hotel. She kissed me on the cheek.
In the morning, it was snowing gently. The puddles on the way to the clinic were frozen. In the newspaper I read that there had been four fatal accidents on the roads that night. “Black ice,” the headlines said.
Larissa was already waiting for me. She told me about a film she had seen the night before. Then we were silent for a long time. Finally, she said she would die of increasing weakness, when her weight loss got to be too great. Or of a hemorrhage. That meant coughing up blood, not a lot, a small glass of it. It didn’t hurt, but it happened quickly, in a few minutes. And it could happen quite suddenly.
“What are you telling me that for?”
“I thought you were interested. Isn’t that what you’re here for?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “maybe you’re right.”
“I can’t talk to anyone here,” Larissa said. “They don’t tell me the truth.”
Then she looked down and said: “Desire never stops. No matter how weak I am. At first, when I was with my husband, we made love every single day. Sometimes … once in a forest. We went for a walk. It was damp in the forest, it smelled of earth. We did it standing up, against a tree. Thomas was worried in case someone saw us.”
Larissa went up to the window and looked out. She hesitated, and then she said: “Here, I do it for myself. At night, only ever at night. Do you do that? Because I can imagine … and because … and because the nurses don’t knock before they come in … Desire never stops.”
And then she fell silent. There was a documentary on the natural world on television. The sound was off. I saw a herd of antelope gallop silently over a plain.
“The old films will be on again soon. Christmastime, you know,” I said.
“This will be my first Christmas in the clinic,” said Larissa, “and my last.”
When I left the ward, I ran into Yvonne in the corridor. She smiled and asked me: “What are you doing tonight?”
I said I would have to work.
I crossed the hospital grounds. For the first time, I was struck by the many faces in the windows. And I was struck by the way the visitors walked faster than the patients. A few were crying, and their heads were down, and I hoped I wouldn’t feel ashamed if it was ever my turn to mourn for someone. The mini golf course beside the hospital was littered with fallen leaves. There were deer in the forest, Larissa had told me. And squirrels. And she fed the birds from her balcony.
As evening fell, I was walking through the industrial park again. I bought a hamburger at a fast-food joint. I came to a vast building, a furniture warehouse, and went in. In the entry hall were dozens of deckchairs; dozens of TV lounges had been simulated. I walked through the series of model lives, and was surprised at how much they all resembled each other. I tried to imagine this or that item in my apartment. And then I thought of Larissa, and I wondered which easy chair she and her husband had bought. And I thought of her husband, who was sitting in their apartment all alone, maybe drinking a beer, maybe thinking of Larissa. And I thought of their little girl, whose name I couldn’t just now remember. I thought she was probably asleep now anyway.
Beside the exit to the superstore, there were Christmas decorations in big baskets, chains of lights, illuminated plastic snowmen, and small crudely carved cribs. “We look forward to your visit, Monday to Friday, 10 A.M.—8 P.M., Saturdays, 10 A.M.—4 P.M.,” I read on the glass door, as I left the store. Darkness had fallen.
The next day was my last. I looked in on Larissa to say goodbye. Once again, she started telling me about her childhood in Kazakhstan, the desert, and her grandfather, her father’s father, who had gone east from Germany.
“When he was dying, the priest came. And they talked together for a while. He was old. And then the priest asked him, well, Anton—my grandfather’s name was Anton—what sort of life did you have? And do you know what my grandfather said? It was cold, he said, all my life I was cold. Even though it got so hot in the summer. He said, my whole life, I was cold. He never got used to the desert.”
She laughed, and then she said: “It passes so quickly. Sometimes I switch the television off, so that it doesn’t pass quite so quickly. But then I find it even harder to stand.”
She talked about one of her neighbors in Kazakhstan, whose television screen was broken, but who kept switching it on anyway and staring at the black screen.
“Just as you look out the window when it’s dark, because you know there’s something there. Even if you can’t see anything,” she said. “I’m scared. And fear won’t leave me. Not till the very end.”
She said fear was like losing your balance. The way that, before you fell, you had a momentary feeling of being torn into pieces, of bursting open, in all directions. And sometimes it was like hunger, or like suffocating, and sometimes like being squashed. Larissa spoke fast, and I had a sense she wanted to tell me everything she had thought in the last few months. As though she wanted me to be a witness, tell me her whole life for me to write down.
I got up and said goodbye to her. She asked if I would come to her funeral, and I said no, I probably wouldn’t. When I turned around in the door, she was watching television. I went home that afternoon.
Two weeks later, I sent Larissa some chocolate. I didn’t send her copies of the photographs. She looked too ill in them. She didn’t write. Yvonne sent me a couple of friendly letters, but I never replied.
I came back from another assignment six months ago, and found a death notice in my mailbox. The chief consultant had written “with best wishes” at the bottom of it.
IN STRANGE GARDENS
He looked out of the window into a strange garden,
and saw many people standing together,
some of whom he recognized straight away.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Book VII
THE VISIT
The house was too big. The children had managed to fill it, but ever since Regina was living in it on her own, it had begun to grow. Successively she had withdrawn from the rooms; one after another they had become strange to her,
and she had finally given them up.
After the children had moved out, she and Gerhard had spread themselves out in it a little. Previously, they had had the smallest room for themselves, now at last there was space for everything, a study, a sewing room, a guest bedroom, where the children would stay when they came to visit, or the grandchildren. But there was only one grandchild. Martina was born to Verena, who had married a carpenter in the next village. When Martina had been a little baby, Regina had minded her a few times. But Verena had always insisted that her mother come to her. Nor did Regina’s other children, Otmar and Patrick, ever stay the night. They preferred to drive back to the city late at night. Why don’t you stay the night here, Regina would always say, but her sons needed to be at work early the next day, or they found some other reason why they had to go.
At first, the children had had keys to the house. Regina had almost forced them each to have a copy of the big old key. She thought it was the natural thing. But over the years, one of them after the other had handed back their key. They were afraid of losing it, they said, they could ring the bell, after all their mother was always at home. And what if anything were to happen? Well, then they knew where the cellar key was hidden.
Once, though, the children did stay overnight, all three of them, and that was when Gerhard was dying. Regina had phoned them, and they came as quickly as they could. They arrived in the hospital and stood around the bed, and didn’t know what to do or say. At night they took turns, and whoever wasn’t in the hospital was in the house. Regina made up the beds, and apologized to the children because the sewing machine was in Verena’s room, and Otmar had the big desk that Gerhard had been able to buy cheap when his company invested in a new set of office furniture.
Regina had lain down to get some rest, but she was unable to sleep. She heard the children talking among themselves quietly in the kitchen. In the morning, they all went to the hospital together. Verena kept looking at her watch, and Otmar, the eldest, was on his mobile telephone the whole time, canceling or postponing appointments. At around noon, Gerhard died, and Regina and the children went home, and did whatever needed to be done. But that very evening, they all drove off. Verena had asked if everything was okay, whether her mother could manage, and she promised to come early the next morning. Regina watched her children go, and saw them talking to each other in front of the house. She knew what they were talking about.
After her husband’s death, the house was even emptier. Regina no longer opened the bedroom shutters in the daytime, as though she was afraid of the light. She got up, washed, and made coffee. She went down to the mailbox, and picked up the paper. She didn’t set foot in the bedroom all day. Eventually, she thought she would only occupy the living room and kitchen, and treat the other rooms as though they had strangers living in them. Then she wondered what had been the point of buying the house in the first place. The years had gone by, the children were living in their own houses, which they furnished according to their own tastes, and which were more practical and more lived in. But even these houses would one day fall empty.
There was a little birdbath in the garden, and during the winter Regina would feed the birds, long before there was any snow on the ground. She hung little balls of suet in the Japanese maple that stood in front of the house. One especially cold winter the tree froze, and the next spring it didn’t bud anymore and had to be chopped down. On summer nights Regina left the upstairs windows open, and hoped a bird or bat might err into the house, and maybe make its nest there.
When there was a birthday to be celebrated, Regina invited the children to the house, and sometimes they were all free, and could all come. Regina cooked lunch, and washed up in the kitchen. She made coffee. When she went upstairs to fetch a fresh pack of coffee, the children would all be standing in their former rooms like visitors to a museum, shy or inattentive. They leaned against the furniture or perched on the windowsills and talked about politics, or their jobs, or where they had gone on vacation. Over lunch, Regina would always try to steer the conversation round to their father, but the children avoided the topic, and in the end she gave up as well.
This Christmas, for the first time, Verena hadn’t come back to the house. She was spending the holiday in the mountains with her husband and Martina, where her in-laws had a vacation house. As ever, Regina had hidden the presents in the wardrobe in her bedroom, as though it could never occur to anyone to go looking for them. She prepared Christmas lunch. She emptied the leftovers onto the compost heap, where a little snow still lay. A week before it had snowed, and it had remained cold since, and yet most of the snow had melted. Regina tried to remember the last time there had been a white Christmas. Then she went back in the house and turned on the radio. There was Christmas music on every single station. Regina stood by the window. She hadn’t turned on a light. She looked across at the neighbors’ house. When she did finally switch on the light, it gave her a shock, and she quickly turned it off again.
The whole family came for Regina’s seventy-fifth birthday. She had invited them all to a restaurant. The food was good, it was a fine occasion. Otmar and his girlfriend were the first to go, Patrick left shortly afterwards, and then Verena and her husband said goodbye. Martina had brought along her boyfriend, an Australian who was an exchange student at the school for a year. She said she didn’t feel like going home yet. There was an argument, and then Regina said why didn’t Martina spend the night in her house. What about her friend? There were more than enough rooms, said Regina. She saw Verena and her husband to the gate. “Make sure she doesn’t get up to any nonsense,” said Verena.
Regina went back to the restaurant, and paid the bill. She asked Martina whether she wanted to go out anywhere still with her friend, she could easily give her a key. But Martina shook her head, and her friend smiled.
They walked back, the three of them. The Australian boy was called Philip. He spoke hardly any German, and it was many years since Regina had last tried speaking English. As a young woman she had spent a year in England, just after the end of the war, had stayed with a family and looked after the children. It had felt to her at the time as though she had just come into the world. She got acquainted with a young Englishman, went out to concerts and pubs with him on her evenings off, and kissed him on the way home. Perhaps she should have stayed in England. When she returned to Switzerland, everything was different.
Regina unlocked the door, and turned on lights. “This is a nice house,” said Philip, and he took off his shoes. Martina disappeared into the bathroom to shower. Regina brought in a towel for her. Through the frosted glass of the shower cabinet, she could see Martina’s slim body, her head tipped back, the long dark hair.
Regina went into the kitchen. The Australian had sat down at the table. He had a tiny computer on his knees. She asked him if she could get him something. “Do you want a drink?” she said. It sounded like a line out of a film. The Australian smiled and said something back to her that she didn’t understand. He motioned to her to come closer, and pointed to the screen of his computer. Regina went over to him and saw an aerial photograph of a town. The Australian pointed to a spot on the picture. Regina didn’t understand what he was saying, but she knew that that was where he lived, and where he would return, once the year here was over. “Yes,” she said, “yes, nice,” and she smiled. The Australian pressed a button, and the town receded, you saw the land and the sea, the whole of Australia, and finally the whole world. He looked at Regina with a triumphant smile, and she felt much closer to him than to her own granddaughter. She wanted to feel closer to him, because he would leave Martina, just as Gerhard had left her. This time she wanted to be on the side of the strong, on the side of the ones who went.
Regina made up the bed in Otmar’s room. Martina was upstairs. She had got dressed again.
“Can I lend you some pajamas?” Regina asked.
“We can share a bed,” said Martina, seeing Regina hesitating. “You don’t have to tell Mom.”
She put her arm around her grandmother, and kissed her on the cheek. Regina looked at her granddaughter. She said nothing. Martina followed her downstairs and into the kitchen, where Philip was typing something on his computer. Martina stood behind his chair, and laid her hands on his shoulders. She said something to him in English.
“You’re very good at that,” said Regina. Martina struck her as being very grown up at that moment, perhaps for the first time, more grown up than she was herself, full of the strength and poise that women need. Regina said goodnight, she was going to bed. And then Martina and Philip sat in her kitchen, as if it were theirs, as if the house were theirs. But that didn’t upset Regina. For the first time in a long time, she had the sense of the house being full again. She thought about Australia, where she had never been. She thought of the aerial photograph that Philip had showed her, and then she thought of Spain, where she had been on vacation a couple of times, with the children. Regina stood in the bathroom, brushing her teeth. She was tired. When she went out on the landing and saw a little beam of light under the kitchen door, she was glad that Martina and Philip were still up.
Regina lay in bed. She heard Philip go to the bathroom and shower. She wanted to get up again, and bring him a towel, but then she let it go. She imagined him stepping out of the shower, drying himself on Martina’s damp towel, walking down the hall to the kitchen, where Martina was waiting for him. They would embrace, go upstairs, and then go to bed together. Verena had asked her to see that there was no nonsense between them. But it wasn’t nonsense. Everything flashed by so quickly.