by Peter Stamm
“He lies on top of a car, and the car smashes through a wall of fire,” she said when Denise came back, and shook out her wet hair. “Ooh, stop it!”
“I’ve never heard of anything as crazy as that,” said Denise. “I’m sure there’s a trick somewhere. Like there is in films. What time is it?”
“Three thirty,” said Denise. “It’s no trick. He actually does it.”
Clouds had gathered, and Manuela and Denise had sat up and put on their T-shirts.
At five there was a brief shower of rain. The two women ran to the kiosk for shelter. They chatted to Andi a bit.
He gave them each an ice cream, and asked them if they were going to the Domino tonight. There was a band playing from the next village.
“We’re going to the stunt show,” said Manuela, “you know, at the container depot.”
“She’s fallen for a stuntman,” said Denise.
“Rubbish,” said Manuela. “Maybe afterwards.”
When the rain eased, it was no cooler, if anything it was even more oppressive. The wet containers glistened in the flat sunlight. Denise had accompanied Manuela to the show. She was curious to get a glimpse of Henry. But Henry wasn’t there.
“He’s forgotten all about you,” said Denise.
“I don’t believe that,” said Manuela.
As the show was about to start, they went up to the fat woman who was selling the tickets, and bought a couple.
At the end of the show, a pickup with huge tires crushed the junk cars that two of the artistes had pushed onto the arena. That was the high point of the show, the fat lady had told them.
“Which one is him?” asked Denise, but Manuela just shook her head.
“What do we do now?” said Denise.
At last the pickup came to a stop on top of one of the flattened cars, and the driver climbed out of the cab, clambered down a little ladder, and jumped out onto the arena. The spectators applauded.
“All things must pass,” said the woman on the PA and turned off the music. The spectators got to their feet. A few of them gathered round the squashed cars that were lying there like dead animals. A couple of kids tugged at their battered doors, and kicked out at the wheels. A man tried to tear away the Alfa sign. “You couldn’t have lined up forty people in that space,” he said. “No way.”
The artistes were off to one side, talking among themselves. Manuela thought they looked disappointed about something. Sad, even. Gradually the spectators drifted away. From out in front she could hear the roar of engines, and tire screech. Manuela and Denise sat all alone on the grandstand. They watched the men clear up. A few youths from the village helped.
Denise asked: “Shall we go?”
“The one with the wall of fire, he was someone else,” said Manuela.
“He must have been lying to you,” said Denise.
“But it wasn’t a trick. I’m sure it was for real.”
Then the artistes started taking down the grandstand, and the women got up to go.
“Maybe he’ll turn up still,” said Manuela.
“Why don’t you ask,” said Denise. But Manuela didn’t feel like it.
“Shall we go to the Domino?” asked Denise, as they unlocked their bikes.
“Who cares,” said Manuela. “It was nothing. Wouldn’t have been anything anyway.”
IN STRANGE GARDENS
It was summer, and the sun shone through the cracks in the shutters and left little patches of light on the walls of the rooms that were facing the street, narrow stripes, that slowly slid down, and widened when they reached the floor, and crossed the parquet or the carpets, occasionally touching some object or other, a piece of furniture or a stray toy, till the evening, when they climbed up the opposite walls and finally dimmed. The kitchen, whose window shutters were never closed, was bathed in festive light from early in the morning, and if someone had walked in there, he would surely have thought the inhabitants of the house had just stepped out into the garden and would be back at any moment. A cloth was draped over the faucet, as if it had only just been used, and the light struck a half-empty glass of water, where little air bubbles had formed.
The view through the kitchen window was of a garden full of peonies and currant bushes, an old plum tree, and a rather leggy bed of rhubarb. At nine, or a little later but still before it got hot, one might have been able to see the next-door neighbor coming down the gravel path, silently watering the begonias and the herb garden that grew in pots on the kitchen steps. Later on, when she had disappeared behind the house and was filling the big watering cans and watering the tomato plants, the raspberry and blueberry bushes, the rushing of the water sounded unusually loud, the only sound in the silent walls of the house.
She really ought to pick the berries, Ruth had encouraged her; by the time she got back they would be past ripe. But the next-door neighbor didn’t pick the berries. She watered the garden every morning, and on the very hottest days she came around a second time in the evening and gave the potted plants another round, and the tomatoes, whose leaves had parched in the heat. When she was finished, she didn’t climb over the low fence—which would have been easy enough—she left the garden through the garden gate, and went home along the pavement.
The neighbor had a key to the house, but she didn’t like to use it. She unlocked the door and left the mail in the cupboard that was on the porch. She sorted it into two piles, one pile of newspapers and the other of everything else. Through the frosted glass in the inside door, she had a sense of the darkness of the rooms within, and perhaps she saw the shimmer of light that fell through the shutters. She hesitated before opening this second door and going into the kitchen, where Ruth had left all the house-plants. There on the table were fifteen or twenty large and small pots, containing ivy, azaleas, a calla lily with a white flower, and a small ficus. She filled the copper can and watered the plants. She had left the front door and the inner door open. Each time she looked at the half-empty glass next to the sink and thought of rinsing it out, but then finally she didn’t, because she thought it might have been left there for a purpose, though she couldn’t have said what.
Once, and only once, the next door neighbor went into the sitting room and looked around. On the sideboard there were photographs of the children in little multiple frames, and a few cards. She picked up one of the cards, and read: “Dear Ruth, congratulations on your 40th birthday. We hope you have a wonderful year, bringing you everything you wish for. Love, from Marianne and Beat.” The two names had been written in the same hand. The picture was of a mouse with big feet, holding out a bunch of flowers.
It hadn’t been a wonderful year for Ruth. I wonder what they’ve done wrong, the next-door neighbor had often said to her husband, honestly, you would have thought…. Nonsense, he had said, without looking up. But it was true: Ruth and her family seemed to have drawn down misfortune upon themselves. Ruth’s father had owned the little stationery shop on Main Street. Ruth and her three younger brothers had grown up in the apartment over the shop. Not long after the birth of the third boy, the mother had developed an incurable illness. For a few years, people had watched her hobbling around on a pair of crutches, then one day she stopped leaving the flat, and thereafter she slowly disappeared from their thoughts.
The stationery store doubled as the bookshop. It didn’t have much in the way of stock, a single shelf that contained children’s books, a few novels, cookbooks, and guidebooks to the major cities and to Italy and France. If a customer wants something different I can always order it, said Ruth’s father, who didn’t seem to care much about the books. Nor was he often called upon to order anything; most of the people in the town made do with what there was, or else they bought their books in the city. The shop had dark wood paneling, and there was hardly ever anyone in it. Not even the owner seemed to like to spend any time there. If anyone went in, it took a while for him to emerge from a back room, and if they didn’t know right away what they wanted to buy, they had to call
him back in order to pay.
The three brothers were quiet and serious. They didn’t seem to have any friends, though no one had anything to say against them. They didn’t attract attention to themselves, and if they did, then it was more through things happening to them than anything that they did. These latter occurrences, though, were of an odd weight, and sometimes of such a violent nature that the whole village talked about them. On one occasion, Elias and Thomas, the two elder boys, had set fire to an empty barn. It was never established why they had done it, but they never denied they had. On another occasion, the three brothers had between them killed a cat and had been seen doing so; a different time one of them had cut through the cable of the street lamp just opposite the stationery store. When the lamp duly plummeted down like a stone, it only just missed striking a bicyclist before shattering on the sidewalk. The brothers wrought their destruction with earnest and concentrated expressions, without particularly intending adverse consequences for anyone. When they were asked why they had poured hydrochloric acid over the teacher’s car, they said it was because they were curious to see what would happen. That same teacher then bent over backwards to prevent the case from coming before the courts.
Simon, the youngest of the three brothers, had gone to school with the next-door neighbor’s son. For a time, the two of them had been friends. Sometimes, Simon came around, and then the boys would play together, or read comics, until the neighbor packed them off outside for the fine weather. The boys never spent any time at Simon’s place. The neighbor wasn’t sorry. She was unable to picture that apartment over the shop, or imagine anyone living in it, except the invisible invalid.
Ruth’s father had died maybe ten years ago. He had driven into the canal by the feed mill. He had been found three weeks later. The car had lain in the canal, with the man inside it, for all of three weeks. No one in the village thought it was an accident.
On Simon, the word was later that he had been on drugs. There were stories that he spent half the year on an island in the Far East somewhere, and one day the paper announced that he had died, and there was something about a long illness, which gave rise to a new surge of rumor. Thomas had moved away, Elias had married and lived at the other end of the village, but in all the years of their being neighbors, the neighbor had never once seen him at Ruth’s.
Ruth was the complete opposite of her brothers. She had been terribly gentle as a child, and good at her schoolwork. She was a Girl Scout, she took part in various sports clubs, and was even in charge of one or another of them, and she was active in the Young Church. After school and right up to the time she got married, she helped her father in the shop. But she too was helpless against the darkness of it, and she too disappeared into the back room. When her father died, the family sold the business to a man who already owned a stationery store in the area. The mother stayed in the apartment over the shop. She had a nurse, and Ruth visited her almost every day.
The neighbor had been glad when Ruth moved into the house next door. She hadn’t gotten along with the previous people in the house because of some silly business that had happened years ago. On the day they moved in, Ruth and her family had gone around to introduce themselves, and the neighbor had immediately lost her heart to Ruth’s two little girls, who were well-behaved but as cheerful and lively as their mother.
Ruth set to work transforming the garden. She took out the bushes that sprouted on the edge of the property, shielding the house from the eyes of strangers, and in their place planted berries. She raised vegetables, and planted the flowerbeds so cleverly that there was always something in bloom. Her husband mowed the lawn—apart from that he was rarely to be seen in the garden. Ruth even set the grill going in the summer months, and carried meat into the house when it was cooked.
Such a nice family, the neighbor had often remarked to her husband, and she had been unable to understand it when one day she learned that the marriage was over and Ruth’s husband had moved out. At that, Ruth had for the first time broken down. Ruth, who earlier had endured all the blows of fortune and had never despaired, who had stood by her brothers after their worst misdeeds, and even after the death of her father had walked about the village with a proud and calm expression. It hadn’t happened suddenly but gradually, like those slow motion sequences in which the walls of a house break apart and collapse, until there was nothing to be seen but a great cloud of dust. The neighbor had been condemned to watch helplessly as Ruth now stood around in the garden, stooped and with a dull expression, holding her rake in her hand but quite paralyzed.
The neighbor put the card back on the sideboard. She opened the top drawer. There was nothing in it but table linens and napkins. In the second drawer she found some knitting, the beginnings of a pullover, presumably for one of the girls. She shut it, and when she stooped to open the bottom drawer she felt suddenly guilty, and hurriedly shut it again. She straightened up. Next to the birthday cards, there was a crumpled scrap of paper, a list of important items to remember. Carpet slippers, contact lens cleaner, nightgown, reading matter. The neighbor pocketed the piece of paper, possibly in order to throw it away, and then she left the room and left the house, and locked the door after herself.
Even July had been hot that year. Ruth had left the windows open overnight, and when she closed them in the morning it was cool indoors, and it stayed cool until midafternoon. But now that there wasn’t anyone there to open and shut the windows, the house had heated up from the attic to the basement. The air was stale and dry. Only in the kitchen, where the houseplants stood, was there the humid atmosphere of a hothouse.
It was quiet in the rooms. Sometimes the telephone on the landing rang six, seven, eight times, and once the muffled sound of band music penetrated the house. Someone in the area had turned ninety, and a brass band had turned out to play. The people stood around in the street, children perched on garden fences, grown-ups stood together and chatted in between tunes, and fell silent when the musicians had found their places and began again. They played briskly and without much feeling. They seemed relieved to be able to pack their instruments away. They might at least have put on their uniforms, the neighbor said to her husband, as they walked home.
At night animals found their way into the garden, mostly cats, but also the odd hedgehog, marten, or fox. Once, years before, the neighbor had seen a badger there, rooting in the compost. But no one apart from her had ever seen the badger, and she stopped talking about it when she sensed that no one else believed her.
One evening there was a storm. The tall pine on the other side of the street bent in the wind, and little birch twigs were blown onto the street. The neighbor stood at the window, looking out. One day the pine would surely fall; it was old and sick and should have been cut down a long time ago. But the apartments in the house opposite were short-term rentals, people kept moving in and out, and no one bothered about the garden.
As darkness fell, it started to rain. Rain flurries blew across the street and rattled against the windowpanes. The street lamp swayed in the wind; it seemed to have come to life, as it lunged around wildly in the darkness. The neighbor wondered what she would do if she saw a light on in Ruth’s house. Of late, there had been several break-ins. I won’t water the garden tomorrow, she thought. She turned on a light, and switched on the TV. By the time she went to bed the wind had eased slightly, but it was still raining.
In the morning the sun was shining, and everything gleamed with wetness. It was cool, the wind had freshened up again, and the clouds blew by in the sky. The neighbor had cycled to the municipal swimming pool. She had swum her lengths, as she did every morning. Now the pool was empty. As she left the baths, the lifeguard locked up after her. The board by the entrance was still marked with the water temperature of the day before.
The neighbor was still on her way home when it started raining again. She cooked lunch. As she ate, she said she wanted to visit Ruth, take her her mail, and perhaps a book. But her husband said she shouldn’t get
involved. Then she told him about the note she’d found. He didn’t know what she was talking about. He looked at her in silence. The neighbor imagined Ruth packing her things, her carpet slippers, her contact lens fluid, her nightgown, and all not knowing when she would come back.
It wasn’t until Ruth had asked her to water the flowers that the neighbor learned that it wasn’t her first visit to the clinic. There is a beautiful garden there, Ruth said, with big old trees, almost a park. The girls had been picked up that morning by some people (she didn’t know them), and just before noon a taxi drew up in front of the house, and Ruth came out with a sports bag, threw a look in the direction of the neighbor’s house, where the neighbor was standing behind the lace curtains. She slowly raised her hand, as if in greeting.
The neighbor didn’t know why she had pocketed the list, or what it was doing still in her apron pocket. The words reading matter had surprised her and moved her, she didn’t understand why, after all, it wasn’t as though she were related to Ruth or anything.
“But she likes reading so much,” she said. Her husband didn’t even look up from his plate. She felt tears well up in her eyes, and she quickly stood up and carried the empty dishes into the kitchen.
THROUGH THE NIGHT
It had started to snow in the late afternoon. He was glad he had taken the day off, because the snow was so heavy that within half an hour the streets were white. He saw the super sweep the path up to the door. He was wearing a hood, and on a small dark island, he was fighting a losing battle against the incessantly falling snow.
It was just as well he hadn’t gone to the airport to meet her this time. The last time he had bought her some flowers from a vending machine, and talked her into taking the subway all the way into Manhattan. When they had talked on the phone a few days before, she said he shouldn’t bother coming to meet her, she would just take a taxi.