by Peter Stamm
He stood by the window and looked out. Even if her flight was on time, the earliest she could be here was in half an hour. But he felt a little restless just the same. He discarded sentences he had prepared and rehearsed over the past weeks. He knew she would demand an explanation, and he knew he didn’t have one. He had never had explanations, but he had always been sure of his ground.
An hour later, he was back in front of the window again. It was still snowing, harder than before, it was a real blizzard now. The super had given up the struggle. Everything was white now, even the air seemed to be white, or at least it was the pale gray of encroaching darkness, and that was barely distinguishable from the white of the falling snow. The cars drove slowly and with exaggerated caution. The few pedestrians who were out leaned forward into the wind.
He switched on the TV. All the local stations were full of news of the storm, and it was striking that they had come up with a name for it too, by which they all referred to it right away. In the outer boroughs the chaos was even worse than downtown, and the coast guard reported a flood alert. But the correspondents who had been sent out to cover the breaking news, in bulky down jackets and speaking into microphones with grotesque windshields, were all in high good humor and were tossing snowballs up into the air, and only got serious when they were asked about the scale of the damage and personal injuries.
He called the airline. He was told that on account of the blizzard, the flight had been rerouted to Boston. No sooner had he put the receiver down than the phone rang. She was calling from Boston, saying they might be on their way again at any moment. There were rumors that JFK had been opened again. But there was also a chance they would have to stay the night in Boston. She said she was looking forward to seeing him, and he told her to take care. See you later, she said, and she hung up.
Outside, it was dark now. The snow was falling steadily, falling and falling, and, apart from a few taxis going by at a crawl, there were no more cars about.
He had thought he would be going out for dinner with her, and he felt hungry now. And it would be several hours till she got there. There was nothing in the fridge except a couple of beers, and a bottle of vodka in the freezer with some ice. He thought he should go and buy something to eat. She was bound to be hungry after the long flight. He put on his warm coat, and a pair of rubber boots. They were the only winter shoes he had, and he had hardly worn them. He took an umbrella and went out.
The snow was deep but it wasn’t heavy, and it was easy to shuffle through it in his boots. The stores were closed, and in only a few of them had the shop workers taken the trouble to put up a sign to say why they’d gone home early.
He walked across town. Lexington Avenue was covered with snow, and on Park he saw the distant orange blinking lights of the snowplows coming up the avenue in a convoy. Madison and Fifth had already been cleared but they were white again. He had to scale a high snow rampart at the edge of the sidewalk. He sank in, and some snow got in over the top of his boots.
There was someone cross-country skiing in Times Square. The ads were flashing away as normal. Their garish alternation had something ghostly in so much silence. He walked on, up Broadway. Just before he got to Columbus Circle, he saw the lit-up window of a coffee shop. It was a place he had been to before; the manager and the waiters were Greek, and the food was good.
There were only a few customers there. Most of them were sitting at one of the tables in the window that reached down to the ground, drinking beer or coffee, and looking out. The atmosphere was solemn, no one was talking, it was as though they were all witnesses to a miracle.
He sat down at a table, and asked for a beer and a club sandwich. The snow in his boots started to melt. When the waiter brought him his beer, he asked why the place was still open. They hadn’t expected there would be this much snow, the waiter said, and now it was too late. Most of them lived in Queens, and it was impossible to get out there as things stood. So they might as well keep the restaurant open.
“Maybe all night,” said the waiter, and he laughed.
The way back seemed easier, even though it was still snowing. He had got them to wrap up a sandwich for her, and noticed that he didn’t know what she liked. In the end, he asked for ham and cheese. No mayo, no pickles, at least he remembered that.
She had left him a message on the answering machine. There hadn’t been any flights out after all, and now Boston was snowed in as well. They were being driven to the station, to catch a train. If everything went according to plan, she would be in Manhattan in four hours. She had left the message an hour ago.
He switched the TV back on. A man was standing in front of a map, explaining how the storm front was moving north along the coast, and had now reached Boston. New York had been through the worst, the man said and smiled, but it would probably go on snowing for the rest of the night.
He switched off the TV and went back over to the window. He wasn’t thinking about his sentences any more, he was just looking out at the street. He turned off the main light and switched on the desk lamp. Then he made some tea, sat down on the sofa, and read. At midnight he went to bed.
When the bell rang it was three. Before he could get to the door, it rang again. He pressed the entry button, and held it a moment. Then, though dressed only in shorts and a T-shirt, he stepped out onto the landing and walked toward the elevator. It seemed to take forever.
Of course he knew it was her, but he was strangely surprised when the elevator doors opened and he saw her standing in front of him. She just stood there, her big red suitcase next to her, waiting. He stepped toward her. When he moved to kiss her, she put her arms around him. The elevator doors shut behind him. She said: “I’m just so incredibly tired.” He pushed the button, and the doors opened again.
They split the sandwich, and she told him about how the train had stopped in the snow in the middle of nowhere,and had stood there for hours until finally a snowplow had come along and cleared the tracks.
“Of course no one knew what was going on,” she said. “I was afraid we’d be there all night. At least I brought some warm clothes with me.” He asked if it was still snowing, then looked out into the night himself and saw that it had almost stopped.
“The taxi would only take me to the corner of Lexington,” she said. “It couldn’t get into your street. I gave the driver twenty dollars and said, please get me to the door, it doesn’t matter how. He carried my case all the way. A little Pakistani. Nice man.”
She laughed. They had drunk some vodka, and he poured out a refill.
“Well?” she said. “What’s this urgent thing you wanted to talk to me about?”
“I love snow,” he said.
He stood up and went over to the window. The snow was falling but only in little flakes that drifted down from the sky, sometimes floated up as if they were lighter than air, then subsided again, disappearing against the white sidewalks. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
He turned around and looked at her a long time as she sat there sipping her vodka. He said: “I’m glad you’ve come.”
LIKE A CHILD, LIKE AN ANGEL
When the fireworks finished, the few hotel guests who had gathered in front of the hall window clapped. In between the bangs of the rockets, there had been scraps of music, choirs, an organ, and once the pealing of bells. The music came from down by the river, a long way off, and sometimes it was drowned out by the noise of the crowd outside on the streets. At those moments, Eric had the feeling he belonged to this city, these celebrations, these people. The applause on the hotel landing brought him back to himself. Someone closed the window.
A million people had watched the fireworks, said the waiter as he brought breakfast up to the room the next morning. On the way to the airport, Eric calculated: on average, a human being lives to the age of seventy, which is twenty-five thousand days. Therefore, every day one person in twenty-five thousand dies. Of the million people who were watching the fireworks last night, statistically speaking,
twenty must already have died.
The taxi drove through a suburb, and Eric saw mothers with children, old people, and a group of girls sitting on a bench waiting for a bus. Suddenly he felt inexplicably moved by something, a feeling that lasted until the taxi drew up in front of the departure lounge. Eric wished the driver a nice day.
Eric worked in the internal accounts department of a multi-national food conglomerate. Roughly two-thirds of his job consisted of visiting the various subsidiaries dotted all over Europe and North America. He had originally taken the job precisely because it involved so much travel. He liked getting around and meeting new people. But over time he had gotten used to it, and the traveling came to seem routine and finally burdensome. It began with his preferring aisle seats on planes, and no longer bothering to unwrap his meals.
He always stayed at classy hotels, he had no real limit on his expenses. By day he worked, and in the evenings colleagues from the various subsidiaries took him out and showed him their cities. They would eat together in expensive restaurants, go to nightclubs, get drunk. Sometimes Eric would take a woman up to his room, not a prostitute, but one of those women you met sitting around the bars of expensive hotels at midnight, looking for something or other. But that wasn’t often. Usually, by the time his taxi driver set him down in front of his hotel, Eric was so drunk that, leaving either an absurdly large tip or none at all, he marched straight up to his room.
The hotel rooms were all alike, the restaurants were all alike, the conversations with colleagues, the airports, the cities. The journeys were always the same, Eric smoked and drank too much, and had headaches in the morning. The worst thing were the times in Eastern Europe. There his companions either ordered vodka, or else the sweet liqueurs they were so proud of, and that, too, were indistinguishable. And on the days after such occasions, the headaches would be worse too.
Valdis, who met Eric at the airport, behaved as though they were old friends, even though they only saw each other a couple of days a year. He should definitely try to stay longer this time, Valdis had said on the phone, when Eric called to announce his latest visit, the city was celebrating its eight hundredth anniversary, and there would be gigantic celebrations.
Valdis was the only man in the local accounts department who could speak German. He used strange expressions, and had a strong accent, and somehow never got to the point. When he went out drinking with Eric, he always insisted on buying for them both. Eric then told him he could put it down on expenses, that way the company would pay. The checks were never for very much, but Eric knew what Valdis made.
Once, Valdis had invited him back to his house. He lived somewhere on the edge of the city in a scuzzy prefab development. The apartment was small and stuffy in its layout and furnishings, and reminded Eric of his parents’ place. Then he met Valdis’s wife. She was beautiful, and Valdis seemed to be very much in love with her. At any rate, when she was in the kitchen he said he was a very happy man.
After dinner, a bottle of an herb liqueur called balzams was produced (which Eric hated), and then they all moved onto a first name basis. Valdis’s wife was called Elza. Eric said it was a beautiful name, and he invited them both to stay whenever they were next in Switzerland. But Valdis said that was hardly likely, such a journey was completely beyond their means. Eric asked if he could do anything else to help.
“No,” said Valdis with a smile. “You enjoyed balancing the books, didn’t you?”
The rest of the year Eric would never hear anything from Valdis. The greater his astonishment when a letter arrived from him one day, to his home address. When he read the name of the sender on the envelope, he had to stop and think for a moment.
Dear friend, wrote Valdis. Eric was taken aback. Valdis wrote to say something was troubling him. The phrase made Eric laugh. His wife was sick, Valdis wrote, and if Eric remembered the occasion of his previous visit, he would know that even then he had intimated that all was not well. Now it had turned out that Elza had cancer, and could not expect to live more than another two years.
Eric had always liked Valdis, but he couldn’t understand what he was doing, writing to him. It struck him as inappropriate and embarrassing. They would see each other in a month anyway. Then Valdis went on to write about his children: the boy was going to high school next year, and his daughter wanted to become an accountant, like her father.
Eric’s wife called him for supper. He turned over the thin sheet of letter paper, and read on. There was, he read, one cure for Elza’s cancer. A Swiss professor had developed it, a completely new drug that was still undergoing clinical trials. But its results so far on a sample group of patients had been encouraging. In such cases as Elza’s a cure was not impossible. At least there was a chance that she might have a few more years to live. Years in which some even more successful therapy might be discovered.
Eric’s wife called him again, and he went into the dining room with the letter in his hand. The treatment was expensive, wrote Valdis, quite impossible for someone from his country, for himself, and not cheap even for a Swiss. He had—at this point the writing got smaller, not least because Valdis had reached the bottom of the page—he had never in his life asked anyone for anything. He and his wife had been through some lean times together, without complaining. Nor did they have anything to complain about, really, because they had always been together, and they loved each other. But now he was turning to Eric for help. You asked me once whether you could do anything for me, he wrote, well, now you can do everything.
Eric put the letter aside, and sat down. His wife asked who the letter was from, and he told her.
“Is that the man with the beautiful wife?”
“She’s sick. She’s got cancer.”
Eric’s wife sighed and shrugged her shoulders. Eric didn’t tell her of Valdis’s appeal to him. He could imagine what she would say.
“They have two kids,” he said.
Valdis had told Eric the name of the professor who had pioneered the new form of therapy, and suggested he get in touch with him directly if he had questions. Eric called the professor. He briefly explained the therapy, and talked about the promising results he had obtained with it thus far. He said, yes, he had heard of the case of the wife of Eric’s friend. Valdis wasn’t really a friend as such, Eric said, it was more that they had professional dealings with one another. Anyway, he was familiar with the case, the professor said again, he had studied in Freiburg with the woman’s own specialist. He said the treatment cost something in the order of a hundred thousand francs. And he could not positively guarantee a successful outcome.
“We’re talking maybe thirty percent,” he said, “at most. I’ve heard she’s an exceptionally beautiful woman.”
Thirty percent, thought Eric. Valdis had talked of “encouraging results.” To raise a hundred thousand, Eric would have had to sell stock. And it was certain that Valdis would never be in a position to repay him. He hadn’t spoken in terms of a loan either. He just wanted the money. Which was understandable, in his position.
Eric sent Valdis an E-mail. He wrote that the best thing would be for them to discuss the matter together, and that they would be seeing each other in two weeks in any case. That was the last he heard, until he called Valdis a week before his departure to phone through his arrival time, and Valdis didn’t refer to Elza’s illness, just said Eric should try to extend his visit to take in the jubilee celebrations.
Nor did Valdis speak of his wife as they drove from the airport to the company headquarters, and Eric didn’t want to be the one to broach the subject either. He praised Valdis’s work, and said really he had no reason to come, as everything there was always so shipshape. Valdis said that would be a pity, because where else would Eric get to drink balzams and eat schaschlik.
Eric had reckoned on three days of work. On Saturday he wanted to make a tour of the city, and he had booked his return flight for noon on Sunday. It was not until his arrival that he learned that Friday had been made a holi
day, on account of the anniversary celebrations. But if Eric liked, said Valdis, then he would come to the office anyway. Then they would be undistracted, and could work quietly. Eric said they could probably get through it in two days anyway.
“I don’t mind,” said Valdis. “Then we can talk quietly instead.”
Eric had the sense that Valdis was working deliberately slowly. During their lunch break, he stayed sitting down for a long time, and Eric got angry. Valdis didn’t mention the situation with his wife, and Eric was certainly not going to bring it up. As in previous years they went out together; Valdis took Eric to an Italian restaurant that had recently opened, and that was supposed to be good. The food was fine but the wine was poor, and overpriced. Valdis knew nothing about wine, but he seemed to take Eric’s criticism personally. When they were finished, he made no move to pay the check, as he usually did. Even though Eric wouldn’t have allowed it anyway, he still felt annoyed with Valdis, and also because Valdis had persuaded him to drink more of that ghastly balzams, and because he had helped him into his coat after dinner.
Valdis was keen to go to a bar afterwards. “Here are the most beautiful women in the city,” he said. Young women who were happy to make the acquaintance of wealthy men from the West. The bar was near the cathedral. The décor was chrome and leather, and the music was so loud that there was no chance of a meaningful conversation. They stood by the bar, Valdis drinking balzams, Eric beer. There were a couple of blond women standing next to them. When Valdis spoke to them, Eric saw how drunk he was. Valdis put his arm round the waist of one of the women, and yelled something in her ear. She seemed not to understand, and raised her eyebrows and gave a puzzled smile. While speaking to the woman, Valdis nodded a couple of times in the direction of Eric. Her face darkened. She shook her head, took her friend by the arm, and pulled her away. Valdis tried to hold the two of them back, grabbed them round the waist, but they twisted out of his hold and disappeared into the crowd. Valdis put his mouth so close to Eric’s ear that he could feel his breath.