In Strange Gardens and Other Stories

by Peter Stamm

  “Come on, let’s go,” I said to Luis, and took him by the arm.

  “I call the police,” said Luis. “I tell them everything.”

  “Call the police. Do you think they’ll believe you?” said Rachel mockingly. She turned to Antonia. “Go on!”

  Antonia pressed the bell, and a shrill metallic ringing came from inside the apartment. Luis climbed up another step. I passed him, and drew myself up in front of him. I pressed him back against the wall, but I knew right away that he was stronger than me, and that my chances of being able to hold him back were nil. His body was tensed, but he didn’t move. I was surprised he didn’t put up any struggle. Antonia rang the bell a second time. We stood there in silence, then finally the door opened. A fifty-year-old woman in a dressing gown peered out. She didn’t say anything. I let go of Luis.

  “I call the police now,” he said once more, and went down the stairs.

  “Get lost!” Rachel called after him. “You fucking idiot!”

  “Come on in,” Antonia said to me, and the three of us stepped into the apartment, and went into their room. All this time, the landlady hadn’t said a word. She looked very tired, and she disappeared.

  “Are you allowed gentlemen callers here?” I asked.

  “I hope you’re no gentleman,” said Rachel. “Do you want a beer?”

  She took three bottles out of the wardrobe and opened them. The beer was tepid. We felt a little easier, and at the same time more excited. We all talked at once, and laughed a lot.

  “What an asshole,” said Rachel.

  “He took us to dinner,” said Antonia. “Maybe he thought …”

  “They won’t come,” said Rachel. “The police. And so what if they do. We’ll just throw the stuff out the window.”

  She asked me if I wanted any. She had sat down on the bed beside Antonia. I shook my head.

  Rachel said they were almost out of money. Could I lend them some? I gave them the last of my escudos. It wasn’t much, and I wouldn’t be needing it anyway, on the ship. Rachel whispered something to Antonia. Antonia pulled a face. She said she was going to take a shower, and she went out into the hallway.

  “What was that you whispered?” I asked.

  “I asked her what we would do for you in return for fifty thousand escudos.”

  She laughed, and sprawled back on the bed.

  “What we need now is a really wide bed,” she said. Antonia came back, and Rachel went to the shower. She stopped in the doorway and told us to behave ourselves. “Remember, Mama’ll be back in a moment.”

  When I left the two of them, it was just starting to get light. We embraced. Rachel handed me an empty beer bottle.

  “In case he’s waiting outside,” she said. “That way you can defend yourself.”

  I went out on the street. There was no one around. I walked through the empty city with my beer bottle in my hand. I felt stupid. After a couple of hundred yards, I dropped it in the garbage. I hesitated for a moment, and then I threw away the piece of paper where Rachel and Antonia had written down their addresses for me.

  Once I was on the ship, I lay down, but I wasn’t able to sleep, and soon stood up again. I trotted through the city some more. When I was tired, I went into a little church where Mass was just being said. I sat down in the back pew, and listened. From time to time, I managed to make out the odd word. At the end, the worshipers turned to both sides and shook hands with their neighbors. I had no one sitting next to me. I hurried to be first out of the church.

  ALL THAT’S MISSING

  The secretary collected David from the airport. She had come in her own car. She asked if it was okay with him if she took the A4. He said he didn’t mind either way, he didn’t know the first thing about the place. After that they were silent, until the skyscrapers of the Docklands area came into view.

  “Over recent years, the docklands have turned into London’s most important financial and business center,” said the secretary. “Living space is of the highest quality. There are also abundant facilities for rest and recreation.”

  She talked like a tour guide, it sounded like something she had rattled off many times before. It was an area of twenty-two square kilometers, she said, larger than the City of London and the West End put together. David would find delightful pubs down on the river, there were fine shops, cinemas, and even an indoor stadium seating twelve thousand people. She talked about swing-bridges, sailing ships, and a city farm with real animals. She said her name was Rosemary.

  “The Isle of Dogs is at the heart of the Docklands area,” she said. “The name is presumably given on account of the royal dog kennels which used to be located here. But my friends say the name might as well come from the many financial institutions that have their offices here.”

  Rosemary laughed apologetically. She said most of her friends worked in other trades. She asked David what his hobbies were. Hobbies? he asked, and looked at her in puzzlement. What he was interested in, then? He said he wasn’t interested. I am not interested, he said. In what? asked Rosemary. In general, he said.

  David didn’t know how long he was going to stay. The initial arrangement was for six months. A tour of duty, they had called it in Switzerland, a mission was how his new boss referred to it. The London branch had experienced difficulties recruiting qualified staff, and they had come to David because he was single. When he hesitated, he was informed that his taking the offer wouldn’t harm his advancement prospects, quite the contrary. A certain geographical flexibility was expected with the job.

  It was a Friday, and the boss introduced David to his future colleagues, before telling him to come back on Monday. For now, he was just to find his feet in London, get moved into his apartment, and take a look around the area. Greenwich, the place where time began, was just across the river. He wished him a pleasant weekend.

  “Rosemary will take you to your new home,” said the boss.

  Rosemary was, again, taciturn. She drove south along the Thames, through building sites. It wasn’t far. They passed a small park, and Rosemary pointed out the building complex behind it, a line of interconnected brick towers. Some of the brick towers were on the river, others faced the park.

  “Here it is,” she said, and turned off the main road. She waved to the security guard who manned the gate, and he waved back to her. She parked the car in one of the visitors’ spots in the underground parking lot, and said she would take David up to his apartment. He said that wouldn’t be necessary, he had hardly anything in the way of luggage, but she insisted.

  “I’ll show you everything,” she said.

  The apartment belonged to the company. It was on the seventh floor, facing north to the park. From the balcony, there was a view of Canary Wharf and the Thames.

  “That’s where we’ve come from,” said Rosemary, pointing to the high-rise blocks. She had followed David out onto the balcony.

  The last person to have lived here was a Swede, she said, but everything had been cleaned and disinfected since. The Swede had been transferred to New York, he was still very young, and had outstanding career prospects.

  “It’s getting cool,” she said. “Shall we go back inside?”

  She took David through the apartment, showed him the walk-in closet in the bedroom, the Italian designer kitchen,the vast TV set on wheels in the living room. She was familiar with the apartment, having picked up the Swede from the airport two years ago now, and taken him here. Perhaps she’s been here since as well, thought David. Her eyes had shone when she was speaking about the Swede.

  Rosemary was a great fan of the apartment. Twice she said she lived in a tiny little terraced house in Stepney, which was quite handy, but it was so much nicer to live here, among other financial sector workers, and just a short walk to work.

  She said there was another TV outlet in the bedroom. If he was ever ill, it was an easy matter to roll the TV across. Magnus, the Swede, had often been ill. She shrugged her shoulders. It was odd that he looked so
fit and healthy, and was always so cheerful. He had some kind of health problem.

  Then all at once Rosemary was in a hurry. She wished David a pleasant weekend, and left. He looked at his watch. It was five o’clock.

  Once he was all alone, he went to the bathroom and washed his hands. He looked at his new premises again. The rooms were clean and bright, the furnishings tasteful. On the coffee table in the sitting room, there was a brochure for the development. The name of the complex was The Icon. Strange and inappropriate name for it, thought David. He thought of the icons in the windows of an auction house that he had often passed, those rigid and attentive women’s faces that all looked alike and gazed at him in astonishment through the bullet-proof glass.

  David sat down on the sofa, and started leafing through the brochure. The towers comprised a hundred and fifty units on eleven stories. An appendix at the back showed the floor plans for the various types of unit. David’s was one of the smaller ones, it was type G. On either side of him were three-room apartments that were type H.

  David went out onto the balcony, with the brochure in his hand. Dark clouds with white edges passed across the sky. A stormy wind was blowing. It had grown distinctly cold. When David turned to go back inside, he saw a Japanese woman standing on the balcony next to his. She was standing there quite still, looking at him. She was no more than five yards away. He quickly turned and went in.

  He stood in his living room and thought: I should have introduced myself. The Japanese woman was his new neighbor, they were bound to run into each other in the hallway, or on their balconies, or in the gym. For a moment, he toyed with the idea of ringing her bell and introducing himself. But he didn’t know whether people did that here or not. The simplest thing would have been to say hello to her when he saw her on her balcony. Spontaneous and uncomplicated. But if he went out there again, it would look as though he had gone out to engineer some kind of conversation.

  Still holding the brochure, David walked through the apartment. He went over the list of specifications. Everything was there. The Hansgrohe bath taps were a little disappointing, but he liked the doors of solid maple, which fell shut with a satisfying thunk. In the living room he got down on his knees to examine the quality of the carpeting. He remembered kneeling in church, as a child. The feeling of one’s own insignificance, and forgiveness. That had been a kind of happiness. Not to have to make any decisions, not to have any responsibility. Sometimes he wished he could have that state back again. In his memory, it was always springtime. The shadows were cool and hard-edged. His mother took him by the hand.

  David’s knees began to ache, and he stood up and carried a chair out onto the balcony, and sat in it. No sign of the Japanese woman. He shivered.

  Tourist boats were going up and down the Thames. The park was almost empty. At the far end of it was a children’s playground. Three children were sitting on swings; from time to time he could hear a random scream. David heard the tinkling of a mechanical piano. Greensleeves, he hummed along to it. All at once, the tune broke off. The children didn’t react, and carried on on their swings.

  On the meadow was a brightly colored kite, the size of a man. At first, David supposed it was a man, then he saw someone with light, thinning hair backing away from it quite quickly, and then the kite lifted into the air, climbed up, and finally hung there, wobbling slightly. The man’s hair was the same color as his face. He had a backpack and a pair of sunglasses. At the sight of him, David was filled with a vague sense of the sadness of life.

  The balconies were now in shadow. There was no one on any of them, though a few had garden furniture of cheap white plastic. David thought of a deckchair he had once seen, made out of oiled robinia wood. It was a construction of striking simplicity, two arc forms pushed together so that one made the seat, the other the back rest. He came close to buying it, even though his apartment in Switzerland didn’t have a balcony. The deckchair folded away to next to nothing, the salesman had said. Now David had a balcony. But it was autumn already, and he couldn’t see himself with the leisure to be outside during the coming months.

  He was to feel at home here, the boss had said to him—it sounded like an order. David wasn’t looking forward to the months, the year ahead. My God, he thought, this isn’t where I want to be.

  He wasn’t hungry, but he ate the sandwiches he had made himself at home. He wasn’t sure whether they served meals on the short flight to London, and so he had packed something to eat. Once, flying to Milan, there hadn’t been anything to eat, and he had felt sick, and it had spoiled the entire day. But on the flight to London, there had been an in-flight snack, a sandwich and pasta salad and a bar of chocolate with the coffee. Meals on planes had always fascinated and disgusted David in equal measure. Even the question, beef or chicken. And then the meal itself, which seemed to have little to do with either—some unspecified meat in nasty plastic dishes. The plane had flown through any weather,and was now up in the blue beyond the clouds. That was how David imagined Paradise, readymade meals under a blue sky, that was how he pictured Hell.

  David sat hunched on the sofa in his living room. When he went to throw away the wrapping of his sandwiches, he noticed he didn’t have any garbage bags. He tore a page out of his notebook and wrote down: “garbage bags.” He would make up a list of all that was missing. And tomorrow he would go shopping.

  Happiness is a question of attitude, he thought. London was a wonderful city, so everyone always said. He would go out to concerts, to films, to musicals. He would meet people. He had already begun to strike up a relationship with Rosemary. He would call her tomorrow. And maybe he would get to meet the Japanese woman in the next-door apartment. It occurred to him that she might not live alone. The thought cast him down.

  He went into the kitchen, to make himself some tea. He opened all the cupboards. Then he wrote down on his shopping list: teabags. And followed that with: coffee, coffee filters, sugar, cream. And then: food.

  Tomorrow he would visit Greenwich, which was what his boss had recommended.

  When David woke up the next morning, it was already past ten o’clock. He was trying to bang on the alarm clock until he realized that the ringing was coming from the telephone. It was Rosemary. She asked if he had started to get acclimatized yet. She hadn’t woken him, she hoped. He had been out on the balcony, said David, and hadn’t heard the ringing.

  Rosemary said she could come over if he liked, and show him the area. Shops and restaurants. David thanked her. He was sure he could manage. It really wasn’t any trouble, Rosemary said. She wasn’t doing anything. She hated weekends.

  “I was going to go to Greenwich,” said David.

  “Lovely,” said Rosemary, “the meridian. You can stand astride the line, with your legs in different hemispheres.”

  The best thing to do was to take the light railway to the southernmost tip of the peninsula, and from there take the Foot Tunnel under the Thames. If he liked, she could show him. He said, thank you, that was fine.

  The sky was overcast, but it hadn’t begun raining yet. The light railway was unmanned. At first, David didn’t notice, then he was a little disquieted by it. The trains went past each other, apparently undirected, remote-controlled from some hub God knows where.

  Without picking it up, David scanned a story in the newspaper that had been left in the seat opposite. A child’s body had been found near Tower Bridge. A colored boy of five or six was drifting in the river. A passerby had spotted the body. The child had had his arms and legs cut off. The man who had found it was receiving psychological counseling.

  There was a little park at the end of the Isle of Dogs. David stared across the Thames at the white buildings on the other side of the river. They looked powerful and silent, as if out of some other time, some better time. At the top of the hill stood the observatory, where, as David had read in his guide, a red ball was lowered every day at twelve o’clock. Once, ships had set their clocks by this ball. Today the only reason it was low
ered was because it had always been lowered.

  Tower Bridge was upstream. When David saw the muddy water of the Thames sliding past, he had to think of the dead boy. The notion of having to walk under the river was suddenly intolerable to him.

  David went shopping. Everything was incredibly expensive.

  He stacked the things in his empty kitchen cupboards and refrigerator. It was soothing to see so much food. This can keep me going for at least two weeks, he thought to himself. He might get through one or another thing, like the milk, but at least he wouldn’t starve. And then, when his supplies were used up, he could go on for probably another month. He tried to remember for how long hunger-strikers stayed alive, when the newspapers wrote about such people. Was it seven weeks? Eight?

  In the afternoon he went back to the supermarket, and bought more food. This time, he had an eye on long life. He bought powdered milk and canned vegetables, chocolate, and deep-frozen ready meals.

  On Sunday, David called his father. His father didn’t ask him any questions. He talked about the neighbor’s cat, which had been run over by a truck. He had found it outside his garden gate, it had been completely flat, rolled out, there was hardly any blood on it. The misfortune seemed to amuse his father.

  “Here, they found the body of a kid drifting in the river,” said David, “it had no arms and no legs.”

  He was still talking when he switched on the TV. He flicked through the channels till he found a program that showed a Japanese man passing his hand three or four inches above the naked body of a Japanese woman. The woman seemed to be becoming aroused by it, even though her eyes were shut and she couldn’t see what was going on. David said goodbye to his father, and turned up the sound. The Japanese man was talking about the transference of sexual energy. The whole thing was some pseudo-scientific investigation; obviously, the only thing that mattered was showing images of naked women.

  The ostensible scientist had something else up his sleeve. This time he set another naked woman, Japanese again, in front of a television screen that was showing images of a Japanese couple copulating. This second woman was wearing headphones. She showed clear signs of sexual excitement. The original Japanese woman was still lying on the bed next door, and she was very excited too, even though nothing was being done to her, or perceivable to her. The scientist explained that the sexual energy transferred itself from the first woman to the second. How and by what means this transference occurred he did not explain.