In Strange Gardens and Other Stories

by Peter Stamm

  In the spring I went to New York for two weeks. I had called Chris. He had said I could come and stay with them, with him and Yotslana.

  I turned up in the evening, Chris opened the door. “Shame,” he said, “Yotslana’s staying with a friend. But you’ll get to meet her tomorrow.”

  We cooked dinner, and reminisced about last summer, and I talked about my time in Chicago, and my roommates, and the icy wind in the windy city. Chris seemed impatient to tell me something. As we were washing up, he said quite abruptly: “You know, Yotslana and me … we’re not sleeping together.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Chris took a couple of beers out of the fridge, and we sat down in the living room. The only light was the little desk lamp. There were piles of books all over the room.

  “We’re in love,” he said. “I’ve never loved a woman so much. But we don’t sleep together.”

  “But you’re almost on top of each other in this place …”

  Chris stood up, and strode quickly to the bookcase that was almost in the dark. He turned around to me.

  “We sleep in the same bed,” he said, and laughed. “It’s killing me. We don’t touch. It’s an experiment.”

  Neither of us said anything. When Chris resumed, I couldn’t see his face at all clearly.

  “I got the idea from something you said. It’s the only way of saving love from banality and habit.”

  “That was just for the sake of argument. I never believed in it. My God! It’s madness.”

  “Well,” said Chris, “it works. We love each other as much as on the first day.”

  The following morning, I met Yotslana. She must have come into the house while I was asleep. She had taken a shower, and was wearing a short bathrobe, and she was every bit as beautiful as Chris had described. She sat at the kitchen table, reading a book. I introduced myself.

  “Chris is at school already,” said Yotslana. “Do you want coffee?”

  I sat down opposite her. She didn’t say much, but looked at me searchingly. We drank the coffee.

  Then Yotslana went into the bedroom, and I left the apartment and headed downtown.

  I got along well with Yotslana. She didn’t often have to go to school, and on some days we went for walks in the park, and talked about all kinds of things. Sometimes she would link arms with me, and we would talk about Chris, things about him that bothered her. That he was so stubborn and pedantic, the way he took everything so seriously.

  “He’s a theorist,” she said, “a cerebral type. I’m the opposite. I’m a gut person.”

  When I was shaving on one of the following mornings, Yotslana walked into the bathroom. She started undressing behind my back. I could see her in the mirror, I could see her back, her wide shoulders, her slender neck as she pinned back her hair. She turned around. Our eyes met in the mirror, and Yotslana smiled and got into the old bathtub to shower. I hurriedly finished shaving, but already she was peeping around the edge of the shower curtain, saying: “Will you pass me the towel, please.”

  She took the towel from me, got out of the tub, and dried herself.

  “India must be a very beautiful country,” I said.

  She laughed, and took the big bottle of baby lotion off the windowsill, and started putting it on all over herself.

  I had gone over to the door, but Yotslana never stopped engaging me in conversation. I looked at my hands, at the ceiling, in every conceivable direction. Then Yotslana threw me the damp towel. She stopped talking, and I sat down on the toilet seat and watched her. She lotioned her arms, her breasts, her belly, her thighs. She perched on the edge of the tub, and carefully applied lotion to her feet, toe by toe.

  “Will you rub my back, please?” she asked, stepped up to me, pushed the bottle into my hands, and turned around.

  I stood up. I rubbed her neck, her shoulders, her back, her lower back. I stroked her waist, her hips, her bottom, all the while trying to keep my eyes on my hands rather than her body. Yotslana turned around, and my hands continued to move, slid over her body, followed and then directed by her hands. Then there was only one hand. Yotslana had directed it, and left it to its own devices. She was propping herself against the washbasin, and she had her eyes shut.

  When the soap dish slid onto the ground and shattered, Yotslana laughed and laid her hands on mine, picked it up, and kissed my fingertips.

  “You smell of me.”

  “If Chris comes back …”

  “You might have thought of that earlier.”

  Later we showered together, and I dried Yotslana with the towel that was still wet.

  “Shall we eat something together?” I asked.

  “No time,” she said. “I’ve got to be somewhere at twelve.”

  In the afternoon I went over to the basketball court, but there was no one there. It had rained a lot in the last few days, and the asphalt court was covered with leaves from the past fall. I didn’t get back to the apartment till after dark. Chris was cooking. He asked me if I wanted to eat with him.

  “Yotslana’s staying the night with a friend,” he said. “How do you like her?”

  “She’s very beautiful,” I said. I was ashamed of myself.

  We put away a lot of beer that night. Just like old times, said Chris.

  “Are you okay, you and Yotslana? Isn’t it inevitable that one day one or the other of you will …”

  Chris shrugged his shoulders.

  A few days later, I got back from the city earlier than usual. I had been out since morning. It was raining, and as the rain got heavier about lunchtime, I decided to go home. Yotslana wasn’t there. I heard voices and laughter from the bedroom. I went to the kitchen to fix some coffee. Then Chris wandered in with a woman. He was wearing just a pair of jeans, she was in a long T-shirt. The three of us drank coffee. Then the woman got dressed and left. Chris told me not to say anything about it to Yotslana.

  “She knows Meg from school.”

  “Meg?” I asked.

  “She’s not my type, but she’s quite sweet. Yotslana can’t bear her.”

  I felt relieved.

  Yotslana was behaving strangely in those days. If Chris was there, she would exchange loving looks with him, but the second he was gone she would come to me, and throw her arms around me, and let me embrace her.

  It had rained again, all afternoon, and we lay together on my bed. I lay on my back, Yotslana on her belly. We were splitting a can of beer. I touched Yotslana’s naked shoulder blades with the ice-cold can, and ran it down her spine. She turned over, took the can out of my hand, and set it down on her belly.

  “Could you imagine living in Chicago?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, “Chicago’s way too cold.”

  “New York’s cold too.”

  “Anyway this is where I’m studying.”

  “I could come back to New York …”

  “No,” said Yotslana crossly. She pressed the can into my hand, got up, and walked to the bathroom.

  “I love you,” I called out after her. I felt ridiculous.

  Yotslana didn’t reply. I heard her in the shower, and later on she left the apartment.

  On my last evening in the city I cooked for Chris and Yotslana. We were drinking coffee when I said: “I love Yotslana.”

  Chris looked at me with a smile.

  Yotslana said: “You’re crazy.”

  “We’ve slept together,” I went on, without paying her any attention. Chris sighed and shrugged his shoulders. Yotslana tried to take his hand. Then she crossed her arms and leaned way back in her chair.

  “The soap dish,” said Chris, and shook his head.

  “Also, Chris and Meg …” I said.

  “Meg?” said Yotslana, and twisted her face in a scornful smile.

  Chris held up his hands in embarrassment, and dropped them again.

  “My God,” he said. “I’m only human.”

  “What’s the matter with you two,” I said. I was furious. “I love Yotslana!”
/>   Yotslana sipped her coffee and said: “Two bodies collide with each other and separate from one another.”

  “That was your idea,” said Chris. “That you shouldn’t sleep with the woman you truly love. We thought about it a long time. And it works. Only everyone keeps falling in love with Yotslana.”

  “If I go to bed with a man, he thinks it means I want to marry him,” she said. “It’s easier for Chris. Women aren’t so emotional.”

  I wasn’t listening, and just repeated: “Yotslana, I love you!”

  She laid her hand on my arm.

  “I like you,” she said. “You’re different from Chris. So romantic.”

  “Yotslana fell in love with you a little bit,” said Chris. “So I told her she should sleep with you. To put a stop to it.”

  THE KISS

  She had suggested to her father that she collect him in Basel. That’s all I need, he had said. He wasn’t some kid, traveling on his own for the first time. She couldn’t remember that he had ever gone anywhere on his own. She had noted the times of the train arrivals at the station, and had sent her father an itinerary: change in Frankfurt and Basel. You get here at 12:48. If I’m not there, wait for me in the station restaurant. I won’t be long.

  Take a roomette. The way she said that. She traveled all the way to Switzerland with up to five others in a compartment. But that wasn’t appropriate for an old man, and least of all, someone like him. She hadn’t said that. She had said: Give yourself a treat, for once. On the rare occasion you do come and see me. You can share my room, that way you’ll save on the hotel.

  He hadn’t slept in the same room as her since she was a baby. Then, they had only had three rooms and a gas stove. At night, Mette had gotten up and fed the baby, and he had pretended to be asleep. How could you call a child Inger? As she got older, he became used to it. But that tiny scrap of a thing going by Inger. He had had a hundred names for her, only Inger was never one of them.

  If she hadn’t occasionally visited home, they would never have seen each other at all. She drove home for her mother’s funeral, and after Christmas, when the owner shut the restaurant for two weeks so that she could go and vacation in Egypt. Why didn’t he ever visit her? She had had to ask him: please come. You’ve got enough time now. But didn’t she like coming home, he said. I go on your account. And she waited for him to say: You don’t have to come on my account. He had already opened his mouth, but he didn’t say anything.

  He had never gone anywhere on his own. He had married young, before that he had never been able to afford to travel, and much less afterwards. At that time, they stayed put. Later on, they vacationed, in Italy or Spain, as a family. When the children were grown up, they didn’t feel like it anymore, and he and Mette traveled by themselves. They took a cruise down the Danube, and once they visited the Christmas fair at Nuremberg. Since Mette’s death, he hadn’t been anywhere.

  Even the station was an adventure to him then. The night train from Copenhagen made only a short stop. He was the only passenger who got on. The conductor asked him what his destination was. He only let him board the train once he’d seen his ticket. After that, he was suddenly very friendly. When would you like me to wake you? Would you like anything else? Coffee? Beer? A sandwich? He wasn’t hungry. He had got to the station far too early, and had eaten a hot dog. He was nervous. He went along to the dining car. The conductor locked the compartment with a special key.

  Even by the time of her third trip, Inger knew how everything worked. She took one of the top bunks. It was warmer up there than below, and you felt protected. She shared the compartment with a couple of young men who were on their way to a soccer game, and with a woman in practical-looking clothes. The three had been on the train since Copenhagen. The men stood out in the corridor and drank beer and smoked, she only got to meet the woman the following morning. She could have been her mother.

  He drank a beer, and then another. There was a group of young people at one of the other tables. They were going to a fair in Frankfurt, and they were in good spirits. He thought of his suitcase, in the locked compartment. He had brought a can of herrings in curry sauce with him, and a pack of salted licorice. He knew what Inger liked. When she left home, Mette had already been sick. Mama isn’t well, that was all he had said. And Inger hadn’t said anything, and had left.

  Mama wasn’t well. As if that was a reason to stay home. It was a reason to go. He always spoke of her as Mama when he was talking to Inger. Go and apologize to Mama. Mama’s not well. Mama’s sick. Sometimes, Inger had wanted just to call her Mette, as her father did. Even the cousins called her by her name. But then she hadn’t done it. She didn’t want any dissension. When her mother died, everything changed. Only he failed to notice.

  He swayed through the narrow corridors of the train. Was his compartment in the third car along, or the fourth? The way back is always shorter, he had often told Inger when they went for walks on Sundays. The way back was always shorter. But Inger didn’t want to go back. Inger wanted to go on.

  Every day she saw the trains, heard the trains, that were going south into the big tunnel. She would find a job in Italy. She didn’t ask for much. A room and whatever the going wage was. She wanted to have fun, meet people who didn’t know anything about her except what she told them. And she wouldn’t tell them anything. She didn’t want to think about Odense, about home and family. The way they sat there chewing over old times, and telling the same stories over and over again. She wanted to go on, and not back. Everyone comes back some time, her father had said. And asked her what he ought to bring. Nothing. You can get everything here. How about licorice? If you like. Herrings? She didn’t say anything. Whatever you like, she said, and thought if I miss anything, it’s licorice. But she didn’t want any arguments. As long as there were arguments, you were dependent on someone. You only got to be independent when you no longer asked for anything. Not even to be left in peace. Whatever you like, she had said. She had said: take some heavy shoes. We’ll be going hiking.

  That was something he had always said: We’re going hiking. Inger didn’t want to go. She wanted to watch TV, sit at home, waste away her Sundays. The exercise will do you good. You can sit all day at school. Sometimes he envied her for feeling happy in the house. He had never liked being at home, and even then he had never left.

  At 12:48 she was still in the restaurant. From noon, she had looked at her watch every couple of minutes. Don’t you need to go, asked the hostess. It wasn’t more than five minutes to the station, but the trains ran on time here. In a minute, she said. She was sure he wouldn’t go to the station restaurant. He would wait for her on the platform, not even sit on a bench. He would stand next to his suitcase and make some remark about her unpunctuality. It wouldn’t even occur to him that she had come late on purpose. Perhaps she was looking for an argument, after all.

  He stood next to his suitcase. He had a book with him. He could have sat down to read, but he was annoyed about her unpunctuality. He wanted to be annoyed. He was always annoyed when he got excited about something. They hadn’t seen each other for three months.

  In the context of three months, what are ten minutes? Twelve minutes. She hugged him. Ever since the funeral, it was hugs all round. It had just happened like that. She liked to be touched. The hostess’s hand around her waist, just casually, when they happened to be standing behind the bar together. The hands of men, brushing hers, when she stepped up to the tables. And when she touched herself. But hugging her father. That didn’t feel right. She felt sorry for him, and that was disagreeable to her.

  So this is where you live? It was a question he had prepared on his way down, and also the reproachful tone of it. The real question was: Why don’t you come home? The valley was dark, the village was ugly, and the noise from the cars was never-ending. He was surprised to find all his prejudices confirmed. He didn’t ask his question. It was too abundantly clear that she couldn’t live there. The place was a hollow, a funnel feeding into
the tunnel. Seventeen kilometers, said Inger, there’s a different climate on the other side, a different language, a different world. Over there is the south, here is the north. You can also go over the pass. The train had passed through many tunnels on its way. The mouths of all the tunnels were the same. You only got to learn how long they were when you came out the other side.

  He greeted the owner politely, he made a good impression, he did at least owe Inger that much. A real gentleman. How old was he? And what was his job? And such good German too. He’s retired, said Inger.

  She had shown him up to the room, and then she’d gone back down to the restaurant. If you like—but she knew he wouldn’t show his face down here. Even so, she looked at the door every time someone came in. He would stay up in the room till she came to get him at the end of her shift. She thought about him all afternoon. When she got off at six, it was already dark outside. She slowly climbed the steps. There was no hurry. He suddenly seemed ridiculous to her, sitting up there alone in the tiny dark room, waiting. The owner would have let her go a little earlier. But Inger didn’t want to go. He was to learn that she had a job, had her own life, that she hadn’t waited for him.

  He had been waiting for her. He was standing in the middle of the room as if he hadn’t moved from the spot all afternoon. He had been preparing himself. His daughter seeing fit to work in such a place. Waiting tables. When she had a degree, and a profession. If it’s just a question of money. It suits me this way. But it doesn’t suit me. The whole village seemed to be like a dark, cramped little room to him. When are you coming home? I’m not. How do I know.

  We could go to the Ticino, she said, in the south. What for? Because it’s beautiful there. Is that a good enough reason? She didn’t know. She had never been there on her own. She took off her blouse and her black skirt, and washed in the basin. Did she resemble her mother? He had hardly any photos from her early years. You’ve got a tattoo? So he was watching her. No. She laughed and stepped closer to him. You can wash it off. Well, then wash it off. Childish nonsense. What have you got it for? A rose. From the station kiosk. She had bought some candy. They didn’t have salty licorice here, but they had other things. Shall we get something to eat? What do you feel like eating? He didn’t mind. He asked if they cooked properly here at least. Yes, they do, she said. But we’ll go out for supper. Tomorrow we’ll go walking, okay? Hiking.