Agnes

by Peter Stamm

  ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

  NOVELS

  Unformed Landscape

  On a Day Like This

  Seven Years

  All Days Are Night

  STORY COLLECTIONS

  In Strange Gardens and Other Stories

  We’re Flying

  Copyright © 1998 by Peter Stamm

  Originally published in German as Agnes in 1998 by Arche Verlag AG, Zurich-Hamburg

  Translation copyright © 2000 by Michael Hofmann

  First published in English in 2000 by Bloomsbury Publishing, London, United Kingdom

  Poetry excerpt on this page from “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London,” by Dylan Thomas, from The Poems of Dylan Thomas, copyright © 1945 by The Trustees for the Copyrights of Dylan Thomas. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.​otherpress.​com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Stamm, Peter, 1963– author. | Hofmann, Michael, 1957 August 25– translator.

  Title: Agnes / Peter Stamm; translated by Michael Hofmann.

  Other titles: Agnes. English

  Description: New York : Other Press, 2016. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016020726 (print) | LCCN 2016008316 (ebook) | ISBN 9781590518120 (ebook) | ISBN 9781590518113 (hardback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Storytelling—Fiction. | Man-woman relationships—Fiction. | Psychological fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Contemporary Women. | FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Psychological.

  Classification: LCC PT2681.T3234 (print) | LCC PT2681.T3234 A7313 2016 (ebook) | DDC 833/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://​lccn.​loc.​gov/​2016020726

  Publisher’s note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  About the Authors

  St Agnes! Ah! it is St Agnes’ Eve —

  Yet men will murder upon holy days.

  —John Keats

  1

  Agnes is dead. Killed by a story. All that’s left of her now is this story. It begins on that day, nine months ago, when we first met in the Chicago Public Library. It was cold when we first met. It generally is cold in this city. But it’s colder now, and it’s snowing. The snow is blowing across Lake Michigan, on the gale-force wind I can hear even through the soundproof glass in my picture windows. It’s snowing, but the snow won’t settle, it gets picked up and whirled on its way, and only settles where the wind can’t get at it. I’ve switched off the light, and look out at the illuminated tips of the skyscrapers, at the American flag that gets tugged this way and that by the wind, in the beam of a searchlight, and at the empty streets far below, where, even now, in the middle of the night, the lights change from green to red and red to green, as though nothing had happened, or was happening.

  This is where we lived together for a while, Agnes and I, in this apartment. It was our home, though now that Agnes has gone, the place seems strange to me, and impossible. Agnes is just a step away, no more than a thickness of glass, but the windows don’t open.

  For about the millionth time, I’m watching the video that Agnes made of the day we went hiking—on Columbus Day. Columbus Day in Hoosier National Forest, it says, on the box and the cassette, in her tidy script, underlined twice with a ruler, like the way we used to underline the answers to our math problems when we were children. I’ve got the sound switched off. The pictures seem so much more real than this darkened apartment. They have a peculiar radiance, the radiance of a great expanse of open country, on an October afternoon.

  An empty expanse, no town for miles around, no village, not even a farmhouse. Staccato shots, without much variety. A series of fresh starts, attempts to capture the landscape. Sometimes I am able to guess what prompted Agnes to press the record button: a peculiar-shaped cloud, a billboard, a strip of forest in the distance, hard to make out through the wide-angle lens. Once, there’s a pan across to me, driving. I make a face. And then she tries to film herself filming, I suppose: the rearview mirror, and the camera looking into it, and Agnes, barely discernible, behind it. Then once, very briefly, Agnes, driving this time, holding her hand in the way.

  The park ranger. He too puts his hand in the way, but unlike Agnes, he does it laughingly. A zoom down to his hands, which are smoothing down a map, pointing to a track that doesn’t show up in the picture. The ranger falls back in his chair, opens a drawer, and pulls out various brochures. He laughs, and holds one up to the camera: How to survive Hoosier National Forest. The image wobbles, and then a hand comes up into shot to take the leaflet. The ranger is speaking all the time, his expression getting more and more serious. The camera turns away from him, and brushes by me on its way. Suddenly there’s forest, a little stand of trees. I’m lying on my back, asleep, perhaps, or just with my eyes shut. The camera moves lower and closer until the picture goes fuzzy, then it pulls back. Then it pans down to my feet, then up to my head again. It stays on my face for a long time, moves in again, but the picture blurs again, and it pulls back.

  “No videos?” the guy in the shop with the slicked-back hair asked me when I went down for a six-pack a couple of hours ago. He asked after Agnes. She’s gone, I said, and he smirked back at me.

  “They all go,” he said, “don’t worry, there’s lots of pretty women in the world.”

  Agnes never liked the guy in the shop, though she couldn’t give a reason why. She just said she was scared of him, and when I laughed at her, she laughed as well. She was scared of him, the way she was scared of windows that didn’t open, or of the droning of the air conditioner at night, or the window cleaners balancing on their platform outside our bedroom window one afternoon. She didn’t like the apartment, the building, or even downtown. At first we laughed about it, then she didn’t talk about it anymore. But I realized her fear was still there, it had gotten so big she couldn’t talk about it anymore. In
stead, the more frightened she got, the more she clung to me. To me, of all people.

  2

  I was sitting in the Public Library, leafing through bound volumes of the Chicago Tribune, as I’d been doing for days, when I first saw Agnes. It was last April. She took a seat opposite me in the big reading room, probably by chance, because it was pretty full. She had a little foam-rubber cushion with her. On the table in front of her, she laid out a pile of textbooks and a writing pad, two or three pencils, an eraser, and a pocket calculator. When I looked up from my work, our eyes met. She looked down, opened the first of her books, and started reading. I tried to read the titles of her books. She seemed to notice, and pulled them nearer, with the spines facing her.

  I was working on a book about American luxury trains, and was just reading about the political debate on whether the army should be called in during the Pullman Strike. I’d gotten rather bogged down in this strike; it wasn’t relevant to my book, I was just fascinated by it. In the course of my work, I’ve always let myself be guided by curiosity, and in this case it had taken me miles away from my subject.

  From when Agnes sat down opposite me, I hadn’t been able to concentrate. She wasn’t that striking-looking, slim and not very tall, brown hair thick and down to her shoulders, a pale complexion and no makeup. Only her eyes had something unusual about them, an expressiveness I haven’t often seen.

  I couldn’t claim it was love at first sight, but she interested me and took up my thoughts. I kept looking across at her, it was embarrassing almost, but I couldn’t help it. She didn’t respond, never looking up once, but I’m sure she sensed she was being looked at. Finally, she got up and went out. She left her things spread out on the table, and only took her calculator with her. I went out after her, not really knowing why. When I got to the entrance hall, there was no sign of her. I walked out of the building, and sat down on the stairs to smoke a cigarette. It wasn’t cold, but I was shivering anyway, after sitting around for hours in the overheated library. It was four in the afternoon, and the people on the sidewalks were a mixture of tourists and shoppers and a few early office workers.

  There was already an intimation of the desolate evening that lay ahead of me. I hardly knew anyone in this city. No one at all, actually. Once or twice I’d fantasized about women’s faces, but I knew enough not to pursue those sorts of feelings; I’d only get hurt. I had several failed relationships behind me, and for the time being, without having come to any sort of conscious decision about it, I was reconciled to being on my own. Even so, I knew I wouldn’t be able to get on with my work as long as that girl was sitting opposite me, so I decided I’d go home.

  I stubbed out my cigarette and was just about to get up when she sat down on the steps no more than three feet away from me, with some coffee in a paper cup. She’d spilled a bit of it, and she set the cup down on the stone step, and wiped her fingers with a crumpled tissue. Then she took a pack of cigarettes from her little rucksack, and started fumbling for some matches or a cigarette lighter. I asked her if I might give her a light. She turned to me as though in surprise, but I saw no surprise in her eyes, only something I didn’t understand.

  “Yes, please,” she said.

  I lit her cigarette for her and another one for myself, and we sat and smoked for a while, not speaking, but half facing each other. Eventually I asked some trivial question, and we started a conversation, about the library, the city, the weather. It wasn’t till she got up that I asked her what her name was. She said she was called Agnes.

  “Agnes,” I said, “that’s an unusual name.”

  “You’re not the first person to say that.”

  We went back inside the reading room. Our little conversation had released my tension, and I was able to work again, without having to keep looking across at her. When I did, she looked back at me with a friendly expression, though not smiling. I stayed longer than I’d meant to, and when Agnes finally packed up her things, I asked her in a whisper whether she’d be here again tomorrow.

  “Yes,” she whispered back, and for the first time she smiled.

  3

  I was back in the library early the next morning, and even though I was waiting for Agnes, I had no trouble concentrating on my work. I knew she would come, and that we would talk and smoke and drink coffee together. In my head, our relationship was already much further advanced than it was in reality. I was already wondering about her, beginning to have my doubts, though we hadn’t even been out together.

  I was working well, reading and making notes. When Agnes arrived, around noon, she nodded to me. Once again, she put her foam-rubber cushion down on a chair near me, spread out her things as she had done yesterday, picked up a book and started reading. After about an hour, she took her cigarettes out of her rucksack, glanced down at them and then across to me. We both stood up and walked, either side of the broad table, toward the passage in the middle of the room. I accompanied her to the coffee machine, once again she spilled some of her coffee, once again we sat down on the library steps. The day before, Agnes had seemed rather shy; now she spoke quickly and hurriedly, which surprised me, as we were talking about trivial subjects. She was restless, but even so—knowing no more of one another than our names—we seemed to have become more intimate overnight.

  Agnes talked about a friend of hers called Herbert, I can’t remember how we got onto him. Herbert had recently had a strange experience. Agnes told me how he was having a drink in the bar of a big hotel. It was afternoon.

  “I’ve been there a couple of times with him myself,” said Agnes, “they have a piano player and the best cappuccinos in town. A short flight of steps leads down from the lobby into the café, past an ornamental fountain, and just as Herbert was going down the steps, there was this woman going the other way. She was about the same age as him, and was wearing a black dress. When he saw the woman, Herbert says, he had this strange feeling. Like a mixture of sadness and belonging. He felt as though he knew her. But he was quite certain he’d never seen her before. At any rate, he felt overcome by weakness, and just stood where he was.”

  Agnes put out her cigarette on the step, and dropped the end in her empty coffee cup.

  “The woman stopped as well,” she went on. “For a few seconds, the two of them stood facing each other. Then the woman slowly walked up to Herbert. When she was standing right in front of him, she raised both hands, laid them on his shoulders, and kissed him on the mouth. Herbert says he tried to put his arms around her, but she pushed him away and took a step back. Herbert stood aside, and the woman smiled at him and carried on up the steps. As she walked past him, she brushed his arm with her hand.”

  “Strange story,” I said. “Did he try and find out who she was?”

  “No,” said Agnes, and as though suddenly embarrassed that she’d told me the story, she got up and said she had to get back to work.

  The following day, when we met for the third time, I asked Agnes if she felt like going to the coffee shop opposite.

  “They bring you the coffee there,” I said, “so you won’t get your hands all dirty.”

  We crossed the road. Agnes insisted on using the pedestrian crossing, and waiting for the Walk sign at the lights.

  That coffee shop was where I’d been having my coffee almost every morning for weeks, and reading the paper. It was a bit run-down, and the red leatherette benches were yielding and unpleasantly low. The coffee was thin and often tasted bitter from standing around on the hot plate for too long, but I liked the place, because none of the waitresses knew me or talked to me, because I didn’t have a special place where I always sat, and because someone asked me every morning for my order, though it was always the same.

  I asked Agnes what she was working on. She said she’d studied physics, and was working on her dissertation. It was on the symmetries of crystal structures. She had a part-time assistantship at the Mathematical Institute at Chicago University. She was twenty-five.

  She said she played th
e cello, and liked painting and poetry. She’d grown up in Chicago. Her father had taken early retirement a few years ago, and her parents had gone to live in Florida, leaving her here on her own. She lived in a studio apartment in a suburb. Agnes didn’t have many friends, just three women who played in a string quartet with her that met every week.

  “I’m not a very sociable person,” she said.

  I told Agnes I wrote. She took no notice, didn’t ask me any questions about my work, and I didn’t mention that I’d had books published. I was pleased about her lack of interest really. I’m not particularly proud of having written nonfiction, and there are more interesting things to talk about than cigars, the history of the bicycle, and the luxury train.

  We talked about ourselves only briefly; instead we discussed art and politics, the coming presidential elections in the fall, and the responsibilities of science. Agnes preferred a general or abstract conversation about ideas, even later on, when we knew each other better. Her private life didn’t engage her much at the time, or at least she didn’t talk about it. When we discussed things, she spoke very earnestly, and she had strong opinions. We spent a long time in the coffee shop. We didn’t leave until lunchtime, when the place started filling up, and the waitress got impatient with us.

  4

  For a few days, we only met in the library, and didn’t arrange to see each other outside. We often smoked our cigarettes or drank our coffee together on the steps, and slowly we got used to each other, the way you might get used to a new garment that you hang up in the closet for a long time before daring to put it on. Finally, after a couple of weeks, I asked Agnes to dinner. We decided to go to a little Chinese restaurant near the university.

  When I got to the restaurant that evening, there was a woman lying on the sidewalk outside. She wasn’t moving. I knelt down beside her, and gave her a cautious nudge. She was no older than Agnes. She had red hair, and her skin was pale and freckled. She was wearing a short skirt and a dark green sweater. She didn’t seem to be breathing, and I couldn’t feel her heart when I put my hand under her sweater. I rang the emergency number from a telephone on the corner. The woman on the other end asked me for my name, address, and telephone number, before finally agreeing to send an ambulance.