Agnes

by Peter Stamm

  “Is the person dead?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m not an expert,” I said. “I imagine so.”

  When I got back to the restaurant, a little knot of passersby had collected around the girl, and we waited in silence for the ambulance to come. It arrived five minutes later, just as Agnes was walking down the street. She had been at a rehearsal for her quartet, and was carrying her cello.

  I talked to the paramedics, told them it was me who had found her, as though it was something to be proud of.

  “Dead,” said the driver. “She’s made it.”

  Agnes stood next to me, waiting. She didn’t ask me any questions, not then, nor over dinner. She sat very erect, ate slowly and carefully, as though needing to concentrate so that she didn’t make any mistakes. As she chewed, she displayed the tension of a musician waiting for her next cue. Only once she’d swallowed her mouthful did her face relax, and she seemed relieved.

  “I never cook for myself,” I said, “just easy, quick things like scrambled eggs. I like cooking for other people. I tend to eat much more when I’m in company.”

  “I don’t like eating, period,” said Agnes.

  I had coffee after dinner. Agnes ordered tea. We’d been sitting in silence for a moment when she suddenly said: “I’m afraid of death.”

  “Why?” I asked in surprise. “Are you sick?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” she said, “but everybody has to die sometime.”

  “I thought you were being serious.”

  “I was being serious.”

  “I don’t think that woman suffered much,” I said, to comfort her.

  “I wasn’t talking about her suffering or not suffering. As long as you suffer, you’re at least alive. It’s not dying I’m afraid of, it’s death. Just because that’s the end of everything.”

  Agnes stared across the room, as though she’d spotted someone she knew, but when I turned and looked, there were only empty tables.

  “You don’t know when it’s the end,” I said, and, when she failed to reply: “I always imagined it was like feeling tired and lying down, and being able to have a rest at last.”

  “You obviously haven’t thought about it very hard,” she said rather coldly.

  “No,” I admitted, “there are other things I’m more interested in.”

  “What if you die sooner?” she said. “Before you feel tired, if you don’t need a rest?”

  “I won’t be ready to die for a long time,” I said.

  We didn’t talk. I tried to think of the words of a Robert Frost poem, but they wouldn’t come. I paid the bill, and we left.

  It seemed inevitable that Agnes would come back with me. I live on the twenty-seventh floor of the Doral Plaza, a high-rise apartment building in the downtown area. In the lobby, we ran into the guy in the shop, who was just locking up. He winked at me, and smirked. “No videos tonight,” he said, and sighed deeply and pleasurably. I ignored him, and just walked past.

  “Who was that?” Agnes asked in the elevator.

  I took her hand and kissed it, and then we kissed in the elevator until it stopped with a little ping on the twenty-seventh floor.

  5

  Everything happened very quickly. We kissed in the corridor, and then in my living room. Agnes said she had never slept with a man, but when we went into the bedroom, she was very calm, took off all her clothes and stood naked in front of me. She was uninhibited, and looked at me earnestly and with curiosity. She was amazed at how pale I was.

  We’d left the light on, and it was still on when we fell asleep some time much later. I awoke as the sky began to brighten outside. The light was off now, and I saw the outline of Agnes’s naked body against the milky light of the window. I got up and stood next to her. She had opened the little tilting window to the side, and pushed her hand through the narrow opening. We both stood there and watched her hand moving about outside, like a creature with a mind of its own.

  “I couldn’t get the window open.”

  “The apartment is temperature-controlled.”

  We were both silent. Agnes was tracing slow circling movements with her wrist.

  “I could almost be your father,” I said.

  “Yes, but you’re not.”

  Agnes pulled her hand back in and turned to me.

  “Do you believe in life after death?”

  “No,” I said, “it would make everything somehow … meaningless. If life went on afterward.”

  “When I was little, my parents took me to church every week,” said Agnes, “but I was never able to believe in it. Even though I sometimes wanted to. We had a Sunday school teacher, a small, ugly woman who had something wrong with her. I think she had a clubfoot. Once she told us about the time she’d lost her house key when she was a little girl. Her parents were at work, and she couldn’t get into the house. So she’d said a prayer, and God had shown her where the key was. She’d lost it on her way home from school. After that, I sometimes prayed myself, but my prayers generally began, ‘Almighty God, if you really exist …’ More often, I would set myself little challenges. If I manage to stand on one leg for a quarter of an hour, or if I can take a hundred paces with my eyes shut, then whatever I want will happen. Even now, I sometimes go into a church and light a candle for the dead. Even though I don’t believe in it. As a child, I always thought, why does that woman have a clubfoot if God loves her. It didn’t seem fair.”

  “Maybe there is a sort of everlasting life,” I said, and shut the window. The quiet sounds of the night abruptly ceased, and I felt we were in a small enclosed space again. “In a way, we do carry on living after we’re dead. In the memories of other people, in our children, and in things we’ve created.”

  “Is that why you write books? Because you don’t have any children?”

  “I don’t want to live forever. I really don’t. I don’t want to leave any traces when I die.”

  “You must,” said Agnes.

  “Come on,” I said, “let’s go back to bed. It’s still early.”

  6

  When I woke up again, it was almost noon. Agnes was asleep. She was lying on her back, and had the blanket pulled up over her face. When I got up, it woke her up, and when I stood in the shower, she came into the bathroom, leaned against the sink, and said: “I can’t believe what we did last night, even if it’s only what millions of people do all over the world every second.”

  Agnes locked the door when she had her shower. When she came out, completely dressed, I asked her if she was shy of me.

  “No,” she said, “I always lock the door, even when I’m all alone. There was never a key to the bathroom in my parents’ house. Sometimes they would go to the toilet while I was having a shower.”

  I shaved, and Agnes went downstairs to the shop to buy orange juice and bread for toast.

  “The man stared at me,” she said when she came back. “He must have remembered seeing us together last night. When I gave him the money, he licked his lips at me and rolled his eyes.”

  I made coffee and eggs and toast. Over breakfast, Agnes asked about my books. I showed them to her. She flicked through them, and said it was a pity she couldn’t read German.

  “I’m sure you’re dying to know all about cigars and bicycles,” I said.

  “I’d like to be able to read what you write. You have long sentences in German, don’t you?”

  I felt a bit ashamed of what I had to show for my life up to that point. I showed Agnes a slim volume of short stories that I’d published many years ago, and told her about a few literary projects that were biding their time in my desk drawer. Years ago, I’d started writing a novel, but never got beyond the first fifty pages. Agnes asked me to tell her what it was about, and while I struggled to sum up what little I could remember of it, it suddenly seemed absurd to have these kinds of delusions at my age.

  “I’ve given it up,” I said. “It’s years since I last worked on it. Sooner or later, you have to realize …
”

  “You shouldn’t have given it up, the beginning sounds really interesting.”

  “I was never in control of my material. It was always artificial. I got drunk on the sound of my own words. Or it was like singing, when you forget about the words, and only think about the melody. Like in those Italian operas that no one can actually follow.”

  We ate in silence.

  “Why did you bring your books with you to Chicago, then?” Agnes asked. “Do you read them?”

  “No, I never look at them. Very rarely.”

  “Can you remember what they say? Do you know a lot about cigars?”

  “Not really. When I take them down and look at them, it’s not to read up on things. The books remind me of the time they were written. They’re a kind of randomized memory. In the same way, luxury trains will always remind me of you and Chicago.”

  “You make it sound as though we’d already split up.”

  “Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “A copy of my dissertation is going to end up in the library,” said Agnes. “I like to think that everyone who’s ever going to do work on the symmetry of symmetrical crystal groups is going to run into my name.”

  We walked to the library together.

  “Have you ever been to Stonehenge?” Agnes asked.

  “I went once,” I said. “It was ghastly. It’s right on a main road, and the whole place is incredibly commercialized. You can’t even see the stones for souvenir stalls.”

  “I’ve never been there, but I read a theory about it once. It was a woman’s, I forget her name. She said that the stones had no astrological or mythological significance at all, they’d just been put there by prehistoric men to leave a trace of themselves, a kind of reminder. They were afraid that nature would overwhelm them, and they would disappear. They wanted to leave something of themselves, a sign that someone had once been there, that there had been people.”

  “A pretty elaborate sign, if you ask me.”

  “And the pyramids were the same, and maybe the Sears Tower as well … Have you ever been in the forests around here?”

  “No. I’ve never left the city.”

  “They’re absolutely endless. All the trees are the same height. If you leave the trail, you get lost immediately. You could disappear and never ever be found.”

  “Oh, someone would come by sooner or later,” I said.

  “I was in the Girl Scouts when I was little,” Agnes said. “My father made me, even though I hated it. Being with all the other girls. Once we went to a camp in the Catskills. We slept in tents, and had to dig a hole in the ground for a toilet. We built a rope bridge, and one of the girls fell, the girl who lived next door to me at home. I always hated her. She did badly at school, but she was good with her hands, and often used to help my father in the garden. He treated her like his own daughter, and always said he wished he could have had a girl like her. At first we thought she was OK after the accident. Jennifer was her name. Then, one morning, two or three days later, she was lying dead in the tent. It was horrible. Everyone cried, and one of the teachers had to walk into the nearest town. Some men came with a stretcher and took her away. We all went back in the bus, and everybody else was crying the whole way. All except me. I wasn’t pleased that Jennifer was dead, but I wasn’t sorry either. I was relieved to go home. Afterward, they were furious with me, it was as though I was to blame. My father was the worst. I’d never seen him cry before. If it was me that had died, I don’t think he would have cried that much, or maybe not at all.”

  7

  I went to New York for five days, to get some books I hadn’t been able to find in Chicago. Since getting together with Agnes, I was starting to work a little better. Just knowing that she existed and that I was going to see her seemed to spur me on. Even though my book was about luxury trains, I could only afford a second-class ticket for the night train. It was pretty full, and I was glad that the seat next to me was empty. But then, at the second stop, in South Bend, an enormous fat woman came and sat in it. She was wearing a thin knitted sweater with Santa Claus appliquéd on it, and she smelled of rancid old sweat. Her flesh ballooned over the armrest between us, and even though I pressed myself against the wall of the car, I couldn’t avoid her contact. I got up and walked to the bar near the front of the train.

  I drank a beer. It was slowly getting dark outside. The scenery had something approximate or unfinished about it. When we went through a forest, I thought of what Agnes had said about being able to disappear in one of these forests and never be seen again. From time to time we passed houses that didn’t stand alone but that didn’t constitute a village either. There too, I thought, you might disappear and never be seen again. A young man started talking to me. He said he was a masseur, and was going to see his parents in New York. He told me about his work, and then some stuff about magnetism or aural therapy or something like that. I stood next to him looking out of the window, trying not to listen. When he offered me a cut-price massage, I went back to my car. The fat woman had turned onto her hip, and was taking up even more space. She had gone to sleep, and was breathing noisily. I clambered over her and squeezed into my seat. In the bag at her feet I saw a book called What Good Girls Don’t Do. I cautiously pulled it out and started looking at it. Halfway through it, I came upon sketches of penises and vaginas and two diagrams that claimed to show male and female orgasms. As I pushed the book back into the woman’s bag, she woke up. She smiled at me and whispered: “I’m going to see my lover.”

  I nodded, and she went on: “It’s our first meeting. He’s Algerian. We got in touch through an organization.”

  “Is that right,” I said.

  “Do you like my sweater? Doesn’t it make me look attractive?”

  “It’s different.”

  “I need to go to sleep, so I look fresh and rested for tomorrow.”

  She giggled, turned onto her side, and was soon asleep again. Eventually I too fell asleep. When I woke up, it was starting to get light. The train was going along next to a wide river. I went to the dining car and got some coffee. Before long the fat woman turned up.

  “May I?” she said, and sat down opposite me. “Don’t you agree that trains are more comfortable than planes?”

  “Sure,” I said, staring out of the window.

  “In six hours we’ll be there,” she said. “I’m too excited to sleep any more.” She pulled a photograph out of her handbag and showed it to me. “There he is. His name’s Paco.”

  “You ought to be careful. It’s not every man you can trust.”

  “We’ve been writing each other letters for months. He plays the guitar.”

  “Do you know anyone else in New York?”

  “I know Paco, and he’s enough for me,” she said, saying the name with a strange and affected drawl. Then she pulled a dog-eared letter out of her handbag and gave that to me. “Here. Read it.”

  I read the first couple of sentences, and handed it back to her. Paco was writing about some photograph that his lover had sent him.

  “Do you think he loves me?” she asked.

  “I’m sure it’ll be fine,” I said.

  She smiled gratefully and said: “I can’t believe anyone who writes such beautiful letters can be a bad man.”

  8

  I came back from New York on a Sunday morning. I had taken the night train again, and called Agnes from the station.

  “Will you come over?” she said. “I’ve got something to show you.”

  It was the first time she’d asked me to her place. Even though she’d given me precise instructions, it took me a long time to find the street. Her cheeks were flushed with excitement when she opened the door. She beamed and asked me in.

  “First we’ll eat,” she said. “Sit down, I’m almost ready.”

  While she was busy in the kitchen, I looked around her room. You could tell Agnes had gone to some trouble to make it all cozy. The mattress in an alcove had some cuddly toys on
it, and there was a big desk in the window with the computer. The round dining table in the middle of the room was set, and there were flowers and candles on it. The fireplace had been filled in. On the mantelpiece were some family snapshots and a picture of Agnes in a gown, which was probably taken at her graduation. She was looking straight into the camera, but even though she was smiling, her face seemed vague and inscrutable.

  “You used to have longer hair,” I called through into the kitchen.

  Agnes poked her head around the corner and said: “Are you talking about my graduation picture? My father took that. I was drunk.”

  “You don’t look it.”

  “I haven’t got a head for it. Can you wait another minute. Look around.”

  She vanished back into the kitchen. I walked over to the window, which was open a crack. It was noon, drizzling outside. The street was deserted. I turned around. There were potted plants all over, but the room still had an unlived-in feel, as though no one had set foot in it for years. Now I noticed that Agnes had hardly any books. Apart from a little row of textbooks and computer manuals that were lined up on a low shelf, I could only see the Norton Anthology of Poetry.

  There were a couple of posters on the walls, an Alpine landscape by Kirchner, and a repulsive theater poster.

  “Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen,” said Agnes, carrying a bowl out of the kitchen. She said it in German; it was strange to hear her speaking my language. It made her voice sound older and raspier. “That’s a poster of Oskar Kokoschka’s,” she said, in English once more.

  “Do you know what the title means?” I asked.

  Agnes nodded. “I know what it means, but I’m not sure why he wanted to say such a thing.”