Agnes

by Peter Stamm

  “My circulation,” she said, “maybe I didn’t have enough to eat. It’s nothing to worry about.”

  I wanted to carry her back to the tent, but she refused, saying she wasn’t sick. She didn’t say much more than that on that evening, only that she was tired, and that she was feeling better.

  16

  When I woke up the next morning, Agnes was already awake. She said she felt sick, and could I get her some water. After she’d drunk it, she felt better and seemed completely restored. She yawned and stretched in her sleeping bag, while I knelt over her and watched. Only then did I notice that her face was scratched from her fall of the night before.

  “You look like a savage,” I said, and she threw both her arms around my neck, and pulled me down to her.

  “Come in my sleeping bag and make me better,” she said.

  It was cold in the tent, and our breath made clouds, but we didn’t feel cold. We had unzipped both sleeping bags, and laid one of them on the ground, the other over us like a blanket.

  “Are you sure there’s no one around?” asked Agnes.

  Then the sun hit the tent, making it very bright and quickly warming it up. By the time we finally crept outside, it was so warm that Agnes got undressed and washed in the cold water of the lake. Then we made love again, out on the sandy shore, and Agnes washed again, and so did I, because I was all covered with sand.

  “Don’t you feel much more naked, out in the open,” I said.

  “But you could live like that,” said Agnes, “naked and close to the earth.”

  “Wouldn’t you be scared of disappearing in Nature? Getting dragged under?”

  “No,” she said, splashing me, “not today.”

  We left the lake, and walked on through the forest. In a long narrow valley, we came upon some rusted old railroad tracks. It was good walking on the former embankment. The valley widened out, and on either side of the tracks we saw the decrepit ruins of some wooden houses. We walked around, looking at them.

  “How long do you think it will be until there are no more traces of human habitation?” asked Agnes.

  “I don’t know. Everything gets overgrown, but there’s stuff left underneath if you look. Broken glass, wire, things like that.”

  The doors were boarded up, and there were signs warning you not to go inside. When we went into a little outbuilding, a wall of which had collapsed, a large bird flapped out into the open, with angry squawks. It gave us a shock. The rotten boards of the collapsed wall were lying on the ground. In one corner of the outbuilding, where it backed onto the main dwelling, was a heap of dry leaves. Beside it was a ring of soot-covered stones, a little hearth. The ground was strewn with rusty old tin cans and a few broken bottles.

  “Do you think someone’s living here still?” Agnes asked.

  “The tin cans look pretty old to me. Not fifty years old, though. Maybe some other hikers came and stayed here.”

  “Perhaps there are people still living in this area that no one knows about. It must be hard to check up on that.”

  “Oh, there’d be smoke from the chimneys. You’d see that from an airplane.”

  “I wouldn’t want to spend the night here,” said Agnes. “I couldn’t help feeling I was staying in someone else’s house. Our generation will leave only its rubbish behind.”

  On the edge of the abandoned settlement we found a ruined church. Behind it was a small graveyard. The trees in it were almost as dense as in the forest, which stretched up the hill, immediately beyond. Most of the gravestones had been uprooted, and were lying on the forest floor. We made out a few names and dates.

  “The dead don’t know their village was abandoned,” said Agnes.

  “Don’t you want to film any of it?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, “you can’t go filming in a graveyard.”

  She leaned against a tree trunk.

  “Just imagine, in a few weeks all this will be covered in snow, and then no one will come for months, and it’ll be completely peaceful and abandoned. Do you know that freezing’s supposed to be a good way to die?”

  We walked on, all that day and part of the next. The sky was clouded over, and we were relieved to hit the parking lot early in the afternoon of the third day. Agnes slept on the drive home. Shortly after Indianapolis, it started to rain, and it was still raining when we reached Chicago.

  17

  It rained for several days, and we’d begun to think winter had arrived, when it got warmer again. It smelled like summer, and the city lay in golden light. Agnes was away at the university, and I walked to Grant Park. I’d brought some sandwiches with me, and ate them sitting on a bench. I wandered over to the planetarium, and then back. I was wearing a warm jacket, and when I got back to the apartment, I was sweaty and tired. I made myself a coffee, but it didn’t wake me up, just made my heart go. I sat down at the computer anyway. The low sun dazzled me. I shut the blinds. The air conditioner was humming. I wrote.

  One Sunday in November, we went to Lincoln Park Zoo, on the lake. It was one of those warm days that Chicago sometimes gets, even late in the year. We looked at the animals for a while.

  “I don’t really like zoos,” said Agnes, “they make me sad. I haven’t been in one for so long that I’d forgotten how sad they are.”

  We went on strolling around, no longer looking at the animals much. When it got to be lunchtime, we sat on a bench. We’d brought some sandwiches, and a thermos of tea, but we’d forgotten to bring any cups. When Agnes drank out of the flask, she spilled some tea on her sweater. She laughed, and I dabbed it off with my handkerchief. We looked at each other, and embraced each other, not saying anything.

  “Will you marry me?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said straight out, and neither of us seemed surprised by my sudden question.

  I didn’t know how to go on from that point. As I was still feeling tired, I lay down on the sofa and tried to plan it in my head. I thought of how I would show Agnes my country, and how we would go hiking in the mountains there. I tried to picture our apartment, the furniture and the pictures we would choose together, and what it would be like when Agnes spoke her first few sentences of German.

  I wasn’t daydreaming. I was fully in control, and everything I thought to myself instantly became real. It was a feeling like walking along a narrow gorge that I couldn’t leave. And if I tried to, I felt a kind of resistance, the presence of another will, some sort of elastic fetters that kept me from setting off in the wrong direction.

  I saw Agnes standing in a narrow stairwell, without knowing where we were, or how she’d gotten there. The bare concrete walls were painted yellow, and the only light was from neon tubes on the landings. Agnes was huddled in a corner, and was looking at me fearfully and angrily at the same time.

  Then she said: “I never wanted to marry you. You frighten me.”

  I slowly advanced toward her. “You never loved me,” I said, “all the time we were together, you were thinking of that Herbert of yours.”

  Agnes pressed herself against the wall and, without taking her eyes off me, moved toward the staircase.

  “You’re insane!” she shouted. “You’re sick!”

  I wanted to move faster, but something was slowing me down. Agnes reached the stairs, turned away, and started running up them. I promptly lost her from sight, and could only hear her footfall and my own breathing, which was unusually loud. It was as though I was breathing in and out at the same time. I ran up the stairs, which seemed to have no end. Then I heard a door slam, and the next moment I had reached it. There was no door handle. I pressed my ear to the cold metal, and heard Agnes, very near me, whisper: “You’re dead.”

  I hadn’t shut my eyes the whole time; the room around me had become a blur. Something jerked me back to reality, and I stood up and went back to the study to write down what I’d seen. Now I could tell with each sentence whether Agnes was in agreement with it or not. Even though I knew I was being led by a dream character, her
words still had a depressing effect on me. I’d never thought about asking Agnes to marry me in real life, but I still had the sense of somehow having guessed at her true feelings.

  18

  Every year, the university stages a big parade on Halloween, which is the last night of October. Agnes had often told me about it, the costumes she’d worn in previous years, and the wild party that took place afterward in the big hall of the university. Weeks before, she and the other members of her quartet had begun sewing their costumes. They were going to go as elves. I’ve always had an aversion to everything to do with masks and dressing up, and so I was relieved when I got an invitation to go to another Halloween party, given by Amtrak, the American railroad company, which would get me out of taking part in the parade. Agnes was disappointed.

  “I’m relying on the cooperation of Amtrak for my work,” I explained, “and if they invite me to something, I can’t really refuse.”

  “But I invited you months ago,” said Agnes.

  “We can be together all the rest of the time,” I said. “I’ll only stay as long as I have to. I can go on to the party at the university afterward.”

  “You’ll never find me there. And if you think I’m going to show you my costume ahead of time, you’ve got another think coming.”

  Agnes was still angry with me when she left the apartment on the evening of Halloween. She’d stuffed her costume into a gym bag. I told her to put some warm things on underneath, it was going to be cold that night. But she didn’t reply, not even when I said I was sure I could get to the party at the university before midnight.

  Amtrak’s Halloween party was nothing special. But when I heard the parade going by outside, I felt I was well out of it. I went out onto the balcony, and tried to guess what costume Agnes was in. There were innumerable witches and skeletons and monsters and scarecrows. A few had luminous paint on them, and one or two were even on stilts.

  “Is that really their notion of evil,” said a woman who was standing next to me on the balcony. She had a faint French accent, and she added, sarcastically: “Those spirits don’t come from the underworld, but out of the children’s channel.”

  “You aren’t from here, are you?”

  “Certainly not,” she said, laughing, “look at the way they’re carrying on.”

  On the street below, a group of skeletons had begun a wild polonaise, and was rushing in and out of the spectators, who screamed as they tried to get out of the way. Then I saw a group of women wearing costumes made of white gauze and golden ribbons. They had small golden half masks over their upper faces. Even though I couldn’t say for sure in all that confusion, I imagined that one of them moved a little like Agnes, with the same stiff gait.

  “Even as a child, I didn’t like masks,” I said, taking a step backward.

  “Look at those beauties down there,” said the woman, “woolly tights and white gauze, every bridegroom’s dream.”

  “I think they’re elves,” I said.

  “Well, by their woolly long johns ye shall know them,” said the woman. “My heart bleeds for American men.”

  “They don’t all wear woollen underwear, you know,” I said.

  “Ooh, did I say something wrong? Is there a little girlfriend here, then? Come on, let’s go inside, it’s too cold here.”

  The woman went back into the room. I watched the elves for a moment, quite convinced that Agnes was among them. Then I went in after the woman, who was waiting for me beside the door.

  “Little babies,” she said. “May I introduce myself? I’m Louise. I work for Pullman Leasing.”

  Louise explained she was the daughter of a French grain merchant and an American woman. She had been living in Chicago for the past fifteen years, had studied here, and was now working in the public-relations department of Pullman Leasing, a company that rented out freight cars. She still hadn’t gotten used to the mentality of people here, she said, even though she had spent half her life among them.

  “They are savages,” she kept saying, “decadent savages.”

  We talked about Europe and America, Paris and Switzerland. Then I told Louise about my book, and she suggested I should look in on her at work sometime. The Pullman that manufactured passenger cars had been the parent company of Pullman Leasing, and there were bound to be some documents in the company archives that I wouldn’t come across in the public domain. I thanked her for her offer, and promised to take her up on it. When I left the party a little after midnight, she gave me her card, and wrote down her private telephone number on it. Then she kissed me on both cheeks, and said: “Call me. I haven’t enjoyed a conversation so much for a long time.”

  19

  After the Amtrak party, I went on to the university. The hall was full to bursting, and after I’d spent half an hour or so vainly looking for Agnes, I gave up and went home.

  When Agnes got in sometime in the small hours, I woke up. I was relieved to see she wasn’t dressed the same as those elves I’d seen from the balcony. She had trouble getting out of her costume, but when I tried to help her, she took a step back from me, and tore at it so violently that one of the seams split. The dress slid to the floor, and Agnes stood in front of me, swaying gently in pale beige thermal underwear. Her skin was shiny, in spite of the makeup she had put on for the occasion.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she said, “I’m drunk.”

  She went to bed, and pulled the sheets over her face. I lay down next to her, and tried to draw her toward me, but she turned away and mumbled: “Leave me alone. I’m dead tired.”

  In the morning, Agnes was in a bad mood. She had a headache and complained that she felt dizzy. The parade was over by ten o’clock, and she’d spent hours waiting for me. Finally she’d spotted me standing by the entrance, and shouted, but I failed to hear. By the time she’d fought her way across the room, I was gone. After that, she’d gotten drunk with her fellow elves from the Mathematical Institute.

  “I saw the parade, and I thought I saw you too. But it wasn’t you. It was an amazing parade.”

  “You can’t say that unless you’ve taken part in it yourself.”

  Agnes spent almost the whole day in bed, reading, while I tried to get on with my work. When it was starting to get dark, she walked into my study. She went over to the window, and stood there, with her back to me.

  “You feeling better?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said, “I wanted to ask you something.”

  I switched off the computer, and swiveled around on my chair to face her. She continued to look out of the window. Finally she asked: “What will you do when you’ve finished your book?”

  “Write the next one, I suppose.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What will happen with us, when you’re finished.”

  I hesitated. Finally I said: “I guess we should talk about it.”

  “Yes,” said Agnes, “that’s what I’m trying to do.”

  Neither of us said anything. The temperature-control system seemed to be unusually noisy. Agnes hummed along to it, holding the note, and only stopping to breathe.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “What I think … Doesn’t that thing ever stop?”

  “In summer it cools, and in winter it heats.”

  Neither of us said anything.

  Then Agnes said: “I’m expecting a baby … I’m pregnant. Are you pleased?”

  I got up and went to the kitchen to get a beer. When I returned, Agnes was sitting at my desk, fiddling with a pen. I sat down next to her, without touching her. She took the bottle from me, and drank from it.

  “Pregnant women aren’t supposed to drink,” I said, and laughed idiotically.

  She gave me a punch on the shoulder. “Well?” she asked. “What do you say?”

  “Well, it’s not exactly what I had in mind. How come? Did you forget your Pill?”

  “The doctor says it can happen, even if you’re on the
Pill. One percent or so of women on the Pill …”

  I shook my head and didn’t say anything. Agnes started weeping softly.

  “Agnes doesn’t get pregnant,” I said. “That’s not what I … You don’t love me. Not really.”

  “How can you say that? It’s not true. I’ve never … never said that to you.”

  “I know you. Maybe I know you better than you know yourself.”

  “That’s not true.”

  Perhaps to convince myself, I merely said: “She doesn’t get pregnant.”

  Agnes ran into the bedroom. I heard her throwing herself on the bed, and sobbing loudly. I went in after her, and stood in the doorway. She said something I couldn’t quite hear.

  “What was that?”

  “It’s your baby.”

  “I don’t want a baby. What would I want a baby for?”

  “What shall I do? What do you want me to do? I can’t change the fact.”

  I sat down on the bed, and put my hand on her shoulder.

  “I don’t need a baby.”

  “I don’t need a baby either. But I’m getting one.”

  “Unless you do something about it,” I said softly.

  Agnes leapt up, and looked at me with a mixture of disgust and loathing.

  “Do you want me to have an abortion?”

  “I love you. We need to talk.”

  “You keep saying we need to talk. But you never talk.”

  “I’m talking now.”

  “Go, go away. Leave me alone. You and your story disgust me.”

  I left the room. I put on some warm clothes, and went out.

  20

  I walked for a long time beside the lake. At the end of Grant Park I found a café. There didn’t seem to be anyone there, but when I went in, a waitress came out of the back room. She switched a light on, and asked me what I wanted. She brought me a coffee, and then disappeared again through the door behind the bar.

  Outside, it was getting dark. The scenery on the other side of the big plate-glass windows was slowly obliterated, and before long all I could see was my own reflection in the glass.