Agnes

by Peter Stamm

  If I go and see Agnes now, I thought, that’ll be it forever. It’s hard to explain; although I loved her and had been happy with her, it was only when she wasn’t there that I felt I was free. And my freedom had always mattered more to me than my happiness. Maybe that was what my girlfriends meant when they talked about my egoism.

  I didn’t go to see Agnes that day or the next. On the third day, I decided to go. Exceptionally, I took a taxi, so as not to lose even more time. I asked the driver to stop outside a bookstore, and ran in and asked for a book about babies. The sales assistant recommended one with the title How to Survive the First Two Years.

  25

  Agnes came to the door in her robe. She was very pale. She asked me in, and I followed her into the room. She lay down again. I sat by her for a while, not saying anything, then I asked: “Are you not well?”

  “I lost the baby,” she said quietly.

  I’d never thought of the possibility of miscarriage. I felt relieved and ashamed at the same time.

  Agnes smiled and said: “You ought to be pleased, really.” But cynicism wasn’t her style.

  “It’s not your fault,” she said, “the doctor says there’s one miscarriage for every birth.”

  “Can you not have babies, then?” I asked.

  “Yes, I can,” she said, “but I need to take hormones if I get pregnant again.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She sat up and put her arms around me.

  “I missed you,” she said. Then she began to cry. “It was six centimeters, the doctor said.”

  “When did it happen?”

  “I was in the hospital for three days,” said Agnes. “They had to perform a curettage. The doctor kept talking about the embryonic matter. So I don’t get infected. It wasn’t viable. The embryonic matter.”

  I stayed with Agnes overnight, lying fully clothed next to her on the mattress, unable to sleep. I got up very early. I felt like reading something, but there was only the Norton Anthology of Poetry and a few manuals. There was a collection of clipped coupons for ten-cent reductions off the price of a jar of peanut butter or a box of cereal. I went to get a glass of orange juice. The kitchen was squeaky clean, as though it had never been used for anything. The fridge was almost empty. I looked in the cupboards. Among the cleaning things was a pair of rubber gloves, marked “Kitchen” in black felt-tip. Out of curiosity, I looked in the bathroom, and found the corresponding pair duly marked “Bathroom.” There was a pile of colorful cleaning cloths next to them. One of them was old and faded, and someone had stitched “Agnes” on it. I went back to the living area. From the corner that had the mattress in it, I could hear Agnes stirring, and muttering something to herself. I sat down at her desk and pulled open a drawer. There was an old carton full of letters and postcards, carefully arranged by sender. There were little index cards, marked “Parents,” “Grandparents,” “Uncles/Aunts,” “Cindy,” and “Herbert.” There was a file card with my name on it too, but the section behind it was empty. I had once sent Agnes a pretty bland postcard from New York, but that was in the kitchen taped to the fridge. I pulled the batch of Herbert’s letters out of the box. First, there were some postcards, then letters, then more postcards, and finally three new letters, the last of which was very thick and only recently postmarked Chicago. I peered into the envelope, without taking out the letter, and read “Dear Agnes.” I put the letters back in the box, and sat on a chair by the window. I must have fallen asleep at some point.

  In the morning, Agnes was feeling a bit better, and she got up for breakfast.

  “I didn’t really mean that, you know,” I said. “I thought about it for a long time. I tried to reach you.”

  “It wasn’t what you said. It was the fact of your leaving me on my own. The way you just ran off.”

  “If you want a baby …”

  “You don’t really want one. But that doesn’t matter anymore now.”

  “Maybe later,” I said.

  “Sure,” said Agnes, “maybe later.”

  26

  Agnes moved back in with me. She was more affected by the miscarriage than I first thought. We didn’t talk about it when we were together, but she often sat alone in the bedroom, looking out of the window. In among all the buildings, you could just make out a tiny patch of lake.

  “What do the birds do when the lake’s frozen over?” Agnes asked once.

  “I don’t think it ever freezes completely,” I said, “and if it does, the animal-welfare people make holes in the ice, or they feed the birds or something. I don’t really know.”

  Agnes hadn’t gone back to her studies yet. Her professor had said she might stay home till Christmas. He seemed to have a very high opinion of her, and when she talked about him, I almost felt jealous.

  “He’s an old man,” she said.

  “So am I. I’m an old man too.”

  “He’s twice your age.”

  I told Agnes about Louise. She didn’t say anything, she didn’t even get angry. Her indifference offended me.

  “Write it down,” she said, “carry on with the story, and write down everything that’s happened. The baby, the lake, Louise …”

  “I have gone on with it,” I said, “in the story you’ve had the child.”

  I was reluctant to show Agnes what I’d written. But she asked to see it, and when she’d read it she was pleased. Her only objection was to the name I’d chosen.

  “What would you like to call it, then?”

  “It’s already been given a name. You can’t change it now.”

  “I bought a book,” I said.

  “Tell me about Margaret,” said Agnes, “if she’s born on the fourth of May, that makes her a … What’s the sign?”

  “A Taurus. I thought you didn’t believe in astrology.”

  “That doesn’t matter. You’ve got that book about star signs, haven’t you.”

  I got the book out, and read: “The Taurus character is defined by Venus. It is in this phase that spring has finally prevailed, something that manifests itself in the Taurus. Tauruses are peaceful and even-tempered, they need plenty of affection, and are capable of great passion.”

  Agnes took the book out of my hands, and started leafing through it.

  “Here,” she said. “They have excellent deductive powers and a logical brain. This often takes the form of an aptitude for mathematics. You see, she takes after me.”

  I looked over her shoulder. “The sign’s proverb is ‘Out of sight, out of mind.’ ”

  “You must write it down,” said Agnes, “you must give us our baby. I wasn’t able to do it.”

  I sat at the computer all afternoon, and Agnes sat next to me, dictating or correcting. Our baby grew fast, within half a page it could walk, and a couple of sentences later, talk as well. We wrote about a visit to its grandparents in Florida, vacations in Switzerland, childhood diseases, and Christmas. Margaret was given beautiful presents. A tricycle, building blocks, dolls, her first book. Agnes and I got married, we had another child, a boy this time. We were happy.

  “I can’t do any more,” I said at last, “we can’t write a whole family epic in an afternoon.”

  “Then we’ll go for a walk and think about what happens next,” said Agnes.

  27

  We went out. Lately we’d been walking in the park, but now Agnes wanted to go into town. It was Saturday, and the streets were crawling with people doing their Christmas shopping. Agnes stopped in front of a toyshop.

  “I want to buy a teddy bear for Margaret,” she said. We went into the shop, and bought a big teddy bear.

  Then Agnes said our baby should get a present from me as well, and we bought her a doll.

  “Now let’s go in the baby clothes section,” said Agnes.

  “Don’t you think …” I hesitated. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

  But Agnes had already gone on ahead. When I caught up with her, I saw there were tears streaming down her face. Almost
randomly, she picked up a few baby things as she went, a woolly sweater, a pair of striped dungarees, a bonnet. I tried to calm her down, but she wouldn’t listen, paid with her credit card, and ran out of the shop. I set off after her, but almost lost her as she weaved her way through the great crowds. I only caught up with her by the Doral Plaza. She was walking more slowly now, though she still wouldn’t speak. Neither of us saying anything, we rode the elevator up. Once in the apartment, Agnes put down her shopping bags, and went into the bedroom.

  I was just taking my shoes off when she raced past me into the bathroom, and slammed the door and locked it. I could hear her wailing loudly.

  “What’s the matter?” I called through the door.

  “In the bedroom …” she sobbed.

  I went into the bedroom. There was a suspended platform outside the window, with a couple of men on it who were cleaning the windows. They finished, waved to me, and floated back up. I’d had a note from the management announcing that the windows were going to be cleaned, but I’d forgotten to mention it to Agnes. I lowered the blinds, and went out into the corridor. In the bathroom I could still hear Agnes whimpering. I knocked, and finally she opened.

  “They were looking at me,” she said, wiping away her tears with toilet paper, and blowing her nose.

  “They’ve gone now. I’ve drawn the blinds too.”

  “They were looking at me. They were all looking at me when we were buying the things for the baby. They all know it’s a lie.”

  “But it’s just a story. You wanted me to—”

  “I didn’t know …” Agnes interrupted me, and that was all she said.

  “You wanted me to write that way,” I said, “we wrote it together.”

  “I didn’t know it was going to be so real. But it’s still a lie. It’s sick.”

  “I thought it might help you. It helped me while you were gone.”

  “It’s not true. You have to write it the way it was and the way it is. You have to be truthful.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Write what happens next,” said Agnes. “We have to know what will happen next.”

  “OK. I’ll write what we do, where we go, what you wear. Like before. You can wear your navy dress again. When it gets a bit warmer.”

  “I’ll put it on tonight.”

  That very evening, Agnes threw all our newly bought baby things down the garbage chute in the corridor. I was in favor of giving them away, but Agnes insisted on getting rid of them. When the teddy bear didn’t fit in the small opening, she tore the arms off it. Also, we deleted what we’d written on the computer that afternoon. And then Agnes put on the navy dress.

  “When I was little, my best friends were the characters in the books I read,” she said, “my only friends, in fact. It was like that later too. After I finished Siddhartha, I stood in the garden for an hour to mortify my flesh. The only flesh I succeeded in mortifying was in my feet. There was snow in the garden.”

  Agnes laughed hesitantly. I’d put a frozen pizza in the oven, and was opening a bottle of wine. “I’m always sad, each time I finish a book,” said Agnes. “It feels to me as though I’ve become the character in it, and the character’s life ends when the books does. I suppose there are times I’m glad too. Then the ending is like coming out of a bad dream, and I feel all light and free, reborn. I sometimes wonder whether writers really know what they’re doing to us readers.”

  I kissed Agnes.

  “So here I am sitting with you, and I didn’t even know your head was full of the entire cast list of world literature.”

  “I don’t read much anymore,” said Agnes, “maybe for that reason. Because I didn’t want books to have me in their power. It’s like poison. I imagined I’d become immune. But you never become immune. On the contrary.”

  Then we ate, and afterward Agnes took the sedative the doctor had prescribed after her operation. I sat on the side of the bed, waiting for her to go to sleep.

  “Now we’re together again,” she mumbled, “just the two of us.”

  28

  Agnes slowly seemed to get better. But it was as though she’d removed herself from me, and couldn’t find our old intimacy again. When we went for a stroll, she would walk beside me completely self-involved; when I held her hand, she quickly freed herself again. She read the Norton Anthology a lot. When I was out, she often played her cello. I could hear it from the corridor, but as soon as I opened the door, she would stop.

  “Would you play something for me?” I asked her once.

  She just said: “No.”

  While she was putting her cello in its case, I leafed through her sheet music.

  “I thought you were playing Schubert?”

  “Not anymore,” said Agnes with a smile, “the others thought that wasn’t what I needed just now, and so we’re playing Mozart.”

  “I don’t like Mozart.”

  “I don’t either.”

  It was Advent. There was the first snow of the year. Agnes had decorated the apartment with white stars that she’d woven from strips of paper. I had given her a tape of carols that she listened to the whole time, even though she thought the music was horrible, and only a European would find favor in something that kitschy. When I got home from the library in the evening, she would kiss me quickly on the lips. She would often light candles. She said she was thinking about her childhood a lot, but she didn’t go into any detail. She asked me about what people did at Christmas in Switzerland. We baked some cookies, which didn’t really taste right, because we didn’t have all the spices, and I made Agnes an Advent wreath out of newspaper and fir twigs.

  “Even though it’s too late really,” I said.

  “That doesn’t matter,” she said.

  In bed, Agnes often turned her back on me, and slept curled up in a ball on her side. When she had a shower, she would lock the door and get changed in the bathroom, just as she had during our first few weeks together. I thought all that was temporary and we would soon be back to normal.

  Agnes was busy in a way she hadn’t been previously. She got plenty of exercise, went swimming, and joined a gym. She attended rehearsals of the quartet, visited her colleagues at the university, and brought work home with her. She’d gotten some new slides of crystal lattices, and sat at the window, holding them up to the light.

  “People have known for a long time that that’s how they look. Long before it could be proved. Theoretically, you can take any crystal—except the tricline-asymmetrical ones—and turn it over and fit it in the same space.”

  “Explain them to me,” I asked.

  “They’re created by the interaction of atoms and molecules. Every little bit has its own fixed place in relation to the others. But perfect crystals are very rare in nature. There are almost always irregularities and malformations.”

  Once Agnes came out to the lake with me, and we brought stale bread to feed the birds. When the shops had closed, we walked back through the downtown area, and looked in the shop windows. I was worried that the baby things we would see would disturb Agnes, but she remained calm. When I asked, she said: “I can have a baby any time I want.”

  “Do you want one?”

  “Maybe. Sometime.”

  When we got back, Agnes said: “We have to clean the apartment. Everything needs to be spotless for Christmas.”

  “We’re not expecting anyone.”

  “That doesn’t matter. We’ll clean it for ourselves. You didn’t do anything while I was away.”

  We spent the whole evening cleaning.

  “You’ve got even fewer things than I do,” said Agnes, once we were finished.

  “Yes, but this is only a part of it. Most of it’s in Switzerland. Furniture, clothes, and especially books.”

  “I keep forgetting you’re only a visitor.”

  “I could stay. Or you could go back with me.”

  “Yes. Maybe. A happy ending for your story.”

  “For our story, you mean.”
<
br />   29

  We celebrated Christmas Eve together. It was some time since I’d last shown Agnes what I’d written. Now I printed out the story on white paper and put it in a folder with a dedication.

  “I haven’t got an ending yet,” I said, “but as soon as I do, I’ll have the whole thing bound into a little book for you.”

  Agnes had knitted me a sweater.

  “God knows, I had enough wool,” she said.

  “Black wool?”

  “No, I had it dyed. Light blue doesn’t really suit you.”

  I didn’t say anything. We were sitting on the sofa, with a little Christmas tree in front of us, that Agnes had decorated only with candles. From next door we could hear the sound of Christmas carols and squabbling children, then a loud, low voice shouting something. And then silence.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “I wasn’t thinking of that.”

  “This morning there was a parcel for you from UPS. I thought it was probably a present, so I didn’t mention it.”

  I recognized the handwriting right away.

  “It’s from Louise.”

  “Open it.”

  Inside it was the model of a Pullman lounge car. It was beautiful and perfect. Behind the windows you could see little figures sitting at tables.

  “Here’s a card too,” said Agnes, “it’s an invitation to her New Year’s party.”

  The card was from Louise’s parents. It was a printed invitation, only my name had been written in by hand. On the back, Louise had written: “Come if you can. Bring Agnes with you, if you like. Lots of interesting people!”

  “Did you tell her about me?” asked Agnes.

  “Only that you’d left me, and then that you came back.”

  “You left me, I think you mean. And then you came back to me.”

  “Christmas is a depressing time, if you think about it,” I said.

  “Children enjoy it.”

  “Come on,” I said, “let’s go up on the roof.”