On A Day Like This

by Peter Stamm

  It is on a day like this, a little later, a little earlier,

  that everything will start over, that everything will begin,

  that everything will go on as before.

  —Georges Perec, Un homme qui dort (A Man Asleep)

  Andreas loved the empty mornings when he would stand by the window with a cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and stare down at the small, tidy courtyard, and think about nothing except what was there in front of him: a small rectangular bed in the middle of the courtyard, planted with ivy with a tree in it, that put out a few thin branches, pruned to fit the small space that was available; the shiny green containers for glass, packing material, other rubbish; the even pattern of the cement paving blocks, some of which were a little lighter, having been replaced some years back for some unknown reason. The noise of the city was only faintly audible, reduced to an even roar, interspersed with distant birdcalls and the rather clearer noise of a window being opened and shut.

  This unthinking state only lasted for a few minutes. Even before Andreas had finished his cigarette, he remembered last night. What did emptiness mean to him, Nadia had wanted to know. For her it meant lack of attention, lack of love, the absence of people she had lost, or who paid her insufficient attention. Emptiness was a space that had once been filled, or that she thought might be filled, the absence of something she couldn’t put her finger on. He didn’t know about that, Andreas had said, he wasn’t interested in abstract notions.

  Evenings with Nadia always followed the same pattern. She would arrive half an hour late, and give Andreas the feeling that it was he who was late. She would be wearing full makeup, and a short, tight skirt and black fishnet tights. She would drop her coat theatrically on the floor, sit down on the sofa, and cross her legs. As far as she was concerned, that was the high point of the evening, her entrance. She put a cigarette in her mouth, and Andreas gave her a light, and complimented her on her appearance. He went into the kitchen and came back with two glasses of wine. Nadia must have had something to drink already, she was a little bit excitable.

  Usually, they ate in a local restaurant. The food wasn’t bad, and the gay waiter bantered with Nadia. Sometimes, if the restaurant wasn’t too busy, he sat down at their table with them. Nadia drank and talked too much, and together with the waiter made fun of Andreas’s being a vegetarian, and the fact that he always ordered the same thing off the menu. He said he wasn’t a vegetarian, he just didn’t eat meat that often. By dessert, if not before, Nadia would have gotten onto politics. She worked for a PR company. One of her clients was a group connected to the Socialist Party, whose views she represented in a way that drove Andreas crazy. By that point, he would often have stopped speaking, and she would ask him in an aggressive undertone if she bored him.

  “I bore you,” she said.

  No, he said, but he was a foreigner, he didn’t understand French politics, and wasn’t that interested either. He obeyed the law, he sorted his trash, he taught the syllabus. Apart from that, he just wanted to be left in peace. Nadia would be annoyed by his lack of interest, and would lecture him, and they quarreled. Andreas tried to change the subject. Then every time Nadia would start to talk about her ex-husband, his lovelessness and his inattentiveness, Andreas got the feeling she was talking about him. Nadia couldn’t stop complaining. She smoked one cigarette after another, and her voice got a little teary. All the other guests would have gone by then, and the waiter had emptied the ashtrays and wiped the espresso machine. When he came to their table and asked them if they wanted anything else, Nadia was suddenly a different person. She laughed and flirted with him, and that would go on for another fifteen minutes until Andreas was allowed to pay the bill.

  On the way home, Nadia was quiet. They hadn’t touched all evening. Now she linked arms with Andreas. He stopped in front of the building where he lived. He kissed her, first on the cheeks, then on the mouth. Sometimes he kissed her on the neck, and then he would feel a bit ridiculous. She seemed to like it, though. Presumably, it accorded with her own glamorous sense of herself. The sort of woman that men prostrated themselves in front of, who gets kissed on the neck, who laughs her lovers to scorn. Andreas would have liked to be alone now, but he asked her all the same if she wanted to come up. It sounded like capitulation.

  Nadia was not one of those women who became more beautiful once you had slept with them. Her tight clothes were like a suit of armor; once she was naked she seemed to lose confidence, and looked old, older than she really was. She permitted everything to be done to her, enjoyed Andreas’s caresses without reciprocating them. That—he should have said to her—was his idea of emptiness. These evenings with her, every other week, or rather the same evening over and over again, followed by the same night, and no sense of getting closer to her. But he didn’t say anything. He enjoyed the sense that Nadia was somewhere else in her head, that she left him her body to do with as he pleased, then, after an hour or two, suddenly got impatient, shoved him away, and told him to call her a taxi. Emptiness meant those evenings with her, the afternoons with Sylvie, or the weekends by himself at home in his warm, comfortable apartment, where he would watch TV, play a computer game, or just read.

  Emptiness was his life in this city, the eighteen years in which nothing had changed, without his wishing for anything to change. Emptiness was the normal state of things, he had said, nor was it anything he was afraid of—quite the opposite.

  Sometimes, when Andreas crossed the street on his way to work, he imagined what it would be like to be run over by a bus. The collision would be the end of what had been thus far, and at the same time a sort of fresh start. A blow that would put an end to entanglements and create a little order. Suddenly, everything seemed significant, the date and the hour, the name of the street or boulevard, and that of the bus driver, even Andreas himself, the date and place of his birth, his profession, his religion. It was a rainy morning, winter or fall. The gleaming asphalt reflected the lights of the electric signs and the car headlights. The traffic piled up behind the bus, which blocked the road. An ambulance came. Pedestrians stood and gawked. A policeman waved the traffic past the site of the accident. The passengers in other buses craned their necks or stuck their heads out of the window. They failed to understand what had happened, or else forgot it straightaway when a different scene caught their attention. A second policeman came and tried to reconstruct the accident. He asked the bus driver, the woman in the bakery who had seen it all happen, a further witness. Then he would write up a report in duplicate, a file that would be stored in some archive somewhere, arranged in an alphabetical sequence of fatal accidents. Andreas imagined the measures that would have to be taken to remove him from the system. His brother would have to be informed, it would be for him to decide what would be done with the body. Andreas had withstood the temptation to draw up a will, it had always struck him as rather narcissistic to leave instructions in the event of one’s own death. Presumably Walter would opt for incineration, that was the simplest and most sensible course. Even so, there would be a lot of paperwork to be done, and all sorts of official business. The embassy would certainly have to become involved.

  Andreas asked himself whether a detailed account would be drawn up of the last working days before his death. The school authorities would know what to do. Perhaps there was even a memo somewhere listing the steps that had to be taken in the event of the unexpected death of foreign members of the teaching staff.

  And then, after a few days of excitement, following letters and phone calls and sotto voce conversations in the staff room, there would be a modest funeral, a wreath from the school, a floral tribute from his colleagues. Walter would buy a big bouquet from the discount florist at the corner. He wo
uld have traveled up from Switzerland, found a cheap room somewhere in the neighborhood, and he would now be trying, with his bad French, to organize everything. He had got hold of Andreas’s appointment and address book. There was insufficient time to place an announcement in the newspaper, but he would call some of Andreas’s friends and invite them. He would be surprised by the number of women’s names in the address book, perhaps he felt a bit jealous of his brother’s bachelor existence. In the evenings he would call his wife and complain about the officiousness of the authorities, and ask how the children were doing. Then he would go out for a meal locally, and go for a walk in the rue des Abesses or the rue Pigalle. Andreas asked himself whether his brother might take in a peepshow or go with a prostitute. He couldn’t imagine it.

  From the Gare du Nord, Andreas took the suburban train out to Deuil-la-Barre. He took the same train every day. He studied the faces of the other passengers, ordinary, unremarkable faces. An elderly man sitting across from him stared at him with expressionless eyes. Andreas looked out the window. He saw rails, factories and storage facilities, an occasional tree, electricity towers or lampposts, brick or concrete walls spattered with graffiti. He had a sense of seeing only colors, ocher, yellow, white, silver, a dull red, and the watery blue of the sky. It was a little after seven, but time seemed not to matter.

  He asked himself whether Walter would leave the clearing out of the apartment to a moving company. The furniture hadn’t been exactly cheap, but what use would he have for it? That aside, Andreas didn’t have many possessions. Personal effects—he had always asked himself what that meant. A little statuette of Diana with bow and arrow, frozen in mid-step, that he had bought at a flea market shortly after his arrival in Paris, a couple of posters from art exhibits long ago, and framed vacation photos of deserted landscapes in the dazzling heat of Italy and the South of France. He owned hardly any books, a few CDs and DVDs, nothing special, nothing of value. His clothes and his shoes wouldn’t fit Walter, who was bigger and bulkier than he was. The apartment itself was the only thing that could be turned into cash. Andreas had bought it at a time when the neighborhood wasn’t as sought-after as it was now.

  It was a strange thing that his brother, with whom he had so little in common and whom he didn’t even resemble, was the person who would have to deal with all this. Andreas didn’t like to think his death would put anyone to any trouble. But probably that was unavoidable.

  He looked around at the other passengers, a pair of lovers kissing by the door, two children whispering, old women with tired faces, businessmen in cheap shiny suits, reading the business section of the paper with grave expressions on their faces. In a hundred years you’ll all be dead, he thought to himself. The sun would shine, the trains would move, children would go to school, but he and all the other people traveling with him today would be dead, and along with them, this moment, this journey, as though it had never been.

  The passengers who got off the train with Andreas seemed to be different every day. He stopped on the platform for a moment and watched as they dispersed in all directions. Even though it was still cool, he took off his jacket. He felt a chill, but he loved the cool of the morning, which felt like a superficial caress.

  He used to teach in a suburb that was even further out. He had always applied for jobs in the city, but every time he had lost out to colleagues who were older or who were married or had children. Ten years ago, when they built the secondary school at Deuil, Andreas gave up his dream of a job in the city. At least he didn’t have so far to go to work as before.

  He was always there half an hour before the beginning of classes. The staff room smelled of cigarettes, even though smoking was not permitted anywhere in the school. Andreas got coffee from the machine and sat down by the window. After about fifteen minutes, Jean-Marc came in, one of the gym teachers. He was wearing a tracksuit.

  “Have you been smoking?” he asked, as he washed his face in the sink. Andreas said nothing.

  “I can’t believe you’re allowed to smoke in staff rooms in Switzerland.”

  Andreas said he hadn’t been in a staff room anywhere in Switzerland for a very long time.

  “Can I ask you a personal question?” said Jean-Marc.

  “I’d rather you didn’t.”

  Jean-Marc laughed. He had pulled off his tracksuit top, and was washing his armpits. He said it was too bad they hadn’t installed a shower for the teachers. He squirted on a deodorant, the smell of it spread through the room. Jean-Marc got dressed again. He got a glass of water, and sat down right next to Andreas.

  “You must know Delphine?” he leaned back with a smug expression. “What do you think of her?”

  “She’s nice,” said Andreas. “There’s something refreshing about her.”

  “That’s exactly it.”

  Andreas went over to the window, opened it, and lit a cigarette. Jean-Marc gave him a glare.

  “We went for a drink together,” he said, “and somehow I ended up staying with her.”

  “And what’s that to do with me?”

  “Well, since then she’s pretended nothing happened. As though she didn’t know me.”

  “You should be pleased. Do you want her calling you at home?”

  Jean-Marc stood up and raised his hands. “God, no,” he said, “but it’s strange. You sleep with a woman, someone … not even beautiful. Did that ever happen to you?”

  “I’m not married,” said Andreas. It seemed grotesque to him that he would certainly have described Jean-Marc as his best friend.

  After Andreas turned off the light at night, he lay awake a little. He had drawn the curtains, and the only light in the darkened room was from the TV, the DVD player, and the stereo. The red luminous diodes had something calming about them, they reminded him of the light that doesn’t go out, of the presence of Christ, whom he didn’t believe in.

  He spent Saturday as always, cleaning the apartment, and shopping for the week ahead. Some years ago, a film that had achieved cult status had been shot in the street, and since that time people came there from all over the world to check out the reality of the dream scenes. Andreas had bought a DVD of the film, and when he watched it from time to time, it seemed to him the pictures were more real than the street outside, as though the reality were just a pale imitation of the silvery film world, a cheap stage set. You had to close your eyes to hear the soundtrack and see the images. Then Paris was the way he had always imagined it.

  Andreas liked being part of this stage set. He liked the sense he had of himself sitting in a café reading the newspaper, or strolling down the street with a baguette under his arm, and carrying bags full of vegetables that would spend the week rotting in his fridge before he threw them away. When tourists stopped him and asked for directions, he was only too glad to tell them. He answered them in French, even when he noticed they were German or Swiss and had trouble understanding him.

  He was both an extra in the imaginary film and a member of the audience, a tourist who had walked these streets for twenty years now, without ever having a sense of arriving anywhere. He was quite happy with his part, he had never wanted to be anything else. Great undertakings and major changes had always alarmed him. He walked through the streets of St. Michel or St. Germain, went up the Eiffel Tower, or took a look around the church of Notre Dame or the Louvre. He strolled across the Pont Neuf and went shopping in the big stores, even though the prices were ridiculous. Sometimes he would follow people on the street for a while, see what they bought or watched them stop in a café for a drink, and then he let them go. When he talked to friends who had spent all their lives in Paris, he was amazed by how poorly they knew the city. They barely left their quartier, and hadn’t visited the museums since their school days. Instead of rejoicing in the city’s beauty, they complained about the striking Metro workers, the polluted air, and the lack of parks and playgrounds.

  Late in the afternoon, he would go to the cinema and watch an American action film, some rout
ine story with spectacular stunts and special effects. On his way home, he would be accosted by the doormen at the sex clubs. Previously, they had always been rather slimy young men, but for some time now they were women, who were even more persistent than men. Andreas looked straight ahead and waved them away with his hand, but one of the women followed him as far as the next traffic light, talking to him, and saying, well, how about it, come on in. We have new girls.

  “I live here,” he said, and crossed the street against the red light, to get rid of the woman.

  It annoyed him that he was always accosted. It was as though they could see through his disguise, as though they knew something about him that he didn’t know himself. Life must be pretty hard behind the scenes, behind the blacked-out doors of the sex clubs and bars and sex shops. The thought that that life might be more real than his own upset him. In all the years he had lived there, he had never once gone to one of those places.

  He slept in on Sundays. He ate breakfast in a café, read the newspaper, and listened to a young German couple argue about their plans for the rest of the day. She wanted to go to the Louvre; he didn’t. When she asked what he wanted to do instead, he had no suggestions.

  At twelve o’clock, Andreas was back home. He corrected a batch of homework, then he leafed through a couple of little books he’d picked up on Friday in the German-language bookstore. They were part of a series of instruction books that he sometimes read with the more advanced pupils, little thriller texts about art thieves or smuggler bands, written in simple vocabulary of six or twelve or eighteen hundred words, that was somehow enough to describe an entire world. Andreas liked the stories, even though they were incredibly banal and predictable.

  He quickly laid aside the first volume. It was about ecoterrorism, a subject that depressed him, and seemed to him unsuitable for his pupils. The second was titled Love Without Borders. On the cover, it had a line-drawing that reminded him of the Sixties, and that he found strangely moving: a young couple sitting at a sidewalk café under tall trees, smiling at one another. Andreas read the jacket copy. The story was about a girl from Paris called Angélique, who takes a job as an au pair in Germany, and falls in love with Jens, a marine biology student. The host family live in Rendsburg, up near the Danish border. Many years before, Andreas had attended a conference there once, on Scandinavian literature. He had liked the town, even though it had rained the whole time, and he hardly saw anything of the countryside.