by Peter Stamm
He didn’t like reading love stories with the kids. Every kiss was accompanied by giggles and whispers and stupid remarks. But when he was younger, he had fallen in love with an au pair himself. He began reading.
I couldn’t concentrate on the traffic. I had to keep looking at her. The Volkswagen smelled of her, and of summer, sun, and fields of flowers.
Andreas thought about Fabienne, and going swimming with her and Manuel in the lake. He had gone to school with Manuel, and later, while they were both away at college, they sometimes ran into each other on the train home. Andreas was studying German and French, Manuel was qualifying as a gym teacher. He owned an ancient 2CV that was always breaking down.
Fabienne and Andreas was a love story that had never quite happened. He had been in love with her all right, but he had never been sure where she stood. One summer, they had met almost every day, had spent a lot of time together, but he had never dared to declare his love to her, and Fabienne seemed not to expect such a declaration from him. When he was already living in Paris, he wrote her a letter where he finally talked about his feelings; he never sent it.
Andreas hadn’t thought about Fabienne or Manuel for a long time. He hadn’t heard anything from them for ages. He had a vague recollection of a birth announcement, a bland baby face, with the weight and height of a newborn, as though that meant anything. Presumably he had offered his congratulations, maybe sent a gift, he couldn’t remember anymore. He had seen the two of them again, briefly, at his father’s funeral, and not since.
He turned over a couple of pages.
I took her hand and kissed it. Shortly afterward, we were lying on the canal bank.
“You are an amazing person. How can I understand you?”
“You’re not to understand me, Butterfly,” I replied, and looked at her. “I don’t understand myself. Often I don’t even know what I want, you see.”
“Too bad,” she said quietly. “It would be nice if you knew what I felt like now.”
For the next twenty minutes, neither of us spoke much. When we got up, Angélique brushed the grass off her pants.
“I like you.”
“You’re sweet.”
Andreas stared at the book. Butterfly was what he had sometimes called Fabienne, in English, because her German then was as bad as his French. And she had said he didn’t know what he wanted, in her over-distinct pronunciation. You do not know what you want.
He remembered the scene. It was a hot day. The three of them had driven out to the lake. They changed into their bathing suits in the undergrowth. Manuel said he would swim to the other side, and disappeared. Fabienne was sunbathing on her back, eyes closed. Andreas remembered her ivory-colored bathing suit, and that she had put her hair up. He looked at her, and then he bent down over her. She must have felt his shadow cross her face. She opened her eyes and looked at him.
He kissed her, and she let it happen. He laid his hand on her throat, caressed her shoulder, and gently brushed over her bosom. Then she broke free, and ran down to the lake.
Andreas stayed lying there for a while. He was stunned that he had actually dared to kiss Fabienne. He dived into the water, and set off after her. Fabienne swam slowly, head out of the water in an effort to keep her hair dry. Andreas had to hang back if he wasn’t to pass her. After a while, Manuel swam out to meet them. They turned back with him, and returned to their spot on the bank.
Later, Manuel tried to teach Fabienne the butterfly. In the past semester he had learned all the various swimming styles, and he showed off his expertise. Perhaps that was why Andreas had started calling her Butterfly. Or was it Manuel who had started that? Suddenly Andreas didn’t feel sure.
Manuel stood next to Fabienne in the shallow water, and tried to grab her by the waist, but she took a couple of quick steps away from him, and gave him the slip. Manuel set off after her. When he didn’t catch her, he splashed water at her, and she ran to the bank.
They had stayed by the lake for a long time that day. When it got dark, they lit a fire. Manuel started to talk about religion in his bad English, and Fabienne argued with him. She was Catholic and couldn’t deal with his Protestant views, his love of Jesus, who, the way he talked about him, sounded like a good friend. Andreas played the nihilist. He got excited. Now it was his turn to show off with glib remarks on the futility of human existence. In the end, Manuel and Fabienne joined forces against him, and he hurled accusations at them that he later regretted. He looked at Fabienne and tried to read some lingering trace of his kiss in her eyes. But all he saw in her look was distaste.
On the way home, she sat in the front, next to Manuel. It was a warm night, they had the roof of the 2CV down, as they drove back over the hill to the village. Manuel drew up in front of Andreas’s parents’ house. They said their good-byes. Fabienne leaned back between the seats and kissed Andreas on both cheeks. He stopped by the garden gate and watched the car disappear around the corner. Then he remained sitting on the front steps for a long time, smoking and thinking about Fabienne and his love for her.
When he next saw her, a couple of days later, she was different, still friendly but distant. They went swimming again, but Fabienne seemed to take care not to be alone with Andreas. Eventually the weather changed, and it got too cold to swim. Then they only saw each other with the rest of the group, going to the cinema or meeting in a restaurant. In the autumn, Fabienne returned to Paris, to study German. Andreas hadn’t gone to the station to see her off—why, he could no longer remember.
After Fabienne was gone, Andreas felt how little he and Manuel had in common. They saw each other once or twice still, but without Fabienne there, their meetings were boring.
He read the scene a second time. The footnotes explained those words that were not part of the basic vocabulary.
canal: man-made waterway
alongside: next to, by the side of
kiss: two people pressing their lips together
At the end of the chapter there were some comprehension questions.
Why is Jens disappointed?
What do you know about Angélique?
Where is Schleswig-Holstein?
That time at the lake, Andreas felt glad that Fabienne had run away. He was in love with her, but for the time being that first kiss was enough for him, that first touch. In the ensuing weeks he sometimes imagined what would have happened if she had kissed him back. They would run into the forest together. They would hide in the undergrowth, take off their bathing suits. They would lie on the forest floor, which was warm and soft in Andreas’s imagination. Then Manuel would come calling for them, and they would hurriedly pull their bathing suits back on and stroll down to the lake, as though nothing had happened. Fabienne would look at Andreas, and smile. Manuel surely must have noticed what had happened, but Andreas didn’t care. In his imagination he felt strangely proud and solemn. They were all quiet on the drive back. Andreas sat in the back, studying Fabienne, her tanned neck, with little tiny, almost invisible hairs on it, her pink translucent ears, her pinned back hair. Through her T-shirt he could see the outline of her shoulderblades and the straps of her bra.
Fabienne’s beauty had always taken his breath away. It was the flawless beauty of a statue. He imagined his hands gliding over her body, which would be cool as bronze or smooth marble. In his projection, Fabienne had remained the young girl he had first met, and when he thought of her he felt as young and inexperienced as he had been at the time. He couldn’t imagine Fabienne sweaty or tired, or aroused, or in a temper. He couldn’t imagine her naked.
In the winter after Fabienne’s departure, Andreas’s mother died of breast cancer. She had known she was sick for some time, but she had first concealed it from the family, and then played it down. Even when she had only a little time to live, she still pretended everything was OK. The atmosphere in the house was unbearable, and finally Andreas rented a room in the city, and came home only at weekends. He would usually arrive after lunch on Saturday, and go str
aight up to his room. He said he had to work. Then he would lie on his bed and read his old children’s books, and only come down for supper. After supper, he disappeared as quickly as possible into the village, to meet friends. He drank too much, and when he came home late at night, drunk, he would sometimes run into his mother, who was unable to sleep. She was standing in the kitchen, swallowing some homeopathic remedy that she tried to keep him from seeing. She would say good night, and pad down the dark corridor to her bedroom, but, once Andreas was in bed, he could hear her getting up again and restlessly pacing about the house.
In those months he started going out with Manuel’s younger sister, Beatrice, who worked as a teller at the Canton Bank, and had just broken up with her boyfriend. The relationship lasted just six months. Beatrice was still living with her parents, who were religious people and wouldn’t have allowed Andreas to spend the night with their daughter. Sometimes, Beatrice visited him in the city, but she never wanted to stay over. Andreas said she was legal, but she shook her head and said, no, she couldn’t do that to her parents. She let him undress her to her underwear, then she said she wasn’t ready yet, she wanted to get to know him a bit better first. Even when she touched him, Andreas thought she didn’t really want to, and it was just to please him. Eventually he had enough. He called her at the bank and said he didn’t want to see her anymore. She said she was working, and wasn’t able to talk, and he said there was nothing to talk about, and hung up. After that he didn’t answer the phone for a week. He saw Beatrice at his mother’s funeral. She had come with Manuel. The two of them offered him their condolences, and they exchanged a few meaningless sentences. Years later, Andreas heard that Beatrice had got back together with her ex, and married him.
During his time with Beatrice, he started writing letters to Fabienne. He had thought about her a lot after her going away, and sometimes when he was lying on the bed with Beatrice, he shut his eyes and imagined it was Fabienne beside him. From that time, she had accompanied him through all his relationships. She was always there, as a shadow, fading a little over time, but never quite disappearing.
Andreas went into the kitchen to make some tea. Then he lay down on the sofa, and started reading the little book from the beginning.
The love between Angélique and Jens was almost as chaste as that between him and Fabienne. Sex did not play any part in the basic vocabulary, and Jens appeared more interested in the beauty of Schleswig-Holstein than in Angélique’s. He drove her around the area in his old Beetle, showed her the Viking museum at Haithabu and the famous Bordesholm altar in Schleswig, and walked along the North Sea-Baltic Canal with her, one of the most important waterways of the world, as he explained to her. He kissed her for the first time on the Rendsburg ferry, and then they went on excursions even further afield. A visit to Lübeck gave Jens the opportunity to deliver himself of the stupidest sentence on Thomas Mann that Andreas had ever read. He turned over a few pages, and it was fall. The date of Angélique’s departure was moving nearer, casting its dark shadow on the young happiness. Just as Jens was on his way to the station to say good-bye to Angélique, and promise to visit her in Paris, his car developed another problem, and by the time he finally got to the station, all he could see of her train were its two taillights. Foolishly, the two of them hadn’t even exchanged addresses, and for a couple of pages it looked as if they would never see each other again. But then Jens managed to get a place to study in Paris. In the spring, he set off after Angélique, and only a few days later, by a wildly improbable coincidence, he met her strolling down the Champs-Elysées. A happy ending in spring light, a jerky pen-and-ink sketch of bliss.
The story was implausible and badly written, but it had extraordinary parallels to Andreas’s own. He too had set off in pursuit of Fabienne, though only after two years. They had exchanged letters that whole time. Andreas had never referred explicitly to the kiss by the lake, but his letters had been full of hints. Fabienne must have sensed what he felt for her.
She was never the first to write, but she replied to all his letters. She wrote about her studies, her family, her friends. She did not mention that Manuel had come to visit her in Paris, just as she did not mention her trips to Switzerland. Not until Andreas had finished his degree and got an assistantship in a school on the outskirts of Paris did she tell him, in a postscript, that she would be going to Switzerland in October. She and Manuel were an item, and all the to-ing and fro-ing had gotten a bit wearing, and a bit expensive as well.
Andreas was stunned. He asked himself why he had never thought to visit Fabienne. He thought of turning down the job, but then he went there anyway. He resolved to speak to Fabienne. For weeks he thought about what he would say to her. He couldn’t imagine what she saw in Manuel, who had just taken a job as a gym teacher in the village where he and Andreas had grown up.
No sooner had he got to Paris than he called Fabienne. She said she was very busy, she was sitting her exams. They ended up arranging to meet on one of the following days in the tearoom of the mosque.
In the two years they hadn’t seen each other, Fabienne had grown still more beautiful. She had lost some weight, and her features were clearer, more mature. She looked utterly self-possessed, walking across the crowded café to greet Andreas, ordering mint tea and pastries for them. Andreas talked about his job, his pupils, and his new colleagues. Fabienne talked about her exams, which had gone well, about her summer vacation, about the books she had read. She said she was going to Zürich to finish her degree. Her German was still not good, she badly needed to spend time in a German-speaking environment. Andreas said she didn’t have the trace of an accent, and anyway Switzerland was the last place she should go to for that. Fabienne just laughed. He didn’t say what he had meant to say. After an hour, Fabienne got up and said she had to go, she was due to meet a girlfriend.
In the two months that Fabienne remained in Paris, they met four or five times. They drank tea or coffee, and once they went to the cinema to see a Fritz Lang film. Just before the end, the film tore, and after a long pause the house lights came on, and a woman walked to the front and said that for technical reasons they were unable to show the ending of the film. In a few sentences she told them how the story ended.
Andreas asked Fabienne to have a drink with him. She was tired, she said. He walked her back to her place. The whole evening they had spoken only banalities. As they walked along side by side, he wanted to say at last the things he had wanted to say, but he couldn’t get a syllable out, only a wheeze. Fabienne asked if he had said something. No, he said, it was just a frog in his throat.
Andreas never supposed that falling in love with an au pair was a particularly original thing to do. It had probably happened lots of times. But what was striking were the many details of his story that chimed with the book. The nickname he had given Fabienne, her appearance, the fact that she had bought herself a cat in Paris, and liked seeing old German films. That she sang him French nursery rhymes, and that her father was a doctor.
The author of the little book was named Gregor Wolf. There was a little biographical sketch of him at the front of the book. Apparently, he was born in 1953, and after training to be a bookseller, he had done various jobs, among them waiter and night porter. He had lived abroad for a long time. As of 1985, he was a freelance writer, living in Flensburg and Majorca. The biography sounded like every other author biography. Andreas had never heard of him, but that didn’t mean much. At the back of the book was a list of other books by Gregor Wolf, and there followed a dozen or so catchpenny titles.
Andreas asked himself whether Fabienne had ever met the author, and told him her story. It seemed unlikely, but what was even more unlikely was that all the coincidences were accidental.
He put the book down and turned on the TV to catch the news. Afterward he switched it off. The programs that would have interested him were generally on too late. He went to bed early, and was soon asleep. When the alarm went off, he still felt tired. He went
to the bathroom, cleaned his teeth, and showered, first hot then cold. He didn’t eat any breakfast, just gulped down a cup of coffee, and set off.
On Wednesday, Andreas met Sylvie. They always arranged to meet on afternoons of no school, but other things often got in the way. Sylvie had three children, and when one of them was ill, or had a music lesson canceled, she would send him a text message to cancel their meeting. When they did meet, she would always make a joke about their relationship. Sometimes Andreas suspected she had other lovers besides him, but he never asked. He thought it was none of his business, and in fact he didn’t care either way.
Sylvie would arrive on her bicycle. She was out of breath when she walked past him into the apartment. He asked if she wanted a drink, but she said she didn’t have much time, put her arms around him, and dragged him into the bedroom.
Once they had slept together, Sylvie was a little calmer. She talked about her husband and her children, and the little catastrophes that always seemed to befall her. She had numerous relatives and close friends who always seemed to need her help, and Andreas listened to her, and got the people she talked about all mixed up. She only ever used first names. That’s your brother, right? asked Andreas. No, said Sylvie, with a show of irritation, he’s my best friend’s husband, or my husband’s cousin, or Anne’s French teacher. Sometimes Sylvie asked him why he never talked. He said he had nothing to say. His life was too formless, and at the same time too much of a tangle to give rise to any stories. Sylvie didn’t listen. She stood by the window looking out. She was naked, but she behaved quite as if she were dressed.