On A Day Like This

by Peter Stamm

  “What a horrible yard,” she said. “What kind of people live here?”

  “I’ve hardly met any of the neighbors.”

  “How long have you lived in this building?”

  Andreas figured it out.

  “Almost ten years,” he said.

  Sylvie laughed and returned to bed. She kissed him on the mouth. Andreas grabbed her around the waist, and pulled her down. Sylvie sat up.

  “Now you can offer me a drink, if you like.”

  Andreas put on his pants, and went into the kitchen to make coffee. Sylvie followed him. She said she didn’t understand how he could stand to live in such a tiny apartment.

  “I can’t afford a bigger one.”

  “I’ve got some friends in Belleville who want to sell their apartment. It’s three big rooms, and not expensive. I’m sure you’d get four hundred thousand for yours. The area’s become so fashionable.”

  Andreas said the apartment wasn’t as small as all that. And he felt at home in it. He didn’t need any more space. Then he told Sylvie about Angélique and Jens, and his love for Fabienne.

  “It’s the exact same story,” he said. “Isn’t that amazing.”

  “But your version of it ended badly.”

  “Yes, for me,” said Andreas. He handed Sylvie a cup, and sat down on the kitchen table. “Maybe she met the author. He lives on Majorca. Stranger things have happened.”

  “Then why should she tell him the story with a happy ending?”

  “I’ve no idea,” said Andreas.

  “Perhaps she was in love with you. Perhaps she wanted it to end well.”

  “I was an idiot,” said Andreas.

  Sylvie asked what was special about Fabienne. Andreas said she was very beautiful when he first met her. But that couldn’t be the whole story. If he met Fabienne now, he would still find her attractive, maybe he would approach her, have an affair with her. She wouldn’t be the great love of his life, not now, not anymore. Presumably it wasn’t even Fabienne herself that he longed for, so much as the love of those years, the unconditionality of the feeling that still floored him now, twenty years later.

  “The bull that’s led to the cow probably thinks he’s in love too,” said Sylvie, and laughed. She said she’d better go, and went into the bedroom to get dressed.

  “Write to her,” she said, as she said good-bye.

  Andreas had decided to write to Fabienne, but he kept putting it off and putting it off, until he finally forgot all about it. There was some trouble at school, a couple of pupils started a fight during recess. One of them was in Andreas’s class, and there were meetings with the headmistress and the parents and a social worker. Then a letter came from Walter. Andreas was very surprised to hear from Walter. They talked on the phone every other month or so, and never had very much to say to each other. Sometimes Walter would send him a postcard from his vacation, which they would all sign, and at Christmas there was a round-robin letter containing all the news of the past year; apart from that, they never wrote to each other. The letter was accompanied by a form. Clearing of a grave, Andreas read. Under that heading were the names of his parents, handwritten, and under the heading, Client, was Walter’s name and his own.

  The undersigned client is prepared to meet the expenses of the cemetery gardener in the removal of the grave. The leveling and refurbishment of the grave space will be paid for by the community.

  Walter had signed the form. Normal practice was for graves to be given up after twenty years, he wrote in his accompanying letter, but the grave counted as that of their mother only. When their father was cremated, they had signed a disclaimer of burial rights, perhaps Andreas remembered. He was sorry to bother him over something like this, but he hadn’t wanted to make the decision on his own. He had thought Andreas might want to visit the grave once more. It wouldn’t be cleared until fall at the earliest. If he did decide to come to Switzerland, he would of course be welcome to stay with them. They would be pleased to see him again. Walter had signed the letter as “Your Brother,” which struck Andreas as being in poor taste.

  He remembered his father’s funeral. It was a hot day. At that time, Walter and his family had still lived in an apartment, and Andreas had refused their offer of spending the night there. He had booked a room in the hotel on the market square. Walter had asked whether he wanted to be picked up in the morning, but Andreas said he didn’t want to put him to any trouble.

  During that whole stay, he had had the feeling of being in a kind of trance. The simplest decisions had been incredibly difficult for him, and he was only able to think about absolutely insignificant things. But his physical awareness had been strangely heightened. Everything seemed to him unbearably loud and intense. Colors, sounds, even smells were more vivid than usual. When he crossed the road to the cemetery, a car braked, and the driver lowered his window and yelled at him. Andreas walked on, not turning around. He felt a trickle of sweat break out on his brow and down his back.

  There were a couple of cars in the cemetery parking lot, but no one to be seen. The heavy wrought-iron gate lay in the shadow of heavy conifers. Andreas had his suitcase with him; he intended to leave right after the funeral. Now he didn’t know what to do with his suitcase. He thought briefly of shoving it in some bushes near the entrance to the cemetery, but rejected the idea immediately. He took off his jacket and lit a cigarette. His shirt was sodden with sweat. A breeze cooled the wet cotton on his back and under his arms.

  The funeral party was standing in little groups outside the chapel, engaged in quiet conversation. There were a lot of his old school friends there. They nodded to him as he walked by, one or another of them muttered something, asked him how he was doing, and what his plans were. Andreas looked around for Walter, but couldn’t see him anywhere.

  With a surprisingly loud clang, the church bells started to ring on the other side of the road, and the funeral party moved with slow, reverent steps to the entrance of the chapel. The situation struck Andreas as grotesque, the grave expressions, the whispering, the embarrassment. His father had been old, he had lived a retired sort of life, and Andreas was sure most of the people here had barely known him.

  He stopped outside the chapel. When the bells ceased, and the sexton emerged from the chapel door to look around for any latecomers, Walter and his wife came out of one of the lying-in rooms, which were all housed in a low, long annex. Walter looked more surprised than grieving. He looked nervously at his watch. Bettina’s face was tear-stained.

  They hadn’t seen Andreas. He followed them into the chapel. He was still holding his cigarette butt in his hand. It occurred to him to drop it in the holy water basin by the entrance. He stood his suitcase on the floor and leaned against the back wall.

  Walter and Bettina walked down the nave. They took their places in the front row, where Bettina’s parents were already sitting, and the children. The children were all dressed in colors. Presumably that was Bettina’s idea. When Walter sat down, he half-turned his head, and the movement became a sort of bow, as though he wanted to greet the mourners. He smiled sheepishly. At that moment, Andreas felt sorry for him, and he would have liked to go up to him and give him a hug.

  Walter lowered his head. The children slithered about, bored. Then the organ began, the mourners relaxed, and settled into their pews.

  Only then did Andreas see Fabienne and Manuel. They were sitting in a row near the back, not far from him. As Fabienne leaned over to Manuel to whisper something in his ear, Andreas could see her profile. She had hardly changed at all. She was wearing a sleeveless black dress. Andreas wished he could touch her shoulders and her neck. Manuel was wearing a dark suit. He had lost a lot of hair, and had gotten rather chubby. As a young man he had been good-looking in a not particularly interesting sort of way; now he looked old to Andreas, though they were the same age.

  The vicar seemed to be suffering from the heat. He was pale, and rattled through his sermon and a fairly interchangeable vita of the dece
ased, that was all work and births of children and memberships of clubs. Some of it Andreas had never heard of—or forgotten it. The little he did know he had heard from his mother.

  The lady organist played a couple of wrong notes. Andreas was glad there wasn’t any singing. For the prayers he put his hands together without folding them. He dropped the cigarette butt quietly on the floor. He didn’t close his eyes, and as he looked at the swaying figures of those praying, he didn’t know who was more ridiculous—the others in their adherence to a meaningless ritual or himself in his pose of rebellion.

  During the service, the coffin had been brought out into the churchyard. It now stood there, but no one seemed to be paying it any attention. Andreas couldn’t imagine that the dead man had anything to do with him. His father had been a quiet and reserved man. If he had still been alive, he would probably have stood on the periphery somewhere, in the shade of one of the pines, and observed the gathering with a nervous and at the same time amused eye. Andreas felt no grief at the time. Grief came later, when he was back in Paris, in his customary surroundings, and with a violence that had taken him aback.

  Walter went up to Andreas, shook hands, and took him to his family. Bettina’s face had a somehow complicated look on it; she resembled an old woman. They said hello, and then the vicar came up to them and said something comforting, and the mourners got in line to offer their condolences. All of them looked bashful and did their best to make their grief appear genuine. Walter’s face had the startled expression it had had before, and sometimes, when he was shaking hands with someone, a forced cheerfulness.

  Fabienne and Manuel came along right at the end. By the time it was their turn, the first mourners had already left the cemetery. Manuel shook Andreas’s hand with an encouraging-looking smile.

  “Glad we could see each other again,” he said, rather too loudly.

  Fabienne stood next to him. Andreas looked at her. She smiled, and once again he longed to touch her.

  “Your father was a nice man,” she said. She spoke correct German, her accent was barely detectable.

  Andreas kissed her on both cheeks, and asked whether she and Manuel would stay to eat with them. He turned to Walter, and asked where the wake was being held. Manuel said unfortunately they wouldn’t be able to stay. His mother was babysitting the boy. They had to be back for lunch. He laughed for no reason. Fabienne asked whether Andreas was staying for any length of time. Why didn’t he come and visit them. She looked at him expectantly. When Andreas said he was going back today, he thought he saw disappointment flash across her face. But he wasn’t sure. Fabienne had composed herself again. She said he hadn’t changed at all.

  “Come and see us the next time you’re in the country,” she said. “We’d like that.” But it didn’t sound like an invitation.

  “Definitely,” said Andreas. He was annoyed with Fabienne for talking of we and us, and not I.

  After the funeral meal, he went back briefly to Walter and Bettina’s place. The wine and the heat had made him tired. It was cool in the apartment. They sat in the sitting room, talking about their father. Walter showed Andreas a stack of old school notebooks. The square paper was divided into vertical columns of dates and numbers.

  “You know he kept a record of the temperature each day, highs and lows, plus the humidity and pressure. Always at the same time of day. An endless list. He did it for forty years.”

  Andreas said the notebooks seemed familiar. He had never quite understood what his father did it for.

  “He stopped a couple of weeks before he died,” said Walter, suddenly bursting into sobs. Andreas couldn’t recall ever having seen him cry before, and felt embarrassed.

  Walter had taken care of everything, the cremation, the thanking people, the execution of the will. Andreas had been sent the papers, and signed without reading them. Then Walter and his family moved into their parents’ house, and paid Andreas his share. That was the money he had bought the Paris apartment with. He had been to Switzerland a couple of times since, but never the village.

  The thought that the grave was being cleared bothered him. For a moment he thought of going. Then he signed the form and put it in an envelope. He looked for an appropriate postcard. Finally he selected a Gauguin of a Breton village in warm colors. He wrote to say that unfortunately he didn’t have any time to visit Switzerland. He sent his love and best wishes to the family. He mailed the letter right away. He wanted to be free of the matter.

  Andreas met Nadia and Sylvie, he did the shopping, he cleaned the apartment, he went to the cinema. The kids at school were difficult, and for the first time in many years, Andreas derived no satisfaction from his job. When the class complained to him about a test, he lectured them. Did they really think he did all that just to give them a hard time? He was doing it for them. He had a syllabus and goals. He hadn’t chosen his profession by chance; he was a teacher by vocation. He said he believed that education made people better. And that as long as they were in school, they had a chance to learn something, while other people had to spend their whole lives doing some stupid job. Knowledge of German would open doors for them, intellectually speaking, especially philosophy, which one couldn’t hope to understand without learning German. German was the language of philosophy, it had a clarity and purity that no other language could claim to have, and at the same time …

  The longer he went on, the more hollow his words sounded to him. He looked at the kids slumped across their desks and whispering and giggling and trying to avoid his eye. He broke off in mid-sentence and sat down.

  From that day forward, he saw the students with different eyes. He no longer deluded himself that he had any influence on them. Even the good boys and the eager girls who tried hard, who did their homework diligently and participated in the classes, annoyed him. They reminded him of himself, and of what had become of him.

  He no longer enjoyed going to school. He suffered from the monotony of his days and felt tired and burned out. In the staff room there were endless discussions about the banning of head-scarves, even though there were no Muslim girls in the school, and head-scarves had never been an issue. The teachers formed two opposing camps. Andreas wanted to belong to neither one. It seemed to him they were both merely trying to settle old accounts. In Switzerland, he once heard himself saying, they dealt with these problems more calmly. After that, he was attacked by both sides, one called him racist, the other misogynist. Even Jean-Marc had come across all political, and defended the values of the republic that he seemed barely to have acknowledged before. Andreas spent his spring break in Normandy. Once again, he had intended to read Proust, but he ended up sitting around in the hotel, watching TV or reading the newspapers and magazines he bought at the station newsstand every morning. He spent a night with an unmarried woman teacher he had met on one of his long walks along the beach. He had been fascinated by her large breasts, and invited her to supper. It took a lot of effort to talk her into going up to his room, and then they talked for a lot longer while they emptied the minibar. While they made love, the woman kept moaning his name out loud, which got on his nerves. He was glad to be alone when he woke up late the following morning. She had left him a note, which he glanced at briefly before balling it up and throwing it away.

  In May, it got really cold again, and Andreas came down with a cold that turned into a persistent cough. After three weeks, he still had it, so Andreas went to the doctor. The doctor listened to his breathing, and said to be on the safe side he wanted him to have a computed tomography scan. Andreas called the hospital and got an appointment for Wednesday afternoon. When Sylvie called, he made up an excuse. She laughed and accused him of having found some new hobby.

  The tomography didn’t take long, and it wasn’t as bad as Andreas had expected. He shut his eyes, and tried to imagine he was lying on the beach in the sun, but the clattering of the machine kept bringing him back to reality.

  The weather improved, and with it Andreas’s mood. The doctor
had prescribed some medicine, and his cough got a little better. He had almost forgotten about it by the time of his follow-up appointment. Even before he had sat down, the doctor said the results were a little worrisome. He held the picture of Andreas’s lung up against the window and with his silver pen circled an area between the two wings of the lung.

  “There’s a chance that it’s just tubercular scarring,” he said.

  He sat down, and twiddled with his pen. To be on the safe side, he wanted to have a biopsy done, a very minor operation sampling the tissue, which could be done on an outpatient basis.

  “They make a little incision above the sternum, and insert a probe. You won’t feel a thing.”

  “What else could it be?” asked Andreas.

  The doctor told him not to worry. Andreas asked what the chances were. The doctor said it was meaningless to talk about chances.

  “It’s either-or. You have it or you don’t.”

  He stood up, returned his pen to the top pocket of his white coat, and shook hands with Andreas. He said he was sorry not to have had any better news.

  Andreas stood in the empty classroom. The corridor rang with the running steps and shouts of boys and girls going home. He remembered his own time at school, the last day of term before the summer holidays, the way the kids ran off in all directions once the final class was at an end. The haste with which everyone disappeared, as though they were going somewhere. His best friend hardly stopped to say good-bye as he ran off, and Andreas felt betrayed. He had dawdled, gone home slowly with the big cardboard folder containing all the drawings he had done in the year. The folder was much too big for him; he needed both arms to carry it, to prevent the drawings from slipping out. Back then, summer had been something horribly, outlandishly long, and the beginning of the new school year was unimaginably far off.