by Peter Stamm
She groaned.
“Can you read German?”
Delphine said she had taken it at school, but forgotten most of it. Andreas pointed her to the little book on the coffee table. That was fairly simple, he said, school level. Delphine worked out the title.
“Love Without Frontiers,” she said. “And you give that kind of thing to your kids?”
“No,” said Andreas, and shut his eyes. Delphine cleared her throat and began to read.
It was on a warm spring day that I saw Angélique for the first time. I knew right away that she wasn’t from here. She wore different clothes from the local girls. The girls here all go around in jeans. They ride bikes, and they talk as loudly as the boys. Angélique was wearing a skirt. She was walking through the village. She was carrying a shopping basket, and she was looking around curiously.
Delphine read softly and slowly. Sometimes she got her stresses so wrong that Andreas had to concentrate hard to follow the text. After a while he gave up the effort, and just followed the sound of her voice.
He tried to picture Fabienne walking in the village, but he couldn’t do it. He could barely remember her face. He saw Sylvie and Nadia and the teacher with the big breasts, and, when he briefly opened his eyes, Delphine, leaning over the book and slowly and with difficulty forming German sentences that she could probably not understand more than half of. He remembered the first lessons in the German book, the language tapes, the friendly detached voice speaking nonsensical sentences: The grass is green. The sky is blue. The pine is tall. And then the expectant silence that made the sentences into questions. Was the grass really green? Was the sky blue? And then the voice a second time, repeating the sentence. The grass was green, and the world was the way it had always been.
Andreas remembered meeting Fabienne for the first time. It was at a twentieth birthday party for Manuel’s sister Beatrice, with whom he went out later. At the time he barely knew Beatrice. He had met her a couple of times while doing homework with Manuel. Presumably she had invited him because of her brother, who didn’t have many friends. At the time, Fabienne was newly arrived in the village. He couldn’t remember where Beatrice knew her from.
The party was in a cottage in the woods. The woods were bordered on one side by industrial terrain and a gravel pit, but the hut was on the other, by the river. When Andreas arrived, there was a big fire already going. Young men and women stood around talking. He propped his bike against a tree, and watched as they went around getting things ready. Most of the guests he knew vaguely by sight. A couple of young men came out of the forest with huge bundles of wood, which they dropped on the ground beside the fire. Beatrice was peeling clingwrap off bowls of salad, and Manuel was pricking sausages. Fabienne caught Andreas’s eye right away. She never left Beatrice’s side.
After they had eaten, Beatrice unpacked the presents, and asked who each one was from, and thanked the people without looking at them properly. Andreas’s present was a book by Albert Camus that he had only recently read himself. The two young men who had brought the wood were now burning cardboard plates and napkins on the fire. Andreas watched as the laminated finish on the plates bubbled up before the plates suddenly caught fire and were consumed with a greenish flame in a matter of seconds.
A birthday cake was produced, and Beatrice and Fabienne pumped coffee from a giant thermos flask.
One of the young men had brought a guitar, and Christian songs were sung that Andreas didn’t know.
Time hurries by, the hours fly,
and no one stops them.
Your years too are rushing by
like a bird in flight.
Fabienne looked ravishing in the firelight. When their eyes met, she smiled. She seemed not to know the songs either.
Someone began telling jokes. Then Beatrice suggested playing hide and seek. Everyone paired off, and because most of the guests knew each other from the Christian youth group, and a few of them were couples already, at the end only Fabienne and Andreas were left over. Beatrice explained the rules, and told people not to go too far. She and her friend stayed by the fire, and started counting down.
The wood was bright, the moon was almost full, but it was hard keeping your bearings. The noise and the laughter of the others could be heard from all sides, as they stumbled over the uneven forest floor. Andreas followed a narrow path. Fabienne followed him at a distance. They had yet to exchange a word. After about fifty yards they left the path and came to a little hollow.
“What about here,” whispered Andreas. He crouched down and looked back in the direction of the hut, where the light of the fire, now almost burned down, shone weakly. Then he heard Beatrice call: “Ready or not, here we come!”
Fabienne was leaning against a tree, as though she didn’t care whether she was found or not. They waited. Shouts and laughter were heard in the forest. The first couple were found, and joined in the search. They seemed to be walking along the edge of the forest, their voices getting louder and then quieter. The fire had flared up once more, and then collapsed into itself. Now you couldn’t make it out anymore.
“They’ll never find us in the dark,” said Fabienne. It was the first sentence that Andreas heard from her mouth. She spoke French. He asked her where she was from. Paris, she said, her parents lived on the outskirts of Paris.
After some time, Andreas got up, and they crept back to the hut. Only Manuel was there, poking the embers with a branch. The others had gone to the gravel pit, he said. Fabienne and Andreas sat down, and Manuel started asking Fabienne questions. And in the end, they arranged to go swimming on Sunday.
When Andreas awoke, it was still dark. Delphine was still sitting in her chair, her legs stretched out on the coffee table, asleep. The book was in her lap.
Andreas wondered what she was doing here. He was almost twice her age, and had no idea what there was for her in making tea for a sick man and reading him children’s stories. They barely knew each other.
He undid the top buttons of his pajama jacket, and prodded the bandage over the wound. It didn’t hurt, but the thought of the incision beneath the bandage made him feel nauseous. He got up to go to the bathroom. When he returned, Delphine was up. He asked her if she didn’t have to go. She said she had nothing planned.
“If you like, I’ll stay the night with you.”
“I’m not up to much, I’m afraid.”
Delphine told him not to be stupid, sex wasn’t everything. She asked him if he was hungry. He shook his head.
“You must eat.”
She went into the kitchen. Andreas heard her open and shut the fridge. She called over to say she would go out and buy a couple of things, was there a store nearby that was still open. Andreas said there was a greengrocer on the corner who stayed open till midnight. She said she’d be back right away. He wanted to give her some money, but by the time he was in the hall, she was already gone. Andreas had never lived together with a woman. It was a strange feeling, having someone moving around in his apartment, and going shopping and cooking for him.
He went back to the sitting room, and stopped in front of the mantel. His eye fell on a little framed photograph there. His father had taken it before Andreas had gone to Paris. It was one of the few things Andreas had wanted to keep when his father died. He picked up the picture and looked at it, and then at himself in the mirror over the mantel. He was startled by how little he had changed. His features had gotten a little harder, but the basic expression was still the same, an expression of friendly indifference.
Andreas studied the inscrutable expression, just as strange to him now as it was at the time it was taken. When pictures were put up in the staff room from a party or a graduation, he often couldn’t recognize himself in them, and when he looked at them he couldn’t remember how he had felt when they were taken. He remembered his father taking that picture. They had gone out into the garden together. His father had got Andreas to stand in the shade under the sumac, and then sheepishly clicked the release
a couple of times. It was the hopeless wish to capture his son. Presumably that had occurred to Andreas too, because he had a smile on his lips, half sympathetic, half-mocking. Only much later did it dawn on him how brave and affectionate it had been on the part of his father.
Not many days later, Andreas had left. He still remembered the silent leave-taking from his father. It was a Saturday, and the local train was packed with people going to the next village, or to the city, to go to the cinema or the theater. Andreas felt he stood out, with his big suitcase and his far-off destination. When the train pulled away, his father waved. His lips moved, perhaps to say something. Andreas briefly raised his hand. He was embarrassed. Only later had he understood that he would never be able to go back to the village. A few months later, when he went home for a visit during the vacation, everything felt different. After that, his visits were rarer and rarer, and finally they stopped altogether.
Andreas put the photograph back on the mantelpiece. He had never had many pictures of his family. The few that he had been given lay in a drawer somewhere. He wondered what had possessed him to put this one out—a picture of himself.
It was ten o’clock. Delphine was in the kitchen, chopping vegetables. Andreas watched her. She said he could go and lie down, it would be at least another quarter of an hour till the soup was ready.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“You could be going to the cinema or meeting friends or what do I know.”
“It’s second nature. If a friend is ill … Anyway, I went to the cinema yesterday.”
“I can make soup for myself,” said Andreas. “Anyway, we’re not friends. We hardly know each other.”
Delphine put down the knife and looked at him in astonishment. She said if he was bothered by her being there, he just had to tell her. Andreas apologized. He said he hadn’t meant it in a bad way.
After supper, he said he would go to bed, the operation had taken more out of him than he had first thought. Delphine carried the dirty dishes out. He heard her washing up, and putting the plates away.
She had her toiletry bag with her, but no nightie. She said she hadn’t been sure what she intended to happen, and so she had struck a sort of deal with herself. Andreas lent her a T-shirt, and she went to the bathroom. He heard her showering, then she came out and lay down next to him on the bed. She leaned across him, kissed him on the mouth and said good night.
“Come here,” he said, “I’m not that sick.”
She said he ought to be careful. She pulled the T-shirt over her head, and scooted over to him. Her body was soft and warm and sluggish. I don’t love her, thought Andreas, I don’t even want her really. Delphine sat on him, and slowly began to move. They were both very calm and quiet. Once, Andreas almost fell asleep, he dropped into a dream for a moment, and then he opened his eyes and saw Delphine, still sitting astride him and moving in a very concentrated way, as if in a slow dance.
“You almost fell asleep,” she said with a smile.
“Don’t stop,” he said.
The next day Delphine went to Versailles to look at a few apartments. In the early afternoon she was back. She was carrying a sports bag with a few clothes.
“Are you planning on moving in?”
“Would you mind?”
“Well, if it’s just for a few days.”
Delphine said he needn’t worry. She was going away on vacation at the end of the month anyway.
“The end of the month!” said Andreas, with mock-horror. “And what do I do then?”
“Come and visit me if you want. I’ve got my own tent. And my parents are nice people.” She grinned and said her parents were about his age.
He said he had intended to go to Brittany to stay with Jean-Marc.
“Don’t worry,” said Delphine, but then she didn’t say anything else.
Andreas was less tired than he’d been the day before. They took the Metro down to the Seine, and walked along the banks. The sun was shining, and there were a lot of people out enjoying themselves, with dogs and bicycles and rollerblades.
“Sometimes I think Paris is one gigantic stage set,” said Andreas.
“Have you ever tried that?” asked Delphine.
“Rollerblading? I’m too old for that. I can remember a time when skates had four wheels, like cars.”
“Did cars even exist back then? Have you got a thing about being old?”
Andreas asked her how old she was.
“When you were born, I was in the middle of puberty,” he said.
“So?”
He didn’t often think about his age, said Andreas. He had never had the feeling of being old; he thought of himself as somehow ageless. Perhaps his cough was getting to him a little bit.
On his fortieth birthday he had had a little party, largely because Jean-Marc and Marthe had forced him to. But he had never understood the fuss about those so-called round-numbered birthdays. The only thing that had bothered him then was that he wasn’t too sure whom to ask. He got on all right with most of his colleagues, but he would never have described them as friends, and he certainly didn’t feel like celebrating his birthday with them. He couldn’t invite Sylvie and Nadia together, and various other ex-girlfriends he was still in touch with weren’t really guest material either. In the end, it was a small gathering, a dinner party, not a party. And Jean-Marc and Marthe needed all their persuasive powers to make Andreas go out dancing with them afterward.
“Do you have a bad feeling about the result?” asked Delphine.
They had sat down on a bench, and watched people strolling by.
“I don’t know,” said Andreas. “I try not to think about it.”
“Then let’s go and do something. Let’s see a movie.”
He didn’t feel like it, he said. He just wanted to sit here a bit and look at the people and enjoy the sunshine, like cats, or like old people. “Did you notice how many old men stand around in the city, on corners or in front of building sites? Always standing around, with frightened-looking expressions on their faces, watching their time go by.”
They walked on. Later they ate in a restaurant near the Tour Montparnasse. Delphine said she had never been up the tower. Did he feel like going up with her? Another time perhaps, said Andreas, he was tired after their walk.
“Did you know there was a rue de Départ here, and a rue d’Arrivée?”
“Of course,” said Delphine, “and in between is the Place Bienvenue.”
“That I didn’t know.”
“And I’ve only been living here for a year,” Delphine said proudly. Three days later, Andreas got a call from his doctor’s office. The assistant said the hospital had sent the results, and asked him to drop by. Andreas asked whether the results were positive. The assistant said that, even if she knew, she wasn’t allowed to tell him. He asked if he might come over right away. In half an hour, she replied. Delphine was off in Versailles again, looking at more apartments. He left her a note, saying he had gone out and would be back soon.
On the way to the doctor’s, he told himself a hundred times that the result, whatever it was, didn’t change his condition, that it was already decided whether he was healthy or sick. Even though he walked slowly, he started to sweat, and felt a little nauseous. He could hardly make it up the stairs.
The assistant told him he would have to be patient a little longer, and asked him to take a seat in the waiting room. He thought she was looking at him rather pityingly. The waiting room was bare. There were chairs along the walls, a table in the middle of the room, with a few tattered magazines on it. A woman was sitting on one of the chairs. She had a child on her lap whose face was half-covered with a purple birthmark. The child was whimpering. The woman spoke to it quietly, and promised it chocolate if it was quiet. Andreas had taken a magazine off the table, a Catholic parents’ magazine. He read an article on the advantages of breast-feeding, but without being able to concentrate on it. The assistant came out and
called a name. The woman got up and took her child by the hand. It started to scream, and clung on to the chair with its other hand.
“Always the same fuss,” said the woman, with an apologetic look in Andreas’s direction.
The assistant unclasped the child’s hand, finger by finger, and together the two women dragged the screaming child out onto the corridor. Andreas stared at the wall, which had a faded Chagall poster on it, from an exhibition he had actually been to many years ago. At the time, he had liked those pictures; now he had no use for them anymore. He took a couple of deep breaths, then he got up and left the room.
The assistant was standing with her back to him in the doorway of the surgery. The mother and child were not to be seen, though the shrill screams of the child were clearly audible. Andreas crept to the exit. He left the office and shut the door after him.
He stopped for a moment at the top of the stairs. Then he heard someone coming up the stairs, and he started to panic. He felt as though no one must see him here. He climbed up a flight of stairs and waited until he heard the door open and shut downstairs.
He left the building, and walked briskly down the street. He asked himself how many people knew about his condition. It alarmed him that there was a file with his name on it, and that there were photographs of his insides, and somewhere some tissue samples that had been taken from him. Someone had made a diagnosis and come to certain decisions about him, someone he didn’t even know. He had no choice. The machinery was in motion. We’ll take a tissue sample, the doctor had said. It wasn’t a question, it wasn’t even a command. You didn’t bother issuing commands to a victim, you just got on with it. The doctor who had performed the little operation had shaken hands with him and introduced herself. He couldn’t remember her name. The nurse and the anesthetist didn’t have names, just their functions. They were as anonymous for him as he was to them.
Andreas walked on and on in a straight line. He wasn’t going anywhere, he just wanted to get out of the neighborhood. He was running away from the disease that was his life, his work, his apartment, the people he called friends or lovers. Here on the street no one recognized him, he was just a pedestrian like a thousand others, who passed him or whom he passed. Here he had no past and no future, only a fleeting present. He had to keep walking on, he mustn’t stop, mustn’t linger, then nothing could happen to him.