On A Day Like This

by Peter Stamm

“Can I take it right away?”

  The salesman said he had to get registration papers issued for it first. That would take at least five days. Andreas asked if there was a hotel anywhere nearby. The salesman didn’t know of any hotels here. There were the spa hotels in Enghien, but they were expensive. If he didn’t want to go back into the city, there were plenty of cheap places to stay on the Périphérique.

  Andreas took a taxi to the Porte de la Chapelle. Right on the motorway, he found a cheap Etap hotel, and took a room. He said he wasn’t sure how long he’d be staying, and paid for one night.

  It wasn’t midday yet, and he had to wait until his room was ready. He sat in the lobby. Along a wall were machines for drinks and candy, and one that sold maps, dictionaries, toothbrushes, and condoms. Everything a man could wish for, thought Andreas. A couple of young blacks stood around in front of the machines, talking loudly. Not hotel guests, he thought.

  Andreas watched a couple with their son, standing at the reception desk, talking to the clerk. The father was not much older than he was, but he looked tired and unhealthy. He was wearing jeans and an old-fashioned knitted sweater, over a little beer belly. The son, who was as old as Andreas’s pupils, was almost as tall as his father. He was thin and pale and had a spotty face. The mother had short, bleached hair. Andreas was sure they were German. The man looked lost and uncertain, and the woman ill-tempered. The porter was talking to them a little exasperatedly.

  Andreas went up to the reception desk, and asked, in German, if he could help. The man looked at him in surprise, and then explained that he had thought the car park was included in the price for the room. Andreas translated. The porter said the price for the underground garage was separate. It wasn’t a very great amount, but the father seemed not to have been expecting the extra expense. The family didn’t look well-off, presumably they were on a budget, and maybe had spent more money than they had.

  The woman said once or twice they didn’t have to stand for it. She looked disapprovingly at her husband, as though he was to blame for the mix-up. For a brief moment, Andreas thought of paying for it himself, but he knew it wouldn’t help in the end.

  The room was small, and you could tell that all possible economies had been made on it. There was a toilet, but no bath. The door to the shower was glass, and opened directly into the room, the washbasin was mounted on the wall just next to it. Tucked behind the head of the double bed was a narrow foldaway cot for a third person. Andreas imagined the German family spending the night in a room like this, the parents in the bed, the boy above them in the cot. He imagined them showering in the morning, the nakedness and the lack of space, the boy’s embarrassment as he treated his face with an acne preparation without being able to lock the bathroom door, the way he did at home. He imagined them traipsing through Paris, looking for the beauty of the city, and he asked himself whether they had found it. Their feet were hurting, they stopped for lunch in a restaurant with a German menu, where the waiter cheated them. Then there was an argument, because the parents wanted to go to a museum, and the boy didn’t. And then, when they asked him what he wanted to do, he couldn’t say anything.

  Andreas was glad he had missed all that. He was glad he had never had a family. It was as near as he wanted to get, the times when his pupils went up to him at the end of class, and told him of their problems, and when he called the parents, and tried to mediate. Once or twice a pupil had even slept on his sofa, when home had become completely impossible.

  He stood by the window and looked out at the many lanes of the highway. You couldn’t open the windows. They were soundproofed; only rarely you could hear the stifled sound of a car horn or an especially loud gear-change.

  Andreas had been in his room since midday. He spent hours watching the traffic, sometimes the cars drove very close together, sometimes a little less, and then toward evening they solidified in columns, and now they were just starting to crawl forward again. The drivers had switched on their headlights. Night fell. They will drive like this forever, he thought, the traffic will never get any less. He thought about his death, or tried to think about it. But his life had been so uneventful that he couldn’t imagine his death. He could only see himself lying in some hospital somewhere. And then the road again, the numberless cars. God Almighty has counted them up, to be sure that none is missing. The stars, the grains of sand, the sheep in His herd. Even when he was a child, Andreas hadn’t believed in that.

  Fear, fear wasn’t a thought. Fear seemed to come from outside. When Andreas thought of being sick he didn’t feel fear. He was desperate, confused, he struggled with himself, he reproached himself. Whereas fear came suddenly, without warning. It was like a darkening of his thoughts. Fear made it impossible to breathe, crushed his body until he felt ready to explode and break apart into a fine spray consisting of billions and billions of tiny droplets, spinning into the void. In the morning, the whole hotel stank of disinfectant. For breakfast there was coffee in plastic cups, the bread was soggy, and the orange juice watered.

  Andreas left the hotel. The sky was gray, but it wasn’t cold. He strolled through the neighborhood. Not since he had first come to Paris, had he ever been out here. He had driven through St. Denis every day, but only ever seen the huge residential blocks from the train window, and in between them streets with dinky single-family homes in postage-stamp gardens, and further out, near the Stade de France, the new commercial district that had sprung up over the last few years.

  Not far from the hotel was a cemetery, behind a high wall. Next to it was a funeral parlor, with a display of various sample gravestones in different shades of marble. In the window was a poster for their summer sale item, which was a stone in pale granite, and a stele with your own choice of top, all at a very low price. Andreas entered the cemetery. A man in a tracksuit came out of the toilet right beside the entrance, and walked past him. Andreas felt reminded of a joke he had once heard. It was something to do with death and tracksuits. He couldn’t remember how it went. A plane crash, maybe? He walked slowly between the rows of graves. There were some in which whole families were buried together. The lists of names were like family sagas, the names of the oldest were barely decipherable, and the newest had a brassy gleam. He stopped in front of one particularly ugly grave with heavy iron chains and a roof copied from some Greek temple. He read the names and dates. Between the Fifties and the Eighties no one in the family seemed to have died, but then in the space of a few years, there had been five deaths. There was a withered bunch of flowers on the grave, so there had to be descendants, people who remembered the dead. There was room on the slab for another one or two names anyway.

  Andreas left the cemetery, and walked on through the quartier. He was astonished how clean and tidy everything looked. He read the names by the doorbells, foreign-sounding names, he couldn’t tell where they came from. Some sounded Arabic, others Eastern European or Asian. There was almost no one on the streets. There were no shops, only a community center with public baths and showers. In the windows of a kindergarten hung some colored drawings, a dozen terrifying android beings all with extra-large heads, that looked exactly the same.

  At noon Andreas was back in the hotel. He paid the room for another night. He had bought a few magazines, and spent the afternoon lying on his bed, reading articles about the most scenic golf courses in the world, and about plastic surgery, and about film festivals. In a women’s magazine he found a list of a hundred tips for good sex. Try to look attractive at all times, comb your hair and freshen your lipstick. Small gifts spread happiness. Complimenting your partner’s physique will intensify your pleasure and his.

  He fell asleep. When he awoke, it was nighttime. He felt restless, he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep anymore. He left the hotel, and prowled through the neighborhood. After a while, he got to the new business centers that he had been able to see every day from the train. A few of them were only just completed, and not yet occupied. The glass facades had a blackish sheen in the li
ght of the streetlamps. There were security cameras everywhere, but not a soul around.

  On the way back, he passed the cemetery again, which was closed now. He wondered who would visit his grave, who would think of him when he was dead. Walter and Bettina, maybe. And apart from them? From time to time someone would read the inscription on his stone, and calculate the age at which he had died, and think he didn’t get to grow very old. And in twenty years’ time, Walter or one of his children would sign a form, and Andreas’s grave would be cleared, and there would be no more trace of him.

  Andreas stayed at the hotel for a week. Every morning after breakfast, he paid for another night, and then he headed straight back upstairs. When the chambermaid came to do his room, he would wait out in the hall until she was finished. He slept a lot, and tried to read, and spent whole afternoons motionless on his bed, lost in vague drifts of thought. Sometimes he felt so weak, he was barely able to get up and put his clothes on, and at others he paced through the neighborhood, as though he might be able to escape his illness that way. Once or twice he thought of calling the doctor’s office because he could no longer stand the uncertainty, but then he put off the call until office hours were safely over.

  On the day he was able to collect his car, he felt better. He got up early, showered, and packed his things. Then he called Delphine and asked if he could see her. She asked him where he was. She sounded sleepy. He said he could be with her in an hour. On the bus to Deuil he wrote a text message to Sylvie. She had sent him a message the day before, and asked him in her telegraphic style how he was feeling and what he was up to. He hadn’t replied. Now he wrote to say he was doing fine, and he wished her a nice summer. No sooner had he sent it off, than he got her reply. Sylvie wished him happy holidays and sent him a hug.

  At half past nine, Andreas was standing outside Delphine’s house. It took a while from when he’d rung the bell to the buzz of the door opener. In the courtyard, Andreas looked up, but he couldn’t remember which window was Delphine’s. Slowly he climbed the stairs. When he was on the third floor, he could hear a door opening above him. Delphine stood there on the landing. She was in her nightie, but that didn’t seem to bother her.

  “What do you want?” she asked. She looked serious, but not hostile.

  “You left your toothbrush behind.”

  “Don’t play games with me.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Andreas, “about what I said.”

  “And that means everything’s all right?”

  Delphine looked at his suitcase. She smiled, and asked him if he was intending to move in with her. Andreas said he had to talk to her. Delphine let him in, and led the way into the kitchen. He sat down, she remained standing. She stood very close to him. He put out his hands and grabbed her around the waist. Through the thin material he could feel the warmth of her body. She took a step away from him, and said she was going to have a quick shower and get dressed. While she was gone, Andreas poured himself a glass of water, and drank it in quick gulps.

  “To see you sitting there like a poor sinner,” said Delphine, returning. She was wearing the same dress she had worn at their last meeting.

  “Weren’t you going to go to the seaside?” asked Andreas.

  “Not till the end of the week,” replied Delphine. “But I’m not quite sure whether I’m going yet. My parents are being annoying.”

  She hadn’t found an apartment, she said. She no longer even felt sure she wanted to go to Versailles.

  “I got my exam results last week. I passed. Now I’ve got a guaranteed job for life. I’m not sure how I feel about that.”

  Andreas asked her what else she could do. Delphine looked at him in a bored way, and said that was exactly what her parents were saying. She didn’t know. She felt too young to be tied down like that. She wanted to live.

  “I’m going to Switzerland,” said Andreas. “Do you fancy coming with me?”

  Delphine seemed less surprised by the question than he was. She asked why didn’t he go to the sea with her. He didn’t say anything. She thought about it for a moment, and then she said OK, she would come. She had never been to Switzerland. When were they leaving?

  “I bought a car,” said Andreas. “I can go and collect it today.”

  Delphine said she had to take care of a few things, and make some necessary purchases. They arranged to meet at four o’clock. Andreas said he would pick her up.

  When Delphine saw the 2CV, she suggested they take her car instead. Andreas shook his head.

  “My best friend had a 2CV,” he said. “When I was young, we used to drive to the lake in it.”

  They rounded Paris on the Périphérique. The sun was high in the sky, the city swam in a milky haze. The sky and the buildings were one and the same color, only different in shadings. The roads were choked with holiday traffic. Delphine had opened the roof, and turned on the radio. They were listening to a jazz station, and Andreas tried to guess the titles of the standards they played.

  “When I was pretty new in Paris, I saw Chet Baker in the New Morning,” he said. “He was incredibly thin and hollow-cheeked. He sat slumped on a barstool, with his trumpet jammed between his legs. Then he started singing, very quietly, and with a cracked voice. I can’t remember the name of the piece, ‘The Touch of Your Lips’ or ‘She Was Too Good to Me,’ but I can still hear his voice today. After a few bars he breaks off, and makes an angry gesture, and the band starts over. His performance was like the echo of an echo. Shortly after, he died.”

  He said he preferred Chet Baker’s late recordings to his early ones. It was no longer a matter of getting the perfect sound. There were cracks, little mistakes and imprecisions. The music was more alive, failure was a possibility, even a certainty. Delphine asked him who this Chet Baker was. She said she didn’t listen to jazz much.

  When they came off the Périphérique at the Porte d’Italie, Delphine asked whether they shouldn’t rather drive to Italy or the south of France.

  “We can do whatever we want,” she said. “We’re completely free.”

  Andreas didn’t say anything. It was a long time since he had last driven, and he had to concentrate on the traffic. Delphine leaned back and looked out the window. Later, they listened to the cassettes Andreas had packed, rock music he had liked once, and chansons that Delphine thought were horrible. Andreas sang along to Francis Cabrel:

  J’aimerais quand même te dire

  tout ce que j’ai pu écrire

  je l’ai puisé à l’encre de tes yeux

  Delphine laughed and said her eyes were brown, not blue. Andreas said the music took him back to his youth. At the time he had written poetry when he was in love.

  “Erotic poetry?”

  “Sentimental would be more like it.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought you capable of that,” said Delphine. “A spark of love within a frozen heart.”

  She said it in jest, but Andreas was a little surprised, just the same. He had never thought of himself as a cold person, but it wasn’t the first time he had heard such an accusation. C’était l’hiver dans le fond de son coeur, sang Francis Cabrel. Andreas remembered how the song had moved him once, and how he had joined the singer in grieving for the death of the girl who kills herself on the eve of her twentieth birthday. Delphine said she couldn’t bear it, it was too mawkish. She pushed the eject button, and pulled another cassette from the plastic bag at her feet. She put it in, there was a moment’s silence, and then a woman’s warm voice. Part seven: Reflexive pronouns.

  Andreas wanted to take the cassette out, but Delphine put her hand over his, and they listened to the woman slowly and clearly speak the examples.

  Tomorrow I shall see you again. Tomorrow you will see me again. Tomorrow we will see you again. Tomorrow you will see us again. The parents see their children again. The children see their parents again.

  Then a man’s voice, equally warm, intoned:

  My day. I get up at half past five in the morning. I always ge
t up at that time, because I have to be in the office by eight. It is only on weekends that I can sleep in. After getting up, I go to the bathroom, clean my teeth and shower, first warm, and then cold at the finish. After that, I feel thoroughly awake, and well. Then I get dressed and comb my hair. I go to the kitchen to have breakfast. I make myself some coffee, eat bread with jam, or cheese or sausage …

  The man’s voice had something strangely cheerful about it. It sounded as though he had yielded completely to the course of such days and years, a destiny without subordinate clauses.

  “I me, you you,” said Delphine, and then she repeated it, running it together like one word.

  “You are the I-me,” she said.

  “I-you,” said Andreas. He took the cassette out of the player, and the radio came back on. He asked her if she had understood the text. Most of it, she said, she wasn’t surprised no one wanted to learn German if that was how they taught it. Sausage for breakfast.

  At Beaune, they left the Autoroute. A little outside the center, Andreas found an Ibis hotel, and parked.

  “I imagined my holiday a bit more romantic than this,” said Delphine.

  Andreas said he didn’t feel like driving into the town. Anyway, they had an early start tomorrow.

  They took a room, and went back out to pick up their suitcases.

  “They’ve even got a pool,” said Delphine. “What have you got in that bundle?”

  She tugged at the curtain, in which Andreas had wrapped the little statue.

  “Don’t,” he said, and shut the trunk.

  Delphine thought she would swim before supper, to cool off. Andreas said he would have a drink meanwhile. It was not a large swimming pool, surrounded by a fence, and just a few steps from the terrace of the hotel restaurant. Andreas sat at a table at the edge of the terrace, and ordered a Ricard. It didn’t seem to bother Delphine that the diners could watch her as she climbed into the water and swam a few lengths. She came out, squeezed the water from her short hair with one hand, and dried herself. Then she wrapped herself in the towel, and came up to Andreas’s table. She sat down, and looked at the menu.