by Peter Stamm
Andreas said he had brought her something. He took the book out of his pocket, and passed it to her.
“What is it?”
“A little book. Do you know the author?”
“Never heard of him.”
“Read it,” said Andreas. “It might remind you of something.”
“How long are you staying in the village?”
“I’ll be here for a while. I’ll call you.”
The storm hadn’t begun yet. The clouds had pushed past, only in the east was the sky still dark, as though night had begun to fall. It was five o’clock when Andreas got back to the hotel. Delphine wasn’t there, and she hadn’t left him a message either. He called her on her mobile, but only got put through to her mailbox. He waited for her in the room. At seven she still wasn’t there. He turned on the TV. An early evening series was on, and Andreas tried for a time to follow it, but the characters all looked too alike, and he soon lost track of what was happening.
A little after half past seven Delphine walked in. Her hair was wet, and she was carrying a plastic bag under her arm. Andreas was furious. He asked her where she’d been, and why she hadn’t left a message. She said she hadn’t known when she’d be back. He could hardly expect her to sit in the room all afternoon.
“You could at least have left your cell phone switched on.”
“It doesn’t work abroad.”
Again Andreas asked her where she’d been. She said she’d gone for a walk. In a garden restaurant she had gotten into conversation with a group of young people. One of them was the night porter here at the hotel. She had asked him what there was to do here. He said there wasn’t anything.
“They asked me where I’m from, and what I’m doing here, and we talked for a bit.”
The young people said they were going for a swim in the lake, and did Delphine fancy coming with them.
“You mean to say you went swimming with a bunch of total strangers?”
“It’s not so bad. They were really friendly. Their French isn’t up to much, but somehow we managed to make ourselves understood.”
“Our table’s booked for half past seven. It takes half an hour to get to the Untersee.”
Delphine said she’d agreed to go to a barbecue with the young people. She had only gone back to the hotel to fetch him. He had told her he was booking a table, said Andreas. He didn’t want to have a barbecue with a load of total strangers.
“Don’t be a spoilsport,” said Delphine. “I spent all day doing what you wanted.”
The young people were parked in front of the hotel. There were three men and two women, and all of them seemed to be younger than Delphine. All evening Andreas was unable to establish who was going out with whom, or if they were all just good friends. He asked the night porter whether he wasn’t working. He shook his head and said not until tomorrow. One of the men had completed a business studies course, the other one seemed not to be doing anything. One of the women was still at school, and another was helping out in her parents’ bakery. They shook hands with Andreas, and made room for him and Delphine in one of the two cars.
“Where are we going?” asked the night porter, who was driving.
“To the Dreispitz. That’s a place on the river.”
Andreas said he knew; he had been there himself many times.
At the sewage plant, they had to leave the cars, and do the last part on foot, through the forest, and over the dam and across an unmown meadow full of molehills. The fire site was at the very end of the meadow in a sandy hollow, where the canal joined the river at an acute angle. The young men had collected wood in the forest, and one of them lit a fire.
The river had been straightened a long time ago, and its banks were reinforced with untrimmed blocks of stone. Andreas scrambled down to the water. He sat on a stone, and lit a cigarette. The conversations of the others were boring. With their lousy French, they were asking Delphine what music she liked, her favorite films, her plans for the future. They made jokes about her name. They drank beer and ate sausages they grilled over the fire.
Gradually it got dark. One of the guys had brought a portable CD player, and put on music that Andreas didn’t know, and that he thought was dreadful. He felt old and out of place, and hardly spoke all evening. It got a bit chilly. He hoped they would all go home soon.
Finally, at midnight they packed everything away. The fire was not quite out, and one of the men said, OK, guys, do your duty, and he unzipped his pants. The others did the same, and all three of them stood around the fire. The women took a couple of steps back. The embers hissed, and the smell of piss spread through the air. The baker’s daughter said they were revolting, and the other woman laughed, as did Delphine. She shot Andreas a triumphant look.
It was pitch-black in the forest. The night porter had a flashlight with him, and went on ahead. Delphine took Andreas’s hand. When they reached the cars, one of the women said they were going dancing in a discotheque in the next village. She asked Delphine and Andreas if they wanted to come. Andreas said he was tired.
“I’d better put this old man to bed,” said Delphine, and the others laughed. Presumably they found Andreas just as boring as he found them.
“The night porter was staring at you the whole time,” said Andreas, once he was lying in bed with Delphine.
“Did you think?”
“It made me wonder if I was like that when I was their age.”
“Are you starting that again.”
Andreas said he was only wondering what she saw in such company.
“Well, if you don’t see it, then you just don’t see it, I suppose.”
Over the next few days, they went on a couple of side trips. One day, they went to the lake where Andreas had kissed Fabienne. Everything looked just as it had then, only there were some cigarette butts in the grass and empty plastic bottles. They had the place to themselves. They swam a bit, and then lay in the sun to dry. They walked around the lake, and then into the forest, until they came to a little hollow.
“Just like a bed,” said Andreas.
They took off their clothes and made love on the dry leaves. Andreas closed his eyes and tried to imagine he was with Fabienne, but he couldn’t do it. The ground was hard, and Delphine said there was something sticking in her back, and Andreas ought to try lying underneath. Then they swam some more. When the sun disappeared behind the trees, they packed their things and drove back to the village.
On the national holiday, they climbed up onto the hill and watched the fire. The inhabitants of the village stood in a large circle around the wooden pyre. The children were setting off fireworks. Their faces glowed in the sheen of the flames. After a while Andreas pulled Delphine out of the circle, and they strolled along the ridge. Down in the valley and on hills opposite, they saw the fires of the other villages, and from time to time they saw the little detonations of fireworks that looked tiny in the distance. The moon was full, and the landscape was in plain view, the village, the road, the cars, and, once, a short train, heading for the village, and disappearing between its houses.
“It looks like a toy landscape,” said Delphine. “Little people driving in little cars. Little houses, a little church, you see, it’s all there.”
Andreas said he sometimes wondered what his life would have been like if he had never left the village.
“Then I wouldn’t be here,” said Delphine. “You’d never have met me.”
Maybe I wouldn’t have got sick, Andreas thought, or not so suddenly. He would have slowly grown older, would have fallen in love, married, had children. He would be here for the national holiday with his whole family, slowly they would climb the hill, saying hello left and right. Then the children would light the fireworks they would have brought with them. Andreas told them to be careful. He would be standing beside his wife with the other grownups, watching the children, who were now chasing around the fire, throwing in boughs they had gotten from the forest. At his back he felt the chill of night,
in his face the heat of the fire. Then they would all go home. In the house it would be oppressively warm, and the light would dazzle him. He sat down on the hallway steps, and took his shoes off. Then he would lie down beside his wife. The window shutters would be closed, but the window would be open. He lay awake and listened to the night outside. From the neighbors’ gardens would come the sound of laughter and the jingle of glasses. and from further afield the bang of a firework, and shortly afterward the barking of a dog who couldn’t settle.
“Let’s go,” said Delphine, “I’m cold.”
The next day they went swimming again. Then the weather took a final turn for the worse. It was sultry all day long. Finally, late in the afternoon, the storm broke. Andreas and Delphine were sitting in the garden restaurant eating ice cream, as the sky turned black in a matter of minutes, and violent gusts tugged at the umbrellas. They barely had time to pack their things and take shelter under the roof before the rain broke loose. When the storm was over, they saw clouds of steam rising off the asphalt road. The next day, it rained all day.
Andreas was woken by Delphine. He watched her for a while. He pushed up her nightie. As he tried to take her panties off, she half woke, and, without saying a word, helped him. It was close in the room, and Delphine was wet with night sweat, and somehow cool. She had only briefly opened her eyes, and quickly shut them again. She was smiling, bit her lip, threw her head back, and turned it to the side. Little beads of sweat formed on her upper lip; Andreas kissed them away. Her face grew serious, looked strained, concentrated, for a moment she seemed to be in pain, then she relaxed again.
“Tu es gentil,” she said, and her eyes opened. “What’s that in German?”
“Friendly,” said Andreas, “kind, nice.”
“Nice,” repeated Delphine. She got up and went to the bathroom. She came back and got straight into her underwear.
They only just made it down to breakfast in time. Then they went back upstairs. Andreas read the newspaper, Delphine rummaged around in the bathroom, painted her toenails, and plucked her eyebrows. It was almost noon. Andreas opened the window and looked outside at the rain falling on the parking lot. The air had cooled down, and there was a smell of wet asphalt. Delphine came out of the bathroom, and leaned out of the window beside him.
“The forecast is poor,” he said. “It’s supposed to rain solidly for the next few days.”
“How much longer do you want to stay here?”
Andreas hesitated for a moment, then he said he felt good here, everything was familiar, the landscape, the climate, the names of the plants. Here, he said, he knew what was coming. Delphine countered that he had spent more of his adult life in Paris than in Switzerland.
“But this is where I grew up,” said Andreas. “I feel I never really arrived in Paris.”
He said his walk to school went around a large field. When the ground was frozen in winter, he would take a shortcut across the field. One time, it was the morning of Christmas Eve. It was still dark, and there was fog over the field.
“The teacher asked us to bring candles. In the middle of the field, I came to a stop. Over by the highway, the fog was dyed orange by the streetlights. I knelt down and pushed my candle into the earth and lit it. Don’t ask me why. I knelt down on the frozen ground, and watched it burn down. And then I went on to school.”
“Children are peculiar,” said Delphine. But she didn’t understand why he was telling her this. Andreas said he wasn’t going back to Paris.
“How do you mean?”
“I’ve given my notice.”
“Are you crazy?” Delphine looked at him in horror. “What’s gotten into you?”
Andreas didn’t reply. There was nothing he could have said. A truck drove up, and a man got out, and began to unload crates of bottles.
“What do you want to do here? Work as a German teacher?”
Andreas said he had enough money.
“Is it that woman?”
“I don’t think so,” said Andreas.
When he turned toward Delphine, he saw she was crying. He put his arm around her, and held her close. She broke away, and they stood silently side by side, watching the delivery man at work.
“If you need money for the train,” said Andreas.
Delphine looked at him, and shook her head.
They went to the station, and Delphine bought a ticket and reserved a berth. The train didn’t leave until ten, they had a lot of time. They drove up the hill to a restaurant with a view of the village, and down to the valley. From there you could see the river, and the wooded slopes and the mountains on the horizon. You could hear the traffic all the way from the highway. It had stopped raining, but the sky was still cloudy. Only in the west was there a little patch of brightness. The low sun made the clouds look darker.
It was cold out on the terrace, and the tables and chairs were wet with rain. Andreas and Delphine sat inside, at a table by a window. The place was almost empty. The landlady came. Andreas remembered her from before, she was only a few years older than him, and she had been a pretty girl then. Now she was a heavyset woman with a tired face. She seemed not to recognize him, and he didn’t say he was local.
Delphine had ordered a salad, but she hardly touched it, and pushed it away after a little while. Andreas wasn’t hungry either. He said it was a pity she was going already.
“What would have been the point of staying?” said Delphine, and she started crying again. The landlady came. She didn’t let on, only asked whether they were done, and if everything had been all right.
He just wasn’t cut out for steady relationships, said Andreas, after the landlady had gone.
“That’s not even the point,” said Delphine. “Do you think I want to marry you?”
“So what is the point, then?”
“I don’t know what to say to you,” said Delphine, half crying, half laughing. “If you don’t know that, then I can’t help you either.”
She could tell his mind was on this other women, she said. Andreas angrily shook his head.
“Nonsense,” he said. “She’s happily married.”
“That’s your problem.”
They were at the station far too early. Andreas parked the car on the other side of the road, in front of the post office. Old chestnut trees surrounded the parking lot, giving a dense canopy of leaves, and keeping away the light of the streetlamps.
Andreas got Delphine’s suitcase out of the trunk. She took it from him and said she was going to say goodbye to him here. She didn’t want a scene on the platform. She embraced him and kissed him on the lips and went away without another word. She crossed the road, and disappeared around the corner of the station building. Andreas waited in the car until the train had pulled in and left again. He had the radio tuned to a classical station, and remembered the train they had seen three days before from the top of the hill, the toy train running through the toy landscape.
He had opened the side window a bit, and cool air flowed in. He asked himself if it was true that he really wasn’t made for long relationships. It was what he had always told himself. Maybe he just hadn’t met the right woman. Perhaps Fabienne would have been right for him—or Delphine was.
He drove to the part of the village where Fabienne lived. He parked by the side of the road, and went on on foot. A white camper was parked outside Fabienne’s house. The windows facing the street were curtained off. There wasn’t much to see from the pavement, just that the light was still on in the kitchen. Andreas pictured Manuel and Fabienne sitting in the kitchen, drinking a glass of wine together. He imagined Manuel having a headache, and getting up to take a painkiller. Fabienne woke up and followed him. She asked him what the matter was, and Manuel said it was nothing, he was coming straight back to bed. She stayed in the doorway for a moment. Then she went to the toilet, half-numb with tiredness, went back to bed, and fell asleep. The light in the kitchen went out.
Andreas felt very tired. He stood outside the house, s
taring at the dark windows. When a woman with a dog passed along the street, he walked on. Their paths crossed. The dog barked, and the woman pulled at the leash and told it off.
The next day the sky was still cloudy, and a cool wind blew. When Andreas put his jacket on, the letter that had been in his mailbox on his last morning in the apartment dropped into his hand. It was from Nadia. Andreas couldn’t recall ever having seen her handwriting before, which was big and a little wild and hard to decipher.
The letter was several pages long. Once again, the subject was emptiness, neglect, and the lack of love. She had tried, wrote Nadia, to make up for the shortage of love in her life with sex. Following her separation from her husband, she had embarked on a rather wild phase, in which she had gone with men pretty casually. It was at that time that they had met. Perhaps she had misused him for her own ends, as he had misused her for his. But she had felt empty from the very beginning. In the meantime, she had got back together with her ex-husband, and they were going to try a fresh start together. She wrote to say that she hoped he would be happy, and that—and then there were some words that he couldn’t read—and that he too would feel the peace that she now felt.
Andreas put the last page of the letter on the table with the others. He was glad there were no hard feelings from Nadia. It had never occurred to him that she was exploiting him. That idea fascinated him. He knew people could ask for anything from him. He would do whatever was required, and if he noticed he was being taken advantage of, then at the most he would be angry with himself. Everything would be much easier if you could see yourself as a victim, he thought, a victim of your childhood, of fate, of the people you had grown up among, and finally too, as a victim of illness. But in order to feel himself a victim, he had to believe in the possibility of another, better life. Andreas believed in nothing but chance. He loved the curious coincidences and repetitions that life threw up, against all logic. He loved the surprising patterns that came about in the sky, or on a body of water or in the shade of a tree, the continual tiny adjustments in the same overall context. Nadia called it nihilism; his own word for it was modesty.