by Peter Stamm
Andreas went back to the hut, and sat down on the wooden bench that ran along the front of it. He felt weak, but his head was clearer than it had been for months. He felt nothing but a kind of jaunty indifference. It was as though he had got rid of a weight, something that had been oppressing him for eighteen years. Presumably his life would have been different if he had mailed the letter then. There was even something mildly consoling about that. If Fabienne had turned him down then, his long wait would have seemed even more pointless.
He tried to remember time spent with her, but he kept coming back to the same scenes. The forest, the lake, the cinema in Paris. He remembered every particular, saw Manuel, Beatrice, the other young men and women they hung around with that summer, he even saw himself. Only Fabienne looked oddly out of focus in those scenes. But with that last kiss—their first kiss—Fabienne had finally come to life. It was only the kiss that counted.
Andreas thought about his childhood, his growing up, the time when happiness or misery, love or panic had been able to fill him completely. When time itself seemed to stand still, and there was no way out. He no longer wanted to love the way he had at twenty, but sometimes he missed the intensity of feeling he had had at that age. And those moments, in which everything suddenly was over, that feeling of total insignificance, and at the same time of complete freedom. A pure perspective on the world that almost took his breath away with its beauty, the patterning on a piece of wood, some peeling paint, a little shred of paper left under a thumbtack, the rust stain on the head of a nail. He ran his hand over the bench he was sitting on, over the wall of blackened, weathered boards he was leaning against. He inhaled deeply, and smelled the damp and moldy smell of the forest, and the sweet accent of some late-flowering bush. He could remember how he had felt, but he couldn’t feel like that anymore.
He probably wouldn’t see Fabienne again. Anyway, it didn’t matter if he did or not. Their story was at an end. One story among a very great many that began and ended at each moment.
Andreas walked along the road toward the village. He passed the little general store where he had sometimes bought candy when he was a boy. He came by here on his way to school, and when he had money he would go in and buy chocolate or biscuits. Back then, he had always been hungry, and had always eaten a lot of sweets between meals. Over the years, his appetite had decreased. Some days, he didn’t eat much more than a sandwich at lunch, and another one at night.
He walked into the store, and went up and down the aisles. He bought a bottle of wine, and a couple of bars of chocolate. There was a young woman sitting at the cash register. To go by her accent, she wasn’t from around here. She made some comment about the weather. It had been a bad summer, she said, and Andreas nodded and said one could only hope that the fall would be nicer.
“Maybe it’ll warm up again.”
The checkout girl said she doubted it.
Andreas walked down the street where he had grown up. It was midday, and there was no one out in any of the gardens. One house had got a new coat of paint, another had had a garage built on to it. Apart from that, nothing seemed to have changed. The enormous pine opposite Andreas’s parents’ house had been cut down. Where it had once stood, there was now only a stump, and, beside it, a newly planted sapling. It will take decades to grow as tall as the old tree, thought Andreas. It wouldn’t happen in his lifetime, or his brother’s or Bettina’s—maybe not even the children would get to see that happen.
As Andreas stepped through the squeaky gate, Walter appeared at the open window. He looked at Andreas in bewilderment.
“What are you doing here?” he called out.
The next moment he came running down the garden path, then stopped. He seemed to hesitate. Andreas also hesitated, then he put his arms around his brother. Clumsily, Walter did likewise.
“Come in,” he said. “We were just about to have lunch.”
Andreas handed over the bottle.
“A Bordeaux,” said Walter, looking at the bottle appraisingly.
Andreas said he just wanted to look over the house and take a peek at the garden.
The flowerbeds were choked with a low growth of weeds, and the hazel bush on the west side had spread, and was now almost as high as the roof. Walter said the garden was his responsibility, but he didn’t have enough time. He was glad if he got around to mowing the grass every other week. Things grew pretty much as they pleased.
As they walked into the house, Bettina was just setting a fifth place. She must have seen the visitor through the window. She too seemed to be so happy about his presence that Andreas felt a little embarrassed. She hugged him. Maia had grown into a pretty girl. She was taller than Bettina, and had a confident air about her. Lukas was a couple of heads shorter, a quiet boy, who reminded Andreas of his brother. He gave them each a bar of chocolate, and said he hoped they weren’t too old for such things. Maia laughed and said you were never too old for chocolate.
Over lunch, they talked about people from the village. Walter said next door’s pine had been struck by lightning, and had had to be cut down. Some of the houses were now occupied by the children that had gone to school with him and Andreas. The two old sisters in the corner house had moved into the assisted-living center long ago. One of them had died since, said Bettina. Walter said that was news to him.
“But I told you,” said Bettina. “I went to the funeral. It must be a year ago now.”
“What about their shop?”
“It was sold. It belongs to a chain now. But it’s not doing any better than before.”
At the edge of the village, a shopping center had been built, Walter explained. The small local shops had trouble competing. There was one butcher shop left in the village. They counted the number of butcher shops there had once been, and they got to seven.
After lunch, the children grabbed their chocolate, and ran upstairs to their rooms. Walter called work to take the afternoon off. The conversation took a while, there was something he needed to explain to a colleague. Bettina put on water for coffee. She leaned against the stove, and said their living there now must feel strange to him.
“If I know Walter, you won’t have changed many things.”
Bettina laughed, and then she was serious again. She said the death of their father had affected Walter very badly.
“If at least he’d talked about it. But he didn’t say anything, not one word. He continued to function, like a machine. At first, when we moved in here, it was terrible. You couldn’t change a thing, not take a picture off the walls, nothing. He made us put all our things down in the basement. If I moved a piece of furniture, in the evening he would move it back to its old place, and not say a word. It was back and forth. Eventually, he gave up, and let me do some of what I wanted. But if it had been up to him, everything would still look exactly the way it did then.”
“The garden reminded me of before,” said Andreas. “Even though it was never as neglected as it is now.”
He said they had been through a lot, living in this house, but he couldn’t see it with the same eyes as then.
“Everything’s still there, I remember every detail. But it doesn’t have the same importance anymore.”
“There are still a couple of boxes of yours upstairs,” said Bettina. “School things, I think. Books and toys.”
Andreas said they could throw them away.
“Don’t you even want to look at them?”
“I looked through some old notes not long ago. It was weird. At times it felt as though I’d written them the day before, at times it was like someone from another planet. And I have to say neither kind was at all interesting.”
Bettina said she would hang on to the things. Maybe he would change his mind. There was enough room. Andreas asked after the children. Maia was taking her final exams next spring, said Bettina. She was very good at math. With Lukas, she didn’t know yet. He was just starting high school. There was plenty of time to decide. He was a dreamy boy, she said, l
ike a child in many ways. He reminded her of Andreas.
“Of me?”
“That’s what Walter says too. Didn’t you see the similarity? He has your eyes. Your father’s eyes.”
They drank coffee in the garden. Walter asked how Andreas was feeling, and he said he had a persistent cough, but he thought he was getting over it. Apart from that, everything was fine.
“Do you still smoke as much?” asked Bettina.
“I’ll stop at some point.”
“That’s what they all say.”
Andreas said he’d rather talk about something else. Walter asked if he wanted to see their parents’ grave. Yes, said Andreas, why not. When Walter went into the house to get his jacket, Bettina asked about Andreas’s cough. He said he had had to take a couple of tests, but had left before the results came through.
“You’re worried.”
“Yes,” said Andreas. “I’m worried.”
“It doesn’t change it whether you know it or not. But you don’t need me to tell you that.”
“I just wanted to take care of a few things first,” said Andreas.
Then Bettina said her father-in-law had been a wonderful man. She often thought of the last Christmas they had spent together.
“I phoned him about a month before he died,” said Andreas. “I meant to visit him, but I left it too late. No one expected him to fade as quickly as he did.”
“He was always very pleased when you called.”
Andreas said the funeral had been awful. It was like being in a bad film. He hadn’t understood what was going on around him.
“I think I was closer to him than I ever realized. I didn’t see much of him in his last years, and when I called him I was often stuck for things to say. But then I would see him in the things that I said and did myself.”
“He told me once he wished he could have had a life like yours,” said Bettina. “You really are like him.”
There were steps on the gravel, and Andreas asked Bettina not to mention his illness to Walter. It would only alarm him.
“Do you have someone you can talk to?” asked Bettina.
“Yes,” said Andreas. “I think so.”
“You know you can come here any time. You can stay with us too, if you can’t manage anymore. We’ve got plenty of room.”
“Things aren’t that bad yet,” said Andreas. “But thank you for offering.”
She said she wished he got in touch more often, and he promised to try. He saw her eyes were misting over. When Walter joined them, she turned away.
Andreas said he would go from the cemetery straight back to the hotel. He was leaving tonight. Walter said that was a shame.
Andreas went up to Bettina. She turned and hugged him. Then they all went into the house together. Walter called the children.
“Andreas has to go,” he said.
They walked to the cemetery. Andreas asked Walter how he was doing, what he was up to, and Walter started telling him. He told him about the vacation in Sweden that they had just returned from, and a canoeing trip in the rain. He made some comment about good-looking Swedish women. Andreas had never known Walter to be so talkative.
Walter said these might be their last vacations as a family all together. Even this year, Maia would rather have gone hitchhiking with a girlfriend. Next year she was finishing school, and she might go to France for a few months to learn the language. She had been very taken with Paris, that time they had all descended on Andreas. Lukas had no idea what he wanted to do, but there was plenty of time to decide that. Bettina was thinking of going back to work, with the children out of the house. She was taking a computer course.
“And what about you?” asked Andreas.
“I’m fine,” said Walter. “My promotion has changed a few things.”
“You never told me.”
Walter gestured dismissively. That was a couple of years ago now. He said it wasn’t a dream job. He had often thought of doing something else. But with the economy as it was, it wasn’t a time to take risks. He imagined he would probably stay with the same firm until he retired. He laughed sheepishly.
“It must all seem terribly boring to you.”
“No,” said Andreas. “No, it’s not boring at all. Sometimes I envy you the children and Bettina. You’ve got on with your life.”
There was no one at the cemetery. Walter made straight for the grave, and Andreas thought he must have been there many times. Walter knelt down, and plucked a few twigs from a little bush that grew in front of the stone.
He didn’t mind that the grave was being leveled, said Andreas. He often thought about his parents, but his memories of them were attached to the places where they had lived, not this place where they were buried. Walter didn’t say anything. In all their phone calls over the years he had never talked about his parents. Nor did he speak about them now, but just about their grave and the flowers on it, which he had replanted in the spring, even though it was really no longer worth it.
They stood in front of the grave in silence. Then Walter said, Well! as if he had completed a task. His voice sounded a little less burdened as they picked their way through the rows of graves and he spoke of one or another deceased whom they had both known, a school friend of Andreas’s who had died very young in a traffic accident, the proprietress of a haberdashery store, Walter’s former music teacher. They parted company at the level crossing.
“The next time you come you stay with us,” said Walter. “Will you promise me that?”
Andreas promised.
“And you’ll stay for a bit longer?”
“OK.”
“Be good, then, and drive safely.”
All at once, Andreas believed there would be such a thing as a next time. He quickly hugged his brother, and then they each went their separate ways.
Andreas thought of Delphine, all the moving she had been put through as a child, such that her childhood memories were not attached to any particular place. She had said she could feel at home anywhere. Andreas wondered if that was a fault or a strength in her. Perhaps it would be simpler not to have any roots. It was like scattering the ashes of the dead. They were everywhere and nowhere. Whereas his childhood was just as much buried in this place as his parents were, but when he stood in front of their grave, he didn’t see much more than a stone with their names and dates on it. His memories were no more alive there than anywhere else. Only the sense of loss might be greater. Perhaps he shouldn’t have gone back—either that or he shouldn’t have left, like his brother. Then he might slowly have gotten used to the changes, just as you got used to the changes in your body, and yet seemed to be the same person from your childhood into ripe old age.
In the hotel, he packed his bags. He went down to the front desk and said he was leaving. It took the desk clerk a long time to make out the bill. Andreas took a postcard from a display, five sunny views of the village: the Catholic and Protestant churches, the town hall, the community center, and the steps up to some historic building, where long ago some freedom fighter had given an important speech. At last the clerk had finished adding up the bill, and Andreas put back the postcard and paid.
The easy mood of that morning had left him. Andreas felt tired and confused. He drove off aimlessly, heading west. He had the radio on, a classical music program that was comparing different recordings of the same piece of music. The host talked about the details of the various interpretations with two guests—a male and a female musician. One interpretation was too quick for them, another one dragged. They criticized soloists who made too much of themselves, and others who played with too little expression, or were imprecise, or with a show of feeling. Andreas tried to hear the differences they talked about, but for the most part he couldn’t.
The further west he got, the weaker the reception. More and more the music was interrupted by hissing, and then suddenly there was a different station, a French-language pop station, and a couple of excitable DJs who were talking nonsense and kep
t interrupting each other. Andreas pushed in the cassette that was in the player. It was the language course that he and Delphine had heard on the way here, the kind man who had cheese and sausage for breakfast, and took the bus to work, ate lunch in the cafeteria, where he had a choice of three delicious specials, and then went home at the end of his work.
After supper I sit down in front of the television and watch the news. The evening program is of no great interest to me. Usually, the interesting programs are on too late for me. I like to go to bed early. The night is quickly over. When the alarm clock goes off in the morning, I usually feel I haven’t had enough sleep. And the next day follows in the same way.
Andreas stopped at a rest stop. He sat in his car and listened to a man talking about his life. When the sentences stopped, his body cramped, and he started to tremble, as though in a fever. He choked, and then he sobbed, dryly and convulsively. When at last the tears came, he stopped trembling, and became calmer. He dropped his head on the steering wheel, and cried for a long time, not really knowing why.
The tape had kept on playing. When Andreas next heard it, a woman was speaking with strange emphasis.
I hurt myself. You hurt yourself. He hurts himself. We hurt ourselves. You hurt yourselves. They hurt themselves.
He took the tape out of the player. He got out of the car, and walked to the men’s room to wash his face. He dropped the cassette into a garbage bin that had thank you written on it in four languages. He sat down at one of the washable concrete picnic tables in the bright sun. When he had calmed down a bit, he drove on.
Fifty miles from Paris, Andreas took the highway west. He thought he had an aerial view of himself driving through the dark landscape, of which he had little sense. For a long time the road led through fields and woods, past scattered villages. Occasionally it brushed a town, and he could read advertisements for cheap hotels and shopping centers. Once, Andreas almost dropped off. His car had slowly drifted into the passing lane, without his noticing. It was only a loud, insistent car horn that woke him out of his dream. He jerked at the steering wheel, and the 2CV yawed off, wobbling wildly, and a car overtook him, so close that they almost brushed each other. Andreas’s heart beat wildly. He opened the window. Warm air flowed in, and the cheeping of the crickets was so loud he could hear it over the sound of the engine.