On A Day Like This (15 page)

The light in the hall was dim and yellowish, and the air felt so close that Andreas felt they were underwater. There was a long rumble of thunder outside, echoing away in the distance. Fabienne sat down on a step. Suddenly she looked very tired. Andreas remained standing in front of her, looking down at her. She asked what time it was.

“Half past four.”

“Manuel will be back soon.”

Andreas sat down beside her. For a moment they sat there in silence, then Fabienne began to speak softly. It was as though she was talking to herself. Her voice sounded mildly amused, as though she didn’t take herself seriously, what she was saying, or as if she was talking about somebody else. Sometimes she felt afraid, she said, she didn’t know what of.

“It began when Dominik was born. Everything went well. He was an easy child, and not ill very often. Perhaps if I had a reason to feel afraid, it wouldn’t be so bad.”

On the occasions when Dominik was stung in the mouth by a wasp, when Manuel had fallen down the basement steps and torn a couple of ligaments, she had been afraid too. But she had known what to do, she had provided first aid, she had driven Manuel to the doctor. The fear she really had in mind was much more diffuse, a feeling of strangeness, of not belonging. Manuel and Dominik sometimes appeared really strange to her. When they were down in the basement tinkering with something, or when they went out fishing together, she had these strange notions about what they were all doing. The life they were living, this house they had built, the photographs on the walls. Sometimes she imagined the house burning down, or some other disaster, and these imaginings
had a somehow liberating effect on her. Andreas asked her if she ever talked about it with Manuel. She shook her head and stood up. “What would I say to him?”

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.