On A Day Like This (17 page)

He ate in the fish restaurant where he had wanted to take Delphine. Earlier, it had been renowned for its good cooking, but he didn’t enjoy the food. It would be nice if Delphine were here, he thought.

He stayed up in his room all afternoon. He hoped Fabienne would call. Suddenly he wasn’t sure whether he had given her the correct room number. Maybe she had forgotten the number, and she was calling reception, and no one was answering.

Fabienne called the next morning, as she had said she would.

“Can we meet up?”

“Manuel and Dominik are flying their hot-air balloon,” she said. “I’m free till twelve.”

“Do you want to meet at the camper?”

“They’ve taken the car.”

They arranged to meet at the hut in the woods where they had first met.

Andreas walked through the village, and through the business district. The sky was clear, except for some little shreds of cirrus clouds. The forecast was for warm weather in the afternoon, but the morning felt cool. It was the first day of autumn, the sky looked suddenly darker, and the air was so clear that everything seemed very close.

Andreas got to the rendezvous too early. There were wet charred branches on the campfire site, and
garbage on the ground. The hut belonged to the community, and on the wall, in a little metal frame, was a list of rules. Andreas perused it: garbage in the containers provided, no loud music, no dogs without a leash.

Fabienne came almost exactly on time. Once again, she was wearing the yellow slicker. She propped her bike against a tree. Andreas hugged her, she kissed him on both cheeks.

“Do you want to go for a walk?”

They walked through the forest. It was probably the same path they had taken that night when they played hide and seek. It led on and on in a straight line. In the distance you could see where the forest ended. For a while they walked in silence side by side. Then Fabienne asked Andreas what was in the letter that he had written but not sent.

“That I love you,” said Andreas. “Not much more than that, I think.”

He asked what she would have done if she’d received the letter.

“I don’t know,” said Fabienne. She seemed to be thinking. She said she was really fond of Manuel. They had a good relationship.

“When did it begin, with the two of you?”

“I suppose it was the day you kissed me. He was very attentive. He took me home. I was a bit confused.”

“Ah, if I’d had the car.”

“But nothing happened,” said Fabienne. “We just talked. You were so dismissive, after you’d kissed me. You behaved as though it was nothing. And then you got really aggressive. I told Manuel about your kissing me. We talked about you a long time. That brought us closer. The next day he brought me flowers. We didn’t kiss until much later.”

Andreas said he didn’t suppose he’d ever loved a woman as much as he’d loved her. Fabienne didn’t say anything. They walked slowly through the forest, side by side. Andreas was a little surprised he didn’t feel angry with Manuel, that he didn’t even feel jealous of him. He wouldn’t have wanted to trade places with him. He stopped and pressed Fabienne to himself. He kissed her on the mouth, but she didn’t reciprocate. She hugged him like a good friend, and laid her head against his chest.

“There’s no point,” she said.

“One night,” he said. “Let’s spend one night together. To give us something to remember. Not just those ten minutes.”

“Love lasts for ten minutes,” said Fabienne. “What difference would it make?”

“What made you sleep with me, anyway?”

“I was curious,” said Fabienne, and then, a while later, she couldn’t just stay away from home for a night, she didn’t know what he was thinking of. In the fifteen years she’d been married to Manuel, she had spent very few nights away from him.

“Do you remember our meetings in Paris?”

“I just remember the fact of them,” said Fabienne, with an apologetic smile.

“In the mosque,” said Andreas. “And one time we went to the cinema. The film tore, and they were unable to show us the ending. Someone came up to the front and told us the ending.”

“I don’t remember.”

It was all so long ago, said Fabienne. So much had happened in the meantime.

“Not in my life,” said Andreas.

They had gotten to the edge of the forest, and stopped. The path led on, past the gravel pit, and through fields and meadows to the next village.

“Are you happy?” asked Andreas.

“I’m not unhappy,” said Fabienne. “Let’s go back.”

Andreas said he had the feeling of having done something incredibly stupid that would never be made up for.

“I can still remember writing the letter. I had something to eat in a pizza place near the Opera. It was evening, I was alone, and I started writing in my notebook, about our first meeting, and driving to the lake, and kissing you. Our story. And that I wanted it to continue. If I’d had an envelope and a stamp, I think I might have mailed it to you right away. But the next morning, I no longer dared.”

They were silent. Andreas wondered if the relationship could have lasted. They had both been so young. Maybe he would have made Fabienne unhappy, maybe they would have split up long ago. Or they would still be together, one of those couples that stick together because they’re each so afraid of being alone. They didn’t really fit. At that time, it hadn’t seemed to matter to him. He wanted to convince himself that the only reason his love had lasted so long was because it had remained unrequited. He asked Fabienne what she was thinking. Nothing, she said.

“What does your girlfriend say about you going to meet me all the time?”

“That’s over. She went back to France. It wasn’t anything serious.”

“Tell me about her.”

Andreas said he didn’t know what to say about Delphine. He didn’t want to think about her or talk about her, least of all with Fabienne.

“What does she look like?”

“Short brown hair, quite a pretty face. About as tall as you, but not such a beautiful figure.”

“How old is she?”

“Twenty-four.”

“Do you love her?”

“I don’t think so. Certainly not as much as I loved you.”

As I love you, he thought, but didn’t say it. He said there had been a time that he could imagine starting a family, having children, settling down somewhere. But that time had passed. He couldn’t even claim to regret it. He wasn’t sure he still wanted to love someone as passionately as when he was twenty.

“What about her? Does she love you?”

“I don’t know. I think she might.”

“And isn’t that enough for you?”

She asked what had made Delphine go back.
Andreas wanted to tell her that he wasn’t going back to Paris, that he would stay in the village, but suddenly his plan struck him as absurd. He had come here on her account. If the story with her was over, there was no sense in staying here. He said he had quarreled with Delphine. Something trivial.

“That’s none of my business,” said Fabienne.

They were back at the hut. Fabienne said she was expected at home, her menfolk would be back soon.

“And you’re making lunch for them.”

“Yes,” said Fabienne. “I’m making lunch for them.”

“Will you tell Manuel? About what happened?”

Fabienne shook her head. What for? She gave Andreas her hand and said good-bye. He shook hands, and kissed her on the cheeks. She got on her bike. She had ridden a few yards when she stopped.

“I almost forgot something,” she said. She got down, and pulled the little book Andreas had given her out of her jacket pocket. He came a little nearer, but he didn’t take the book.

“Did you read it?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“There must be hundreds of stories like ours.”

“But all the details. The fact that I called you Butterfly …”

“That wasn’t you. That was Manuel’s name for me.”

“And the cat she buys herself when she returns to Paris?”

“I never had a cat.”

Andreas asked if she was sure. Fabienne laughed at him.

“That must have been a different girl.”

“I suppose it’s the story of you and Manuel, then,” said Andreas.

“No,” said Fabienne, “it is our story. What I have with Manuel isn’t a story. It’s reality.”

They stood and faced each other. Then Fabienne put her arms around Andreas and kissed him on the mouth. It was their first kiss. Her lips were dry and a little rough, it was the kiss of a young girl. They kissed for a long time until they were both out of breath.

“Keep the book,” said Andreas as they finally broke.

Fabienne smiled. Without another word, she got on her bike and rode off. Andreas watched her go. She stood on the pedals, the bicycle swayed from side to side. The road led along the edge of the forest, past a meadow
full of old fruit trees and a farmhouse. By the time Fabienne reached the first houses in the village, she was just a yellow dot.

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.