Authors: Peter Stamm
WHEN HERMANN WAKES UP
the next morning, it’s still dark. Before he gets up, he opens the suitcase and takes the things out, one after the other, looking at each item for a long time. He puts on Rosmarie’s cardigan, eats the chocolate bar, reads the blurb on the book jacket. Was there a family argument between the factory owner and his son-in-law? Or did the night watchman of the glassworks pay the price for being such a devoted reader? Hermann turns a few pages and finds an epigraph from Don Giovanni:
What strange fear
Assails my spirits!
Where do they come from
,
Those horrible whirlwinds of flame?
The book is full of Italian words in italics:
maestro, canna, servente, l’uomo di notte
. Hermann can’t imagine
what Rosmarie saw in such nonsense. He puts the book away and takes the underwear out of the suitcase, counts the items, the way you might count days, with a brief lurch of memory.
That morning he washes his hair with Rosmarie’s shampoo, he uses the olive oil soap and cleans his teeth with her toothbrush. He doesn’t eat any breakfast, he feels a little sick from the chocolate. He is terribly thirsty and drinks three glasses of tap water.
On the train he puts the suitcase on the seat next to him. A lot of people get on in Olten. A young man asks Hermann whether the seat next to him is free. Yes, he says, and he puts the suitcase on his knee. Would you like me to put that on the luggage rack for you? asks the young man. No, says Hermann, more roughly than he intended. He clutches the suitcase for the whole journey, as though someone was going to come and try to take it away from him. He takes it with him when he goes to the bathroom.
IT’S THE HOSPITAL
that Hermann was born in, where his children were born. At that time there was only the old building. The long brick building next to it must be from the seventies or early eighties. Hermann walks past the porter, he thinks he can remember the way to intensive
care, but then he gets lost and needs to ask a nurse for directions. She asks him if he’s feeling all right, and insists on escorting him to the ward. There is no news for him there. The doctor was just in a meeting and would be out in a moment. Did Herr Lehmann want to see his wife? He asks for a glass of water and sits down. A nurse gives him the form he didn’t fill out yesterday. It’s very important.
Hermann sits in the waiting room, going through a brochure on the early detection of heart attacks, and then he looks at some women’s magazines. Franz Beckenbauer is praying for the seriously ill Monica Lierhaus, a TV sports show host Hermann has never heard of. He is not interested in sports, but he reads the article all the same. The woman had a blood clot in her brain, underwent an operation, there were complications, she was put in an artificial coma. Her life is hanging by a thread, the article ends, her closest relatives fear the worst. Why her? it says under the picture of a beautiful young woman with chestnut hair. Hermann feels tears coming on. He clears his throat and tears the page out of the magazine, folds it, and puts it in his pocket. Then he goes with the suitcase into Rosmarie’s room. He looks around, there is no one around. He hides the suitcase under the stand with medical equipment, and, without looking back at Rosmarie, leaves the room.
Sweet Dreams
I should have known
I’d never wear your ring
—REBA MCENTIRE
T
HE CORKSCREW WAS
made in the shape of a girl in a pleated frock of the sort Lara knew from girlhood pictures of her mother, a short light green summer dress. Only the red collar didn’t really fit, it should have been embroidered tulle, and white. Lara could see the pictures, big family get-togethers in a garden in the north of Italy, pictures full of people she didn’t know, even her mother didn’t know some of the names. That man was a neighbor, what was his name again? And aren’t those my mother’s cousin Alberto’s children, Graziella, Alfina, and what was the little one called? Antonio? Tonino? The colors were bleached, which made them somehow more garish. It was as though the pictures had caught the sun, the
sun of childhood, pale and ever-present. Thereafter the family had fallen apart, people had gone their separate ways. When Lara had visited Italy with her parents, there hadn’t been any more big reunions, only visits in darkened homes with old people who smelled funny and served dry cookies and big plastic bottles of lukewarm Fanta.
The grip on the corkscrew was the girl’s head. She had a pageboy cut and a fixed smile. Lara looked at the price tag. They already had a corkscrew, and they hardly ever drank wine. She hesitated for a long while, the shop woman was already eyeing her doubtfully, then she pulled herself together and took it to the register. Is it for a present? asked the woman, unpicking the price tag and dabbing it on the back of her hand. No, Lara shook her head, no need to wrap it, I’ll take it like that. She looked at her watch. The bus wasn’t due for another half an hour.
Lara worked at the Raiffeisen Bank, and she got off work before Simon, but she liked to wait for him so they could travel home together. Generally, she would sit in the bus shelter, smoke a cigarette, and browse through the free paper. Suddenly she was aware of someone in front of her. She looked up and saw Simon standing there smiling. She jumped up and kissed him on the lips, and he made a remark about her awful habit, sometimes he meant it, at others he was just being flippant. The last few days it
had been so cold, she skipped her cherished after-work cigarette and piled into the bus, which was usually standing there when she got to the station. Simon worked in a hi-fi store. After it closed, he needed to tidy things away, and when the boss wasn’t there, to do the register. The bus drivers knew him and they waited when they saw him running around the corner. I had to stay and do the till, he would say breathlessly, drop onto the seat, and kiss Lara on the lips. Have you been smoking again? They were sitting right at the back, the row with the three seats together was their favorite. There wasn’t much light there, and the noise of the engine muffled their whispering.
Lara hadn’t taken off her coat, but still she felt Simon’s shoulder against hers. He told her about his day, picky customers and new equipment and an argument with the owner. Lara loved these rides with him, especially in winter, when it was already dark outside, the half hour up and over the ridge through little villages, past meadows with old apple orchards and plowland. The radio was playing a country music song. That was “Sweet Dreams,” said the presenter, by Reba McEntire, to whom we are devoting the whole of our show today. Lara kissed Simon and laid her head on his shoulder.
They had been living together for just over four months in a little one-bedroom apartment over the station
restaurant not far from the lake. It wasn’t ideal, but Simon had wanted to remain in the village he had grown up in, and even though there wasn’t much going on in the place, it proved difficult to find anywhere at all. The building was old and run down, the staircase was a mess, with an old freezer unit in the way, and stacks of white plastic chairs for the beer garden, empty cardboard boxes, and lots of other junk. On the second floor there were a couple of rooms for guests, which were rarely taken, and up on the third was their little apartment and a couple of studios. One of these was empty, in the other lived Danica, a young Serbian girl who waited tables in the restaurant. When Lara and Simon first went to look at the apartment, Lara hadn’t been able to envisage them living there at all. But after they’d been to look at a couple of other places, all much more expensive, they went back to it. Before they moved in, they repainted all the rooms: the landlady chipped in with paints and brushes and left them a free hand with the decoration. They spent whole evenings talking about various color schemes, but in the end they just painted everything white. The rooms looked cozier right away, and Lara was happy. It was the right time to leave home, even though she got on well with her parents. She was ready to decide her life for herself, buy things, move out.
Lara was twenty-one, Simon three years older. He’d had one girlfriend before Lara, but they hadn’t lived together. It wasn’t anything serious, he would say if Lara asked. He had lived with his parents so far, and still needed to get used to the fact that clothes didn’t wash themselves and the fridge wasn’t automatically kept full. But he too seemed to get a kick out of going shopping together on the weekends, and wondering what they would cook today and tomorrow and the next day. Do we need milk? You know, the coffee’s almost finished. We’re out of garbage bags. Sentences like that had an unexpected charm, and a full shopping cart was like an emblem of the fulfilled life that lay before them. When Simon wheeled it into the underground parking garage, with Lara at his side, she felt a deep pride and a curious satisfaction at being grown up and independent.
They had been to IKEA a couple of times, and bought a mattress and a box spring and various bits and pieces for bathroom and kitchen, lamps and tablecloths and silverware. Simon’s parents had given them an old table and four chairs. For a wardrobe they had a set of cheap shelving for which Lara had sewn a curtain of red material. She loved these little tasks, sewing cushion covers, fitting a new toilet seat and a showerhead, putting up posters. Simon would watch her and enjoy it with her. The electrical things were his department.
Every week there would be something new, a barely used coffee machine that Lara found on eBay, a wooden crate for their shoes, a whole stack of yellow bath towels that were on sale. Simon hardly got involved, at most he would say, Do we really need this? Or, How much did you pay for that? It’s a mistake to economize on quality, these towels will last us forever. Forever is a long time, answered Simon.
He hadn’t brought much into their household, the rented van they had driven first to his parents’, then hers, was barely a quarter full of his boxes of clothes, CDs, and old schoolbooks. Most room was taken up by his stereo equipment, the gigantic loudspeakers, and the computer. They bought a TV on the never-never, an ex-showroom model Simon’s boss had given them a good price for.
How do you like it? asked Lara, producing the corkscrew from the bag she had next to her on the empty seat. Simon picked it up and played with it, saying nothing. He furrowed his brow, pulled on the screw, and the girl raised her arms. A ballet dancer, he said. No, said Lara, just a girl. Do we even have any wine? That bottle from your parents, said Simon. He was still playing with the thing, pulling the handle up and down, causing the girl to wave her hands, as though cheering or calling for help. Was it expensive? We drank that when Hanni and Martin came, said Lara, don’t you remember?
The restaurant downstairs was a bit seedy. Lara and Simon never went there, even though the manageress was their landlady. If they went out anywhere, it was to a place a hundred yards up the road, which did stuffed chicken breasts. They didn’t go to the lakeside disco much anymore where they met. During the week they went to bed early, and if they felt like going out dancing on the weekend, they would go to the city, where there were better clubs and where not everyone knew them.
THE BUS STOPPED
outside the station, and the driver wished everyone a nice evening over the p.a. and turned off the engine. The passengers got off, said a word or two in parting, and went their separate ways. Lara knew most of them fleetingly, there was only one man she hadn’t seen before. He had turned once or twice during the trip and looked at her. When the driver said the next stop was their final destination, he had got up right away and gone to the door, even though the bus was stopping anyway. While the bus took its last few corners, the man stood directly in front of Lara. He held on tight and pressed the Stop button again. He had to be about forty, and with his long black coat didn’t seem to really fit in. While she was
studying him, their eyes met. The man seemed quiet, almost indifferent, but in his eyes Lara saw an attentiveness and a kind of hunger that were a little disagreeable, but at the same time provoked her. She turned to Simon, kissed him, and asked, Will you come to the market with me tomorrow during your lunch break? She could feel how her voice sounded artificial and even a bit loud, but she felt she had to say something. The man in the black coat was the first to get off the bus. Lara saw him go back in the direction of the main street. After a few steps he turned around quickly, as though to see whether she was following him, and their eyes met once again. Do you know him? Simon asked. Lara shook her head. The face looks familiar to me for some reason.
When Lara locked the door after her, she read, as she did every evening, the handwritten sign that hung there.
PLEASE DON’T THROW BREAD AWAY
. Beside the door was an old cardboard box filled to the top with stale bread. Lara asked herself what her landlady planned to do with it. From downstairs came music and the sound of loud laughter. When folk groups played there on Fridays, they could hear the racket up in their apartment. Even worse were the toilet smells in the passage and the smoke that wended its way up the stairs. Simon had been down to complain a couple of times, but the landlady just said if
they were that bothered by the smell, they should open a few windows.
Are you hungry? Lara asked. I wouldn’t mind a hot bath before dinner, I’m chilled to the bone. The half hour in the bus hadn’t been enough to warm her up. I bought some fresh ravioli, they only take three minutes. I had a late lunch, said Simon, I’m not hungry yet. They were standing together in the kitchen, and Lara was putting the shopping away. She held up the corkscrew. Do you like the color? Green, said Simon, and Lara thought about the bleached colors of the Italian photos again. It was forty-five francs, she said. Do you think that’s too much? Simon shrugged. You could always get a bottle of wine from the restaurant while I’m in the bath, said Lara, and then we can initiate the corkscrew.