Peter Stamm - We're Flying

Once Lucia got sick. She was alone at home, her mother was away in the clinic, and her father was in the shop downstairs. He sold radios and TVs, and he was a nice, rather shy man. She’s just got a bit of a cold, he said, and he sent me upstairs to her.

Lucia answered the door in pajamas, and I followed her up to her room. It was my first time in the house, and I had a mildly alarming sense I was doing something forbidden. It was that afternoon Lucia told me about her mother. It’s only in summer, she said, she sits upstairs in her room all day long, doesn’t speak, doesn’t do anything, and my father keeps having to go up and check how she is. He’s worried she might try to do it again, said Lucia. Will you make me some tea?

She wasn’t really sick, but I made her some tea anyway, it was like a game of house. Lucia told me where to find everything. When I opened the cabinets, I had a feeling I was under observation. Then Lucia walked into the kitchen and watched me and smiled when I looked at her. When she coughed, it sounded like she was pretending.

Lucia showed me photographs. We lay on the bed together, she was under the covers, I was on top. Eventually she asked me to kiss her, and I kissed her. About a week later, we slept together, it was the first time for both of us.

We thought we would go on a circular walk over two mountain passes. We would spend the night in a youth hostel in the next valley. We had been walking all day, had climbed up a long way, crossed stony landscapes, and only late in the afternoon reached our destination, which was a tiny village way up a barren valley. The youth hostel was a small stone house at the edge of the village. On the door was a sign telling you where to pick up the key.

The house was cold and empty. On the ground floor was a kitchen and a little dining room. There was a guest book on the table. The last entry was a couple of days ago. Two Australians had written something about the end of the world. The dormitory was up in the attic. It was dark, because there were only two dormer windows and a single weak lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. I dropped my backpack on one of the narrow mattresses along the wall on the floor, and Lucia took the one beside it. At the foot end of the mattresses were piles of brown woolen blankets. We went down to the kitchen, made coffee, and ate provisions we’d brought with us, bread and cheese and fruit and chocolate.

The sun dipped over the mountain early and it quickly got cold, but the sky was still blue. In a little general store we bought a liter of red wine. Then we strolled up the valley out of the village. We could hear marmots whistle, but we couldn’t see them. After a bit, Lucia said she was getting cold. I offered her my jacket, but she declined and we turned back.

The youth hostel was situated next to a stream we could hear even with the windows closed. It was barely warmer inside than out. I opened the wine and we got into our sleeping bags, not undressing, and drank wine out of the bottle and talked. Tell me a story, Lucia said, and I told her about things I wanted to do and films I’d seen and books I’d read.

Lucia slipped out of her sleeping bag to go to the bathroom. When she came back, she sat on my sleeping bag for a minute, then she stripped to her underwear and scooted in beside me.

Autumn came, and Lucia got a job at a hotel bar. I went home and enrolled at university. I had a good record at high school, but I had trouble making the adjustment to college. I found it hard to meet people, and spent most of my evenings alone in the little attic room my parents had found me.

I wrote regularly to Lucia, who rarely wrote back. If she did, it was a postcard that barely said anything, just that she was doing fine, that there was nothing happening in the village, the weather was good or bad or whatever. Sometimes she filled in the space with little drawings, a flower or an Alpine hut, and one time a heart with a drop of blood squeezed from it. The drawings looked like tattoos to me.

The summer after, my grandfather died. I drove out to the funeral in the village with my father. I hoped to see Lucia. She wasn’t there. I left messages for her but she didn’t get in touch. When we returned to the flatland, we took Grandmother with us.

A couple of times I tried to phone Lucia. Usually her father picked up and said she had just gone out. Once it was her. I said I wanted to visit her, but she didn’t seem interested. When I insisted, she said I was free to do what I liked, she couldn’t tell me never to come to the village. After that I wrote to her less often, but I didn’t forget her either. I had promised her that summer that I would be back, and when I’d finished at college, I applied for the job of teacher at the village school. The headmaster told me it was only on account of my grandparents that I got the job.

YOU WON’T COME BACK, Lucia had said four years ago. Now she said, I never thought you’d be back. I had come up by train at the beginning of the week. My father promised to bring my stuff up to the valley by car that weekend, my books and the stereo and the little TV. But on Friday it snowed and the pass was shut. My father called and said did it matter if he came the following week? I was sitting in my grandparents’ little house. I was sleeping in the bed my grandfather had died in, and presumably my great-grandfather before him. I lay under the heavy comforter, my arms pinned to my sides like a dead person’s, and I tried to imagine what it would be like if I really couldn’t move them, just to lie there and wait for death.

When the rest of my stuff comes, I’ll have you around to dinner, I said to Lucia. I’d gone to the bar where she worked. She said she was still living with her parents. She was working a lot, she said, in summer she’d totaled the car, and she wanted to buy another one in the spring. I said my grandparents’ garage still had the old Volvo standing in it, she could always borrow that. That piece of junk? she said, and she smirked.

Work at the school was difficult. I had taken courses in education at college, but the kids here were rowdy and badly behaved and didn’t make it at all easy for me. My colleagues were no help either. Most of them were local, and the talk at break was about going hunting and village gossip and the weather. Once I rang the father of one especially difficult girl. He was a hotelier, and he treated me like a schoolboy on the phone. A few days later the headmaster came into my classroom after lessons and said if I had trouble, I should talk to him, and not blame the parents for my failures. Astrid stays up half the night watching TV, I said. And then she can’t stay awake during class.

The head looked at the cut-paper shapes I’d done with the kids and that we’d hung in the windows. Snowflakes, he said. As if we didn’t have enough snow here. He took them down one after the other, slowly and without saying a word. When he was finished, he put them down in front of me and said, You ought to work on the syllabus instead of cutting fancy paper shapes.

He left. I could hear the kids yelling outside. I went to the window. They were fighting, and then, just like that, they all ran out of the yard and disappeared down the street. They all ran off together, and I was put in mind of a swarm of scruffy birds I’d seen scavenging on the rubbish dump outside the village.

The days were short and getting shorter. For a long time that year the snow held off, instead it was cold and rainy, and often I couldn’t see the tops of the mountains because the clouds were so low. It’s worse than in other years, said Lucia, at least when the snow comes everything gets brighter. She said she sometimes feared she might lose her mind like her mother. We had gone for a walk one afternoon when there was no school, out of the village and up the slope. It was one of the few fine days that autumn. But soon enough the sun disappeared behind the mountains, and only the upper slopes still had light on them.