Peter Stamm - We're Flying

Reinhold walked up to them and held the basket aloft. The staff of life, he cried out. The people looked at him with hostility and shrank away. Then Reinhold heard a mewing cry, and raising his head, saw a gull hovering in the air above him. He took a piece of bread from the basket and threw it up, and with a tiny flick of its wing, the gull leaned forward and caught it in its beak. It flew so close to his head that he could feel the draft of its wings. And suddenly he was mobbed by a whole flock of seagulls. He threw bread around in gay abandon, and finally flung the whole empty basket into the air. All are invited, he shouted merrily. The seagulls’ mewing sounded like crazed laughter, and Reinhold too was moved to laugh; in fact, he couldn’t stop laughing, for at the end of many weeks of darkness, he finally saw the light.

THE HUNTER MUST get into position very early in the morning. By the time Anja is awake, he’s already there. He keeps very still, and he is so far away that she can only just make him out, but even so, she has a sense of knowing him and being close to him. All day she thinks about him. When she zips herself into her sleeping bag at night, she imagines him approaching her sleeping place, to watch over her while she sleeps. His gaze is calm and friendly. He picks up her clothes, sniffs them, as though looking to find a scent. Then quietly he takes off, climbs up the ladder into his high stand, and waits.

Even before the sun reaches Anja, she is woken by the confused singing of many birds. She lies there a moment longer, looks secretly across to the high stand, and sees the hunter sitting there, and her heart starts to beat faster. She takes a little more time in the mornings now, and risks getting to school late. She notices herself moving more consciously, and she feels her body’s beauty and freshness, as though it were she observing it and not he. She is in her underwear, but she is in no hurry to get dressed. She stretches, combs her hair, squats down to wet her hands in the dew, and looks around, as though she were seeing the forest for the first time. She hums a tune and wonders if the hunter can hear her. It’s a shy form of courtship. Because all the time Anja knows she would run off if he left his stand and took so much as a single step in her direction.

I LIVED IN THE FOREST for three years, that’s the most Anja will say on the subject, even years later. It was no secret, even the children knew, but at that time it was grownups who were asking questions that Anja didn’t want to answer, couldn’t answer. The school psychologist was asking them, after she’d been found. Why? Others gave answers for her: a broken home, father and mother both violent and both alcoholics, often disappearing for days on end. No, Anja said, this has got nothing to do with my parents. No one could understand that she wasn’t running away from something, but toward something.

When she looked out of the kitchen window at the wooded hill on the other side of the expressway, she didn’t feel anything. You could only feel the forest when you were in it. That was the thing that made it so special, the way you could step into it as if into a room. You needed to be in it to be able to absorb it and be absorbed by it. She didn’t go into the forest much anymore, and people didn’t understand that either if they happened to know her story, and took her for some kind of forest creature. She didn’t pick mushrooms, she didn’t watch birds or animals, she didn’t know more names of trees than other people. Nor was she one of those bleeding hearts who got agitated about every tree that was cut down. On the contrary, it was a relief to see how people dominated the forest, which sometimes seemed to her like a disease, something that proliferated and spread. Only the noise of chain saws still bothered her, because back then it signified the threat of being found. The routes taken by the foresters were less predictable than those of the hikers, the joggers, and even the hunters, who had their fixed places that they liked to drive up to, if they could, in their pickup trucks. But over time, Anja noticed that the lumberjacks didn’t proceed without a plan either, and that they tackled a forest a piece at a time. Once or twice, because of that, she had to move camp, which was bothersome but not threatening.

All this was twenty years ago. In the meantime she had trained as a bookseller, had worked, married, had two children. What was left of her old self were memories and a sensitivity, an alertness, that Marco mistook for nervousness.

THERE WAS ALWAYS SOMEONE Anja was trying to catch up to, her parents, her school friends, dream characters she didn’t know and who still seemed to be somehow familiar to her. She was always running after people, in the certainty she wouldn’t be able to catch them. Anja wanted to be quicker, but it was as though her limbs were lead, and the air was a viscous soup that required a violent exertion for each movement. She sought to free herself, but that only made the invisible bonds tighten around her. Then she woke up, her forehead burning, her pajamas soaked in sweat. The screaming had awoken her, it was two in the morning. Anja pulled the covers over her head, but she could still hear the screams, hear things being knocked over, the crash of the front door. Often she was all alone in the apartment in the morning. The door was ajar. On the floor lay the wreckage of whatever had fallen over in the night, a sort of still life with destroyed objects.

School was the only secure place. Where Anja liked best to be was in the physics lab on the lower ground floor, with its dim light and metallic smell, or in the library, among the tightly packed shelves full of the past. When the library was closed, she hung around the school grounds until it grew dark. The worst weren’t the shouts or the blows. The worst was coming home, and no one there. The expectation, the certainty, practically, that they would arrive sometime in the night.

YOU HAVE TO LEARN to live without expectations, that’s the only way of getting by. Patience by itself isn’t enough, because in fact nothing happens. In the forest there is no future and no past, everything there is either instantaneous or takes place over periods that cannot be measured in mere years. Sometimes Anja imagines what it was like when the whole country was covered with forest. Then she climbs up the lookout tower, peers down at the city, and sees nothing but trees. She sees the trees in the parks and gardens and along the streets, envoys from a past or future time, and everything in between loses its brashness and its significance. Even the old town, the houses that are many hundreds of years old, seem no less provisional to her than her shelter of branches and canvas.

Eventually the ice will return and efface everything that people have built and made. Glaciers will lie over the land for thousands of years, rivers of ice miles deep, and what they will finally leave behind will be a new landscape; there will be new rivers and valleys, the moraines will form chains of hills, enormous piles of rubble that will soon be colonized by the first pioneer plants. Trees will grow on the humus, a thin forest to begin with, then ever thicker. Wild animals will come over the mountains in the south: insects, birds, deer and antelope, and with them their predators, foxes and wolves and lynxes and the first man. And then it will all be as though nothing had happened.

THEY WERE JOGGING through a residential district, past small detached houses. There were people working in the gardens, people walking their dogs, children playing on the streets. The gym teacher was out in front, along with the fast runners. A little way behind was the main group, followed by three or four slower girls, the overweight ones or the artsy ones, who didn’t care. Anja brought up the rear. She made an effort, she wanted to be quicker, but her legs felt leaden.