Peter Stamm - We're Flying

By the time they reached the edge of the forest, the others were out of sight. After a few hundred yards along a narrow footpath, she reached a dirt road, which led straight up. Way ahead she saw the others, heard the distant padding of their feet on the gravel, their shouts and laughter. Anja stopped. She had a stitch, and she was panting hard. Her T-shirt was sweated through, and now that she had stopped running, she felt a chill. She leaned down to touch her toes, took a couple of deep breaths, and slowly set off again. The others disappeared round a bend, and it was quiet.

Something has changed. To Anja it feels as though she’s considering the forest for the first time, as though the forest were turning to her. Her thoughts have stopped, and so too has time, everything is connected to her, becoming a single, exquisite feeling, the light, the smells, isolated sounds that make the sudden silence still deeper. She stands there, studying the play of the light in the treetops. She touches the trunk of a beech tree, its cool silvery bark. Later, whenever she is tempted to give up and return to her parents’ apartment, she will evoke this moment. And then time once more stands still, and nothing matters, and she can get through the night, the week, the year.

She had thought the class would take the same route back, but no one came down the hill toward her, and by the time she finally reached the lookout tower, there was no one there either. She climbed up the tower and stared out over the forest and down over the city, where the first lights had already come on.

The next day, Michaela asked what had kept Anja. I told the teacher you weren’t feeling well, and had stayed home. Thank you, said Anja. She had been home. Her parents weren’t in, and she packed a few things in a backpack, clothes and books and something to eat and a sleeping bag, and she left.

That was her first night in the forest. She wasn’t afraid, on the contrary, she felt freer than she had in a long time. In front of a fire she had built, she sat and thought until it started to get light. Over the weeks and months she thought less, and learned just to be there, in a state of alert indifference.

SNOW FALLS FROM A BRANCH, it’s like the opposite of a noise, this fall without acceleration that changes the depth of the silence and the configuration of space. Relieved of the weight, the branch rebounds upward in slow motion, and loose snow crystals drift through the air.

The deer sink deep into the snow on their thin legs. Anja watches them from the lookout, their strutting movements, their breath steaming with exertion. When it starts to get dark, she sees the lights coming on in the city. Now she yearns for a home, a room, a warm bed, and a fridge full of things to eat. It’s a yearning she is unable to satisfy. She knows too much about what life in the houses is actually like.

In the forest her dreams are different, more alive, even though nothing seems to happen in them. In these dreams, she crosses the terrain, quickly but without haste. Perhaps they are like animal dreams.

It is very quiet at night. If Anja happens to wake, it’s on account of the cold. There are some nights when she puts on all her clothes in layers and layers, and it’s still not enough. Then she lies awake for a long time, but it feels as though morning won’t come unless she falls asleep. Hours later, the quiet bleeping of her alarm wakes her. She quickly turns it off. Though she’s a long way from any street or footpath, she’s afraid someone could hear the sound and find her.

Anja has her clothes in the sleeping bag with her, so that they’re not quite so cold in the morning. She gets dressed in the dark and crawls out of her shelter. Outside, she stretches, cleans her teeth, drinks some water, eats a hard-boiled egg and a couple of slices of bread. She stole the food yesterday. She’s due to get her allowance in a week, her father has at least got it together to set up a standing order, but it’s never enough to last her through the end of the month. Carefully she wraps the eggshells in a napkin and packs it in her schoolbag. She doesn’t want to leave any traces.

AN HOUR BEFORE the beginning of classes, Anja was at school. Luckily, the sports hall was already open. It was cold in the girls’ shower room. Anja piled her clothes in a corner and walked right across the changing room, naked as a wild animal. She turned on the water and took a jump back, waited for steam to rise. She showered for a long time, but the hot water seemed only to warm her skin, the chill inside her would take all morning to thaw.

Once she was almost caught. She was just putting her clothes on when she heard the changing room door, footsteps, and the door of the shower room. She stood motionless in the corner, holding her breath. She heard a man clearing his throat and, shortly after, the door falling shut. She waited another fifteen minutes before daring to go out.

She had the afternoon off. Michaela asked Anja if she felt like coming back to her house to eat. She knew her friend had trouble with her parents, and often invited her back. Michaela’s parents treated Anja like a sick child, which she sometimes enjoyed and sometimes found unbearable. After lunch the girls sat on Michaela’s bed together, listening to music and talking, but at three, Anja said she had better go, she had some things to do.

On such clear days she couldn’t stand to be indoors. And the light would start to fade at five. She went to the grocery store. There weren’t many customers, and she had to take care she wasn’t caught. She stole three small cans of tuna, a jar of mayonnaise, and some chocolate biscuits. She bought a pack of gum, to deflect attention. She thought the checkout girl eyed her suspiciously, but perhaps that was just her own bad conscience. It wasn’t until she was back in the forest that she heaved a deep sigh and felt free once more.

SHE HAS CHOSEN her sleeping place carefully, a little dip on an incline. That way she’s hidden from sight, but if she walks or crawls a few steps, she can overlook a big piece of forest. She builds a fireplace from a few rocks. At night the firelight can be seen reflected in the treetops, a little dome of light, but at night she’s all alone in the forest. The last people here are the joggers who come in groups, and in winter have little miners’ lights on their headbands. They make an amazing amount of noise. But noise doesn’t protect you, as Anja learned quickly. You have to be very quiet, learn to disappear in the forest, become invisible and inaudible. She was always puzzled that the walkers hardly ever leave the footpaths, that all of them stick to the paths that others have used before them. Three years in the forest have taught Anja that you can blaze your own trail.

MARCO RECKONED she was unhappy because she didn’t want to go to the cinema with him, and because she didn’t like it when he asked people back to the apartment. Ever since living out here, Anja had stopped seeing her friends—she had long ago broken with her parents—and she didn’t like to visit his family either. Marco concluded she was depressed. He didn’t understand that it all seemed like a waste of time to her, every moment she wasn’t on her own.

For ten years they had lived in the city and done a lot together, gone to clubs and concerts, hung out with friends. Anja had her job, and everything was good. Her time in the forest was long ago, and she felt she could lead a perfectly normal life. It was when she got pregnant that she noticed herself beginning to change. The doctor said that was to be expected, it was hormonal, but Anja could feel something returning to the surface that had long been buried. Without really thinking about it, she had done what was expected of her, and deceived Marco and herself. Now she felt she was waking up, her senses were sharpened, and nothing was obvious anymore. She thought about the forest more often, and about the way she had felt when she was there, that strange mixture of unconsciousness and a higher pitch of being. She began to withdraw.