Peter Stamm - We're Flying

THE DIFFERENT PLACES are connected by paths that are not logging roads and not trails, which she will only use at night or in bad weather. They are paths known only to her, that she has discovered over the months and years, and that she has walked again and again, safe paths that are hard to spot. She has hiding places where she keeps her clothes, her school things, one or two personal items, little dumps with cans of food she has stolen or bought, those few times she had money to spend, food she can eat cold when it’s raining and she can’t start a fire. Early on, she sometimes lost things, she isn’t sure why, maybe wild animals took them. Since then, she has become more cautious, more adept. In winter she heaps leaves on the hiding places to keep the food from freezing. Winter is the most difficult time, but also the most beautiful. When there is snow on the ground, and she has the forest all to herself for days on end. The only thing she’s afraid of is that her footprints might give her away.

Once all humans used to live that way, she told the school psychologist. It’s the others who’re not normal, sitting in their houses behind their lowered blinds. He looked at her pityingly, and she thought, you wouldn’t last a week in the forest. There it was never a question of why. Everything was just the way it was, food was food, sleep was sleep, warmth was warmth.

The psychologist looked at her the whole time. When she walked out, he followed just behind. He had a little shiny car, he offered to give Anja a lift somewhere, but she refused. When he drove off, she saw the child seat in the back, and a little sticker in the rear window in the shape of Lake Constance. Anja felt nothing but contempt for him.

SHE NEVER MANAGED to find out whether the hunter had betrayed her or whether it was her own fault. Perhaps she had dropped her guard. The forest wasn’t about power or fleetness of foot, the only thing that mattered was alertness, attention, living wholly in the present. That was an advantage animals had over humans, for them memory was only experience, and not another world in which you could lose yourself.

It was just before her final exams, Anja was eighteen and could do as she pleased. Even so, one morning a policeman visited the classroom to ask her some questions. He was friendly enough, but the fact that afterward they all spoke to her as to an invalid, that offended her. Michaela’s parents offered to put her up temporarily. She declined and moved back in with her parents, who were intimidated by the police and treated her like a stranger. After a few weeks, she managed to persuade her father to pay the rent for a staff room in a nurses’ hostel. No sooner had she moved in than she stopped going to school. It was spring, and the exams were in fall. Anja was a good student, and everyone urged her to stick it out, but she stood her ground.

It wasn’t difficult to find a job. Anja had always spent a good deal of time in the bookstore when she was feeling low, or it was raining. The bookseller knew she had no money, and had given her reading copies of recent publications and asked her afterward how she’d liked them. Anja had done errands for her, or minded the shop when she had to be away for a while, to go shopping or to a doctor’s appointment. She had been pleased when Anja turned to her to ask if she would take her on as an assistant.

During her training, Anja lived in an attic room above the bookstore. Apart from the customers and her boss, she had very little contact with people. Erwin visited the shop from time to time, and now it was she who was recommending things to him, books, novels, stories, to divert him from his introverted musings. Eventually he stopped coming. To begin with, she didn’t even notice, later she heard from another customer, who had also been to school with her, that a forestry worker had died and Erwin had been responsible. He had been cutting down a tree, the other fellow wasn’t paying attention and had been crushed. The customer explained how there had been an inquiry but no charges had been filed. Anja wondered about writing Erwin, but she didn’t know what to say, and eventually it was too late for that. Soon after, she heard that he had given up his job, and begun to train as a psychiatric nurse. When she bumped into him on the street a few months later, he had joined a free church, and wanted to talk to her about God. She gave him the brush-off. Back home she cried over him.

HAVE YOU HAD YOUR BREAK TODAY? Anja sees the poster everywhere. She has taken the kids to McDonald’s. The little one is telling her how his neighbor gave him an apple to eat. That was months ago, and he’s told her a dozen times, but it doesn’t bother him. The only significance the story can have for him is that it’s something he remembers. To Anja, it’s as though he’s using his memory to escape from her. She watches a world come into being in him to which she has no access. After lunch, the two boys argue over the presents that came with their Happy Meals. One of them wants the other’s, but he’s not prepared to swap. Anja sends them out, and tells the older one to take his brother to kindergarten. He sulks and fusses, and only agrees after she promises him an ice cream.

When the children are gone, she gets herself some coffee, then she goes to the shopping center. This is her territory, she knows every nook and cranny of it by now. She walks through the shops as though she worked there. On the ground floor there’s a discount bookstore, it’s a chain, and the stock is all best sellers and cheaply produced coffee table books on popular topics. Marco thought she might apply for a job helping out there, just a few hours a week. He probably thought it would do her good. But Anja has had enough of books. Ever since they’ve been living out here, most of life strikes her as a waste of time, especially television. Only music is an occasional exception.

She likes the provisional quality of the buildings in the shopping center, which will be knocked down after a couple of decades and replaced by others. She likes the piles of merchandise, the soulless items sealed in plastic. She is capable of walking around for hours on end and picking up the things on display. She tests the fabric of clothes, sniffs them, tries them on. In the food sections, she opens packaging and quickly crams some of the contents into her mouth.

The customers in the stores seem somehow incomplete, they are missing something in their present, provisional setting. Anja doesn’t perceive them as people, not even the salespersons. On the rare occasions she is addressed, she gives a start and mutters something, No thanks, just having a look, and goes on her way.

She concentrates so hard on her walking that it ceases to be automatic. Her sensitivity becomes extreme, the cracks between the tiles irritate the soles of her feet. When she comes home after such expeditions, she is exhausted and can barely tolerate the children, and yells at them over everything and nothing.

FOR A TIME, Anja lives in a clump of pines so dense that almost no light gets in. Only the moss on the forest floor glows with a fluorescent green. She has been on edge for months, and this is the safest place. Like a diseased animal, she has retreated here. It’s difficult to force herself to go to school every day, the only thing that gets her up in the morning is her fear of being found. When Michaela asks her to come around after school, Anja shakes her head. She spends whole afternoons in her sleeping bag under an old army groundsheet that she bought at a flea market. The ground under her is covered with a dense layer of pine needles that set up a little cracking and rustling. It’s been a long winter, in some spots the snow is still there in late March. Once it’s thawed away, Anja dares to leave her pine refuge. She sets up on the edge of a clearing, on a little piece of boggy meadow ringed by trees that’s hard to get to. Only animals come here, and sometimes a hunter. A week before Easter it finally gets warm, and the forest seems to change from one day to the next.