Peter Stamm - We're Flying

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.

She went to the bathroom, filled the tub, and got undressed. The mirror misted over with condensation, and the smell of pine needles filled the air. She turned off the water, and the apartment suddenly seemed very quiet. Then she heard footsteps and Simon’s voice through the half-open door. He said, I’m just going downstairs for the bottle of wine. I thought you’d gone already, said Lara, and she poked her head through the crack, and he kissed her on the lips and tried to barge the door open, but she held it shut. They kissed again. See you in a minute, said Lara. It was odd, she still felt a little ashamed in front of him. When they went to bed, she would get changed in the bathroom and slip under the sheets next to him in her nightie. She would wait impatiently for him to slide across to her, but she would never dream of taking the initiative.

Before they moved in together, it had all been pretty complicated. She introduced Simon to her parents fairly early on in the game, and they liked him, but he never spent the night under her roof. Lara would have felt ashamed of sleeping with him in her childhood bedroom, she would have been scared of her parents walking in on them, or hearing them, even though they weren’t noisy in bed. The times they had slept together were at Simon’s. Lara had always felt tense, and jumped at the smallest sound. In the summer, they had done it in the forest a couple of times, but that was uncomfortable, and Lara had felt just as nervous. She had yet to get used to the new freedom. Even now, she was still scared someone would see them or hear them. Sometimes, when Simon was lying on top of her, she pulled the covers up over his head. When he tried to pull them down, she held on to them and said, I’ll get cold.

She basked in the warm water, and thought about what still had to be done in the apartment, what they were still missing. She would have liked a bedside table, but that didn’t make much sense, as they didn’t even have a bed frame. They had seen a colonial-style bed in the furniture store, a sort of four-poster in poplar, with white tulle curtains. A dream, said the salesman, who had approached them and was looking expectantly at them both. That bed came with fitted tables, and a wardrobe as well. But for the moment it was more than they could afford, and Lara wasn’t sure if Simon liked it, or if it wasn’t a bit girly for him. When they went to see the beds at IKEA, Simon’s only question each time had been, Is it strong? Will it hold up? He probably didn’t mean it like that, but Lara still felt embarrassed in front of the salesman. We don’t need to buy everything at once, she said. So now they had a mattress and box spring on the floor.

After twenty minutes she got out of the bath and pulled the plug. She dried herself on one of the big yellow bath towels. It wasn’t actually a color she liked, that slighty off-, mustardy yellow. But you couldn’t argue about the quality, the quality was excellent. She had put them through the wash a couple of times, and they still felt brand new. Lara had to think about what Simon said: Forever is a long time. Presumably the towels would outlast their relationship, she thought, and that gave her a shock. She loved Simon, and he loved her, but was there any guarantee that he would still love her in five or ten years’ time? Her notions of the future were both very precise and very vague. She wanted children, and a home, and she wanted to go on working part-time once the children were there. In a few years she would get her promotion, and maybe one day she would become branch manager. But all that seemed very far off, a different life. Sometimes she would ask herself if Simon had the same sort of dreams as she did. It made her suspicious when he said, Let’s just see, que sera sera , we’re still young. In fact he felt as strange to her as this apartment that was only slowly turning into home. She never knew exactly what he wanted, he didn’t talk much about himself, it was only when he was together with his friends that he seemed perfectly natural and relaxed.

She wrapped the towel around her, rinsed her hair in the sink, and put it up. Suddenly she felt a longing for Simon, she wanted to throw her arms around him, lie in bed with him, and press herself against him. She went to the kitchen, but he wasn’t there. Simon, she called, and went into the living room and then the bedroom. Simon? He must still be down in the restaurant, he was sure to be back any moment. She sat at the table, leafed through the free paper she had picked up at the bus station. One ex–Miss Switzerland wanted to climb Kilimanjaro to raise money for a children’s cancer hospital, Prince William had worn a toupee for a portrait photographer, or so at least the newspaper claimed, an American was put to death for a murder he had committed twenty-five years ago. Under the headline Gruesome Find on Lake, there was a story about a trout fisherman who had stumbled upon a dead body in the water just offshore. The policemen who pulled the body in were quoted as saying that the dead man had been missing for a couple of months. Presumably it was suicide, though accidental death was also a possibility. The water temperature wasn’t above thirty-eight or forty degrees, if you fell in you wouldn’t last more than a few minutes.

A drop of water fell from Lara’s hair to the picture of the yachting marina where the body had been found. With a shudder she pushed the newspaper away. She had to think about that man being found in the water no more than a few hundred yards away, while she and Simon were getting moved in, or eating their supper, or making love. She felt cold in her towel. There was only a gas heater in the apartment, and the windows were not exactly insulated. Lara went into the kitchen and put on the water for ravioli. She took two plates from the cupboard and a couple of forks off the draining board, and scrubbed at a stain on one of the units, but it wouldn’t budge. The kitchen was from the seventies, and you could scrub away at it as much as you liked, it never got completely clean. Lara went to the bathroom, blow-dried her hair, and put on some clothes.

SHE SNEAKED DOWN the creaking staircase. She didn’t turn on the landing light, she didn’t want to be seen. The music had stopped, and the voices had quieted down too. She had almost reached the bottom when the door to the bar opened, and she saw the backlit silhouette of an enormous man. At the same moment, the light went on. The man had a flushed complexion, he pulled the door shut behind him, and passed her without a word on his way to the gents, as though he hadn’t seen her. The voice of the landlady was loud and distinct. He didn’t recognize him right away, she was saying, because the man was lying face down. In summer he would probably have bobbed up sooner. Lara pushed open the door to the bar and stepped inside.