Peter Stamm - We're Flying

The ash falls onto the rock, a few flakes of it break away, tumble down over the rock, driven by the wind and the unevenness of the granite, and fall over an edge and out of sight. The wind, coming off the land, has picked up. The few people walking on the beach are all heading toward me, as though we had arranged to meet here, only subtly changing direction when they have almost reached me, and walking past me. The flat waves make a feeble splash as they crest and spread out. In the distance there’s the wail of a siren. One man flies a kite, another walks over the beach with a metal detector. He walks slowly to and fro, following some system that only he knows. It’s twenty to three on October 21, 2002.

The granite block is one of several that have been dropped into the sea every couple of hundred yards or so. A Spanish-speaking family has stopped near me, a man, a woman, and two little girls. They laugh, talk, feed the gulls, which are squawking greedily and fighting for pieces of bread with jagged motions.

Down by the sea, two young women have been taking pictures of each other. Then they draw nearer. One walks past me, the other asks if she can take my picture. Her companion stops to watch. Her eyes are staring and the corners of her mouth are turned down with impatience or dismay. Her face looks like a skull.

The one taking the picture stands with feet apart. The camera masks her face. She doesn’t take forever framing the image, just squeezes the release, once, and again. I ask, Do you want me to smile? She shakes her head. No, she says. Just the way you are. That’s perfect.

PETER STAMM was born in 1963, in Weinfelden, Switzerland. He is the author of the novel Agnes , and numerous short stories and radio plays. His novels Unformed Landscape, On a Day Like This , and Seven Years , and the collection In Strange Gardens and Other Stories are available from Other Press. His prize-winning books have been translated into more than thirty languages. He lives outside of Zurich.

MICHAEL HOFMANN has translated the works of Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, and Peter Stephan Jungk. He is the author of several books of poems and a book of essays, Behind the Lines , and is the editor of the anthology Twentieth-Century German Poetry . In 2012, he was awarded the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Florida and London.