Peter Stamm - Seven Years

I filled notebooks with confused thoughts and designs for enormous purposeless constructions, archives, cenotaphs, fortresses half sunk into the ground, almost windowless rooms that light barely penetrated.

When, quoting Aldo Rossi, I said in a letter to Sonia that every summer felt like my last, she shot back that to her, this summer had felt like her first. She had never cared for Rossi’s melancholy and fixation on the past. She believed the world could be transformed by architecture, and when I objected that all the great things had already been built, she mocked me and said I was just trying to excuse my lack of ambition.

Our shared apartment was on the second floor of a tenement building on a narrow street. As long as Sonia had lived there, I had always enjoyed visiting, but since she moved out, I felt rather ill at ease in the rooms. The arrangement of space was somehow inharmonious, and it didn’t get enough light. My room was long and narrow and disproportionally high. I had set up my table in front of the window, but even so, whenever I sat down to work, I felt simultaneously exposed and jammed in. The only heating in the apartment was an oil-burning stove in the living room, and when I closed my door for privacy, I noticed the room got cold very quickly. So when I was at home, I spent most of my time lying on my mattress, which was in one corner of the floor, and read or dozed.

My living with Birgit and Tania turned out to be problematic. Sonia had talked them into taking me in, but actually neither of them wanted to share with a man. In the case of Birgit, who was just gearing up for her thesis, I had often had the feeling before that she resented me, but when I raised it with Sonia, she only laughed and shook her head, and said Birgit had grown up with two sisters, she just wasn’t used to encountering a man outside the bathroom door every morning. Tania, my other roommate, worked as a medical assistant at the hospital in Bogenhausen. To begin with, we had gotten along rather well, but lately she’d gotten into discussions about drugs and upbringing and expressed arch-conservative views that I hadn’t expected in her. She was away for weeks on end at congresses or courses, and each time she returned, she had a new pet theme, feminism or antiauthoritarian rearing or homosexuality, which she would proceed to blame for the approaching end of the world. Shortly after Sonia left, Tania started talking obsessively about AIDS, and developed an absurd preoccupation with hygiene. She brought back bottles of disinfectant spray and left them out in the kitchen and bathroom, and each of us got his own individual shelf in the fridge, and there was no more sharing of food. Then Tania started bringing home people who were put up in the living room, and who tried to convert Birgit and me to their opinions. It turned out that they were all members of a dubious anthroposophical society. Birgit would often argue with them, while I retreated to my room or demonstratively switched on the TV and turned the volume so high that it wasn’t possible to conduct a conversation over it. The atmosphere in the apartment deteriorated. Even so, I was only halfhearted about looking for a new place to live.

Most of the people I knew from college had moved away. Ferdy had found a job in Berlin and Alice had gone with him, Rüdiger was touring Latin America and sending back postcards from Buenos Aires and Brasília. I envied him, not so much the trip itself as the energy to have undertaken it in the first place. I had the feeling of being the last person left in the city. That’s the only way I can explain the fact that at the end of October, I started seeing Ivona again.

It was very simple. I told them in the office that I had a dentist’s appointment, and went to the bookstore just before closing time. Ivona came out from the back of the store, just as on the occasion of my first visit. She stood silently behind the counter and straightened the saints’ pictures and the little books compiled from nature photos and quotations from Scripture. She wore beige knickerbockers and a sort of folksy embroidered blouse. I could feel her eyes on me, but when I looked over, she looked away. I felt an incredible desire to sleep with her, in the midst of this Christian kitsch and self-help and inspirational literature. Are you on your own? I asked. She didn’t reply. I lifted the curtain and peered into the back room. In spite of the drawn curtains, the space was murky this time. The window opened onto a tiny yard that probably caught the sun only for an hour or two in the middle of the day. In the center of the room stood massive old oak desks, and on the walls were shelves containing cardboard boxes and stacks of plastic-sealed books. There was a smell of dust and paper, and more faintly of candle wax and human sweat. I sat down on one of the desks. Ivona followed me, and stopped in the entry. Come on, I said. She said she was closing in five minutes. The bell chimed in the shop, and Ivona disappeared. I heard her speaking, and couldn’t understand a word, it must have been Polish. I looked through a chink in the curtain and saw a pretty blond woman roughly Ivona’s age. The two of them clasped hands, and the blond woman was laughingly trying to persuade Ivona of something, who shook her head, and seemed to be explaining. I sat down on the desk again, and waited. Shortly afterward, the bell went again, and then I heard the key turn in the lock.

I had expected Ivona would complain to me about what had transpired at our last meeting, or that I hadn’t been in touch for such a long time, but she stopped an arm’s length in front of me, and stared into space. I stood up, took a step toward her, and embraced her. She didn’t resist, just freed herself quickly to switch off the light, and pull the curtain across.

I took off her pants and underwear, and kissed and stroked her. She moaned and turned her head from side to side. She almost looked to me as though she was faking, but I didn’t care. I got undressed, and we lay on the bare floor, and Ivona started kissing and stroking me back. Only when I tried to enter her did she refuse me. When I finally turned away from her, she whispered something in Polish. I didn’t ask what she was saying, I could imagine it well enough, and I didn’t want to hear it. Don’t go yet, she said. I’ve got lots of things to do, I said. Do you want something to eat? she asked. I said I didn’t have the time, and got up. Will you come again? Yes, I said, and I went.

I went back to the office to finish a couple of things. My boss had already left. At eight I called Sonia. She wasn’t home. Two hours later, after I was finally finished with my work, I tried again. This time, Sonia picked up, and I asked her if she was so busy. But I wasn’t jealous, and I listened patiently as she told me about some new project she was working on. Then I talked to her about my work. Sonia said she hadn’t heard me in such a good mood for ages. And it was true, I was perfectly calm, and made jokes, and told her I missed her. I miss you too, said Sonia. We’ll see each other at Christmas. I was astonished not to feel guilty at all — on the contrary, I felt more connected to Sonia than I had in a long time.

When I turned up in the shop the next time, Ivona asked me to go back to the student residency with her. It was one of the few times she ever asked me for anything.

From then on, I only saw her in the dorm. Her room seemed like it might belong to an old woman or a little girl. It was stuffed full of junk, faked memories of a life that hadn’t happened. At the head of the bed was a small plastic crucifix, the walls were covered with postcards and framed Bible sayings. On the bed were any number of soft toys in garish colors, the kind you can buy at railway station kiosks. On the floor were piles of romance novels, Christian manuals, and Polish magazines. In amongst them were scattered clothes and tights, clipped recipes, and cheap costume jewelry. The pokiness, the untidiness, and the absence of any aesthetic value only seemed to intensify my desire. There was nothing there to inhibit me, by reminding me of my life and my world. It was as though I became someone else in that room, an object in Ivona’s chaotic collection of treasured and neglected knickknacks.