Peter Stamm - Seven Years

On the day Ivona’s letter arrived I happened not to have my car with me. I had belatedly taken it to the mechanic that morning to have summer tires put on, and had gone to work by subway. It was a fine day, and after work I went to the station on foot, and was thinking about Ivona. The thought that she was still living in Munich was somehow disagreeable to me. I hadn’t seen her for almost seven years. It was surprising that we’d never bumped into each other in all that time, on the street or on a bus or in a store. I was sure I would recognize her instantly if I did happen to see her. Perhaps she was observing me, the way she did back then in the beer garden. I stopped with a jolt and spun around. A man who was following hard on my heels brushed past me and muttered, asshole. Not a trace of Ivona.

It had been my intention to tell Sonia about the letter and ask for her advice, but when I got home I saw that she still had her migraine, and I decided not to. She would only worry herself needlessly, or get all suspicious or something. I would call Ivona, meet her somewhere if it wasn’t possible otherwise, and lend her the money, provided the amount she needed wasn’t too much. And that would be an end to the matter.

Sonia said she was feeling a little better, and tomorrow she would go back to work. She had even cooked something. I’m just going to make a quick call, I said, and went to the basement where we had set up a little office.

I shut the door and rang the number in Perlach. A man’s voice answered. I asked for Ivona. Just one moment, he said, and I heard sounds, a door, a hushed conversation. Then there was silence, and I knew Ivona was on the line. I got your letter, I said. I didn’t want to, said Ivona. Want to what? Ask you for help. Silence again. I’ll see what I can do, I said. I’m not swimming in money. Silence from Ivona. It was no good, I’d have to see her. I asked if we could meet. The man came on the line again, said Ivona was sick, if I wanted to see her, I’d have to go there. His voice sounded dismissive, but I was pleased Ivona appeared to have someone looking after her. I asked who I was talking to. Hartmeier, he said, a friend.

The following afternoon I went to Ivona’s. I told Sonia I had a meeting, and she nodded and said she’d probably stay longer at the office, a lot had accumulated in the course of her absence.

Ivona lived in an apartment building in a characterless sixties development. The buildings stood right on the road, clustered around a green space with a few trees and a neglected playground. The facade was grimy and sprayed with cryptic graffiti next to the entrance, but other than that it was in surprisingly good condition. I rang the bell and after a while a bluff-looking man with gray hair came down the stairs and opened the door for me. Hartmeier, he said, extending his hand. We were expecting you. I looked at my watch, I was only a few minutes late. He took me to the third floor, to a small, cluttered apartment. He knocked on a door and went in. I stayed in the hallway and listened to him say, with false friendliness in his voice, that he had to go. You sure you’ll be all right? Then he came out and held the door open for me. When you leave, make sure she locks the door after you.

I entered the bedroom. The curtains were drawn, and it took me a moment to make out Ivona in the dimness. She was sitting on a chair beside the window. This room too was stuffed with junk. The air was stale and far too hot. I walked up to Ivona and gave her my hand. She had changed in the years of not seeing her. Her face had grown puffy, her hair was thinner. She was wearing an ugly quilted wrap of no particular color, and white socks under plastic sandals. She might be only two years older than me, but she was an old woman.

I had known her body in all its details, the heavy, pendulous breasts, the rolls of fat at her neck, her navel, the stray black hairs on her back, and her many moles. I knew how she smelled and tasted, how her body responded to touch, I knew its repertoire of familiar and less familiar movements, but when I saw Ivona sitting there, I had to acknowledge that I didn’t know the least thing about her, that she was a complete stranger to me.

She told me quite freely, almost pleasurably, about her condition before the impending operation. For some time now she had had very heavy bleeding and cramping during her period. The doctor had found myomas, harmless growths in her womb, and instead of putting her on hormone treatments for years, he had suggested having the womb and ovaries removed. A perfectly routine operation, she said, the removal would be done vaginally, there was no need to open her up. It felt strange to hear the technical medical terms in her mouth. She talked about her body as though it were a malfunctioning machine. She had no fear of the operation, she said, but what made her sad was the knowledge that she would be unable to have children afterward. Thirty-eight is leaving it a bit late for babies anyhow, I thought, but didn’t say anything.

Are you with someone? I asked. Herr Hartmeier is just a friend, she said. She had the flu, that’s why she was home. And he looked in on her from time to time and checked up on how she was. She asked me if I wanted some tea, and I followed her into the kitchen and watched her heat up water and take a tea bag from one of the cupboards. Her way of moving had something coquettish about it, I could think of no other word for it. Presumably, I was the only man who had seen her naked apart from her father and the gynecologist, I thought. And suddenly I had the overwhelming desire to strip her naked. I came up to her from behind, and opened her wrap, and let it fall to the ground. She was wearing a thin short nightie underneath, maybe it was the same one she had years ago. I pulled that over her head, and took off her underthings too. She turned to face me. Her features were completely expressionless.

I was pretty sure Ivona had never slept with a man, and that her panting wasn’t excitement but fear. I knew I was making a mistake that could not be amended, but I was reeling with desire. I pulled her into the bedroom and onto the bed, and she lay down, and I lay on top of her. Again, I had the sense of Ivona’s body having a life of its own, that when it was naked it was quite divorced from her character, and was capable of unexpected responsiveness, a mute language all its own. While Ivona kept her eyes tightly closed, and her face looked as if it were asleep, her body was awake and reacted to every touch, every glance almost, with a shaking, a trembling, tension or relaxation, in a way that both excited and repulsed me.

At five I called Sonia in the office, and explained I was running late, the meeting was taking longer than expected. Then I went back to the bedroom. Ivona lay naked on the bed, her pose had something obscene about it. I lay down on top of her and she shut her eyes again.

It was almost seven before I could tear myself away. She was in the bath, and I was sitting on a kitchen stool, feeling liberated. I could hear noises in the apartment over us, and thought about the people who lived here, the human hordes who filled the subways in the morning and sat in front of the TV at night, who sooner or later fell ill from their labor and the hopelessness of their efforts. A camp of the living and the dead, as Aldo Rossi had once described the city, where only a few symbols manage to survive. Undecipherable references to people who had once lived there. I had always been half-afraid of the faceless masses for which we put up skyscrapers. I remembered the topping-out parties when we celebrated the completion of a project with the workers. How they sat hunkered together and looked at the rest of us, the investors and builders and architects, almost with scorn. Or when I visited one of these projects years later, when I saw how the buildings had been taken over — laundry hanging out to dry on the balconies, bicycles dumped higgledy-piggledy outside the doors, little flowerbeds arranged in defiance of any understanding of landscaping — then too I didn’t feel annoyance so much as fear and a kind of fascination with life swarming and seething and escaping our plans, the memories that sprouted here and merged with the buildings in some indivisible unity. Then I understood the remark that a building wasn’t finished until it had been torn down or lay in ruins.