Peter Stamm - Seven Years

Alice had a massage appointment. Ferdy asked if we fancied going to the sauna before dinner. I looked at Sonia. She said she didn’t, but there was no reason for me not to go. She’d meant to get on with some work anyway.

You’re still in pretty good shape, said Ferdy in the changing room, and he smacked his spare tire with his bare hand, I’ve put on some weight. Alice is a fabulous cook.

We had the sauna all to ourselves. Ferdy asked how business was, and I said we couldn’t complain. Berlin is an El Dorado, he said, if you’re half-presentable, then you can earn yourself a golden nose. He and his firm specialized in the construction of office buildings, maybe not the most thrilling things to build, but incredibly well paid. His clients thought strictly short-term, he said, buildings needed to be amortized within three years, nobody nowadays planned any further ahead than that. Good design was okay, but the critical factors were being on time and not going over budget.

He talked about the new type of contract where the price was set before the planning began. That way, if you kept costs down, you could make a hefty profit. The magic formula was guaranteed maximum price, and he got up to splash on some more water.

While we rested after the first round, he said Sonia was looking pretty good too. But she was never his cup of tea, too controlled, too cool. What did I think of Alice? I said nothing. She was still great in the sack, said Ferdy. Then he told me about a young woman journalist who had done an interview with him not long ago, and afterward gone for a meal with him. Then over dessert she said, what’s the point of sitting around here, why don’t you come back to my place and we’ll screw. He laughed deafeningly. That’s what young women are like these days. He had sat up and was rocking back and forth like a maniac. Everything about him, his way of talking and moving, had something driven about it, restless, that I disliked. After the second go-round in the sauna, I said I’d had enough, and we’d see each other at dinner.

I didn’t go upstairs to the room, I went outside. I stood in the darkness in front of the hotel and smoked a cigarillo, and asked myself what the difference was between Ferdy and me. I was driven too, and maybe even more than he was. He had bedded the journalist as if it meant nothing, the two of them had enjoyed a couple of pleasurable hours, and that was it. No hard feelings, as Ferdy said. If anyone had behaved like a son of a bitch, then surely it was me. And yet my relationship with Ivona seemed less contemptible to me than Ferdy’s casual fuck. It was as though Ivona’s love and anguish did something to ennoble me, and give our relationship a seriousness that Ferdy’s infidelity lacked.

Do you ever hear from Rüdiger? Ferdy asked over dinner. I shook my head, and was pretty dumbfounded when Sonia said yes, she sometimes talked to him on the phone. What’s he up to? He’s working in a think tank in Switzerland, said Sonia, but she wasn’t sure exactly what it was about. Something futurological, the private realm, or evolving forms of cohabitation. That’s so typical of him, said Ferdy, anything rather than work.

When I was in bed with Sonia later on, I asked her why she’d never told me she was in touch with Rüdiger. I was the last person who could afford to be jealous, she said. I’m not jealous, I just think it’s odd, after all, he’s my friend as well. I got the impression you didn’t like him, said Sonia. Of course I like him. Things hadn’t been easy for Rüdiger. He had fallen in love with a Swiss art student. Maybe you remember her, she was there at the New Year’s Eve party. Was that the crazy woman who was working on bread? No idea, said Sonia, I didn’t talk to her that night. Elsbeth, I said, that’s what her name was.

Rüdiger had met Elsbeth on his tour of South America; he traveled around with her for a while and then brought her back to Munich. She had applied to the Academy of Arts there, but hadn’t gotten in, so she’d gone back to Switzerland. Rüdiger followed her and lived with her in an artists’ commune in a farmhouse somewhere in the sticks. Full of people, said Sonia, who don’t know what they’re about, and who spend half the day high, and call themselves artists, without ever accomplishing anything. I’ve no idea what Rüdiger saw in the lifestyle. He never got his degree. Instead he’d tried his hand at art as well; along with Elsbeth and the others, he’d run up some socially critical installations in public space somewhere, and scrounged off his parents the whole time.

He wrote to me a couple of times, said Sonia, crazy letters, he seemed to be deliriously happy. I wrote back to warn him, but he took no notice of my alarm, and only repeated how fantastic his life was, and how free and un-tethered he felt.

Eventually Elsbeth got into harder drugs. Rüdiger gave her money, so as to stop her having to get hold of it in other ways. She promised to quit, then she disappeared for days on end, and when she returned she was stuffed full of dope. There’s this park in Zurich where a few thousand addicts live, said Sonia. I nodded, I could remember the pictures in the newspaper. Eventually Rüdiger gave up, said Sonia, I think he accepted that he couldn’t help her. He looked for an apartment and found this job in the think tank, but he’s still obsessed with her to this day. She keeps turning up on his doorstep, asking for money. I think — I hope — he doesn’t give her any. I can’t imagine what’s so spellbinding about a woman like that, and a life without responsibility and without aims. I thought I could see the attraction myself, but said nothing.

We spent another two days in the mountains. We went for walks and swam and went to the sauna. I gradually adjusted to the setting and didn’t feel as nervous as I had at the beginning. Ferdy seemed to calm down a bit as well, and started talking about other things than his money and his success. In time, Sonia and Alice got along better, and on one of our walks Sonia even raised the subject of adoption, though admittedly without going into detail. Can’t you have babies then? asked Alice. Sonia said we didn’t know, all the medical tests were fine. With Alice you just take her to bed, and bingo she’s pregnant just like that, said Ferdy. It made me wonder if he was really so keen on having kids. Alice had always wanted children, even when she was with me she had gone on about it the whole time. I thought I’d ask him about that, but in the end I didn’t. What was he going to say, anyway? In a different context he’d said you could plan a building, but not a life. Sonia had contradicted him, but presumably he was right, and hadn’t done too badly with his philosophy.

In the new year, I visited Ivona to talk about the baby. I’d had to promise Sonia to quit Ivona once and for all, and I was grimly determined to do just that. You must understand, I said, I’ve been married to Sonia for seven years, I love her. Ivona said nothing, and I was forced to remember how right at the beginning of our affair she once said she loved me. Her presence was disagreeable to me again, but I forced myself to be friendly. Did you think about it? I asked her. She said Bruno had promised to help her. I’ll help you too, I said, whether you keep the baby or not. It’s a matter of whether you’ll allow our child to be raised free of worry and in a protective environment or not. If you work the hours that you do, you’ll hardly have any time to look after it.

By now I had visited the social welfare department, where I was told parental rights were automatically with the mother, but if we drafted a joint agreement, then the child might grow up with us. Even then, however, the mother kept her rights to the child. Adoption would be a more effective method. That way the mother’s out of the picture, the social worker said.