Peter Stamm - Seven Years

The following months were the worst in my life. The only way I managed to get through them was by doing what I had to do one day at a time. Two weeks after our conversation, Sonia left for Marseilles. The company was put into temporary administration, and every other day the administrator came along, wanting to know this or that. She had called a company meeting right at the start, and made it clear to me that I no longer counted for anything in the firm. She sat at my desk and rummaged through my papers and began sacking people, and cutting costs wherever she could. I had to ask her for every little thing. At least she was trying not to have to shut the company down entirely. Even so, the atmosphere was terrible. There were always two or three employees standing around the coffee machine whispering, only to fall silent when I went by. I could feel their stares when my back was turned, and their hostility, as if it was my fault that the construction industry wasn’t doing well.

The administrator tried to cheer me up. In America, bankruptcy wasn’t dishonorable at all, on the contrary it was proof that you had taken a chance, had had a go at something. This isn’t America, I said. She said I should try and hustle for orders, anything that brought in money, even if it was just licking envelopes. I called Ferdy. I hadn’t heard from him in ages, and it was embarrassing to approach him for work, but I didn’t have any option. He said he was sorry but he couldn’t do anything for me, he would be lucky to get through himself. Come and see us, it would be nice to meet your little girl. I asked how Alice was doing, and we talked on a bit in a desultory way, but the old intimacy couldn’t be restored, my begging mission came between us, and I felt vaguely despised. Chin up, said Ferdy, with a show of cheerfulness, as we said good-bye.

The administrator canceled the contract on my leased car and got me a new, smaller one, a white Opel Astra. Maybe that was the single worst thing of all. Not that I cared that much about cars, but every time I parked the Astra next to her Mercedes, I felt my failure anew.

As soon as she was gone, I sat down at my desk, even though I felt like an impostor. I couldn’t stick it out in the office. Whenever possible, I drove out to the building site in Vilsheim. But there too I noticed how my presence was only disruptive, and a distraction to the workmen. Often I would check into a bar at four in the afternoon and sit through the time until I could collect Sophie from school. We drove home in silence. I made dinner and put her to bed, and then I fiddled around until midnight. I went to sleep for five or six hours, showered, woke Sophie, took her to school, and went to the office, where the administrator was already waiting for me.

The spite of our rivals was bearable. Some were up to their necks in trouble themselves, and avoided direct comment. The whole sector was suffering, everyone was hurting, lots of companies had already let people go. Sonia was right of course, there wouldn’t have been anything for her here. She stayed with Antje in Marseilles, and called every other day or so, but the calls were usually brief. She didn’t want to hear about the company, and we didn’t have much else to talk about. I was pleased each time Sophie took the phone out of my hand to exchange a few words with her mother.

After a month, Sonia came back for a long weekend. It was early August and the weather was beautiful. The world looked lush and peaceful. The green of the trees had already taken on the blackish hue of late summer, and the color of the water in the lake had darkened too. We strolled along the shore, watching the sailboats and looking at the lovely old villas. The kids were playing badminton in the gardens, and from somewhere you could smell the aroma of grilled meat. We read the menus of the lakeside restaurants. Sonia said prices had doubled since the introduction of the euro, we’d be better advised to stay home and eat.

On the way back, Sophie started moaning. Since Sonia’s return she had hardly spoken to her, and wouldn’t hold her hand on our walk. From the very beginning Sophie had a closer relationship with me than with Sonia, and the long separation hadn’t improved matters.

The next morning, Sonia was short-tempered and irritable. We drank wine at lunchtime, and in the afternoon, when she was tired and needed a rest, she scolded Sophie for not being quieter. She blamed me for things, and she was cynical when I tried to talk about the future. Even though she was suntanned, she seemed exhausted, and her features were harder and thinner, and there was something unattractive about her. We squabbled all day, and in bed at night we fell upon each other and made love more passionately than usual, but the sex had something desperate about it, as though we were trying to save ourselves. Stop it, said Sonia, you’re hurting me. I dropped off, and we lay there side by side, sweating and panting. Sonia said I had changed. I didn’t ask what she meant by that. For the first time in all our years together, I felt ashamed in front of her.

In those months I thought about Ivona a lot. When I went out onto the terrace late at night to smoke, I imagined her standing in the dark with her camera, watching me. The notion simultaneously excited and infuriated me. I imagined hauling her in and interrogating her. She was obdurately silent, and tried hiding the camera behind her back. So I stripped her naked, and we slept together on the sofa, or in Sonia’s and my bed. And then, still in the darkness, without her having said a single word to me, I would send her packing.

Once I called Eva’s cell, but I hung up before she could answer. I didn’t want to hear any more about Ivona’s childhood or her family or her life without me. All that bored me, just as Ivona had always bored me with her saints’ lives and schlocky TV movies whose stories she narrated, as if they’d happened to her. When I thought about being with her, it wasn’t the yearning you felt for a friend or lover, it was an almost painful desire, something uncontrollable and brutal. On nights like that I sometimes drove into Munich, and sat in the car in front of Ivona’s building for an hour, in the crazed expectation that she would sense my presence and come out. Of course she never did, and eventually I’d drive home feeling slightly sobered.

When I came back from one of those excursions, Sophie was awake. I heard her loud crying as soon as I set foot in the house. It was a long time before she would settle down, and I was so exhausted from my exaltation that I ended up yelling at her and threatened to leave again if she didn’t cut it out. The whole time I felt as though I was somehow standing outside myself, watching, disgusted by my own heartlessness. But I couldn’t help myself, and that only deepened my fury and my self-disgust.

We had deadline issues on the building site. Perhaps I’d been too optimistic in my planning, perhaps it was the builders’ fault. At our meetings I would urge them on and threaten them with breach-of-contract suits. But by now everyone knew about the moribund state of the business, and when I swore at them, they avoided eye contact and scribbled on pieces of paper. July had been rainy, which contributed to some of the delays. In August the weather improved, and finally things got going on site. But in the middle of the month the plumbers’ foreman fell from a scaffold and was badly hurt. When I got to the site, he had already been taken away. The workers were standing around, talking. No one could explain to me what happened, everyone had just heard a cry and then the sound of the impact. The scaffolding was solid, that was checked up on right away. So what was it? I asked. They said he had been an approachable guy. The ambulance men had carried him away on a gurney. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything, I said. They looked daggers at me and went back to work. The next day we learned that the plumber had broken four vertebrae in his spine. The spinal cord wasn’t affected, but he would be gone for at least a couple of months. At least it was no problem finding someone else in the current climate.