Peter Stamm - On A Day Like This

At half past nine, Andreas was standing outside Delphine’s house. It took a while from when he’d rung the bell to the buzz of the door opener. In the courtyard, Andreas looked up, but he couldn’t remember which window was Delphine’s. Slowly he climbed the stairs. When he was on the third floor, he could hear a door opening above him. Delphine stood there on the landing. She was in her nightie, but that didn’t seem to bother her.

“What do you want?” she asked. She looked serious, but not hostile.

“You left your toothbrush behind.”

“Don’t play games with me.”

“I’m sorry,” said Andreas, “about what I said.”

“And that means everything’s all right?”

Delphine looked at his suitcase. She smiled, and asked him if he was intending to move in with her. Andreas said he had to talk to her. Delphine let him in, and led the way into the kitchen. He sat down, she remained standing. She stood very close to him. He put out his hands and grabbed her around the waist. Through the thin material he could feel the warmth of her body. She took a step away from him, and said she was going to have a quick shower and get dressed. While she was gone, Andreas poured himself a glass of water, and drank it in quick gulps.

“To see you sitting there like a poor sinner,” said Delphine, returning. She was wearing the same dress she had worn at their last meeting.

“Weren’t you going to go to the seaside?” asked Andreas.

“Not till the end of the week,” replied Delphine. “But I’m not quite sure whether I’m going yet. My parents are being annoying.”

She hadn’t found an apartment, she said. She no longer even felt sure she wanted to go to Versailles.

“I got my exam results last week. I passed. Now I’ve got a guaranteed job for life. I’m not sure how I feel about that.”

Andreas asked her what else she could do. Delphine looked at him in a bored way, and said that was exactly what her parents were saying. She didn’t know. She felt too young to be tied down like that. She wanted to live.

“I’m going to Switzerland,” said Andreas. “Do you fancy coming with me?”

Delphine seemed less surprised by the question than he was. She asked why didn’t he go to the sea with her. He didn’t say anything. She thought about it for a moment, and then she said OK, she would come. She had never been to Switzerland. When were they leaving?

“I bought a car,” said Andreas. “I can go and collect it today.”

Delphine said she had to take care of a few things, and make some necessary purchases. They arranged to meet at four o’clock. Andreas said he would pick her up.

When Delphine saw the 2CV, she suggested they take her car instead. Andreas shook his head.

“My best friend had a 2CV,” he said. “When I was young, we used to drive to the lake in it.”

They rounded Paris on the Périphérique . The sun was high in the sky, the city swam in a milky haze. The sky and the buildings were one and the same color, only different in shadings. The roads were choked with holiday traffic. Delphine had opened the roof, and turned on the radio. They were listening to a jazz station, and Andreas tried to guess the titles of the standards they played.

“When I was pretty new in Paris, I saw Chet Baker in the New Morning ,” he said. “He was incredibly thin and hollow-cheeked. He sat slumped on a barstool, with his trumpet jammed between his legs. Then he started singing, very quietly, and with a cracked voice. I can’t remember the name of the piece, ‘The Touch of Your Lips’ or ‘She Was Too Good to Me,’ but I can still hear his voice today. After a few bars he breaks off, and makes an angry gesture, and the band starts over. His performance was like the echo of an echo. Shortly after, he died.”

He said he preferred Chet Baker’s late recordings to his early ones. It was no longer a matter of getting the perfect sound. There were cracks, little mistakes and imprecisions. The music was more alive, failure was a possibility, even a certainty. Delphine asked him who this Chet Baker was. She said she didn’t listen to jazz much.

When they came off the Périphérique at the Porte d’Italie, Delphine asked whether they shouldn’t rather drive to Italy or the south of France.

“We can do whatever we want,” she said. “We’re completely free.”

Andreas didn’t say anything. It was a long time since he had last driven, and he had to concentrate on the traffic. Delphine leaned back and looked out the window. Later, they listened to the cassettes Andreas had packed, rock music he had liked once, and chansons that Delphine thought were horrible. Andreas sang along to Francis Cabrel:

J’aimerais quand même te dire

tout ce que j’ai pu écrire

je l’ai puisé à l’encre de tes yeux

Delphine laughed and said her eyes were brown, not blue. Andreas said the music took him back to his youth. At the time he had written poetry when he was in love.

“Erotic poetry?”

“Sentimental would be more like it.”

“I wouldn’t have thought you capable of that,” said Delphine. “A spark of love within a frozen heart.”

She said it in jest, but Andreas was a little surprised, just the same. He had never thought of himself as a cold person, but it wasn’t the first time he had heard such an accusation. C’était l’hiver dans le fond de son coeur , sang Francis Cabrel. Andreas remembered how the song had moved him once, and how he had joined the singer in grieving for the death of the girl who kills herself on the eve of her twentieth birthday. Delphine said she couldn’t bear it, it was too mawkish. She pushed the eject button, and pulled another cassette from the plastic bag at her feet. She put it in, there was a moment’s silence, and then a woman’s warm voice. Part seven: Reflexive pronouns.

Andreas wanted to take the cassette out, but Delphine put her hand over his, and they listened to the woman slowly and clearly speak the examples.

Tomorrow I shall see you again. Tomorrow you will see me again. Tomorrow we will see you again. Tomorrow you will see us again. The parents see their children again. The children see their parents again .

Then a man’s voice, equally warm, intoned:

My day. I get up at half past five in the morning. I always get up at that time, because I have to be in the office by eight. It is only on weekends that I can sleep in. After getting up, I go to the bathroom, clean my teeth and shower, first warm, and then cold at the finish. After that, I feel thoroughly awake, and well. Then I get dressed and comb my hair. I go to the kitchen to have breakfast. I make myself some coffee, eat bread with jam, or cheese or sausage …

The man’s voice had something strangely cheerful about it. It sounded as though he had yielded completely to the course of such days and years, a destiny without subordinate clauses.

“I me, you you,” said Delphine, and then she repeated it, running it together like one word.

“You are the I-me,” she said.

“I-you,” said Andreas. He took the cassette out of the player, and the radio came back on. He asked her if she had understood the text. Most of it, she said, she wasn’t surprised no one wanted to learn German if that was how they taught it. Sausage for breakfast.

At Beaune, they left the Autoroute. A little outside the center, Andreas found an Ibis hotel, and parked.

“I imagined my holiday a bit more romantic than this,” said Delphine.

Andreas said he didn’t feel like driving into the town. Anyway, they had an early start tomorrow.

They took a room, and went back out to pick up their suitcases.

“They’ve even got a pool,” said Delphine. “What have you got in that bundle?”