Peter Stamm - On A Day Like This

As they walked into the house, Bettina was just setting a fifth place. She must have seen the visitor through the window. She too seemed to be so happy about his presence that Andreas felt a little embarrassed. She hugged him. Maia had grown into a pretty girl. She was taller than Bettina, and had a confident air about her. Lukas was a couple of heads shorter, a quiet boy, who reminded Andreas of his brother. He gave them each a bar of chocolate, and said he hoped they weren’t too old for such things. Maia laughed and said you were never too old for chocolate.

Over lunch, they talked about people from the village. Walter said next door’s pine had been struck by lightning, and had had to be cut down. Some of the houses were now occupied by the children that had gone to school with him and Andreas. The two old sisters in the corner house had moved into the assisted-living center long ago. One of them had died since, said Bettina. Walter said that was news to him.

“But I told you,” said Bettina. “I went to the funeral. It must be a year ago now.”

“What about their shop?”

“It was sold. It belongs to a chain now. But it’s not doing any better than before.”

At the edge of the village, a shopping center had been built, Walter explained. The small local shops had trouble competing. There was one butcher shop left in the village. They counted the number of butcher shops there had once been, and they got to seven.

After lunch, the children grabbed their chocolate, and ran upstairs to their rooms. Walter called work to take the afternoon off. The conversation took a while, there was something he needed to explain to a colleague. Bettina put on water for coffee. She leaned against the stove, and said their living there now must feel strange to him.

“If I know Walter, you won’t have changed many things.”

Bettina laughed, and then she was serious again. She said the death of their father had affected Walter very badly.

“If at least he’d talked about it. But he didn’t say anything, not one word. He continued to function, like a machine. At first, when we moved in here, it was terrible. You couldn’t change a thing, not take a picture off the walls, nothing. He made us put all our things down in the basement. If I moved a piece of furniture, in the evening he would move it back to its old place, and not say a word. It was back and forth. Eventually, he gave up, and let me do some of what I wanted. But if it had been up to him, everything would still look exactly the way it did then.”

“The garden reminded me of before,” said Andreas. “Even though it was never as neglected as it is now.”

He said they had been through a lot, living in this house, but he couldn’t see it with the same eyes as then.

“Everything’s still there, I remember every detail. But it doesn’t have the same importance anymore.”

“There are still a couple of boxes of yours upstairs,” said Bettina. “School things, I think. Books and toys.”

Andreas said they could throw them away.

“Don’t you even want to look at them?”

“I looked through some old notes not long ago. It was weird. At times it felt as though I’d written them the day before, at times it was like someone from another planet. And I have to say neither kind was at all interesting.”

Bettina said she would hang on to the things. Maybe he would change his mind. There was enough room. Andreas asked after the children. Maia was taking her final exams next spring, said Bettina. She was very good at math. With Lukas, she didn’t know yet. He was just starting high school. There was plenty of time to decide. He was a dreamy boy, she said, like a child in many ways. He reminded her of Andreas.

“Of me?”

“That’s what Walter says too. Didn’t you see the similarity? He has your eyes. Your father’s eyes.”

They drank coffee in the garden. Walter asked how Andreas was feeling, and he said he had a persistent cough, but he thought he was getting over it. Apart from that, everything was fine.

“Do you still smoke as much?” asked Bettina.

“I’ll stop at some point.”

“That’s what they all say.”

Andreas said he’d rather talk about something else. Walter asked if he wanted to see their parents’ grave. Yes, said Andreas, why not. When Walter went into the house to get his jacket, Bettina asked about Andreas’s cough. He said he had had to take a couple of tests, but had left before the results came through.

“You’re worried.”

“Yes,” said Andreas. “I’m worried.”

“It doesn’t change it whether you know it or not. But you don’t need me to tell you that.”

“I just wanted to take care of a few things first,” said Andreas.

Then Bettina said her father-in-law had been a wonderful man. She often thought of the last Christmas they had spent together.

“I phoned him about a month before he died,” said Andreas. “I meant to visit him, but I left it too late. No one expected him to fade as quickly as he did.”

“He was always very pleased when you called.”

Andreas said the funeral had been awful. It was like being in a bad film. He hadn’t understood what was going on around him.

“I think I was closer to him than I ever realized. I didn’t see much of him in his last years, and when I called him I was often stuck for things to say. But then I would see him in the things that I said and did myself.”

“He told me once he wished he could have had a life like yours,” said Bettina. “You really are like him.”

There were steps on the gravel, and Andreas asked Bettina not to mention his illness to Walter. It would only alarm him.

“Do you have someone you can talk to?” asked Bettina.

“Yes,” said Andreas. “I think so.”

“You know you can come here any time. You can stay with us too, if you can’t manage anymore. We’ve got plenty of room.”

“Things aren’t that bad yet,” said Andreas. “But thank you for offering.”

She said she wished he got in touch more often, and he promised to try. He saw her eyes were misting over. When Walter joined them, she turned away.

Andreas said he would go from the cemetery straight back to the hotel. He was leaving tonight. Walter said that was a shame.

Andreas went up to Bettina. She turned and hugged him. Then they all went into the house together. Walter called the children.

“Andreas has to go,” he said.

They walked to the cemetery. Andreas asked Walter how he was doing, what he was up to, and Walter started telling him. He told him about the vacation in Sweden that they had just returned from, and a canoeing trip in the rain. He made some comment about good-looking Swedish women. Andreas had never known Walter to be so talkative.

Walter said these might be their last vacations as a family all together. Even this year, Maia would rather have gone hitchhiking with a girlfriend. Next year she was finishing school, and she might go to France for a few months to learn the language. She had been very taken with Paris, that time they had all descended on Andreas. Lukas had no idea what he wanted to do, but there was plenty of time to decide that. Bettina was thinking of going back to work, with the children out of the house. She was taking a computer course.

“And what about you?” asked Andreas.

“I’m fine,” said Walter. “My promotion has changed a few things.”

“You never told me.”

Walter gestured dismissively. That was a couple of years ago now. He said it wasn’t a dream job. He had often thought of doing something else. But with the economy as it was, it wasn’t a time to take risks. He imagined he would probably stay with the same firm until he retired. He laughed sheepishly.