Peter Stamm - In Strange Gardens and Other Stories

In the store on the ground floor of our building I bought the Sunday edition of the New York Times, and spent the rest of the day reading it. When I sat down on the window seat in the evening to smoke a cigarette, I noticed a window with a red light in the house opposite. I saw the slender form of a woman, leaning down over a lamp to switch it off. Just afterwards, there was a flash at the back of the room. Then the room remained dark.

I wasn’t thinking about the woman in the house opposite when I sat down in the window again for a smoke a few days later. The room was once again illuminated by the red standard lamp, and once again I saw her. She was moving slowly about the room, as if dancing. Her window was open but I couldn’t hear music, only the sounds of traffic from Broadway and the occasional rumble of the subway on its viaduct. I smoked a second cigarette. The woman stopped dancing. As she shut the window, I had the brief impression that she was looking across at me. But she was about twenty yards away, and I could only make out her outline. She draped a cloth over the lamp, and then she left the part of the room that I could see into.

Down on the street, some kids were rocking parked cars till their alarms went off. The wail of the sirens mingled with the noise of the city, but no one seemed to pay it any mind. I tossed my butt down on the street, shut the window, and lay down.

Chris came from Alabama. He had been living in New York for several years. He had studied politics, and had a badly paid job with a church organization. Eiko was still studying. She described herself as a heathen to irritate Chris. She was a Marxist and a feminist.

“If my mother calls,” Eiko told me once, “you’re not to say anything about Chris. She doesn’t know I have a boyfriend. I told her you’re both gay.”

Chris laughed, and I laughed as well. “And what if she comes by?” I asked.

“My parents live out on Long Island,” said Eiko. “They never come to Manhattan.”

Sometimes I went out for a beer with Chris. Then he would complain about Eiko’s political views and her stubbornness, and the way she had a different view of their relationship from his. He loved her, but he wasn’t sure she loved him back. “She doesn’t believe in anything,” he said, “not even me.”

I had stopped going out with my colleagues. After work I usually went straight home. Then I would sit in the window and smoke, and sometimes I saw my dancer.

Summer came, and it got unbearably hot on the streets. Eiko went back to Japan for three months. Before she left, she and Chris invited me to supper.

“Will you look after Chris for me while I’m away,” said Eiko. “He’s so helpless on his own.”

We drank Californian wine, and sat up past midnight talking.

“Chris is really warped,” said Eiko. “He likes country music.”

Chris was embarrassed. “My parents always used to listen to it. It’s just nostalgia for me. I don’t really like it.”

“You’ve got to listen to it,” said Eiko. “Home, sweet home.”

She put in the cassette. Chris protested, but he made no move to take it out.

“No more from that cottage again will I roam, be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home,” sang a deep voice. I had never heard Eiko laugh so wholeheartedly. I laughed as well, and finally Chris did too, reluctantly and slightly shamefacedly.

My head was spinning from the wine and lots of cigarettes and all our talk as I finally turned in at about two in the morning. But I noticed right away that the light was still on in the window opposite. As I smoked a last cigarette, I saw the dancer lean over the lamp and switch it off. I kept watching a while longer, before finally switching off my own light, and going to sleep.

Eiko left, and Chris often came home late. Sometimes I could tell he’d been drinking. “I miss her,” he said.

The first of August* was a Monday. My boss was organizing the celebrations for the Swiss Club, and gave us the afternoon off. A group of us went to the beach, which was almost deserted during the week. We swam, and as evening fell we lit a fire behind a sand dune and grilled some steaks. Someone had brought along a tape recorder, and was playing Swiss rock music.

I ate my steak and walked over the dune, and across the wide beach down to the sea. Sky, sand, and sea were almost indistinguishable now, all a dusty pink or tan color. I took my clothes off, and swam out till I could no longer see land beyond the waves. I felt I could swim on and on, till I got to Europe. Then for the first time since coming here, I wanted to go home. Suddenly I was afraid I might not make it back to land, and I turned and swam back. As I was climbing the dune again, I heard whispering voices. I saw one of my colleagues lying in the sand with his girlfriend. She had just recently come to America to visit him, and the pair of them had been lovey-dovey all evening.

It was after midnight when I got home. There were no lights on in the apartment, and it was very quiet. There was a whiff of marijuana in the air. Dirty dishes were piled up in the kitchen.

In the middle of August Chris went away on vacation. He was going to stay with his parents in Alabama.

“Look after yourself,” I told him.

He laughed. “My mother will look after me. You’ll see, I’ll have put on ten pounds by the time I’m back.”

It no longer cooled off at night. The city was swarming with tourists, but the subways were less crowded than usual. In my part of town, you could hear samba and salsa music till late at night. Everywhere people were sitting on their front steps talking. Young men stood around in groups, leaning on cars that weren’t theirs. Young women strolled back and forth in twos and threes and looked around at the men and sometimes called out a few words to them. There were hardly any couples. I hadn’t thought about my dancer for a long time, but now I looked at the women on the street and thought which one of them might be her.

A postcard came from Eiko. It was addressed to Chris, but I read it anyway. There was nothing in it of a personal nature. She signed off, “ Love, Eiko .”

One evening toward the end of the month, I was sitting in my room in the twilight. Then I heard the wailing of sirens outside closer than I ever had yet. I looked out the window and saw firetrucks turning into our street. Men in protective clothing leaped out of the trucks, but then they just stood there without doing anything. They took off their black helmets, and wiped the sweat off their brows. They stood there individually posed, like statues. A large crowd had assembled, and some of the firemen blocked off the end of the road. But that was all that happened. After a while, the sirens stopped their wail. I was going to shut the window, and then I saw my dancer standing on the fire escape of the house opposite. It was the first time I had ever seen her completely, though her face was indistinct in the dark. She was leaning on the railing, and looking across at me. As soon as she saw I had noticed her, she turned away. She was slender and not very tall. She had long black hair that fell over one shoulder, because of the way she was leaning on the fire escape. She was wearing a knee-length skirt and a tight top. She was barefoot. When she turned away after a while to climb back through the window into her room, the light from the red lamp caught her face momentarily. I was certain I had never seen her on the street.

After weeks of incessant heat, it finally started to cool down. The sky was still radiant blue, but at least there was usually a breeze blowing through the city streets now. When I rode out to the beach with friends on the weekends, the extensive parkland behind the dunes was almost deserted. Then we would just lay ourselves flat on the sand to be out of the wind, or else we would walk along the beach in our clothes and watch the gray water scoop up the sand.