Peter Stamm - In Strange Gardens and Other Stories

The hotel had a sauna in the basement, and that evening I put the fifteen marks on my bill, and went down. I found myself in a large, unheated room, empty except for a couple of exercise machines, and a ping pong table. “Roman Baths,” it said on a door. Inside, there was soft music coming from loudspeakers in the ceiling. The walls and floor were covered with white tiles. There was no one else around. I sat down in the sauna cabin. I sweated, but then, as soon as I went out to take a shower, I shivered.

The following day I went out to see Larissa again. She said she was feeling better. I asked her to tell me something about herself, and she talked about her family, her home in Kazakhstan, the desert there, and her life. I avoided asking her any questions about her illness, but eventually she got onto the subject herself. After a couple of hours, she said she was tired. I asked if I might come again the next day, and she said yes.

Before I left the room, I looked around and wrote down: “A table, two chairs, a bed, a washbasin behind a yellow flowered plastic screen, everywhere used paper tissues, pictures of her daughter on the wall, and a chocolate Advent calendar, empty. The TV on throughout. Sound off.” Larissa looked at me questioningly.

“Atmosphere,” I said.

When I got back to the hotel, the photographer had arrived. I had made a date for that evening with Gudrun, the nurse on the TB ward. I called her to ask if she had a colleague she could bring along. The four of us ate in a Greek restaurant, the photographer and I, and the two nurses, Gudrun and Yvonne.

“How long have you been smoking?” Yvonne asked me, as I lit up after supper.

“Ten years,” I said. She asked me how many I smoked, and together we toted up the number of cigarettes I had smoked in my life.

“Well, it’s still better than TB,” I said.

“TB is no problem,” said Yvonne. “You can be cured in six months. And it heightens desire. Your sex drive.”

“Is that really true?”

“It’s what they say. Maybe it just used to. In the days when people still used to die of it. A kind of terminal panic.”

“He’s writing about Larissa,” said Gudrun.

“That’s a bad case,” said Yvonne, shaking her head.

I liked Yvonne better than Gudrun, who seemed to prefer the photographer. Once, I winked at him, and he laughed and winked back.

“What are you doing, winking at each other?” said Gudrun, laughing as well.

When I went in to Larissa the next day, with the photographer in tow, she insisted on getting changed. She pulled the yellow curtain rather carelessly, and I saw her pale, emaciated body, and thought she must have gotten used to changing behind curtains. I turned away and went up to the window.

When Larissa came out from behind the curtains, she was wearing jeans, a loud patterned sweater, and black patent leather pumps. She said we could go out on the balcony, but the photographer said the room was better.

“Atmosphere,” he explained.

I could see him sweating under his mask. Larissa smiled as he took her picture.

“He’s a good-looking man,” she said, after the photographer was gone.

“All photographers are good-looking,” I said. “People only want to have their picture taken by good-looking people.”

“The doctors are good-looking as well,” said Larissa, “and healthy too. They never get sick.”

I told her about the high suicide rate among doctors, but she refused to believe me.

“That’s something I would never do,” she said, “take my life.”

“Do you know how much longer …”

“Half a year, nine months maybe …”

“Can’t they do anything?”

“No,” said Larissa, and she laughed hoarsely, “it’s spread all over my body. All rotten.”

She talked about her first spell in a clinic, and how she had left thinking she was cured. Then she had become pregnant, and had got married.

“I would never have dared before. And when I was in the hospital for the birth, that’s when it all began again. Slowly. They treated me at home for six months, and then they said it was too dangerous. For my baby. I was so afraid, so afraid they might catch it from me. But they’re healthy. Thank God. They’re both healthy. I was still living at home this Easter. My husband cooked. And he said, in six months the doctor said you’ll be better. By the time Sabrina has her first birthday, in October, you’ll be home again. In May, on my birthday, he came with a ring.”

She slid off the ring she had on her finger. She held it in her fist, and said: “We had no money before, we bought furniture, a television, things for Sabrina. The ring wasn’t a priority, we told each other. In May he brought me the ring. Now we need it, he said.”

Then Larissa said she wanted to see my face. She tied on a mask, and I took mine off. She looked at me for a long time in silence, and only then did I notice her beautiful eyes. Finally she said, all right, and I tied my mask back on.

That evening we went to the sauna with the two nurses. When the photographer suggested it, Gudrun giggled, but Yvonne agreed straight off. I hardly broke a sweat during the first session, and remained sitting long after the sand timer was empty. The photographer and Gudrun had left in quick succession.

“Shall I pour on more water?” Yvonne asked, and, without waiting for my agreement, poured water on the heated stones. There was a hiss, and a smell of peppermint. We sat facing each other in the dim sauna. In the low lighting, Yvonne’s body glistened with sweat, and I thought she was beautiful.

“Don’t these mixed saunas bother you?” I asked.

“Why?” she asked. She said she belonged to a gym, and often used saunas.

“I don’t like it,” I said. “Being naked, as though it didn’t signify anything. We’re not wild beasts.”

“Then why did you agree to come?”

“There’s nothing else to do here.”

As we finally left, Gudrun and the photographer were just returning. And from then on, we took turns. While we rested, they sweated, while we sweated, they rested and showered. I lay next to Yvonne on one bench. I turned to the side, and watched her. She was flipping through a car journal, whose pages had gotten dulled and wavy with the moisture.

“Somehow I can’t reason myself out of it,” I said, “a naked woman is a naked woman.”

“Are you married?” she asked rather indifferently, without looking up from her magazine.

“I live with my girlfriend,” I said. “What about you?”

She shook her head.

After three goes, we had had enough. When Yvonne got dressed, she seemed more naked to me than she had in the sauna. Then we played ping pong, and the photographer and Gudrun sat down on the exercise machines to watch. Finally, Gudrun said she was getting cold, and the two of them went upstairs to the bar. Yvonne was a good player, and beat me. I asked her for a rematch, and she beat me again. We had built up a sweat, and so we had another shower.

“Shall we have a drink?” Yvonne asked.

“Men are so straightforward,” I said, and I had the feeling my voice was trembling.

“How do you mean?” she asked, coolly doing up her shoes.

“I don’t know,” I said. And then I asked her: “Will you come upstairs with me?”

“No,” she said, and looked at me with disbelief, “absolutely not. What’s going on?”

I said I was sorry, but she just turned and walked off. I followed her upstairs to the bar.

“Are you coming?” she said to Gudrun. “I want to go home.”

When the two of them had gone, the photographer asked me what had happened. I told him I had asked Yvonne to come upstairs with me. He said I was a fool.

“Did you fall in love with her?”