Peter Stamm - In Strange Gardens and Other Stories

“I don’t know. How should I know? What are we doing here?”

“So long as you don’t fall in love with your beautiful patient.”

“Do you think so?”

“Yes, she’s got something. But don’t expect a writer to see that.”

He laughed, threw his arm around me, and said: “Come on, let’s have another beer. We can enjoy our evening even without those two.”

The following morning, the photographer left. The nurses on the TB ward were less friendly than they’d been before. I didn’t see Yvonne, but I assumed she’d talked. I didn’t care.

“How many more times do you plan on coming?” asked the head sister.

“Till I have enough material,” I said.

“I hope you’re not taking advantage of your situation.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Frau Lehman has been in isolation for the past six months. She is very receptive to any kind of attention. If she experienced a disappointment, it might affect her adversely.”

“Does she not get any visitors?”

“No,” said the ward sister, “her husband’s stopped coming.”

Larissa was wearing her jeans again. She had combed her hair, and was wearing make-up. I looked at her, and thought the photographer was right.

“That’s the worst thing,” said Larissa, “the fact that no one ever touches me. Not for six months now. Except in rubber gloves. I haven’t kissed anyone in six months. I sensed … when my husband brought me here, I sensed he was scared of me. He kissed me on the cheek, and said in six months … It was as though that was the moment that I got sick. The night before we slept together. That was the last time. Though I didn’t know that then. And when we arrived here, he was suddenly afraid of me. I can still picture him shaving in his shorts, while I’m packing up my toilet articles. And he says to me, take the toothpaste with you, I’ll buy a new tube. And I took it.”

She said she sometimes kissed her hand, her arm, the pillow, the chair. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. Larissa lay down and cried. I went up to her bed, and put my hand on her head. She sat up and said: “You must disinfect your hand.”

I had enough material for my story. That evening, I went downtown for supper. But I couldn’t stand the racket, and soon took the bus out to the industrial park. As I got out at the terminus, I thought of Larissa. She told me she had tried running away one evening. When a nurse had forgotten to lock her room. She had gone as far as the bus stop. She had stood a little separately, and watched the people arriving from the factory. They must have imagined she too had come from there. Was on her way home. Would pop into a store on the way, and get home and fix dinner for her husband and child. That they would watch television together afterwards. And then she had gone back to the clinic.

It was still early. I walked through the industrial park. In among the ugly factories were a few new homes. They were dwarfed by the structures around them, as if they had been built to a different scale. Outside one of the homes, a man was hanging electric lights on a tree. In the doorway, a woman and a little child stood and watched him. The woman was smoking. A man in an apron was setting the table. I wondered whether he was expecting guests, or if he was cooking for himself or for his family. In the distance, I could hear the traffic on the highway. Then I went back to the hotel. It had gotten cold. Yvonne was sitting at the bar. I sat down next to her and ordered a beer. For a while we didn’t speak, and then finally I said: “Do you come here often?”

“I’ve come to see you,” she said.

I said I hadn’t meant it unpleasantly.

She said: “I’m not like that.”

“I’m not either. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. All those sick people … I had the feeling that nothing that happened here counted. That everything was excused. And that we had to hurry. Because there’s not much time.”

Yvonne said we could go back to her place, if I liked. She said she lived in a village a few miles from here. Her car was parked outside.

Yvonne drove far too fast. “You’ll kill us both,” I said.

She laughed and said: “My car is my favorite thing. It spells freedom for me.”

The furniture in Yvonne’s apartment was all chrome and glass. There were some red weights in a corner. In the hall there was a little cheap frame, with a piece of paper in it that said: “You can get it if you really want it.”

“It’s cold in your place,” I said.

“Yes,” said Yvonne, “I expect that’s the way I like it.”

“Do you believe that,” I asked, “that you can get it if you really want it?”

“No,” said Yvonne, “though I’d like to. What about you?”

“I didn’t get you.”

“You don’t ‘get’ people,” she said. “If you really wanted … And if you were patient …”

I said I didn’t have much time. Yvonne went into the kitchen, and I followed her.

“Water, orange juice, wheat grass, or tea?” she asked.

We drank tea, and Yvonne told me about her job, and why she had gone into nursing. I asked what she did in her time off, and she said she was into fitness. In the evenings, she was usually too tired to go out. On the weekends, she visited her parents.

“I’m all right,” she said, “I’m doing fine.”

Then she took me back to the hotel. She kissed me on the cheek.

In the morning, it was snowing gently. The puddles on the way to the clinic were frozen. In the newspaper I read that there had been four fatal accidents on the roads that night. “Black ice,” the headlines said.

Larissa was already waiting for me. She told me about a film she had seen the night before. Then we were silent for a long time. Finally, she said she would die of increasing weakness, when her weight loss got to be too great. Or of a hemorrhage. That meant coughing up blood, not a lot, a small glass of it. It didn’t hurt, but it happened quickly, in a few minutes. And it could happen quite suddenly.

“What are you telling me that for?”

“I thought you were interested. Isn’t that what you’re here for?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “maybe you’re right.”

“I can’t talk to anyone here,” Larissa said. “They don’t tell me the truth.”

Then she looked down and said: “Desire never stops. No matter how weak I am. At first, when I was with my husband, we made love every single day. Sometimes … once in a forest. We went for a walk. It was damp in the forest, it smelled of earth. We did it standing up, against a tree. Thomas was worried in case someone saw us.”

Larissa went up to the window and looked out. She hesitated, and then she said: “Here, I do it for myself. At night, only ever at night. Do you do that? Because I can imagine … and because … and because the nurses don’t knock before they come in … Desire never stops.”

And then she fell silent. There was a documentary on the natural world on television. The sound was off. I saw a herd of antelope gallop silently over a plain.

“The old films will be on again soon. Christmastime, you know,” I said.

“This will be my first Christmas in the clinic,” said Larissa, “and my last.”

When I left the ward, I ran into Yvonne in the corridor. She smiled and asked me: “What are you doing tonight?”

I said I would have to work.

I crossed the hospital grounds. For the first time, I was struck by the many faces in the windows. And I was struck by the way the visitors walked faster than the patients. A few were crying, and their heads were down, and I hoped I wouldn’t feel ashamed if it was ever my turn to mourn for someone. The mini golf course beside the hospital was littered with fallen leaves. There were deer in the forest, Larissa had told me. And squirrels. And she fed the birds from her balcony.