Peter Stamm - In Strange Gardens and Other Stories

As evening fell, I was walking through the industrial park again. I bought a hamburger at a fast-food joint. I came to a vast building, a furniture warehouse, and went in. In the entry hall were dozens of deckchairs; dozens of TV lounges had been simulated. I walked through the series of model lives, and was surprised at how much they all resembled each other. I tried to imagine this or that item in my apartment. And then I thought of Larissa, and I wondered which easy chair she and her husband had bought. And I thought of her husband, who was sitting in their apartment all alone, maybe drinking a beer, maybe thinking of Larissa. And I thought of their little girl, whose name I couldn’t just now remember. I thought she was probably asleep now anyway.

Beside the exit to the superstore, there were Christmas decorations in big baskets, chains of lights, illuminated plastic snowmen, and small crudely carved cribs. “We look forward to your visit, Monday to Friday, 10 A.M. — 8 P.M., Saturdays, 10 A.M. — 4 P.M.,” I read on the glass door, as I left the store. Darkness had fallen.

The next day was my last. I looked in on Larissa to say goodbye. Once again, she started telling me about her childhood in Kazakhstan, the desert, and her grandfather, her father’s father, who had gone east from Germany.

“When he was dying, the priest came. And they talked together for a while. He was old. And then the priest asked him, well, Anton — my grandfather’s name was Anton — what sort of life did you have? And do you know what my grandfather said? It was cold, he said, all my life I was cold. Even though it got so hot in the summer. He said, my whole life, I was cold. He never got used to the desert.”

She laughed, and then she said: “It passes so quickly. Sometimes I switch the television off, so that it doesn’t pass quite so quickly. But then I find it even harder to stand.”

She talked about one of her neighbors in Kazakhstan, whose television screen was broken, but who kept switching it on anyway and staring at the black screen.

“Just as you look out the window when it’s dark, because you know there’s something there. Even if you can’t see anything,” she said. “I’m scared. And fear won’t leave me. Not till the very end.”

She said fear was like losing your balance. The way that, before you fell, you had a momentary feeling of being torn into pieces, of bursting open, in all directions. And sometimes it was like hunger, or like suffocating, and sometimes like being squashed. Larissa spoke fast, and I had a sense she wanted to tell me everything she had thought in the last few months. As though she wanted me to be a witness, tell me her whole life for me to write down.

I got up and said goodbye to her. She asked if I would come to her funeral, and I said no, I probably wouldn’t. When I turned around in the door, she was watching television. I went home that afternoon.

Two weeks later, I sent Larissa some chocolate. I didn’t send her copies of the photographs. She looked too ill in them. She didn’t write. Yvonne sent me a couple of friendly letters, but I never replied.

I came back from another assignment six months ago, and found a death notice in my mailbox. The chief consultant had written “with best wishes” at the bottom of it.

The house was too big. The children had managed to fill it, but ever since Regina was living in it on her own, it had begun to grow. Successively she had withdrawn from the rooms; one after another they had become strange to her, and she had finally given them up.

After the children had moved out, she and Gerhard had spread themselves out in it a little. Previously, they had had the smallest room for themselves, now at last there was space for everything, a study, a sewing room, a guest bedroom, where the children would stay when they came to visit, or the grandchildren. But there was only one grandchild. Martina was born to Verena, who had married a carpenter in the next village. When Martina had been a little baby, Regina had minded her a few times. But Verena had always insisted that her mother come to her. Nor did Regina’s other children, Otmar and Patrick, ever stay the night. They preferred to drive back to the city late at night. Why don’t you stay the night here, Regina would always say, but her sons needed to be at work early the next day, or they found some other reason why they had to go.

At first, the children had had keys to the house. Regina had almost forced them each to have a copy of the big old key. She thought it was the natural thing. But over the years, one of them after the other had handed back their key. They were afraid of losing it, they said, they could ring the bell, after all their mother was always at home. And what if anything were to happen? Well, then they knew where the cellar key was hidden.

Once, though, the children did stay overnight, all three of them, and that was when Gerhard was dying. Regina had phoned them, and they came as quickly as they could. They arrived in the hospital and stood around the bed, and didn’t know what to do or say. At night they took turns, and whoever wasn’t in the hospital was in the house. Regina made up the beds, and apologized to the children because the sewing machine was in Verena’s room, and Otmar had the big desk that Gerhard had been able to buy cheap when his company invested in a new set of office furniture.

Regina had lain down to get some rest, but she was unable to sleep. She heard the children talking among themselves quietly in the kitchen. In the morning, they all went to the hospital together. Verena kept looking at her watch, and Otmar, the eldest, was on his mobile telephone the whole time, canceling or postponing appointments. At around noon, Gerhard died, and Regina and the children went home, and did whatever needed to be done. But that very evening, they all drove off. Verena had asked if everything was okay, whether her mother could manage, and she promised to come early the next morning. Regina watched her children go, and saw them talking to each other in front of the house. She knew what they were talking about.

After her husband’s death, the house was even emptier. Regina no longer opened the bedroom shutters in the daytime, as though she was afraid of the light. She got up, washed, and made coffee. She went down to the mailbox, and picked up the paper. She didn’t set foot in the bedroom all day. Eventually, she thought she would only occupy the living room and kitchen, and treat the other rooms as though they had strangers living in them. Then she wondered what had been the point of buying the house in the first place. The years had gone by, the children were living in their own houses, which they furnished according to their own tastes, and which were more practical and more lived in. But even these houses would one day fall empty.

There was a little birdbath in the garden, and during the winter Regina would feed the birds, long before there was any snow on the ground. She hung little balls of suet in the Japanese maple that stood in front of the house. One especially cold winter the tree froze, and the next spring it didn’t bud anymore and had to be chopped down. On summer nights Regina left the upstairs windows open, and hoped a bird or bat might err into the house, and maybe make its nest there.

When there was a birthday to be celebrated, Regina invited the children to the house, and sometimes they were all free, and could all come. Regina cooked lunch, and washed up in the kitchen. She made coffee. When she went upstairs to fetch a fresh pack of coffee, the children would all be standing in their former rooms like visitors to a museum, shy or inattentive. They leaned against the furniture or perched on the windowsills and talked about politics, or their jobs, or where they had gone on vacation. Over lunch, Regina would always try to steer the conversation round to their father, but the children avoided the topic, and in the end she gave up as well.