Peter Stamm - In Strange Gardens and Other Stories

This Christmas, for the first time, Verena hadn’t come back to the house. She was spending the holiday in the mountains with her husband and Martina, where her in-laws had a vacation house. As ever, Regina had hidden the presents in the wardrobe in her bedroom, as though it could never occur to anyone to go looking for them. She prepared Christmas lunch. She emptied the leftovers onto the compost heap, where a little snow still lay. A week before it had snowed, and it had remained cold since, and yet most of the snow had melted. Regina tried to remember the last time there had been a white Christmas. Then she went back in the house and turned on the radio. There was Christmas music on every single station. Regina stood by the window. She hadn’t turned on a light. She looked across at the neighbors’ house. When she did finally switch on the light, it gave her a shock, and she quickly turned it off again.

The whole family came for Regina’s seventy-fifth birthday. She had invited them all to a restaurant. The food was good, it was a fine occasion. Otmar and his girlfriend were the first to go, Patrick left shortly afterwards, and then Verena and her husband said goodbye. Martina had brought along her boyfriend, an Australian who was an exchange student at the school for a year. She said she didn’t feel like going home yet. There was an argument, and then Regina said why didn’t Martina spend the night in her house. What about her friend? There were more than enough rooms, said Regina. She saw Verena and her husband to the gate. “Make sure she doesn’t get up to any nonsense,” said Verena.

Regina went back to the restaurant, and paid the bill. She asked Martina whether she wanted to go out anywhere still with her friend, she could easily give her a key. But Martina shook her head, and her friend smiled.

They walked back, the three of them. The Australian boy was called Philip. He spoke hardly any German, and it was many years since Regina had last tried speaking English. As a young woman she had spent a year in England, just after the end of the war, had stayed with a family and looked after the children. It had felt to her at the time as though she had just come into the world. She got acquainted with a young Englishman, went out to concerts and pubs with him on her evenings off, and kissed him on the way home. Perhaps she should have stayed in England. When she returned to Switzerland, everything was different.

Regina unlocked the door, and turned on lights. “This is a nice house,” said Philip, and he took off his shoes. Martina disappeared into the bathroom to shower. Regina brought in a towel for her. Through the frosted glass of the shower cabinet, she could see Martina’s slim body, her head tipped back, the long dark hair.

Regina went into the kitchen. The Australian had sat down at the table. He had a tiny computer on his knees. She asked him if she could get him something. “Do you want a drink?” she said. It sounded like a line out of a film. The Australian smiled and said something back to her that she didn’t understand. He motioned to her to come closer, and pointed to the screen of his computer. Regina went over to him and saw an aerial photograph of a town. The Australian pointed to a spot on the picture. Regina didn’t understand what he was saying, but she knew that that was where he lived, and where he would return, once the year here was over. “Yes,” she said, “yes, nice,” and she smiled. The Australian pressed a button, and the town receded, you saw the land and the sea, the whole of Australia, and finally the whole world. He looked at Regina with a triumphant smile, and she felt much closer to him than to her own granddaughter. She wanted to feel closer to him, because he would leave Martina, just as Gerhard had left her. This time she wanted to be on the side of the strong, on the side of the ones who went.

Regina made up the bed in Otmar’s room. Martina was upstairs. She had got dressed again.

“Can I lend you some pajamas?” Regina asked.

“We can share a bed,” said Martina, seeing Regina hesitating. “You don’t have to tell Mom.”

She put her arm around her grandmother, and kissed her on the cheek. Regina looked at her granddaughter. She said nothing. Martina followed her downstairs and into the kitchen, where Philip was typing something on his computer. Martina stood behind his chair, and laid her hands on his shoulders. She said something to him in English.

“You’re very good at that,” said Regina. Martina struck her as being very grown up at that moment, perhaps for the first time, more grown up than she was herself, full of the strength and poise that women need. Regina said goodnight, she was going to bed. And then Martina and Philip sat in her kitchen, as if it were theirs, as if the house were theirs. But that didn’t upset Regina. For the first time in a long time, she had the sense of the house being full again. She thought about Australia, where she had never been. She thought of the aerial photograph that Philip had showed her, and then she thought of Spain, where she had been on vacation a couple of times, with the children. Regina stood in the bathroom, brushing her teeth. She was tired. When she went out on the landing and saw a little beam of light under the kitchen door, she was glad that Martina and Philip were still up.

Regina lay in bed. She heard Philip go to the bathroom and shower. She wanted to get up again, and bring him a towel, but then she let it go. She imagined him stepping out of the shower, drying himself on Martina’s damp towel, walking down the hall to the kitchen, where Martina was waiting for him. They would embrace, go upstairs, and then go to bed together. Verena had asked her to see that there was no nonsense between them. But it wasn’t nonsense. Everything flashed by so quickly.

Regina got up once more, and stepped into the landing without turning on the light. She stood in the dark, and listened. There was no sound. She went into the bathroom. The streetlamp outside shed a bit of light in the room. The towel was lying on the rim of the bathtub. Regina picked it up and buried her face in it. It felt cool against her forehead, and it had an unfamiliar smell. She put it down, and went back to her room.

When she was back in her bed she thought about Australia, where she would never go. She would probably never see Spain again either, she thought, but she was maybe good for one more trip somewhere.

There was only a hiss coming out of the television. Henry turned up the sound as far as it went, and stepped outside. It was still hot. He adjusted the satellite dish, which was mounted on an improvised wooden stand on the asphalt. He knew the rough position of the satellite, southeast. West was where the sun went down. Then the hiss was suddenly gone, and Henry could hear music and voices. He climbed up the metal steps. It was airless in his little cubbyhole behind the driver’s cab that he called home. Bed, chair, TV, fridge, everything a man needed. There was no window, but on the walls were a couple of American flags, a Marlboro poster, and a placard for some Erotica Fair that Henry had pulled off a wall somewhere. He turned off the TV, picked up his deckchair, and sat down in front of the truck in the evening sun. The piled up containers cast long shadows.

The caravans of the others were still in the next village, where they had performed yesterday. It had taken them the whole day to get the cars and all the rest of the stuff over here, and to put up the wooden grandstand. At noon it had rained, but Joe had been in a foul mood even before that. Joe was like that, up and down the whole time. And Charlie had been God knows where, and Oskar had been tooling around with his motorbikes. With the result that once again Henry had done all the work on his own. Henry the daredevil. Actually he was more like the nightwatchman, the maid of all work, the odd job man, the spare prick at the wedding. Only during the shows he was the fire devil, who lay on the roof of the car as Oskar drove through the wall of fire.