Peter Stamm - In Strange Gardens and Other Stories

“He lies on top of a car, and the car smashes through a wall of fire,” she said when Denise came back, and shook out her wet hair. “Ooh, stop it!”

“I’ve never heard of anything as crazy as that,” said Denise. “I’m sure there’s a trick somewhere. Like there is in films. What time is it?”

“Three thirty,” said Denise. “It’s no trick. He actually does it.”

Clouds had gathered, and Manuela and Denise had sat up and put on their T-shirts.

At five there was a brief shower of rain. The two women ran to the kiosk for shelter. They chatted to Andi a bit.

He gave them each an ice cream, and asked them if they were going to the Domino tonight. There was a band playing from the next village.

“We’re going to the stunt show,” said Manuela, “you know, at the container depot.”

“She’s fallen for a stuntman,” said Denise.

“Rubbish,” said Manuela. “Maybe afterwards.”

When the rain eased, it was no cooler, if anything it was even more oppressive. The wet containers glistened in the flat sunlight. Denise had accompanied Manuela to the show. She was curious to get a glimpse of Henry. But Henry wasn’t there.

“He’s forgotten all about you,” said Denise.

“I don’t believe that,” said Manuela.

As the show was about to start, they went up to the fat woman who was selling the tickets, and bought a couple.

At the end of the show, a pickup with huge tires crushed the junk cars that two of the artistes had pushed onto the arena. That was the high point of the show, the fat lady had told them.

“Which one is him?” asked Denise, but Manuela just shook her head.

“What do we do now?” said Denise.

At last the pickup came to a stop on top of one of the flattened cars, and the driver climbed out of the cab, clambered down a little ladder, and jumped out onto the arena. The spectators applauded.

“All things must pass,” said the woman on the PA and turned off the music. The spectators got to their feet. A few of them gathered round the squashed cars that were lying there like dead animals. A couple of kids tugged at their battered doors, and kicked out at the wheels. A man tried to tear away the Alfa sign. “You couldn’t have lined up forty people in that space,” he said. “No way.”

The artistes were off to one side, talking among themselves. Manuela thought they looked disappointed about something. Sad, even. Gradually the spectators drifted away. From out in front she could hear the roar of engines, and tire screech. Manuela and Denise sat all alone on the grandstand. They watched the men clear up. A few youths from the village helped.

Denise asked: “Shall we go?”

“The one with the wall of fire, he was someone else,” said Manuela.

“He must have been lying to you,” said Denise.

“But it wasn’t a trick. I’m sure it was for real.”

Then the artistes started taking down the grandstand, and the women got up to go.

“Maybe he’ll turn up still,” said Manuela.

“Why don’t you ask,” said Denise. But Manuela didn’t feel like it.

“Shall we go to the Domino?” asked Denise, as they unlocked their bikes.

“Who cares,” said Manuela. “It was nothing. Wouldn’t have been anything anyway.”

It was summer, and the sun shone through the cracks in the shutters and left little patches of light on the walls of the rooms that were facing the street, narrow stripes, that slowly slid down, and widened when they reached the floor, and crossed the parquet or the carpets, occasionally touching some object or other, a piece of furniture or a stray toy, till the evening, when they climbed up the opposite walls and finally dimmed. The kitchen, whose window shutters were never closed, was bathed in festive light from early in the morning, and if someone had walked in there, he would surely have thought the inhabitants of the house had just stepped out into the garden and would be back at any moment. A cloth was draped over the faucet, as if it had only just been used, and the light struck a half-empty glass of water, where little air bubbles had formed.

The view through the kitchen window was of a garden full of peonies and currant bushes, an old plum tree, and a rather leggy bed of rhubarb. At nine, or a little later but still before it got hot, one might have been able to see the next-door neighbor coming down the gravel path, silently watering the begonias and the herb garden that grew in pots on the kitchen steps. Later on, when she had disappeared behind the house and was filling the big watering cans and watering the tomato plants, the raspberry and blueberry bushes, the rushing of the water sounded unusually loud, the only sound in the silent walls of the house.

She really ought to pick the berries, Ruth had encouraged her; by the time she got back they would be past ripe. But the next-door neighbor didn’t pick the berries. She watered the garden every morning, and on the very hottest days she came around a second time in the evening and gave the potted plants another round, and the tomatoes, whose leaves had parched in the heat. When she was finished, she didn’t climb over the low fence — which would have been easy enough — she left the garden through the garden gate, and went home along the pavement.

The neighbor had a key to the house, but she didn’t like to use it. She unlocked the door and left the mail in the cupboard that was on the porch. She sorted it into two piles, one pile of newspapers and the other of everything else. Through the frosted glass in the inside door, she had a sense of the darkness of the rooms within, and perhaps she saw the shimmer of light that fell through the shutters. She hesitated before opening this second door and going into the kitchen, where Ruth had left all the house-plants. There on the table were fifteen or twenty large and small pots, containing ivy, azaleas, a calla lily with a white flower, and a small ficus. She filled the copper can and watered the plants. She had left the front door and the inner door open. Each time she looked at the half-empty glass next to the sink and thought of rinsing it out, but then finally she didn’t, because she thought it might have been left there for a purpose, though she couldn’t have said what.

Once, and only once, the next door neighbor went into the sitting room and looked around. On the sideboard there were photographs of the children in little multiple frames, and a few cards. She picked up one of the cards, and read: “Dear Ruth, congratulations on your 40th birthday. We hope you have a wonderful year, bringing you everything you wish for. Love, from Marianne and Beat.” The two names had been written in the same hand. The picture was of a mouse with big feet, holding out a bunch of flowers.

It hadn’t been a wonderful year for Ruth. I wonder what they’ve done wrong, the next-door neighbor had often said to her husband, honestly, you would have thought…. Nonsense, he had said, without looking up. But it was true: Ruth and her family seemed to have drawn down misfortune upon themselves. Ruth’s father had owned the little stationery shop on Main Street. Ruth and her three younger brothers had grown up in the apartment over the shop. Not long after the birth of the third boy, the mother had developed an incurable illness. For a few years, people had watched her hobbling around on a pair of crutches, then one day she stopped leaving the flat, and thereafter she slowly disappeared from their thoughts.

The stationery store doubled as the bookshop. It didn’t have much in the way of stock, a single shelf that contained children’s books, a few novels, cookbooks, and guidebooks to the major cities and to Italy and France. If a customer wants something different I can always order it, said Ruth’s father, who didn’t seem to care much about the books. Nor was he often called upon to order anything; most of the people in the town made do with what there was, or else they bought their books in the city. The shop had dark wood paneling, and there was hardly ever anyone in it. Not even the owner seemed to like to spend any time there. If anyone went in, it took a while for him to emerge from a back room, and if they didn’t know right away what they wanted to buy, they had to call him back in order to pay.