Peter Stamm - In Strange Gardens and Other Stories

He switched off the TV and went back over to the window. He wasn’t thinking about his sentences any more, he was just looking out at the street. He turned off the main light and switched on the desk lamp. Then he made some tea, sat down on the sofa, and read. At midnight he went to bed.

When the bell rang it was three. Before he could get to the door, it rang again. He pressed the entry button, and held it a moment. Then, though dressed only in shorts and a T-shirt, he stepped out onto the landing and walked toward the elevator. It seemed to take forever.

Of course he knew it was her, but he was strangely surprised when the elevator doors opened and he saw her standing in front of him. She just stood there, her big red suitcase next to her, waiting. He stepped toward her. When he moved to kiss her, she put her arms around him. The elevator doors shut behind him. She said: “I’m just so incredibly tired.” He pushed the button, and the doors opened again.

They split the sandwich, and she told him about how the train had stopped in the snow in the middle of nowhere,and had stood there for hours until finally a snowplow had come along and cleared the tracks.

“Of course no one knew what was going on,” she said. “I was afraid we’d be there all night. At least I brought some warm clothes with me.” He asked if it was still snowing, then looked out into the night himself and saw that it had almost stopped.

“The taxi would only take me to the corner of Lexington,” she said. “It couldn’t get into your street. I gave the driver twenty dollars and said, please get me to the door, it doesn’t matter how. He carried my case all the way. A little Pakistani. Nice man.”

She laughed. They had drunk some vodka, and he poured out a refill.

“Well?” she said. “What’s this urgent thing you wanted to talk to me about?”

“I love snow,” he said.

He stood up and went over to the window. The snow was falling but only in little flakes that drifted down from the sky, sometimes floated up as if they were lighter than air, then subsided again, disappearing against the white sidewalks. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

He turned around and looked at her a long time as she sat there sipping her vodka. He said: “I’m glad you’ve come.”

When the fireworks finished, the few hotel guests who had gathered in front of the hall window clapped. In between the bangs of the rockets, there had been scraps of music, choirs, an organ, and once the pealing of bells. The music came from down by the river, a long way off, and sometimes it was drowned out by the noise of the crowd outside on the streets. At those moments, Eric had the feeling he belonged to this city, these celebrations, these people. The applause on the hotel landing brought him back to himself. Someone closed the window.

A million people had watched the fireworks, said the waiter as he brought breakfast up to the room the next morning. On the way to the airport, Eric calculated: on average, a human being lives to the age of seventy, which is twenty-five thousand days. Therefore, every day one person in twenty-five thousand dies. Of the million people who were watching the fireworks last night, statistically speaking, twenty must already have died.

The taxi drove through a suburb, and Eric saw mothers with children, old people, and a group of girls sitting on a bench waiting for a bus. Suddenly he felt inexplicably moved by something, a feeling that lasted until the taxi drew up in front of the departure lounge. Eric wished the driver a nice day.

Eric worked in the internal accounts department of a multi-national food conglomerate. Roughly two-thirds of his job consisted of visiting the various subsidiaries dotted all over Europe and North America. He had originally taken the job precisely because it involved so much travel. He liked getting around and meeting new people. But over time he had gotten used to it, and the traveling came to seem routine and finally burdensome. It began with his preferring aisle seats on planes, and no longer bothering to unwrap his meals.

He always stayed at classy hotels, he had no real limit on his expenses. By day he worked, and in the evenings colleagues from the various subsidiaries took him out and showed him their cities. They would eat together in expensive restaurants, go to nightclubs, get drunk. Sometimes Eric would take a woman up to his room, not a prostitute, but one of those women you met sitting around the bars of expensive hotels at midnight, looking for something or other. But that wasn’t often. Usually, by the time his taxi driver set him down in front of his hotel, Eric was so drunk that, leaving either an absurdly large tip or none at all, he marched straight up to his room.

The hotel rooms were all alike, the restaurants were all alike, the conversations with colleagues, the airports, the cities. The journeys were always the same, Eric smoked and drank too much, and had headaches in the morning. The worst thing were the times in Eastern Europe. There his companions either ordered vodka, or else the sweet liqueurs they were so proud of, and that, too, were indistinguishable. And on the days after such occasions, the headaches would be worse too.

Valdis, who met Eric at the airport, behaved as though they were old friends, even though they only saw each other a couple of days a year. He should definitely try to stay longer this time, Valdis had said on the phone, when Eric called to announce his latest visit, the city was celebrating its eight hundredth anniversary, and there would be gigantic celebrations.

Valdis was the only man in the local accounts department who could speak German. He used strange expressions, and had a strong accent, and somehow never got to the point. When he went out drinking with Eric, he always insisted on buying for them both. Eric then told him he could put it down on expenses, that way the company would pay. The checks were never for very much, but Eric knew what Valdis made.

Once, Valdis had invited him back to his house. He lived somewhere on the edge of the city in a scuzzy prefab development. The apartment was small and stuffy in its layout and furnishings, and reminded Eric of his parents’ place. Then he met Valdis’s wife. She was beautiful, and Valdis seemed to be very much in love with her. At any rate, when she was in the kitchen he said he was a very happy man.

After dinner, a bottle of an herb liqueur called balzams was produced (which Eric hated), and then they all moved onto a first name basis. Valdis’s wife was called Elza. Eric said it was a beautiful name, and he invited them both to stay whenever they were next in Switzerland. But Valdis said that was hardly likely, such a journey was completely beyond their means. Eric asked if he could do anything else to help.

“No,” said Valdis with a smile. “You enjoyed balancing the books, didn’t you?”

The rest of the year Eric would never hear anything from Valdis. The greater his astonishment when a letter arrived from him one day, to his home address. When he read the name of the sender on the envelope, he had to stop and think for a moment.

Dear friend , wrote Valdis. Eric was taken aback. Valdis wrote to say something was troubling him. The phrase made Eric laugh. His wife was sick, Valdis wrote, and if Eric remembered the occasion of his previous visit, he would know that even then he had intimated that all was not well. Now it had turned out that Elza had cancer, and could not expect to live more than another two years.

Eric had always liked Valdis, but he couldn’t understand what he was doing, writing to him. It struck him as inappropriate and embarrassing. They would see each other in a month anyway. Then Valdis went on to write about his children: the boy was going to high school next year, and his daughter wanted to become an accountant, like her father.