Peter Stamm - In Strange Gardens and Other Stories

Rosemary was a great fan of the apartment. Twice she said she lived in a tiny little terraced house in Stepney, which was quite handy, but it was so much nicer to live here, among other financial sector workers, and just a short walk to work.

She said there was another TV outlet in the bedroom. If he was ever ill, it was an easy matter to roll the TV across. Magnus, the Swede, had often been ill. She shrugged her shoulders. It was odd that he looked so fit and healthy, and was always so cheerful. He had some kind of health problem.

Then all at once Rosemary was in a hurry. She wished David a pleasant weekend, and left. He looked at his watch. It was five o’clock.

Once he was all alone, he went to the bathroom and washed his hands. He looked at his new premises again. The rooms were clean and bright, the furnishings tasteful. On the coffee table in the sitting room, there was a brochure for the development. The name of the complex was The Icon . Strange and inappropriate name for it, thought David. He thought of the icons in the windows of an auction house that he had often passed, those rigid and attentive women’s faces that all looked alike and gazed at him in astonishment through the bullet-proof glass.

David sat down on the sofa, and started leafing through the brochure. The towers comprised a hundred and fifty units on eleven stories. An appendix at the back showed the floor plans for the various types of unit. David’s was one of the smaller ones, it was type G. On either side of him were three-room apartments that were type H.

David went out onto the balcony, with the brochure in his hand. Dark clouds with white edges passed across the sky. A stormy wind was blowing. It had grown distinctly cold. When David turned to go back inside, he saw a Japanese woman standing on the balcony next to his. She was standing there quite still, looking at him. She was no more than five yards away. He quickly turned and went in.

He stood in his living room and thought: I should have introduced myself. The Japanese woman was his new neighbor, they were bound to run into each other in the hallway, or on their balconies, or in the gym. For a moment, he toyed with the idea of ringing her bell and introducing himself. But he didn’t know whether people did that here or not. The simplest thing would have been to say hello to her when he saw her on her balcony. Spontaneous and uncomplicated. But if he went out there again, it would look as though he had gone out to engineer some kind of conversation.

Still holding the brochure, David walked through the apartment. He went over the list of specifications. Everything was there. The Hansgrohe bath taps were a little disappointing, but he liked the doors of solid maple, which fell shut with a satisfying thunk. In the living room he got down on his knees to examine the quality of the carpeting. He remembered kneeling in church, as a child. The feeling of one’s own insignificance, and forgiveness. That had been a kind of happiness. Not to have to make any decisions, not to have any responsibility. Sometimes he wished he could have that state back again. In his memory, it was always springtime. The shadows were cool and hard-edged. His mother took him by the hand.

David’s knees began to ache, and he stood up and carried a chair out onto the balcony, and sat in it. No sign of the Japanese woman. He shivered.

Tourist boats were going up and down the Thames. The park was almost empty. At the far end of it was a children’s playground. Three children were sitting on swings; from time to time he could hear a random scream. David heard the tinkling of a mechanical piano. Greensleeves , he hummed along to it. All at once, the tune broke off. The children didn’t react, and carried on on their swings.

On the meadow was a brightly colored kite, the size of a man. At first, David supposed it was a man, then he saw someone with light, thinning hair backing away from it quite quickly, and then the kite lifted into the air, climbed up, and finally hung there, wobbling slightly. The man’s hair was the same color as his face. He had a backpack and a pair of sunglasses. At the sight of him, David was filled with a vague sense of the sadness of life.

The balconies were now in shadow. There was no one on any of them, though a few had garden furniture of cheap white plastic. David thought of a deckchair he had once seen, made out of oiled robinia wood. It was a construction of striking simplicity, two arc forms pushed together so that one made the seat, the other the back rest. He came close to buying it, even though his apartment in Switzerland didn’t have a balcony. The deckchair folded away to next to nothing, the salesman had said. Now David had a balcony. But it was autumn already, and he couldn’t see himself with the leisure to be outside during the coming months.

He was to feel at home here, the boss had said to him — it sounded like an order. David wasn’t looking forward to the months, the year ahead. My God, he thought, this isn’t where I want to be.

He wasn’t hungry, but he ate the sandwiches he had made himself at home. He wasn’t sure whether they served meals on the short flight to London, and so he had packed something to eat. Once, flying to Milan, there hadn’t been anything to eat, and he had felt sick, and it had spoiled the entire day. But on the flight to London, there had been an in-flight snack, a sandwich and pasta salad and a bar of chocolate with the coffee. Meals on planes had always fascinated and disgusted David in equal measure. Even the question, beef or chicken. And then the meal itself, which seemed to have little to do with either — some unspecified meat in nasty plastic dishes. The plane had flown through any weather,and was now up in the blue beyond the clouds. That was how David imagined Paradise, readymade meals under a blue sky, that was how he pictured Hell.

David sat hunched on the sofa in his living room. When he went to throw away the wrapping of his sandwiches, he noticed he didn’t have any garbage bags. He tore a page out of his notebook and wrote down: “garbage bags.” He would make up a list of all that was missing. And tomorrow he would go shopping.

Happiness is a question of attitude, he thought. London was a wonderful city, so everyone always said. He would go out to concerts, to films, to musicals. He would meet people. He had already begun to strike up a relationship with Rosemary. He would call her tomorrow. And maybe he would get to meet the Japanese woman in the next-door apartment. It occurred to him that she might not live alone. The thought cast him down.

He went into the kitchen, to make himself some tea. He opened all the cupboards. Then he wrote down on his shopping list: teabags. And followed that with: coffee, coffee filters, sugar, cream. And then: food.

Tomorrow he would visit Greenwich, which was what his boss had recommended.

When David woke up the next morning, it was already past ten o’clock. He was trying to bang on the alarm clock until he realized that the ringing was coming from the telephone. It was Rosemary. She asked if he had started to get acclimatized yet. She hadn’t woken him, she hoped. He had been out on the balcony, said David, and hadn’t heard the ringing.

Rosemary said she could come over if he liked, and show him the area. Shops and restaurants. David thanked her. He was sure he could manage. It really wasn’t any trouble, Rosemary said. She wasn’t doing anything. She hated weekends.

“I was going to go to Greenwich,” said David.

“Lovely,” said Rosemary, “the meridian. You can stand astride the line, with your legs in different hemispheres.”

The best thing to do was to take the light railway to the southernmost tip of the peninsula, and from there take the Foot Tunnel under the Thames. If he liked, she could show him. He said, thank you, that was fine.