Peter Stamm - In Strange Gardens and Other Stories

I stopped the tape, and called Graham. We didn’t talk for long. When I got myself a beer, Romeo walked into the kitchen. There was some milk in the fridge. “Do you know where your children are” it said on the package, and underneath was a picture and a short description of a missing child.

The milk had gone bad, and I poured it away. In one of the cupboards there was a can of cat food. I turned on the TV, lay down on the sofa, and drank my beer.

A few days later I called Joseph, and asked if I could meet him. I said I was a friend of Lotta’s. He cleared his throat and said we could meet at his restaurant, which was on the corner of Vandam and Houston.

I went there the next morning. The place was dark and empty. There was one short, stout man sitting reading the paper at a table at the back. He was balding, and fifty. He stood up as I approached the table, and we shook hands.

“You must be Robert. I’m pleased to meet you. I’m Joseph. What’s Lotta up to?”

He asked me to sit down, and went behind the bar to get me a coffee.

“I’m Lotta’s subtenant,” I said.

“So she’s back from Finland. I thought she might be.”

“She’s disappeared,” I said.

He laughed. “Milk and sugar? She does have a habit of disappearing.”

“Black, please,” I said. “She disappeared with a friend of mine. No idea where.”

Joseph sat down opposite. “The building is mine,” he said. “Lotta didn’t pay any rent. Don’t look at me that way. It’s not as though I’m married.”

“There was nothing between us,” I said. “We just shared the apartment.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Joseph, and drank his coffee. “Lotta’s one of those wandering scrounging types. New York’s full of them. They take whatever they can get, and give you nothing back.”

“I always wanted to live the way she does,” I said. “I like her. She’s nice.”

“Sure. Why do you think I let her live in the place for free?”

I smiled, and then he smiled too.

“How long do you want to keep the apartment for?”

“Three weeks still. I’ve paid the rent. I’ve got a receipt here …”

“That’s fine. You can stay as long as you like.”

“What about Lotta’s things?” I asked. “She said she wouldn’t be needing them any more.”

“Just leave everything the way it is,” he said. “She’ll be back one day.”

I’d spent Christmas Eve with friends. They’d uncorked some champagne in the afternoon, and I’d gone home early because I was drunk and I had a headache. I was living in a small studio apartment in West Queens. In the morning I was awakened by the phone. It was my parents calling from Switzerland, to wish me a merry Christmas. It wasn’t a long conversation, we didn’t know what else to say to each other. It was raining outside. I made myself some coffee, and read.

In the afternoon I went for a walk. For the first time since I’d been there, I headed out of town, toward the outer suburbs. I hit Queens Boulevard, and followed it east. It was a wide straight road, cutting through precincts that didn’t change much or at all. Sometimes it was shops, and I had a sense of being in some sort of conurbation, and then I found myself in residential districts of tenements or small, squalid row houses. I crossed a bridge over an old, overgrown set of rails. Then there was an enclosed patch of waste ground, full of trash and rubble, and an enormous crossroads with no lights and no traffic. After that I came to another bunch of shops and a cross-street that had a subway stop on top of it, like a roof. The Christmas decorations in the storefronts and the tinsel hanging over the streets, disarrayed by rain and wind, looked like ancient remnants.

The rain had let up, and I stopped on the corner to light a cigarette. I wasn’t sure whether to go on or not. Then a young woman came up to me, and asked for a light. She said it was her birthday. If I had twenty dollars on me, we could buy a few things and have ourselves a little party.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I haven’t got it on me.”

She said that didn’t matter, I was to wait here for her anyway. She was going shopping, and would be back.

“Funny, it being your birthday on Christmas Day.”

“Yes,” she said, as though it had never occurred to her, “I suppose you’re right.”

She went off down the street, and I knew she wouldn’t be back. I knew it wasn’t her birthday either, but I would still have gone with her if I’d had the money. I finished my cigarette, and lit another. Then I started back. There was a bar across the street. I went in and asked for a beer.

“Are you French?” asked the man next to me. “I’m Dylan.” As in the great poet Dylan Thomas, he said , light breaks where no sun shines …

“Did you ever,” Dylan asked me, “read a love poem from a woman to a man?”

“No,” I said, “I don’t read poetry.”

“I tell you, you’re making a mistake there. You’ll find everything in poetry. Everything.”

He got up and went down a short flight of stairs to the rest room. When he came back, he stood next to me, put his arm round me, and said: “There aren’t any! Women don’t love men, believe me.”

The barman gave me a signal I didn’t understand. Dylan pulled a tattered volume from his pocket and held it over our heads.

“Immortal Poems of the English Language,” he said. “It’s my Bible.”

There were dirty little scraps of paper stuck in between many of the pages. Dylan opened the book at a certain place.

“Now, listen to the way women love men,” he said, and he read out: “Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways … Not one word about him. All Mrs. Browning does is say how much she loves him, how magnificent her feelings for him are. Here’s another one …”

An old man next to me whispered: “He’s always doing that.” And he made the same signal as the barman before him. I started to get it, but I was already feeling a bit drunk, and I didn’t want to go just yet. I just smiled, and turned to face Dylan who had turned to another poem.

“Miss Bronte,” he said, “same story! Cold in the earth, and the deep snow piled above thee! Far, far removed … That’s how it starts, and then it’s all about her pain. Nothing about the guy. Or this … Mrs. Rossetti: My heart is like a singing bird … My heart is like an apple-tree … And so on, till the last line, which goes: Because my love is come to me. Do you call that love? Is that the way a person in love would write? Only someone in love with herself.”

He put the book away, and put his short arm around me again.

“You know, my friend, there’s no such thing as a woman’s love. They love us like children, or the way the creator might love the thing he’s created. But as little as we find peace with God do we find peace with women.”

“Does that make God a woman?” I asked.

“Of course,” said Dylan, “and Jesus is Her daughter.”

“And you’re his sister,” said the barman.

“I don’t like women with beards,” said the old fellow on the other side of me.

We fell silent.

“Homosexuals will all go to Hell,” said the old man.

“I’m not going to get involved on that level,” said Dylan angrily, and moved closer to me, as if seeking protection. “The two of us were talking about poetry. This young man here doesn’t have the prejudices of you two clowns.”

“The next round’s on the house,” said the barman, and he put a cassette of Christmas tunes on the stereo behind him.

“God rest ye, merry gentlemen,” sang Harry Belafonte.