Peter Stamm - In Strange Gardens and Other Stories

I had come home on the evening train from the French part of Switzerland. I was working in Neuchâtel at the time, but home was still my village in the Thurgau. I was just twenty.

There had been an accident somewhere, a fire, I don’t remember what. At any rate, the train came from Geneva half an hour late, and it wasn’t the normal express but a short train with old cars. It kept stopping in the middle of nowhere, and the passengers got into conversation with each other, and opened the windows. It was summer, vacation time. Outside, it smelled of hay, and once, when the train had stopped somewhere for quite some time and the country around was very quiet, we heard the screaking of cicadas.

It was almost midnight when I got to my village. The air was still warm, and I slung my jacket over my arm. My parents had already gone to bed. The house was dark, and I did nothing more than dump my carrier bag full of dirty clothes in the corridor. It didn’t feel like a night for sleeping.

I found my friends standing outside the local, wondering what to do with themselves. The landlord had told them to go home, licensing hours were over. We talked out on the street for a while, till someone opened a window and shouted to us to shut up and go away. Then Urs’s girlfriend Stefanie said: “Why don’t we go up to Ice Lake and go for a swim? The water’s really warm.”

The others headed off, and I said I would just fetch my bike and catch up with them. I packed my trunks and towel, and then I set off after them. Ice Lake was in a valley between two villages. I was halfway there, when I ran into Urs heading the other way.

“Stefanie’s got a flat,” he called out to me. “I’m just going back for a puncture kit.”

Shortly afterwards, I saw Stefanie sitting by the side of the road. I dismounted.

“Urs might be a while,” I said. “I’ll go with you, if you like.”

We pushed our bikes slowly up the hill behind which the pond lay. I had never been especially keen on Stefanie, perhaps because they said she would try it on with anybody, perhaps because I was jealous because Urs never went anywhere without her. But now, alone with her for the first time, I seemed to get on with her okay, and we talked pretty easily about all sorts of things.

Stefanie had taken her final exams in the spring, and was working as a cashier in a supermarket until going on to college in the fall. She talked about shoplifters, and who in the village bought only sale items, and who bought condoms. We laughed all the way up the hill. When we got to the pond, we saw the others had all swum out already. We got undressed, and when I saw that Stefanie didn’t have her swimsuit with her, I didn’t put on my trunks either, and made as though that were quite natural. There wasn’t a moon but there were loads of stars, and dim starlight on the hills and the pond.

Stefanie had jumped into the water, and was swimming in a different direction from our friends. I set off after her. The air was a bit cooler already and the grass was wet with dew, but the water was just as warm as it was by day. Only when I reached down with my feet and kicked hard did I stir up cooler water from underneath. When I had caught up to Stefanie, we swam side by side for a while, and she asked me if I had a girlfriend in Neuchâtel, and I said I didn’t.

“Come on, we’ll swim to the boathouse,” she said.

We reached the boathouse, and looked back. We saw that the others were back on the shore by now, and had got a campfire going. We couldn’t tell whether Urs had joined them yet or not. Stefanie climbed up onto the pier, and then onto the balcony, from where we had often dived into the water when we were kids. She lay on her back and told me to join her, she was feeling cold. I lay down next to her, but she said: “Come closer, that’s no good.”

We stayed on the balcony for a while. In the meantime the moon had come up, and it was so bright that our bodies cast shadows on the gray weathered wood. From the forest behind us we could hear sounds, but we didn’t know what they were, and then someone was swimming toward the boathouse, and Urs’s voice called out: “Stefanie, are you there?”

Stefanie put her finger to her lips, and pulled me back into the shadow of the tall rail. We heard Urs panting as he climbed out of the water, and pulled himself up on the rails. He had to be standing directly over us. I didn’t dare look up, or stir.

“What are you doing there?” Urs was crouched on the balcony rail, looking down at us. His voice was quiet, surprised, not angry, and he was talking to me.

“We heard you coming,” I said. “We were talking, and then we hid, to surprise you.”

Now Urs looked over at the middle of the balcony, and I looked that way too, and the damp patch that my body and Stefanie’s had made was as clear as if we were still there.

“What did you do that for?” asked Urs. Once again, he was addressing me, he seemed not to notice his girlfriend, who was crouching motionless in the shadow. Then he got up, and high above us on the rail he took a couple of steps, and with a sort of cry, a whoop, he leapt into the dark water. Even before the splash, I could hear a dull impact, and I jumped up and looked down.

Leaping off the balcony was dangerous. There were some poles stuck in the water that reached up to the surface; when we were kids we knew where they were. Urs was floating on the water. His body had an odd white shimmer in the moonlight, and Stefanie, who was standing beside me now, said right away: “He’s dead.”

I carefully climbed down from the balcony onto the pier, grabbed Urs by an ankle, and pulled him toward me. Stefanie had jumped down from the balcony, and swum back to the others as fast as she could. I pulled Urs out of the water, and heaved him onto the little pier in front of the boathouse. He had a horrible wound on his head.

I think I mainly just sat next to him. Some time, a lot later, a policeman turned up and gave me a blanket, I hadn’t realized how cold I was. The policeman took Stefanie and me back to the station, and we told them what had happened, but not what we had done on the balcony. They were very friendly, and when it was morning they even gave us a ride home. My parents were worried about me.

I saw Stefanie at Urs’s funeral. The others were there too, but we didn’t talk, not till later in the bar, and then not about what had happened that night. We drank beer, and someone, I can’t remember who it was, said he wasn’t sorry Stefanie had stopped coming. Ever since she’d started turning up, we hadn’t had any proper conversations any more.

A few months later, I heard that Stefanie was pregnant. From then on, I started spending most of my weekends in Neuchâtel, and I even started doing my own laundry.

I wasn’t sure whether I’d called the right number or not. There was a snatch of classical music on the answering machine, and then the beep, and then the expectant silence of the recording. I called a second time. Once again, there was just music, and this time I left a message. Half an hour later, Lotta called me back. When we had gotten to know each other better, she told me about Joseph. He was the reason why she couldn’t leave her voice on the tape. He musn’t learn that she was back in the city.