Peter Stamm - All Days Are Night

Tamara looked as though she didn’t believe a word of it. Do I have to warn the local women about you, or not? she asked.

He shook his head. I haven’t painted any nudes for years.

She asked him a couple more standard questions about his life, his work at the college, and his plans for the future, then she got up, and so did Hubert.

Well, see you at the opening, if not before, she said, gave him her card, and got into her car.

The entrance to the cultural center was north facing and already in shade. The air was cold. Hubert went in to get a jacket and then he drove into the village and took a look around. The center of the village looked impressively unspoiled, there were many old buildings decorated with artful graffiti, some were festooned with Romansh proverbs, one had a sundial. The whole area must have been prosperous once, he thought, the boxy concrete hotels you found in other touristy places were completely absent.

After Hubert had wandered around for a while, he took a seat on a bench in a big square and watched the passersby. He thought about the exhibition. The village was lovely, the landscape was lovely, even the weather was lovely. He had grown up in a village himself, what was there to say about it? He should have known there was just as little for him here as there was at home.

The shadows had gotten longer, and when they stretched to cover the bench he was sitting on, Hubert felt the cold. He walked into the nearest restaurant, ordered a cup of tea, and checked his e-mails. Astrid had written, and so had Nina and a couple of the other students. The college invited him to a meeting and sent him the minutes for another. His gallerist asked him how he was getting on in the mountains and wrote to say he was looking forward to the opening. He asked Hubert to book him a room for the time.

Hubert answered evasively. By the time he was finished it was seven o’clock, and he ordered something to eat. The restaurant was almost empty, a few men were sitting at a round table drinking beer and arguing noisily about local politics. Shortly before nine, Hubert left the restaurant. He had drunk too much to drive, really.

The hotel was brightly lit. When Hubert parked his car, he heard voices and laughter from the grounds, and music. There were no lights on in the cultural center, the door was locked, and the building looked discouraging. Hubert groped for a light switch. In the kitchen he found half a bottle of grappa. He took it up to his room, set up the slide projector, and looked at the photographs of women he had taken back in the day. He didn’t mean to work with the slides, presumably he had just brought them with him because they were part of the last sensible thing he had done. He projected the photos on a wall. He hadn’t looked at them for years, in his memory they had been more interesting than they were. He was surprised at the impertinence with which he had proceeded, he must have been completely convinced by his work. Almost more surprising was that his self-assuredness and enthusiasm had been so contagious that he had found women who agreed to take part. In one of the photographs there was a small black-haired woman, a postwoman, whom he had run into at the end of her shift. She wedged a bottle of Prosecco between her thighs and fiddled with the cork. In the next picture she was reaching for glasses on a high shelf, in the third she was pouring wine into one of them and laughing because the bubbles overflowed the glass. Then there were two out-of-focus shots of her walking down the corridor, and one of her turning back the corner of her bed. That was the one and only time that Hubert had slept with one of his models. He had never used the photographs.

In the next slide tray there were photos of a woman of sixty or so, knitting, in a third a young woman breast-feeding her naked baby. She had struck an attitude and after the session asked him for copies of the pictures, which he had never sent her. These pictures had been useless as well. Hubert went through all his trays, pictures of more than forty women. Most of them he could just about remember, but in some of the latter trays he had the sense that he had never seen the pictures before. One sequence was taken in dim light, the pictures were slightly out of focus, and the face of the woman was never completely visible, sometimes she hid it behind her long hair, most of the time she was trying to avoid the camera anyway. Hubert couldn’t quite remember her story, she was leaning across a table and seemed to be tidying up or looking at something. The room she was in seemed anonymous, other than the table there were no pieces of furniture or other objects to be seen. The pictures radiated a deep quiet, as though the model had been all alone in the room.

When he stood in the kitchen the next morning making coffee, Arno walked in. He said he had to go ahead and print up some exhibition posters, perhaps Hubert could let him have an image.

No, said Hubert.

A rough sketch? Anything at all? Is there a title for the show?

Hubert shook his head. Arno grimaced.

I suppose we can just print “Carte Blanche” on a white background, he said, what about that? Or better, white on black. Get it? He laughed. Have you seen the article?

He went off and reappeared a little later with a newspaper, which he laid on the table. Hubert took it back with him into his room. On the front page was a small photograph of him, with just his name, the word “painter,” and the number of the page where the article could be found. There was another picture of him, and a reproduction of the poster for his previous exhibition. The article wasn’t exactly hostile, but it had an ironic undertone. Tamara had gotten hold of biographical information (and misinformation) from Wikipedia. She referred briefly to the first exhibition in the cultural center, which had provoked a minor scandal, and wrote about Hubert’s way of working. A few of the quotations must have been lifted from other interviews.

Hubert Amrhein’s interest in naked ladies has worn off, wrote Tamara, he has matured, or perhaps simply got older, and he no longer scouts out naked bodies. There was a time when women had to go in fear of him, nowadays he is a spiritual seeker. It’s not impossible that he will find what he is looking for here in our area.

Hubert had no idea what that was based on. He took the newspaper back to the office.

Arno looked up at him questioningly. Do you like the article?

The stuff about spirituality is nonsense, said Hubert, I have no idea what that’s about.

Arno told him there were a lot of power places in the area, most artists who came here were interested in those.

Well, I’m not, said Hubert and he went back to his room.

That afternoon he went for a walk. He called Tamara and asked if she had time for coffee, he thought she had played pretty fast and loose with things he’d told her in her article.

Do you want right of reply?

Coffee would probably take care of it, he said, but I’ve got some things I want to ask you.

Okay, she said, come and meet me at my office at six.

Oh, the power places, snorted Tamara. That’s a complicated story.

She jabbed at her salad, and Hubert wondered if that was everything, then she put down her fork and said she didn’t believe in any of that stuff herself. But of course she couldn’t print anything negative about it in the paper, there were lots of people who came here for precisely that.

There are a few standing stones and cup marks from the Bronze Age, sure enough, but the dowsers, the guys who run around here with pendulums, measuring Bovis units, and claiming the radio vitality here is as strong as Chartres Cathedral, I think they’re bonkers.

She talked about an ethnologist who called himself a geobiologist and saw traces of a landscape deity called Ana everywhere around. The hills were her breasts, the valleys and sources her loins. Hubert recalled the landscapes of Georgia O’Keeffe, where the hills looked like the bodies of naked women.