Peter Stamm - All Days Are Night

Do you like them? she asked.

Hubert suddenly remembered her provocative question to him when she had taken her clothes off. Do you like what you see, then?

Yes, he said. Presumably something could have been done with these.

He also spread out the photos of Jill’s injured face.

They have more to do with one another than you might think, she said. If my husband hadn’t seen these shots of yours, the accident wouldn’t have happened.

She refilled their glasses and lit a cigarette. That’s a frightening thought, isn’t it, that you’re capable of killing someone with your art.

He put the photographs on the table into two piles: the nude shots and the injured faces.

Do you want me to exhibit these?

I don’t know, said Jill. You’re the artist.

She had been smoking one cigarette after the other, now clouds of smoke hung under the low ceiling. Hubert wanted to open a window, but when he stood up he almost overbalanced and had to grab hold of Jill’s chair. She stood up as well, and the chair fell over. They held each other.

Come, she said. He looked in her eyes, but their look was expressionless. It was chilly in the bedroom and smelled of wood and old smoke.

When Hubert awoke, he felt giddy, but at least he didn’t have a headache. He was dressed. Next to him lay Jill, apparently asleep. She was wearing a short silk nightdress, which had ridden up a little. He stroked her, felt her coming around, though she didn’t move. After a time she turned and looked at Hubert.

What time is it?

Without answering, he laid his hand on her stomach and went on stroking her. Jill smiled. When he slipped his hand down between her legs, she gripped it tight.

Draw me.

Hubert groaned.

There’s a pad and pencils on my desk downstairs, she said.

He groaned again, got up, and went downstairs. When he came back, she was undressed. She was lying on her stomach, her head pillowed on her crossed arms.

Hubert sat on a chair and drew her. As soon as he stopped, Jill changed position, and he turned the page and started a new sketch. She lay on her side; with her upper body raised; kneeling, hands behind her back; standing with folded arms by the window; sitting on a chair, legs apart, hands on her knees.

After he had done about twenty drawings, Jill went up to him and propped her hands on her hips. Let’s see what you’ve done.

Hold that, he said and sat on the bed to go on drawing.

Turn around.

He made a couple more drawings until Jill said she was hungry and had to have a cup of coffee and a cigarette. They ate breakfast in the sunshine outside.

Well, that seemed to work all right, said Jill.

Hubert shook his head. Those were just finger exercises.

Jill leafed through the pad on the table in front of them.

I like your drawings.

Of course I can knock out a couple of nudes, said Hubert, but that doesn’t prove anything.

I think I expected to be told something about myself from your pictures, said Jill, but then I saw you didn’t see me at all. That’s what made me undress. The notion that a human being should be something sealed off like a table or a chair is nonsense. Eventually I was reconciled to the thought that I didn’t really exist.

She went on leafing through the drawings.

The thing about the drawing lessons here, by the way, I meant that. They don’t need to be life classes. If you’re going to be spending more time here. You’d be paid for it, maybe it would inspire you.

Hubert was pushing buttons on his phone. There’s no reception here either, he said.

He spent the next several days driving around the area, even though he felt tired and unwell. He took photographs of the landscape that he knew he would never use. It was pleasant and warm. Sometimes he parked his car and walked some way up a slope, but he never went very far. When he ran into Arno, Arno always looked at him reproachfully. Once, Hubert asked him when the other artists were arriving. Arno shrugged and said they were delayed, he had no exact information.

On Thursday Hubert took the train down into the valley and spent the weekend in the city without getting in touch with Nina or Astrid, or taking in the diploma exhibition. Arno tried to speak with him once or twice, but each time Hubert refused the call. Instead, he called Jill and made a date for Saturday.

This time they went to a restaurant in the village. In the car, Jill asked Hubert where he had been, Arno had been desperately looking for him. We have the events committee tomorrow afternoon. He’s afraid you won’t be ready in time. It’s in less than two weeks. He’s thinking of trying to bring in someone else instead at short notice. Hubert didn’t say anything.

After dinner, Jill quite naturally drove back to her house. They split a bottle of wine and talked about the past six years. At midnight Jill asked if Hubert wanted to stay the night. Again, they slept in the same bed.

When Hubert awoke, Jill was already up, and he could smell coffee. Over breakfast she said she had to get going, but he didn’t have to hurry. Just call Arno.

Hubert didn’t feel like going to the cultural center and getting leaned on, so instead he showered and then wandered farther on up the road out of the village. It climbed a little more, and wound among meadows with large rocks lying on them, and then it went down, and he arrived in a thin forest. The air was cool and damp and resinous and ever so slightly smoky. Sunbeams fell through the trees and cast blurred patterns on the forest floor. He sat on a thick tree trunk by the side of the road and listened to the birds. He could hear the rushing of the Inn down below. He remembered walks he had gone on with his parents, vacation weeks in the mountains, endless days spent building dams over mountain streams, playing hide-and-seek in the forest, making campfires and cooking sausages. Suddenly he heard a buzzing sound. He looked down at his cell and saw he had five text messages. Three were from Arno, who wrote that there was an important meeting today, and would Hubert get in touch, urgently. The fourth was from Astrid, who asked how he was doing. She was planning on coming to the opening. Nina had written some nonsense. Hubert wiped everything and put the phone back in his pocket.

He walked back to Jill’s house, did the dishes, and picked a bunch of wildflowers from the garden. He couldn’t find a vase, so he used a big beer glass. Then he looked around the house once more. The books on Jill’s shelves were surely mostly her parents’. Everywhere in the house lay piles of magazines and fashion papers, in the living room next to the sofa was a stereo, beside it a little shelf with a couple dozen CDs. Hubert sat down at Jill’s desk and opened a drawer. He leafed through her old calendars, which he found right at the back. Most of the entries seemed to be about her work, plus a few massage or pedicure appointments, and sometimes a name without time or comment. Mostly they were women’s names, and they came around fairly regularly.

It was just two o’clock. Hubert went back out into the garden. He took a piece of wood from the pile next to the door, sat down at the granite table, and started whittling away at it with his pocket knife. He didn’t carve a shape, but first took off the bark, then cut the wood patiently into thin strips. As a boy he had often whiled away the hours like this, had pulled one thread after another from a piece of rough cloth, or picked away at a rope until there were just thin fibers left, broken up a blossom or a fir twig into its constituent parts, hatched and crosshatched a piece of paper with pencil till it made a shiny even surface. Suddenly he saw the exhibition he wanted to put on: white steles distributed around a room, and on them the remnants of such labors, a pile of thread, hemp fibers, blossoms. Or, better, he would leave the steles empty, and the materials would lie beside them on the floor, as though rejected, or as though the objects had dissolved of their own accord. He went into the house, got a small plastic bag from the kitchen, and put in the wood shavings and the rest of the log.