In Strange Gardens and Other Stories

ICE LAKE

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.

FLOTSAM

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.

Lotta was Finnish, and she lived in the West Village in Manhattan. I was looking for an apartment. An agency had given me Lotta’s number.

“I sometimes have to rent the apartment,” said Lotta, “when I don’t have any work.”

“And where do you live then?”

“Usually with friends,” she said, “but this time I couldn’t find anyone. Do you know of anywhere I can go?”

The apartment was big enough for two, so I offered to let her stay in it. She agreed right away.

“You must never pick up the phone,” she said. “Always wait till you know who’s calling. If you want to talk to me, call my name, and I’ll switch off the answering machine.”

“Were you there the first time I called?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

Lotta lived on the fourth floor of an old building on 11th Street. Everything in the apartment was black, the furniture, the sheets, the rugs. A few withered cactuses stood on the little wrought iron balcony that opened out onto the yard. On the table by Lotta’s bed, and the glass-topped table that had the answering machine on it, there were dusty shells and twigs of coral. The few lamps had red and green bulbs in them, which made the rooms look odd at night, as if they were under water.

When I came to inspect the apartment, Lotta had answered the door in pajamas, even though it was midday. After showing me round the place, she went straight back to bed. I asked her if she was ill, but she shook her head and said, no, she just liked sleeping.

After I moved in, I never knew her to get up before midday, and usually she went to bed before me as well. She read a lot, and she drank coffee, but I rarely saw her eat anything. She seemed to live off coffee and chocolate. “You should have a healthier diet,” I said, “then you wouldn’t be so tired.”

“But I like sleeping,” she said, and smiled.

There was a black kitten living with us too. Lotta had been given it, and she called it Romeo. Later, she learned that Romeo was a girl, but the name stuck anyway.

It was October. I was meeting a couple of old friends, Werner and Graham, who were working for a bank. I suggested we go to the shore for a long weekend. Graham said we could take his car, and I asked Lotta to come along. We set off on a Friday morning. We wanted to go to Block Island, which is a little island about a hundred miles east of Manhattan.

We made our first stop in Queens. We were late setting out, and already hungry. We bought hotdogs from a stand on the road. Lotta just drank coffee. At a crossroads a little way ahead of us was a black man, who was standing beside a cardboard box full of vacuum-packed meat. Whenever the lights turned red, he would go from car to car and try to interest the people in the meat. When he caught sight of us he came running up, with one of the packages in his hand. We stopped and talked to him for a while. He spoke better French than English, and we asked him what he was doing in Queens. He didn’t mind our kidding around with him; probably he was hoping we would buy something from him. Even as we drove off, he was still smiling, waving his packages at us, and calling out something after us that we couldn’t understand.

We got onto the island on the last ferry of the day. We had left the car in an almost deserted carpark on the mainland. The crossing took two hours, and even though it was cold, Werner spent the whole time outside, leaning on the railing. The rest of us sat in the cafeteria. The ship was almost empty.

Right next to the port on the island there was a big, crumbling turn-of-the-century hotel. Not far away was a simple B and B in a shiny, white-painted clapboard house. Lotta and I shared a room — it seemed the natural thing to do.

There was a near gale blowing in off the sea. All the same, we thought we’d take a walk before supper. There was a gray wooden boardwalk going along the shore. Once outside the village, it suddenly stopped, and we had to trudge on through sand.

Werner and I were walking together. He was very quiet. Graham and Lotta had taken off their shoes, and were looking for shells nearer the tide line. Before long, they had dropped back. Only occasionally we heard a shout or Lotta’s high-pitched laugh through the roar of the surf.

After we’d walked along a while, Werner and I sat down on the sand to wait for the others. We could see their silhouettes black against the glinting water.

“What are those two doing down there?” I asked.

“Picking up shells,” said Werner placidly. “We’ve gone a long way.”

I clambered up onto a dune to look back. Sand leaked into my shoes, and I took them off. The village was a long way away. Some of the houses already had lights on. When I came back down, Werner had got up and walked down to the water. Lotta and Graham were sitting in the shelter of a dune. They had put their shoes back on. I sat down beside them and we looked silently out to sea, and watched Werner throwing rocks or shells into the water. The wind blew up little tornadoes of sand along the beach.

“I’m cold,” said Lotta.

On the way back, I walked with Lotta and helped her carry some of the shells she’d picked up. I had knotted together my shoelaces, and my shoes were dangling over my shoulder. The sand felt chilly underfoot. Graham was walking on ahead, Werner was following us at a distance.

“I like Graham,” said Lotta.

“They work in a bank,” I said, “him and Werner. But they’re okay.”

“How old is he?”

“We’re all the same age as each other. We went to school together.”

Lotta talked about Finland. She had grown up on a farm, north of Helsinki. Her father had bred bulls. Lotta had left home early, and gone first to Berlin, then London, then Florence. Finally, four or five years ago, she had turned up in New York.

“Last Christmas I visited my parents. For the first time in years. My father’s not well. At first, my plan was to stay with them, but I came back in May.” She hesitated. “I suppose I only went away on account of Joseph.”

“What happened with Joseph? Were you an item?”

Lotta shrugged her shoulders. “It’s a long story. I’ll save it for some other time.”

As we were approaching the village, we turned around to look for Werner. He was a long way back, and was walking slowly down by the water’s edge. When he saw us waiting for him, he waved and speeded up a bit.

We had supper in a little fish restaurant. Lotta said she was a vegetarian, but Graham reckoned she was allowed to eat fish anyway. We paid for her, and she ate whatever the rest of us ate, but she didn’t drink any wine.

After Lotta had been silent a while, Graham and I sometimes lapsed into our native tongue. Werner didn’t speak, and it didn’t seem to bother Lotta either way. She ate slowly and with concentration, as if she had to think about every move and every bite. She noticed me watching her and smiled, and only went on eating when I’d stopped looking at her.

At night, Lotta wore pink pajamas with appliquéd teddy bears. She had short blond hair. She was certainly over thirty, but she seemed like a little kid. She lay on her back, and had pulled the covers up to her chin. I rested my head on my hands, and looked at her.

“Do you think you’re going to stay in New York?” I asked.

“No,” said Lotta, “I don’t like the climate.”

“Is Finland any better?” I asked.

“At home I was always cold. I want to go to Trinidad. I’ve got a lot of friends there.”

“You’ve got a lot of friends, period.”

“Yes,” said Lotta.

“Well, you’ve got some friends in Switzerland now.”

“I’d like to have a little shop in Trinidad,” she said. “Cosmetics, films, aspirin … things imported from here. You can’t get that kind of thing over there. Or else it’s very expensive.”

“Do they speak English on Trinidad?” I asked.

“I think so. My friends speak English … well, and it’s always warm.”

On the road below, a car drove past. Its headlights sliced through the blinds, swung across the room, up onto the ceiling, and suddenly went out, just over our bed.

“You have a lot of freedom,” I said. But Lotta was already asleep.

We met Werner and Graham at breakfast.

“Did you sleep well?” asked Graham with a grin.

“I like to be able to hear the ocean from bed,” I said.

“I was very tired,” said Lotta.

Werner ate in silence.

It started raining in the morning, and we went to the local museum. It was housed in a little white barn. There’s not much to report on the history of Block Island. Some time it was discovered by a Dutchman by the name of Block. Some settlers crossed from the mainland. Not too much happened after that.

The old fellow who ran the museum told us about the many ships that had run aground on the reefs in front of the island. The locals had lived from flotsam and jetsam more than they had ever done from fishing.

“People say they lured the ships ashore with false lights,” said the man, and laughed. Nowadays the island was living off tourism. In summer, every ferry was full of summerfolk, and a lot of wealthy New York people kept summerhouses there. For a while it had been quite the thing to have a house on Block Island. But today a lot of those people flew to the Caribbean.

“Things have gotten quieter here,” said the man, “but we can’t complain. Ships no longer come to grief here, but all kinds of things still get washed ashore.”

Lotta asked him whether he was a fisherman.

“I used to be a realtor,” he said. “You can’t imagine the kind of things that get washed up here.”

He laughed, I didn’t know why.

Then we went down to the beach again. Lotta started looking for shells again, we others sat down and smoked. Graham took a shard of crab’s claw and dug a hole with it in the fine sand, which grew waterlogged just below the surface.

“Well,” I said, “what did I tell you? She’s quite nice, don’t you think?”

Werner didn’t say anything. Graham laughed. “What are we going to be able to say about her, we don’t get to sleep in the same bed with her.”

“The sound of that: sleep in the same bed with. Why don’t you say what you’re really thinking.”

“It’s my turn tonight,” said Graham with a grin, “and tomorrow it’s Werner’s. But he doesn’t go in for that kind of thing.”

I told him he was being an idiot, and Werner said: “Come on, stop it.” He stood up and walked off, down to the sea. Lotta came back, with her hands full of shells. She sat down in the sand next to us, spread out her bounty, and began slowly wiping each shell with her fingers. Graham picked up a spiral shell from between Lotta’s legs, and examined it for a long time.

“Strange, what nature throws up,” he said, and laughed. “What was it the man said? You can’t imagine what washes up here.”

The noon ferry brought a few more tourists ashore, but they quickly dispersed in various directions, and before long the village was deserted again. We ate on the terrace of a coffee shop.

“What now?” I asked.

“I’m tired,” said Lotta. “I think I’ll go and lie down for an hour.”

Graham set off to look for a newspaper, and Werner said he was going down to the sea. I strolled back to the hotel with Lotta.

The beds in our room had been made up, and the window was wide open. Lotta shut it, and pulled down the blinds. She lay down. I sat down on the floor and leaned against the bed.

“I wonder how poor little Romeo’s doing,” said Lotta. “I do miss him terribly.”

“I’m sure he’s fine.”

“Don’t you want to lie down?”

“I’m not tired.”

“I can always sleep,” said Lotta.

In the late afternoon, we rented some bicycles to go and view the Palatine graves on the south of the island. That’s where sixteen Dutchmen who survived the famous wreck of the Palatine are supposed to be buried.

“Why are they buried if they survived?” asked Lotta.

“Buried alive,” said Graham.

Werner laughed.

“It was in the eighteenth century,” I said.

“But why were they buried together then?” asked Lotta. “Just because they were on the same ship?”

“Perhaps because they were rescued together,” I suggested. “They must have bonded.”

We found a crumbly signpost somewhere, but we never found the graves. We saw a man in a meadow. He didn’t know where the graves were either. He had never even heard of them. Disappointed, we turned back.

“I don’t care,” said Lotta, “I don’t like graveyards anyway.”

We were riding into the wind now, and only reached the hotel after dark. We drank a beer. Lotta called her neighbor, to see if her cat was okay.

“Everything’s fine,” she said, coming back.

“It’s Werner’s thirtieth birthday next week,” I said to Lotta. “We should have a party for him.”

“That makes you a Libra,” she said. “Joseph was a Libra as well.”

“What Joseph?” Graham asked. “As in Joseph and Mary?”

“As in Joseph and Lotta, more like,” I said.

“A friend,” said Lotta.

“Libra,” muttered Graham, and leafed through his newspaper. Then he read out: “You are facing a decision, and should be realistic about it. It shouldn’t be difficult for you to strike up new acquaintances. Happy hours lie ahead.”

“That’s a good horoscope,” said Lotta.

Werner laughed. It was an odd, mocking laugh. Graham and I laughed along, but Lotta merely smiled, and laid her hand on Werner’s arm.

“It’s all right,” she said. “Come on, let’s go for a walk.”

They got up, and we arranged to meet up in an hour in the fish restaurant where we’d gone the night before. Werner walked upright and stiff like an invalid. He looked as though he wasn’t moving at all. Lotta pushed her arm through his. She seemed to be driving him onward, down toward the beach.

“So,” said Graham, after we’d been silent for a long time, “what’s she like then?”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t play the innocent. What else did you bring her along for?”

“She’s a strange woman,” I said. “Don’t you think so?”

Graham grinned. “A woman’s a woman.”

“No,” I said, “I like her. I like being with her.”

“Which one of the three of us do you think she likes best?” asked Graham.

“I think you’re the one who’s desperate to be liked by her.”

“Ach, give over. I like it that she’s always so tired. They’re good in bed. I know the sort.”

“Listen, guy, you should remember you’re married.”

“I’m on vacation. Do you think I’ve come to look for seashells?”

“What does Werner say?” I asked.

“Nothing. Werner says absolutely nothing. I’ve never known him so quiet. He’s like a fish.”

We finished our beer. Graham said he needed to phone, and I sat down in an armchair in the lobby of the hotel and started flicking through the Fisherman’s Quarterly.

Lotta didn’t come to supper. She was tired, explained Werner as he came to the table alone. He was as quiet as ever during the meal, but the earnestness of the past few days was gone, and he sometimes put down his knife and fork and smiled quietly to himself.

“Are we in love then?” asked Graham mockingly.

“No,” said Werner curtly but not angrily. And he calmly went on eating. Over coffee he said we ought to go and look at the chalk cliffs on the south of the island tomorrow.

“They must be somewhere near the Palatine graves then,” I said. “I don’t know about cycling all the way down there again …”

Graham had no desire to cross the island again.

“Just on account of a few chalk cliffs. There are chalk cliffs all over Europe. In England, in Brittany, in Ireland, all over.”

But Werner wouldn’t be deterred, and merely said: “Well, you don’t have to come if you don’t want.”

At midnight Werner went off to bed. Graham and I sat around for a long time after. We had had quite a bit to drink. Graham said his wife had moved out. She was now living with her English tutor.

“She didn’t get a work permit,” he said. “Then she wanted a baby, but that didn’t work. She was bored.”

I felt sorry for Graham. Then I suddenly realized that I disliked him. I said I was tired and was going to bed. He ordered two more beers, but I got up and went anyway.

Lotta seemed to be fast asleep when I walked into the room. Her breathing was loud and irregular. I got undressed, opened the window a crack, and lay down beside her. I listened to her breathing and to the roar of the sea, but I soon fell asleep, and only woke up when I heard someone banging on the door. I saw right away that Lotta wasn’t there, but I didn’t think anything of it. It was mid-morning. Graham was standing outside the door.

“Werner’s gone,” he said.

“Lotta is too,” I said. “Maybe they’re having breakfast.”

“No,” said Graham, “I’ve been downstairs and looked.”

We ate our own breakfast.

“Perhaps they went down to the sea,” I suggested, “or to look at the cliffs.”

“Well, one thing for sure, they haven’t taken their bicycles,” said Graham, “and it must be two hours on foot.”

We both felt irritated. When Werner and Lotta weren’t back by lunchtime, we took the bicycles and rode south. But there were two roads, and if Werner and Lotta were walking, there was no knowing which one they would have taken. A couple of hours later, we were back in the bed and breakfast.

“They’re going to get such a tongue-lashing when they get back,” said Graham.

The woman at the front desk wanted to see us. She said we needed to clear out our rooms. Our friends had left while we were gone. They had left a note. She passed me a piece of paper where Lotta had written we weren’t to worry, and should drive home without them. She and Werner would make their own way back.

“I sensed your Finn wasn’t too picky,” said Graham, “but taking off with Werner …”

“I can’t understand why they left,” I said. “We had nice times together.”

“Werner won,” said Graham. “Simple as that.”

He was grinning, but he couldn’t mask his fury.

“She’s her own person,” I said, “she’s free to go with anyone she likes.”

There was just enough time to pack our things before the next ferry departed for the mainland.

The crossing was cold and windy. By the time we got to the car the entire sky had clouded over, and shortly after we drove off it started raining. We barely talked. Graham was livid, and drove much too fast. He was going back to Switzerland, he said, he had had it with America. His wife would have to go back with him, like it or not. After all, she was still dependent on him for money.

Outside Bridgeport we stopped for gas, and I tried calling Werner and then Lotta. But Werner wasn’t there, and Lotta’s answering machine played only music, as though nothing had happened. After the signal I yelled out: “Lotta, are you there? Lotta!”

I imagined my voice echoing through the empty apartment, felt stupid, and hung up.

We drove through the Bronx to Queens, where Graham lived. I went up with him. His place was a mess, dirty plates in the kitchen. While Graham played back phone messages, I made coffee. There was an agitated voice on the tape, but I couldn’t hear much over the boiling water. When I walked into the sitting room, Graham was sitting slumped on the sofa, with the phone pressed to his ear. I poured the coffee. Graham said yes once or twice, and then thank you, and then he hung up.

“Werner’s killed himself,” he said. “He wrote a farewell note before we set out on Friday. That was his landlady I was talking to. She has a key to his place and was looking around it yesterday. It was because it was raining, she said, and she wanted to check that all the windows were closed.”

He told me the whole, utterly irrelevant story as if he was terrified of silence.

“The note was on the kitchen table. The woman is Hungarian, she knows a bit of German, and she understood the gist of it. But she didn’t know where we were going. She found my number next to the phone. She called a couple of other people as well.”

“But Lotta,” I said, “surely she didn’t … After all, she wrote that we weren’t to worry about her. They were going to make their own way home …”

Graham shrugged his shoulders.

“Do you think he wanted to … do you think he jumped off the cliff?” I asked. “I don’t think he’s capable of that. He’s not a romantic.”

“Well, I’m sure he didn’t have a gun,” said Graham.

“What are we going to do?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s too early to go to the police.”

He wanted to give me a ride into the city, but I said he ought to stay by the phone. I didn’t feel like talking, I wanted to be alone. The two cups of coffee sat on the table, untouched.

The subway station was almost deserted. I had to wait fifteen minutes for a train. As we approached Manhattan, it gradually filled up. I got out one station before my usual stop, and walked the last few blocks. It wasn’t raining any more, but the streets were still wet. I bought a beer and a sandwich at a convenience store.

As I opened the front door of the apartment, I could hear Lotta’s voice. The answering machine was on, and was recording. At first I wanted to pick up the receiver and speak to her, but then I didn’t and just listened. “The furniture all belongs to Joseph. And Romeo … Robert, please will you look after Romeo. He’s so little. Promise me you won’t let anything happen to him. You can stay in the apartment too. You’ll just have to sort it out with Joseph. Tell him you’ve paid the agency fees.” There was silence for a moment.

“I think that’s everything. Be well, and don’t be mad at us. Bye Graham, bye Robert.”

She whispered: “Do you want to say anything else?”

I heard Werner clearly say no. Then there was a click, and the connection was broken. I pictured Lotta turning to face Werner, in some bus stop or restaurant, and he smiling, and the two of them going off together and disappearing. I thought I’d missed my last chance to speak to her, or at least to say goodbye.

I rewound the tape and listened to it from the beginning.

“You have … TWO messages,” said the synthetic voice. Then I heard my voice: “Lotta, are you there? Lotta!” I sounded nervous and angry, worried. There were a couple of clicks, and then Lotta spoke: “Hello, is anyone home? Hello, Robert, hello!” She sighed, and then she said: “Ah well, then you’re still on your way back. Doesn’t matter. I’m calling from a restaurant. We’re in … where are we?”

I could hear them whispering.

“We’re near Philadelphia. I’m with Werner. We’re traveling together. Originally, Werner was going to … well, he left a note in his apartment. But he’s changed his mind. We’re going traveling together. He’s fixed everything. You’ll understand when you see the note. I don’t have much that needs taking care of. Robert? If you get this, will you call Joseph. He knows about everything. You’ll find his number on the list next to the phone. I came back to the apartment quickly to pick up a few things. I don’t need any more. The furniture belongs to Joseph …”

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.”

IN THE OUTER SUBURBS

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.

“Yo,” went a young man at one of the tables, “he misadeh misadeeho …”

The barman set our beers down on the bar in front of us. I was pretty drunk by now. I raised my glass, and said: “To poetry!”

“Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you,” said the old man.

“Now read the poems that men have written for women,” said Dylan, and he recited from memory: “She is as in a field a silken tent, at midday when a sunny summer breeze has dried the dew …”

Overcome, he stopped, looked down at the dirty floor, and sadly shook his head.

“Women call themselves romantics, as if they would call themselves American,” he said. “They love it when you say you’re beautiful, your eyes shine like the sun, your lips are red as coral, your breasts are white as snow. They think they’re romantic because they like to be adored by men.”

I wanted to contradict, but he said: “I just want to open your eyes. Don’t let women make a fool of you. They’ll tempt you with their spare flesh. And once you’ve bitten, they’ll break your head open and eat you up.”

I laughed.

“You remind me of someone,” said Dylan.

“Some friend of yours?” I asked.

“A very good friend. He’s dead now.”

I went to the rest room.

“I’ve got no money left for the bus now,” I said.

“I’ll take you home,” said Dylan.

I thought it must be dark by now, but as we stepped out of the bar, it was a fine afternoon. The rain had stopped.

There were still clouds in the sky. But the low sun shone through underneath them. The houses and trees and cars glistened and projected long shadows. Dylan had his car parked on Queens Boulevard. He turned into a sidestreet.

“That’s not my way home,” I said. “You’re going the wrong way.”

Dylan laughed. “Are you scared of me?” he asked.

I didn’t say anything.

“I’m just turning the car around,” he said. “Are you that scared of women too?”

“I don’t know … I guess not.”

We drove back toward Manhattan in silence. I hadn’t walked nearly as far as I thought.

“Here,” I said, “I’d like to walk the last bit.”

I got out, and walked around the car. Dylan had wound down the window and held out his hand.

“Thanks for the ride,” I said, “and thanks for the beer.”

Dylan wouldn’t let go my hand till I looked into his eyes. Then he said: “Thanks for a pleasant afternoon.”

As I crossed the street, he called after me: “And Merry Christmas.”

EVERYONE’S RIGHT

I could see Monika’s yellow rain jacket through the trees. I had put on water for coffee when she called me. The forest was dense here, and the ground was covered with boughs and twigs that snapped underfoot. It was hard going, and after just a few steps my pants and my hands were filthy with moss and algae that covered everything with their slime.

“Quiet,” said Monika softly, as I approached. Then I saw that Michael was curled up on the ground in front of her.

“What’s the matter with him?” I asked, once I heard his noisy breathing.

“When he caught sight of me he ran off, and then he fell,” said Monika. She knelt down, and shook Michael gently. “What happened? Where’s Sandra?”

“I lost my shoe,” he said, panting. “I can’t find it anywhere.”

“Where’s Sandra?” asked Monika.

“Gone to get help.”

It was only by chance that I had wound up in Sweden at all. Monika had recently broken up with her boyfriend, and since the canoe tour had already been booked, she asked me whether I’d like to go with her. I’d been in love with Monika back in high school, but there was one terrible night when she told me she wasn’t in love with me. We had stayed friends, and I’d gone on hoping for a while, till one day she told me she had a lover. All that happened years ago.

We had run into Sandra and Michael on the train. They were both wearing purple fleeces and trousers with loads of pockets. Sandra said this was her fifth visit to Sweden, she had worked in the travel business, she loved the north, her car had been broken open and robbed once in Goteborg. She spoke Swedish place names as if she had mastered the language. When Monika asked her, she said no, unfortunately not, she just spoke German, French, Italian, and, of course, English. She said her name was Sandra, and her husband’s was Michael.

“My husband’s name is Michael,” she said. “We’re on our honeymoon.”

Michael didn’t say anything. He didn’t even seem to be listening, and just stared out into the forest. Only once, when a heron flew up from close to the tracks, and cleared the treetops with a few lazy wingstrokes, did he say: “Sandra, look.”

“This will be our last vacation for some time,” said Sandra. “We’re having a baby in six months. Isn’t that right, Michael?”

Michael was staring out of the window again, and Sandra repeated: “Isn’t that right, Michael?”

“Yes,” he said eventually.

“You seem to be over the moon about it,” said Monika, with an exaggeratedly warm smile.

“It seems such a miracle to me,” said Sandra, “to feel a new life stirring within me.”

“The real miracle will be when the life starts stirring on its own,” said Monika tartly.

“Don’t you want children?” asked Sandra, turning to me.

“Children aren’t compatible with the interior design of our apartment,” said Monika quickly.

The campsite was on the edge of a small town, between an automobile factory and the big lake. When we went to the store to buy provisions, we ran into Sandra and Michael again. Sandra said we had to buy mosquito repellent, and only Swedish mosquito repellent worked on Swedish mosquitoes.

“Have you vino?” an Austrian woman was asking at the checkout ahead of us. The checkout clerk shook her head, and Sandra told the woman about the Swedish laws governing the sale of alcohol.

“I can’t stand that woman,” Monika whispered in my ear. In the evening, as we were heading for the pizza joint next to the campsite, we saw Sandra and Michael crouching in front of their tent, cooking.

“We’re having a proper adventure vacation,” Sandra called out. “The pizza place is no good, and it’s expensive.”

Michael didn’t say anything. It was true, the pizzas weren’t very good, and they were really expensive. But Monika did imitations of Sandra all through supper, and we spent a fun evening.

“I can have much more of a laugh with you than I could with Stefan,” she said.

“Is that why you split up?”

“No,” said Monika. “He wanted to have a baby.”

“And you?”

“He just wanted it because he was scared. All his friends were having babies. He was probably afraid everything would carry on in the same way. And that he would get old. All that. That’s what he said.”

“And you?” I asked again.

“Well, in the end, you’re on your own anyway,” said Monika.

“Don’t you want a baby?”

“No. I want to get through life alone. Even if it means growing old on my own.”

Monika said ideally she would have gone on the canoeing tour on her own as well. But then she had read that at some points you had to carry the boat across land for a little ways, and she didn’t think she could do that. And so she’d asked me to come.

“So I’m here as your bearer?”

“No. You know what you mean to me. You’re my oldest friend, and that’s more than the greatest lover.”

When we returned past Sandra and Michael’s tent, we couldn’t see them anymore. But from inside the tent we could hear Sandra moaning: “Oh, yes! Oh, give it to me! Oh, that’s so good!”

Monika coughed and in a disguised voice called out something that might sound like Swedish. There was silence right away.

“I’m going for a shower,” Monika said when we’d got to our tent. “Last showers before the highway.”

By the time she was back, I was already in my sleeping bag.

“Turn away,” she ordered. She undressed, and I smelled the fresh smell of soap. She clicked off the flashlight. We lay side by side, silently. Then Monika asked me: “Do you yell like that each time you sleep with a woman?”

“No,” I said.

“Glad to hear it,” said Monika. “Good night.”

The next morning, when we went down to the canoe rental place, Michael and Sandra were already there. Sandra was talking about universal rights. Everyone was entitled to walk in the forest, and to go on the river, and pick mushrooms and firewood for his own personal use. She said, basically you were allowed to live in the forest. Just like the animals, free, without money. To live off roots and berries, and whatever the forest would provide. Off the fruits of nature, was what she said.

“Hunger, cold, and disease,” said Monika, “those are the fruits of nature.”

Michael stood there silently. Then a canoe rental person came along, and we loaded the canoes onto an old bus, and drove to the starting point of our tour. The road led further and further into the forest. Our driver drove fast, and sometimes he jerked the steering wheel to the side, to avoid a pothole in the unmade road. And then he would laugh. Now it was Sandra who was very quiet, except once I heard her say: “I’m not going to be sick. It’s just a matter of will power.”

Sandra and Michael seemed to get their boat ready to go in no time at all. They paddled off, while the driver was still explaining the use of the camping stove to us, and how to tie the most important knot. We were to keep our life vests on at all times, and keep our baggage tied on, in case we should capsize. Then, before we had the canoe in the water, he had turned the bus, and vanished into the forest.

After a few hours I felt exhausted from the unfamiliar exercise, from the heat of the midday sun, and from the long journey the day before. But I didn’t say anything, and paddled on in silence. Eventually I forgot the soreness in my arms, my strokes became calmer and more rhythmic, and we made steadier progress. I had the sense that my body had detached itself from my head, and was working automatically.

Then, all at once, it was late, and we were surprised that the sun was still so high in the sky. At eleven at night, you could still read a newspaper here out of doors, Sandra had told us in the train, but when we finally found a place to pitch our tent, we merely pitched it and made our supper.

“Ideally, I’d never stop,” said Monika, “just keep going down the river, night and day.”

“It would be nice not to know where we were going,” I said.

“You never know where you’re going anyway.”

The following days all resembled each other. We got up late, made coffee, set out. Sometimes we swam in the river, or lay around on the grass during the midday heat. One sunny afternoon, we moored on a tiny island in the middle of a lake. We had something to eat. I had meant to read, but I was already too tired. I turned onto my back, and closed my eyes. The sun was bright, and I saw colorful whirling shapes in orange and light green that spun in circles. I fell asleep.

When I opened my eyes, the sky above me looked almost black. My mouth was dry, and my body felt warm and heavy. It took me a while to come round. With an effort I turned onto my side. Monika wasn’t there, and I stood up and crossed the little patch of grass to the place where we’d fixed the boat. Monika’s clothes lay on the grass. I looked out onto the lake, and saw her some way off.

“Come on in,” she shouted, swimming back toward me, “the water’s lovely.”

“That sounds like a film,” I said. “The water’s lovely. People only say that in films.”

“But it really is lovely.”

“Funny, you can’t even describe it.”

“It’s true,” she said, “I can’t describe it. Is that silly? But I really can’t.”

She emerged from the water. I had never seen her so nearly naked. Her hair was plastered against her head, and the water dribbled out of her bathing suit.

“Do you know that I used to be hopelessly in love with you?” I said. “You broke my heart. I thought you were the woman of my life.”

“When was that?” asked Monika, shaking the water out of her hair.

“When you told me you didn’t love me.”

“Did I say that?” Suddenly she started laughing. “Oh, if only you could see your face. I remember. It was after our class trip. I was in love with Leo then, but he didn’t like me.”

“When was the first time you slept with a man?” I asked. I had sat down in the grass, and was looking at her. Monika turned her back to me, and pulled off her bathing suit. Then she dried herself with her towel, and got dressed. “I was seventeen,” she said, and turned to face me again, “it was with a friend of my brother’s. He was a lot older. Maybe ten years or so. You were all so childish then with your talk of undying love and God and the meaning of life. I just wanted to see what it felt like.”

“That’s all I wanted too.”

“Nonsense,” said Monika, “you were in love, you just said so.”

We were now paddling through forested country, but we started looking at it more closely, and noticing that the landscape kept changing, and the colors and the water. The water was black or blue or dark green, and sometimes our canoe slipped through patches of water-lilies or through beds of reeds. When there was a wind, we kept inshore. In the evenings, we tried to tally up the days, and looked at the map to see how far we’d come. We soon lost all sense of time.

We hadn’t seen another human being for days when we saw a canoe on the bank. Then we saw Sandra and Michael who were lying naked on the grass. I hoped they wouldn’t see us, but they seemed to hear us, and looked up. They didn’t wave, and we pretended we hadn’t seen them.

“Lying there like animals,” said Monika. “With her, I always have the feeling she’s trying to prove something.”

“Because she’s having a baby?”

“No, it’s not that,” said Monika. “Haven’t you ever seen children where you can just tell they’re going to turn into idiots just like their parents? Even quite small children.”

I thought I wouldn’t mind lying naked with Monika in the grass, and I said so.

“Like an animal,” said Monika. “I couldn’t do that. I’d be scared.”

“There’s no one around.”

“That would be why. There has to be some distinction.”

“I mean just because we’ve known each other for so long,” I said. “I wouldn’t feel ashamed in front of you.”

“I always wanted to be different from my parents. Even though I like my parents. But I don’t want to be just a copy of them. It would be awful if everything just carried on being exactly the same.” She hesitated. Then she said with a laugh: “And why would you feel ashamed anyway?”

When I looked back after a while, I saw Sandra and Michael sitting in their canoe, and coming after us. They were paddling as fast as they could, and shortly after, when they passed us without a word, I could hear their panting. They were dressed now, in swimsuits and T-shirts. Automatically, I started paddling faster, but Monika said, “Oh, don’t. I don’t feel like racing.”

“But I don’t want to have anybody in front of me,” I said. “Do you think they knew it was you, at the campsite?”

“I don’t care,” said Monika. “Fuck them too.”

The next afternoon we went swimming again. The water was cold, and we soon returned to the shore.

“They were here too,” said Monika, picking up a chocolate wrapper that was lying on the sand. “Pigs.”

“It could have been anyone.”

“I expect he did it to her here too.”

“You’re a little bit obsessed. Leave them alone. If they enjoy it.”

“It spoils everything,” said Monika. She balled up the wrapper and threw it in the bushes. “How do you do it? You’re not a monk. How long have you been on your own?”

“Half a year … eight months. How do I do what?”

“It’s so strange. It’s nice, it doesn’t cost anything, and you can do it anywhere. And yet …”

“I don’t know … Really — everywhere …”

“In principle,” said Monika. “Where was the craziest place that you slept with a woman?”

We had hung our towels up to dry on a tree, and were lying on the grassy bank. Monika turned toward me, looked at me, and smiled.

“It was just I didn’t have any respect for you then,” she said. “I liked you all right. But if I don’t have any respect for a man …”

“What about now?” I asked.

Some clouds had drawn up, and when they passed in front of the sun, the temperature cooled quickly. We packed our things together, and moved off. The wind was gusting, but the water was almost still and very dark, and made little sucking sounds against the thin aluminum sides of our canoe. In some places it curled up, as over some shallows. Then we saw a flash of lightning, and we counted the seconds till the thunder, and we knew there was a storm at hand. I remembered my childhood, when the lifeguard had got us all out of the water when there was a storm coming. Then on the shore, just ahead of us, we spotted one of the little shelters they set up for canoeists here and there along the river. When we moored our boat, the waves were already high, and then all at once it started to rain. We pulled the boat onto the shore, covered it over with a tarpaulin, and ran for shelter.

“Where do you reckon the others are now?” I asked.

“No idea,” said Monika. “Struck by lightning, for all I care.”

The rain fell. We sat in the shelter for hours. Monika leaned against me, and I put my arm around her. Some time, we both fell asleep. Later on, we got the camping stove out of the boat, and made coffee and smoked the last of my cigarettes.

“What will we do if it doesn’t stop raining?” I asked.

“Oh, it always stops eventually,” said Monika.

It had gotten cold, and we could barely see the opposite bank through the teeming rain. It was like sitting in a room with walls of water. Gradually, it lessened, and we caught a glimpse of a low-angled sun. We paddled on. The river narrowed, and the current increased. We passed under a solitary bridge that water was still dripping off. In some places, trees had toppled into the river, and we had to squeeze by them. That night, we had trouble finding a campsite. By the time we finally did, mist was already rising off the water. We tried, unsuccessfully, to light a fire.

The next morning the sun was shining, but round about noon it began to rain again. A fisherman we met as we carried the boat around a little lock warned us that the weather would stay like this now. And it really did rain all that day, into the evening, when we put up our tent. Everything was wet, and this time we didn’t try and cook, we just ate crispbread and ham with sweet mustard.

I couldn’t sleep for a long time that night, but it didn’t bother me. I listened to the rain falling on the taut canvas and thought of the time I was in love with Monika, and all that had passed since then. It rained all that night, and it was raining the next morning, and through most of that day as well. When it finally stopped, we had long since stopped bothering about it.

The river levels were high now, and the water was murky with particles of earth. The river was narrow at this point, and the current was so strong that the water seemed to roar, and we stopped using our paddles except to keep from running into anything. When we came around a corner, we saw a canoe on the bank, with bags, mats, and a couple of sleeping bags next to it. There was a big dent on it.

“I think they must have capsized,” said Monika. “Our two fuckers. Shall we go see?”

“Do you want to?” I asked.

“They might need help,” she said. “It’s our duty as citizens.”

We allowed ourselves to drift past the spot, turned, and made our way back to the bank against the current. “Hallo!” called Monika. “Michael, Sandra, are you there?” We heard nothing. Monika said she was going to have a little look around, and would I make some coffee. Then she found Michael, and called me.

“Sandra’s gone to get help,” said Michael, “she headed into the forest.”

We helped him to get up. The three of us couldn’t squeeze through the trees, but it turned out Michael wasn’t in such a bad way as we’d initially supposed. He was able to walk unaided, but he had a limp, and favored his bare foot. By the time we were beside the river, the water for coffee was boiling. We only had two cups. Monika and I shared one, and gave the other one to Michael. After a few swallows, he began to talk.

“There was a fallen tree lying across the river. Up ahead. We took the corner too fast, and were unable to avoid it.”

They had rammed the tree, and the canoe had turned sideways, tipped up, and immediately filled with water. They had jumped out of the boat, Michael said, the water wasn’t deep at that place, but all their things had fallen into the river. Their food was gone, and the camping stove and the paddles as well. All they’d been able to save had been a few things that had bobbed on the surface for a while.

Monika asked if he wanted something to eat. He said he wasn’t hungry. When we broke out our things, he ate with us after all. Then we decided to paddle on to find a place where there was more room for our tent. But Michael refused to get into a boat again.

“But how are you going to get away from this place, if not by boat?” asked Monika. I looked up the map. The nearest road was about three miles away. From there, it was at least another six to the nearest settlement.

“When did Sandra go?” I asked.

“Yesterday,” said Michael. “No, it was this morning, in the early hours.”

“We would get lost in the forest,” said Monika, “at least on the river there’s only one way to go.”

Things got a little tight in the tent. Michael lay upside down next to Monika and me. I lent him a pair of socks. His sleeping bag was damp, and it smelled moldy in the tent. Michael fell asleep immediately, and started breathing heavily and rhythmically.

“I think he must have a fungus or something. Normal people’s feet don’t smell so bad,” Monika whispered into my ear.

“It’s his sleeping bag, I think,” I whispered.

Then Monika started laughing quietly, and saying: “Oh, give it to me, oh, oh.”

“Ssh, he’ll hear.”

She unzipped my sleeping bag, and groped for me.

“Just to warm my hands,” she said.

“They’re ice cold.”

“That’s the disadvantage of being alone.”

I slept badly that night. When I woke up the next morning, Michael wasn’t in the tent. I could hear him walking about outside. My sleeping bag was damp, and I felt cold.

“Are you awake?” Monika asked beside me.

“Yes,” I said. “What’s he doing?”

“What are you doing?” Monika called out.

“I’m looking for my shoe,” Michael called back.

We crawled out of the tent. The weather was slightly better. It was still cloudy, but at least it had stopped raining. There was a thin mist between the trees and over the river. The air smelled of moldering wood. I put on some water to heat.

“This is the end of our coffee,” I said. “We’ve just got powdered milk left.”

“And mushrooms and roots,” said Monika. “This is where the universal law kicks in.”

Michael didn’t say anything.

“We should start off before it begins raining again,” said Monika.

“I’m not getting in a boat again,” said Michael.

“Don’t be childish,” said Monika.

He stood up and disappeared into the forest. When we called after him to come back, he called out that he had to find his shoe first. He knew exactly where he had lost it. We packed our things, and also those of Sandra and Michael. We roped their canoe to ours. When we were done, we called Michael again. He made no reply, but we heard him in the underbrush nearby.

“If we don’t set out now, we won’t get there today,” said Monika. “Come on, let’s get him.”

We followed Michael into the forest. As we got closer to him, he moved away, and when we went faster, he went faster as well.

“That’s enough now,” called Monika. “Stop right where you are.”

“We have to wait for Sandra,” he called back. At least he had stopped walking. When we had caught him up, he said it again: “We have to wait for Sandra.”

“Why didn’t the two of you just wait for us,” I said. “You knew we weren’t far behind.”

“Sandra said you wouldn’t stop,” said Michael, “just because we overtook you. She thought you’d be mad at us. And because she hadn’t tied the baggage on. She said you’d laugh at us.”

“Are you crazy?” said Monika. “This isn’t some kind of competition. Cow.”

Michael bent down.

“My shoe must be very nearby,” he said with a pathetic voice.

“Fuck your shoe,” said Monika. I’d never seen her so angry. I could hear that it had begun raining again, but the drops couldn’t get through the thick canopy of leaves. “We’re going on now. And you’re coming with us. We can leave a note for her.”

“What about my shoe?”

“Leave it,” screamed Monika. “We couldn’t sleep all night because of your stinking feet. You must have got a fungal infection or something. And now we’re going.”

Michael was cowed and silent, and followed along behind us. Monika scribbled a note on a piece of paper, put it in a polythene bag, and attached that to a tree at eye level. She seemed to have calmed down.

“This isn’t a game,” she said to Michael. “This is a big, wild forest. You can die here, you know, just like an animal.”

Our canoe was now low in the water. For a while the river snaked through the forest in tight curves, and then it widened out again, and it was easier to make headway. Toward noon, the sun briefly broke through the clouds. The trees were still dripping with moisture, and in the boat it smelled of our wet things. Once, we saw a hat caught in the boughs of a fallen tree in the water, and Michael said: “That’s my hat.”

Monika and I didn’t say anything, and, though it would have been easy to fish it out, we carried on. The current grew weaker. We were now passing through tall rushes, and finally we got out onto a big lake. In the haze we couldn’t make out the opposite shore. Monika looked at the map.

“The campsite is on the eastern shore, about six miles from here,” she said. “If we keep going, we should get there tonight.”

The wind was against us, and the canoe we were towing slowed us down as well. Monika and I paddled. Michael sat silently in the middle of the boat. Once I told him he should spell Monika. But he was so clumsy with the paddle that she soon took it out of his hands again. The wind grew fresher, and the waves lapped almost over the edge of the boat. We made barely any progress.

“At least when it was raining, there wasn’t any wind,” I said.

“Come on, don’t give up,” said Monika.

After that, we didn’t speak any more. The shore was all overgrown with reeds, and it all looked the same. Once, we steered the boat into the reeds, and stopped to eat some ham and crispbread. Then we paddled on. It was past seven before we finally reached the campsite. There was a man on the shore, who helped us get the boats onto land.

Michael vanished as soon as we had landed. Monika and I scrubbed our canoe clean. When we carried it overhead to the boathouse, we saw Michael and Sandra walking across the campsite in a tight embrace. They didn’t look in our direction. We put up our tent close to the shore, in the middle of people’s caravans.

I was showering when I saw Michael once more. He was wearing some plastic sandals, and shaving. He gave me a barely audible greeting.

“I expected Sandra to come at the head of a rescue party,” I said.

“She was going to come back for me,” he said.

When I got back to the tent, Monika was gone. The socks I had lent Michael were airing on the line. I threw them in the nearest garbage can. Monika came, bringing a bottle of Portuguese wine, which she dug up somewhere.

“I ran into Sandra while I was showering,” she said. “She was missing a tooth, at the front, in the middle. She didn’t say a word to me.”

We boiled some rice, opened a can of tuna, and drank the wine. Then, when it was almost completely dark, we walked down to the lake. We sat down on the pier.

“Do you think she would just have left him out there?” Monika asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe because of the shoe.”

“And what about the tooth?”

Music drifted softly from the garden restaurant, and there was the sound of TV from one of the caravans. Otherwise, it was quiet.

“Strange,” I said, “do you remember there being any mosquitoes?”

Monika drew up her legs, and rested her face on her knees. She looked over the lake water for a long time. Then she turned her head, looked at me, and said: “Things always happen when you least expect them to.”

“I didn’t think anything like this would happen to us,” I said.

“Who knows,” said Monika, and she smiled. “Actually, I quite fancy sleeping with you. But only if you promise not to fall in love with me again.”

PASSION

Whenever I think of Maria, I think of the evening she cooked for us. The rest of us were already sitting down at the table in the garden, and Maria stood in the doorway, with a flat dish in her hands. Her face was flushed from the heat in the kitchen, and she was beaming with pride in her work. Just at that moment, I felt incredibly sorry for her, and for the whole world, and for myself too, and I loved her more than I had ever loved her before. But I didn’t say anything, and she set the food down on the table, and we ate it.

We had gone to Italy as a group, Stefan and Anita, Maria and me. It had been Maria’s idea to visit the village of her grandfather. Her grandfather had emigrated to Switzerland many years ago as a young man, and even Maria’s father had only known their former home as a vacation place.

We stayed in a small, slightly run down rental cottage, in the middle of a pine-wood near the sea. There were other cottages dotted about the wood, most of them bigger and handsomer than ours. Not far away was a coastal promenade,with restaurants, hotels, and shops. The old part of the village was back from the coast, at the foot of some hills. We spent most of our time in the new part, in our cottage, because we didn’t have a car. Only once, after a late breakfast, did we call a taxi and visit the old village.

There was no one on the streets. From time to time a car drove by. We heard kitchen noises through an open window, and once we saw two black-clad women. Maria wanted to ask them about her grandfather, but before we could get near them they had vanished into one of the houses. We found a little bar that was open. We sat down at a table, and had something to drink. Maria asked the bar owner whether a family bearing her name lived in the village. He shrugged his shoulders and said he was from the north, and only knew the customers at the bar. And even with them, he mostly just knew their nicknames and Christian names.

Then we went to the graveyard, but there was no memento there of Maria’s family either. We didn’t find her name on any of the tombstones or any of the burial urns.

“Are you sure we’re in the right village?” asked Stefan. “I always thought most Italians came from Sicily.”

Maria didn’t reply.

“Everything’s so sleepy,” said Stefan. “Your relatives could at least have gotten up if you’ve come all this way to visit them.”

“Are you disappointed?” I asked.

“No,” said Maria. “It’s a beautiful village.”

“Did you feel anything?” asked Anita. “I don’t know, roots. Maybe there are some … I don’t know, cousins of cousins still living here?”

At first we thought we would stay there a bit longer, but there was nothing for us to do, and we didn’t see any restaurant where we could have gotten something to eat. We walked back, trekked along endless paths across a hot plain without any shelter from the sun. Once, a man rode past us on a motor scooter. He waved and shouted something I didn’t understand. We waved back, and he disappeared in a white cloud of dust.

“Maybe he was a relative of yours,” said Stefan, and grinned.

Ever since we’d arrived in Italy, it had been hot, so hot that not even the shadows of the trees offered any cool. In the daytime we were sleepy, but at night we hardly slept because of the heat and the cicadas, whose cries were so loud it was as though there’d been some calamity. I think we all wished we could have been back home, in the cool forests or the mountains, even Maria. But there was no way out of the heat, we were trapped in it, in our indolence, and unless the weather broke, our only hope was that the holidays would pass as soon as possible.

We hadn’t done anything for days. Then Anita heard there was a riding stable somewhere nearby. She had enjoyed riding as a child, and she wanted to try it again. Stefan didn’t feel like it, and Maria said she was frightened of horses. Finally I told Anita I would go along with her. That evening she told all kinds of riding stories, and I had to sit backwards on a chair so she could show me how to use the reins, and what to do if the thing ran off with me.

When she saw the horses the next day, she was disappointed. They were old dirty beasts, standing around apathetically with drooping heads in front of their stables. We paid for the ride, and joined a little group of people waiting. After a while, a girl in riding boots and tight pants came out. She said something in Italian, handed each of us a whip, and allocated us our horses. She showed off in front of us, and talked to the horses as if it was they that had paid for us. A young man strolled across the yard toward us. Even before reaching us he called out a greeting, and asked whether we all spoke Italian. When a few said they didn’t, he said in English: “We will explore the beautiful landscape on horseback.”

He helped us into our saddles, jumped up himself, and rode off. He had briefly explained to us how to steer the horses, but regardless of what we did they trotted slowly along in Indian file. I felt ridiculous.

We rode through a dense forest. Everywhere in among the trees, there was rubbish in the underbrush, plastic bottles, an old bicycle, a defunct washing machine. The tracks we followed were deeply marked into the ground, because they had been taken so many times. I rode at the back of the column, and sometimes my horse stopped to nibble at bushes by the path. Then our leader would turn around and shout: “Hit him!” And if I didn’t hit the horse hard enough, he would hit his own and shout: “Hit him harder!”

Anita, who was riding in front of me, turned and laughed. She said: “You’re not hurting him.”

I could feel the warmth of the great animal in my legs, which I pressed against his flanks, and the movements of his muscles. Sometimes I held the flat of my hand against his neck.

Our ride lasted barely half an hour. Anita and I had brought our swimming things. We got changed under the trees.

“I can’t wear my clothes anymore,” I said, “they stink so.”

“I like the smell,” said Anita. “I wish I could start riding all over again. It’s only the riders I don’t like. They’re only interested in horses. And sex.”

I said, “I think it’s the smell that does it,” and Anita laughed. We climbed up the steep dunes. Our feet sank into the soft sand. Anita went ahead of me, and I thought I would like to clasp her neck in my hand, and feel her warmth. Then she slipped over. I caught her by the waist, coming from behind her, stumbled over myself, and we both fell down. We laughed and helped each other up. We had been sweating, and sand stuck to our bodies. Before we went on, we helped to get it off each other’s backs and arms.

We didn’t stay long at the beach. It was dirty here, and the water was murky and too warm and smelled bad. It was much too hot now, and there were too many people there. When we got back to the house, we found Stefan and Maria had gone out. The blinds had been rolled down. It was dark, but no cooler than it was outside.

Still in our swimming things, we slumped down on Maria’s and my bed. I looked at Anita. She raised her arms over her head, stretched, and yawned with closed mouth. “It’s my favorite time,” she said, “when you can lie down in the dark in the daytime, and not have to do anything.”

“On days like this, I wish I could be an animal,” I said. “I only want to drink and sleep. And wait for it to cool down some time.”

Anita turned to face me. She propped herself up on one elbow, and cradled her head in her hand. She said she and Stefan had grown apart. Their relationship was boring. Stefan was boring. He couldn’t get enthusiastic over anything with her. It was typical that he hadn’t wanted to go riding with her. Even though she hadn’t minded finally. “It’s much more fun with you.”

“I always thought you were the perfect couple.”

“Who knows,” said Anita, “maybe we were. And now we aren’t anymore. What about you two?”

“So-so,” I said. “I sometimes catch myself looking at other women. It’s not a good sign, it seems to me. Maria must notice, but she doesn’t say anything. She takes it. And I feel guilty.”

“I noticed,” said Anita, and she laughed, and let herself fall onto her back.

And then it got even hotter. In the morning the air was clear, but by noon everything had disappeared into a milky-white haze, as if the country below us were slowly going up in a smoldering fire. For the next few days we did absolutely nothing. Sometimes we got down to the sea early in the morning, or in the evening as the sun was going down. We did our shopping before the stores closed down for the afternoon, bought cheese and tomatoes, unsalted bread, and cheap wine in big liter bottles. Then we sat around and tried to read in the shade of the big pines in front of the house, but mostly we just dozed, or had futile conversations. In the evenings we cooked a meal, and over dinner we would quarrel noisily over matters that we didn’t really know or care about. Maria was generally quiet during our debates. She listened as we quarreled, and when we made things up, she would get up and disappear somewhere with a book.

“I love the smell of summer,” she said one time, “I don’t even know what it is. It’s more a feeling than a smell. You smell it with your skin, with your whole body.”

“I used to have a better sense of smell,” said Stefan. “Strange, isn’t it? I even used to be able to smell the air, and the rain and the heat. Now I can hardly smell anything. It must be the pollution. I can’t smell anything.”

“You smoke too much,” said Anita.

“Sometimes,” Stefan said, “sometimes when I spit in the mornings, there’s blood in my saliva. But I don’t think it means anything. It might just be the wine.”

“Dogs need more than half their brain capacity, just for smelling,” I said.

“Everything’s so complicated,” said Anita. “Things used to be simpler.”

Maria said she was going down to the beach. The rest of us went on with the conversation for a while, and then we set off after her. It took us a long time to find her, sitting in the dark, looking out to sea. The crashing of the waves seemed to be louder now than in the daytime. Maria said: “When you get along with each other, you’re even worse than when you’re quarreling.”

Sometimes, Maria would cook Italian recipes for us. Then she would do the shopping herself and spend hours in the kitchen, and not let anyone in. She would have liked to be a good cook, but she wasn’t.

Maria suffered least from the heat, and I noticed her getting more impatient with the rest of us by the day. One evening she said she had rented a car for the next day, she wanted to go on a trip. We could come along if we wanted. Anita and Stefan were delighted, but I didn’t feel like driving anywhere, and I said so. Maria didn’t say much, beyond that she couldn’t force me to come. I had drunk too much wine as I did every evening, and I said I was going to sleep. As I lay in bed, I could hear the others discussing their outing, what they wanted to see, where they thought they might go.

“We should set out early,” Maria said, “so that we arrive before it gets really hot.”

“I’ll take the camera,” said Stefan, and Anita said she wanted to buy herself a hat, a straw hat.

I thought I’d like to stay like that forever with the open window, listening to the others making plans. Then they blew out the candles and brought in the dirty dishes, quietly, so as not to disturb me. When Maria crept under the covers next to me, I pretended to be asleep already.

That was the evening I felt such sympathy for Maria, when I felt so sorry for her and for myself, and for the whole world. As I lay in bed now, unable to sleep, hearing Maria’s breathing next to me, I again had the feeling of absolute meaninglessness, which was at once sad and liberating. I thought I would never feel anything other than this sympathy, this feeling of connection with everything.

The others were already gone by the time I woke up. The whole house smelled fresh of soap and deodorant. I put on some coffee. I had finished my cigarettes the night before, and I had resolved to give up smoking now. Then I saw Stefan’s cigarettes lying out on the table, and I helped myself. I drank my coffee, and I walked through the woods into town to buy more cigarettes. It wasn’t even nine o’clock, but it was already heating up, and there were people everywhere making their way to the beach.

When I got back the house seemed deserted, as though no one had lived in it for ages. From the garden next door, I heard children playing, and in the distance there were cars and motorbikes going by. The garden chairs were standing under the pines, where we’d left them yesterday in our quest for shade. They had our magazines on them, and open books, lying face down. In the top of a tree, a bird screamed very loudly and very briefly. The children were quiet now, or they had gone inside, or around to the front. I felt empty but I didn’t feel like eating, and just smoked another cigarette.

In the time we’d been here, I’d gotten much less reading done than I’d thought I would. Now that I finally had time I yearned for life, but I was still happy not to be sitting in a stuffy car, or traipsing through a sleepy town, through pedestrian precincts full of sweaty tourists, or drinking coffee on a crowded café terrace. I felt lonely, the way you only feel lonely in summer, or when you’re a kid. I felt all alone in a world that was full of groups and families and couples, who were all together somewhere, far away. I read, but before long I put my book down. I leafed through some of the magazines, then I made some more coffee, and smoked. It was noon by now, and I went inside to shave for the first time in many days.

I had started to worry about the others when they finally came back in the evening. They seemed to be feeling guilty for having had such a lovely day. They had already returned the car.

They walked through the garden into the house, laden with plastic bags and packages. Anita was wearing a straw hat, and Stefan had a kite. Maria gave me a kiss on the mouth. She was hot from the long drive, and she smelled of sweat.

We went down to the sea, where there was hardly anyone left now. The sun was just over the horizon. The others ran out into the shallow water. I sat on the sand and smoked, and watched them splashing each other. Anita still had her new hat on.

After a while, they came out of the water. Maria stopped just in front of me, and dried herself. Against the light, I could only see her outline. Then she tossed the damp towel at me and said: “Well, and did you have a nice day, you stick-in-the-mud?”

Only now did they begin to talk about their trip. Briefly, I regretted not having gone with them, not because it had been anything special but because it would have been nice to share the memory with them. I said I had spent the day reading, and maybe they felt a little envious of me. Anita said they had brought me something, a present. Stefan ran along the beach with his kite but there was no wind, and in the end he gave up. We stayed by the sea till the sun had gone down, and then we went into the house to eat.

All through supper, Maria kept making little digs at my sluggishness till I lost my temper and told her to stop it. Surely she could get through one day without me. But she said I was always boring like that, even at home. I got up and went out into the garden. I heard the others finish their meal in silence. Then Maria came out. She stood in the doorway and looked out at the trees. After a while she said: “Don’t be so childish.”

I said I wasn’t hungry anymore, and she said she wanted to go for a walk with me, down on the beach.

It wasn’t quite dark. We walked along the beach close to the water, where the sand was firm and it was easier to walk. For a long time we didn’t speak. Then Maria said: “I’ve been looking forward all day to seeing you again.”

“You should have said something yesterday,” I said. “I had too much to drink, and I didn’t feel like going anywhere. I don’t like the heat.”

“We’re too different,” said Maria. “I don’t know. Maybe …”

“Surely we can manage to be apart for one day.”

“It’s not that,” she said, and then, more in surprise than anger, she asked: “What do you want anyway …?”

She stopped but I walked on, faster than before. She came after me.

“You always dramatize everything,” I said. “I don’t want anything.”

“I’m not dramatizing anything,” said Maria. “We just don’t get along.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“It’s not your fault.”

Maria stopped again, and this time I didn’t walk on. I turned to face her. There was a jellyfish on the sand in front of her, a small, transparent mound of aspic. She nudged it with her foot.

“Silly things,” she said. “They’re beautiful when they’re in the water. But when they get washed up onto the shore … there’s nothing you can do for them.”

She picked up a handful of sand and crumbled it onto the jellyfish. She waited.

Finally I said: “Do you want to …?”

“When the sun shines, there won’t be anything left of it,” said Maria. She hesitated, and then she said yes.

“It’s Italy,” I said. “It’s only because we’re in Italy. Back home, everything will feel completely different.”

“Yes,” said Maria, “that’s why.”

She said she didn’t feel good here. “It’s not the heat. But I don’t have any feeling of having come from here. It doesn’t say anything to me. I can’t imagine my grandfather living here. I can’t even imagine my father coming here for vacation. I thought there’d be something here for me. But it’s all completely foreign. And you … I have to feel I belong somewhere, with someone.”

She turned and walked back. I sat down on the sand next to the dead jellyfish, and lit a cigarette. I stayed there smoking for a long time.

When I got back to the house, the others were still sitting outside, talking and drinking wine. I went inside without a word. Maria followed me. We stood together in front of the sofa in the living room, where Maria had made up a bed for herself. She didn’t say anything, and I didn’t either. I went into the bedroom, got undressed and lay down. I couldn’t sleep for a long time.

I awoke because there was someone in the room. Outside, it was getting light. Maria was packing her things. She didn’t make any effort not to make any noise. I watched her secretly, but when she turned toward me, I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep. She carried her bag down into the living room and then came back once more and stood by the bed. She stayed there for a long time and then she left, closing the door softly behind her. I heard her making a phone call. After a while, a car drew up outside. It stopped, but the motor was running. Then I heard doors slam, and the car moved away. I stood up and went into the living room.

The sofa was empty. The bedclothes were folded up beside it on the floor. There was a piece of paper on the table. While I read it, Anita came out of her bedroom. She asked what was happening, and I said Maria had gone home.

“Something went wrong,” I said. “I don’t know what, I must have done something wrong.”

“What time is it?” Anita asked.

“Six,” I said.

“Is that all? I’m going back to bed for a while then.”

We went back to our rooms. There was a T-shirt of Maria’s next to the bed. I picked it up. It smelled of her, her sweat, her sleep, and for a moment I felt she was still there, that she’d just gone out for a while.

At breakfast we didn’t talk about Maria not being there. But later, when Stefan went to the beach to try to get his kite to fly again, Anita asked me why Maria had left me: “Was it something to do with Italy?”

“Yes,” I said, without much conviction, “it’s all so complicated.”

“Do you think you’ll get back together?” Anita asked.

I said I didn’t know, I wasn’t even sure I wanted that.

Anita said she envied us really. “I’ve wanted to do that for such a long time. If I wasn’t so passive …”

“I can’t imagine her life without me,” I said.

“That’s always the way of it, but life always goes on somehow,” said Anita.

Stefan came back. There hadn’t been any wind, and as he was dragging the kite across the beach, a dog had grabbed at it and chewed it up. Anita grinned.

“You should have buried it on the spot,” she said.

“When I was a kid I always longed for a kite,” said Stefan, “but all I ever got were clothes and books and schoolbags.”

“You haven’t given me my present yet,” I said, “the thing you brought back for me.”

“Maria’s got it,” said Anita. “She must have taken it away with her.”

“What was it?”

“I don’t know. We weren’t with her when she bought it.” Maria had been all secretive, and hadn’t wanted to tell anyone.

“I expect it was something stupid,” said Stefan.

“Maybe she’ll send it to me,” I said, “or I’ll call her.”

It was the last day of our vacation. We packed our things and cleaned the house. There was sand all over. In the evening we went to the promenade. We wanted to go and eat in a restaurant.

“Why do Italians always keep their shutters down?” Stefan asked, as we passed through the settlement of vacation homes.

“With that heat …” said Anita.

“They do it at home too,” said Stefan. “I used to have Italian neighbors. They always kept their shutters closed. And an enormous satellite dish on their balcony.”

“Maybe homesickness,” said Anita.

We strolled along the promenade. The sun had gone down, but it was still hot. There were tables and chairs out in front of the restaurants. There were big luminous signs showing the food they offered. The red was bleached, and the food all looked blue and unappetizing. One restaurant had fish and shellfish lying out in front of it, in baskets full of crushed ice.

“Can you smell anything?” Stefan asked. “I can’t smell anything. Surely you should be able to smell it.”

“If fish smells fishy, you shouldn’t eat it,” said Anita.

We were unable to decide on a restaurant, and we walked on to the end of the promenade. There we sat down on a low wall. The sky was empty, it looked locked up against the neon from all the restaurants. Stefan had lain down on the wall, and was resting his head on Anita’s lap. She was stroking his hair. I sat next to her. Our shoulders were touching.

“Look at that star,” said Stefan, “it must be a fixed star, it’s so bright.”

“It’s an airplane,” said Anita, “only airplanes give out that much light.”

“Airplanes blink,” said Stefan, “and they have red and green lights.”

The bright light slowly moved across the sky. We were quiet, and watched it disappear into the west.

“It’s a nice feeling,” said Anita, “to think there are people up there, flying into the morning. Somewhere another day’s beginning. Here it’s still night, and they’ll be seeing the sun already. The American sun.”

“I feel I’ve been here for ever,” said Stefan.

“I could live here,” said Anita, “and do nothing but look at airplanes, and eat and read. I feel really at home here.”

“I wonder where Maria is now,” I said. “I wonder what she wanted to give me.”

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL GIRL

After five mild, sunny days on the island, clouds started to mass. It rained overnight, and the next morning it was twenty degrees colder. I walked over the reef, a giant sandbar in the southwest, which was no longer land and not yet sea. I couldn’t see where the water began, but I thought I had a sense of the curvature of the earth. Sometimes I crossed the tracks of another walker, though there was no one to be seen far and wide. Only occasionally a heap of seaweed, or a black wooden post corroded by seawater, sticking out of the ground. Somewhere I came upon some writing that someone had stamped in the wet sand with his bare feet. I followed the script, and read the word “ALIEN.” In the distance I could hear the ferry, which was due to dock in half an hour. It was as though I could hear its monotonous vibration with my whole body. And then it began to rain, a light and invisible shower that wrapped itself around me like a cloud. I turned and walked back.

I was the only guest staying at the pension. Wyb Jan was sitting in the lobby with Anneke, his girlfriend, drinking tea. The room was full of model ships, Wyb Jan’s father had been a sea captain. Anneke asked me if I wanted a cup of tea. I told them about the writing on the sand.

“Alien,” I said. “It’s exactly how I felt on that sandspit. As strange as if the earth had thrown me off.” Wyb Jan laughed, and Anneke said: “Alien is a girl’s name in Dutch. Alien Post is the most beautiful girl on the island.”

“You’re the most beautiful girl on the island,” Wyb Jan said to Anneke, and kissed her. Then he tapped me on the shoulder and said: “When the weather’s like this, it’s best to stay indoors. If you go out, it might drive you crazy.”

He went into the kitchen to get me a cup. When he came back, he switched on a lamp and said: “I’ll put an electric heater in your room.”

Anneke said: “I wonder who wrote that. Do you think Alien’s found herself a boyfriend at long last?”

WHAT WE CAN DO

Evelyn had suggested a café with a silly name like Aquarium or Zebra or Penguin, I can’t remember. She often ate there in the evenings, she said. When I arrived, only two of the tables were occupied. I sat down near the door and waited. I looked at the menu. It was one of those places where the dishes have strange names, and the portions are on the small side.

We could go out for a beer together, I had said to Evelyn when we shook hands on my last day at work. It was what I said to everyone on that day, without ever really meaning it. Evelyn said she didn’t drink beer, and I said it didn’t have to be beer. And then she said sure, and when was convenient for me. I didn’t have any option but to make a date with her.

When Evelyn finally turned up, a quarter of an hour late, I was pretty drunk.

“Would you mind if we sat over there?” she said. “I always sit over there.”

She greeted the guests at the other tables by name.

“Do you live here or something?” I asked.

Evelyn found it hard to choose a dish. Even when the waitress had already taken her order, she changed her mind again.

“Don’t you know the menu by heart, then?” I asked.

Evelyn laughed. “I always have the same thing,” she said. After that, she didn’t say anything, and just beamed at me. I talked about God knows what. By the time the food finally arrived, I had no idea what else I could have spoken about. Evelyn seemed not to have any interests. When I asked her about any hobbies she might have, she said: “I always wanted to be good at singing.”

“Do you take singing lessons?”

She said: “No, that’s too expensive for me.”

“Are you in a choir?”

“No, I feel ashamed to sing in front of other people.”

“Well, that’s not exactly an ideal basis for a career as a singer,” I joked, and she laughed.

“No, I just wish it was something I was good at.”

No sooner had we drunk our coffee than Evelyn said the restaurant was closing in a quarter of an hour.

“Shall we go and have a nightcap somewhere?” I asked, out of politeness, when we were standing on the pavement.

“I don’t like to go to bars,” said Evelyn. “I hate the smoke. But if you like, I’ll make us both a hot chocolate.”

She blushed. So as not to make the situation still more embarrassing, I said if she had coffee, I’d be happy to go along. She said she had instant, and I said that was fine.

“Doesn’t your girlfriend mind you going out with other women?”

“I don’t have a girlfriend.”

“I don’t either,” said Evelyn, “I mean, a boyfriend. Just now.”

Evelyn lived on the third floor of a tenement block. She looked in her mail box. It seemed just to be a kind of reflex, because she must have emptied it earlier in the evening. As she stepped into her apartment, she gestured clumsily and said: “Well, welcome to my palace.”

She led me to the living room, pointed to the sofa, and told me to make myself at home. I sat down, but as soon as she’d disappeared into the kitchen, I got up again and looked around. The room was furnished with light clunky pine furniture. On the bookshelf were about thirty illustrated volumes on all kinds of topics, a few travel books, and lots of novels with bright covers, and titles with women’s names in them. There were costume dolls lying and standing around all over. On the walls were felt-tip drawings of cats and flower pots, which I assumed Evelyn had made herself.

It took a long time for Evelyn to have the coffee and hot chocolate ready. The coffee was much too weak. I told some story about something or other, and then Evelyn suddenly started talking about an illness she suffered from. I can’t remember what it was, but it was something to do with her digestion. Only then did it occur to me that she smelled bad. Perhaps that was why she reminded me of a plant, some potted plant that was missing something, either light or fertilizer, or else was too heavily watered.

After that, Evelyn was very quiet, but when I got up to go she suddenly started talking.

She said: “I get these letters, from a man. He seems to know me, I don’t know.”

A man who called himself Bruno Schmid had been writing to her for months, she said, and I wasn’t sure whether she wasn’t just putting on airs. But she did seem genuinely disturbed.

“I keep them hidden,” she said, and she pulled down a small box lined with marbled paper from the bookshelf. There was a bundle of letters inside it. She took out the top one and passed it to me. I read.

“Dear Miss Evelyn,

I like you, I find your proximity appealing. Are we in any danger of wanting something unbeknown to ourselves? It should be neither sinful nor lethal. Children need parents to ward off dangers. I have never been able to get away from their warnings. My faith takes up a fair part of my time, and of my fortune. But there is much left, which I would like to share. I sense you have unfulfilled hopes, and I would like to learn about them. I wonder what I can do for you. Best wishes …”

“He always writes the same things,” said Evelyn, looking at me beseechingly.

“Some poor madman,” I said.

“What does he mean when he says it shouldn’t be lethal?”

“Life always ends in death,” I said, “but I don’t think he’s dangerous.”

“Sometimes I wish I was old already. Then it would all be over. All that disquiet.”

“Are you scared of him?”

“The world is full of maniacs.”

To distract her, I asked her about her dolls. She said she collected dolls in national costume. She already had thirty of them, mostly given her by her parents, who traveled a lot.

“Have you gone on to a new job already?” she asked.

“I wanted to take a trip around the world.”

“Perhaps you could bring me back a doll,” she said. “I’d pay you, of course.”

Then she disappeared to the bathroom, and didn’t come back for a long time. When I left, I kissed Evelyn on both cheeks.

“Will we see each other again?” she asked.

“I’m not quite sure when I’m leaving,” I said. “You can call me. If I’m still here, that is.”

Two weeks later, I had a call from Evelyn. I had given up my plans for going around the world, and decided to go to the south of France for a few weeks instead. Evelyn asked if I’d like to come over for supper. She had asked a few people.

“People from work,” she said. “It’s my thirtieth birthday. Please come.”

Even though I had no desire to see my former colleagues again, I said I would come. I had a feeling I owed Evelyn something.

When I turned up on the evening in question, I was the first person there. Evelyn was wearing a short skirt that didn’t suit her, and an old-fashioned apron over it.

“I had to shine the doorknobs this morning,” she said. “It was an idea of Max’s. It’s something they do in Germany. When a woman gets to be thirty and is still single, she has to polish doorknobs.”

She said some of our colleagues had put mustard on the doorknobs over the whole floor.

“They want to keep on doing it now. It’ll be Chantal’s turn next. And men have to clean the stairs. You’re only allowed to stop when someone kisses you.”

She said it had been ghastly, but I had the feeling she had quite enjoyed being the center of attention for a while. She showed me a long chain of paper cartons she had had to wear round her neck.

“Because I’m now what the Germans call an old box,” she said, and laughed.

“And who kissed you?” I asked.

“Max,” she said. “After a couple of hours. He’s one of the guests.”

The other guests all came together, Max and his girlfriend Ida, Evelyn’s boss Richard and his wife Margrit. They seemed pretty happy. Max said they had stopped in a bar in the neighborhood, and drunk an aperitif. They had gone in together to buy Evelyn a present. He handed Evelyn a box, and the four of them started to sing: “Happy birthday to you.”

Evelyn blushed and smiled sheepishly. She wiped her hands on her apron and shook the package.

“I wonder what it can be?” she said.

Inside the box was a cookbook, Recipes for Lovers or Cooking for Two or something of the sort.

“There’s something else in there as well,” said Max. Evelyn pulled aside some crumpled crepe paper. Under it was a vibrator in the shape of a colossal orange penis. She stared into the box, without touching the thing.

“It was Max’s idea,” said Richard. He was embarrassed, but Margrit, a heavily made-up woman of fifty or so, laughed shrilly and said: “Every woman needs one. Especially once you’re married.”

“I got this one out of Ida’s collection,” said Max, and Ida: “Max, you’re so awful. You know I don’t have anything like that.”

“Not anymore,” said Max, “not anymore. We’ve supplied the batteries as well.”

“I have to go to the kitchen,” said Evelyn, “otherwise the supper will burn.”

She put the crepe paper back in the box, shut the lid, and went out.

“I told you it was a bad idea,” whispered Richard.

“Ah, nonsense,” said Max, “it’ll be good for her. You’ll see, in a month she’ll be a different person.”

Margrit laughed shrilly again, and Ida said: “Max, you’re disgusting.”

“Anyway, Evelyn’s got you now,” Max said to me.

Then they started talking about work, and I went into the kitchen to help Evelyn.

She had gone to a lot of trouble, but the food was nothing special. Even so, the atmosphere was relaxed. Max told dirty jokes that made Richard and his wife laugh. Ida seemed to be drunk after her first glass of wine, and didn’t say much except that Max was awful. Evelyn was busy serving the food, and taking out the dirty dishes. I was bored. After supper, we drank tea and instant coffee. Then Max said we should leave Evelyn on her own now, she was probably dying to try out her new present. The four of them got up and put their coats on. I said I would help Evelyn with the washing up. Max said something off-color, and Ida said he was disgusting. Evelyn showed them down to the front door, and I heard loud laughter from the stairwell, and then the door crashing shut.

When Evelyn came back she said: “I can wash up tomorrow.” Then she said she wanted to freshen up. It seemed like a sentence from a film or a cheap novel. I didn’t know what it meant, or what I was supposed to say. She disappeared into the bathroom, and I waited. I wanted to put on some music, but I couldn’t find any CDs I wanted to listen to, so I left it. I took down an illustrated volume about the Kalahari Desert, and settled down on the sofa. I wished I could be somewhere else, preferably at home.

I heard Evelyn go from the bathroom to the bedroom, and then she finally came back to the living room. She was in her underwear, which was white and solid and shiny. She had slippers on her feet. She stopped in the doorway, leaned against the doorjamb, and pushed one leg in front of the other. I had just been looking at photographs of gophers, skinny, catlike creatures that stand over their burrows and look into the distance. I set the book down next to me on the sofa. We didn’t speak. Evelyn went red and looked down at the floor. Then she said: “Would you like another coffee? I think there’s some hot water left.”

“Sure,” I said.

She disappeared into the kitchen. I followed her. She took down the jar of instant coffee, and I held out my cup. She tipped in way too much coffee powder, and poured in hot water. Oily scum formed in the cup. I saw Evelyn had tears in her eyes, but neither of us said anything. I sat down at the kitchen table, and she sat down opposite me. She sat slumped on her chair, with eyes closed, shaking. I looked at her. Her bra was too big. The two arced cups stood out in front of her breasts like shields. Once again, I noticed her disagreeable smell.

“Are you gay?” she asked.

“No,” I said, and wished I was drunk.

“I’ve got a headache.”

“Are you not cold?”

“No,” she said. She stood up and folded her arms across her chest, holding her upper arms in her hands. I followed her into the bedroom. She lay down on the bed, and started sobbing silently into the pillows. Her body jerked convulsively. I sat down on the side of the bed.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

I ran my hand down her back, and along her legs down to her feet.

“You’ve got a pretty back,” I said.

Evelyn sobbed aloud, and I said: “A pretty back has its attractions.”

She turned over and for a moment lay quite relaxed in front of me, her arms by her sides. She took slow, deep breaths, and looked up at the ceiling. Then she said: “It’s no good. And it’s not going to get any better.”

“You mustn’t expect too much,” I said. “Happiness consists of wanting what you get.”

“I want a glass of wine,” she said, and sniffed and slowly sat up. There was a packet of Kleenex beside the bed, and she took one out and blew her nose. Then she got up and went over to the chair where her dress was hanging. She hesitated briefly, and then pulled out a pair of jeans and a blouse from the wardrobe. I watched her get dressed with practiced movements. When she bent over to smooth the stockings over her knees, I momentarily felt like sleeping with her.

“We’re at our best when we do what we can,” I said, “what we’ve always been able to do.”

Evelyn turned to me and said, buttoning her jeans: “But I don’t like what I do. And I like what I am even less. And it’s just getting worse.”

We went back into the living room, and she got a bottle of wine from the kitchen. Then she went over to the stereo, pulled a few CDs off the rack, and put them back. Then she switched on the radio. A Tracey Chapman song was playing. I went to the bathroom. From the corridor I heard Evelyn slowly singing along: “Last night I heard a screaming …”

She didn’t sing well, and when I walked back into the living room, she stopped.

“I have to go home,” I said. “Will you be all right?”

“Yes,” she said, “I’ll be fine. Will you do me a favor?”

She got the carton with the vibrator and gave it to me.

“Will you chuck this in a bin somewhere. I don’t want it anywhere around tonight.”

“What shall I do about the batteries?” I asked. She didn’t answer.

“Okay,” I said. “I can see myself out.”

When I turned around at the top of the stairs, Evelyn was still standing in the doorway. I waved, and she smiled and waved back.

THE TRUE PURE LAND

When I moved in, the room’s single window was so dirty that the room seemed twilit even in the middle of the day. Even before I unpacked my suitcase, I cleaned the window. When Chris came home in the evening, he laughed and called Eiko.

He said: “Look and see what our guest has done.”

“The Swiss are very clean,” said Eiko.

I laughed. That was in April. I had gone to New York because I was fed up with Switzerland. I was lucky enough to find a job for six months working in a travel agency that belonged to a Swiss woman. But it was so badly paid I could only afford a very cheap room. The building was on the corner of Tieman Street and Claremont Avenue, on the edge of Spanish Harlem. On the other side of the street were tall dilapidated brick buildings inhabited almost entirely by Hispanics.

The first week I went to some bar or other every night with people from work. On the weekends I was mostly on my own. Chris and Eiko would be visiting friends or somewhere in the city, and the apartment was peaceful and empty.

One rainy Sunday morning, I set off to explore the area. I headed south down Riverside Drive. The traffic was heavy but there were hardly any pedestrians, and I enjoyed the feeling of being on my own. Somewhere around 100th Street, I saw a bigger than life-size statue of a Buddhist monk in a niche in a house. He was standing barefoot behind a black fence, looking out at the Hudson River. The rain started coming down harder, and I turned back and went home.

In the store on the ground floor of our building I bought the Sunday edition of the New York Times, and spent the rest of the day reading it. When I sat down on the window seat in the evening to smoke a cigarette, I noticed a window with a red light in the house opposite. I saw the slender form of a woman, leaning down over a lamp to switch it off. Just afterwards, there was a flash at the back of the room. Then the room remained dark.

I wasn’t thinking about the woman in the house opposite when I sat down in the window again for a smoke a few days later. The room was once again illuminated by the red standard lamp, and once again I saw her. She was moving slowly about the room, as if dancing. Her window was open but I couldn’t hear music, only the sounds of traffic from Broadway and the occasional rumble of the subway on its viaduct. I smoked a second cigarette. The woman stopped dancing. As she shut the window, I had the brief impression that she was looking across at me. But she was about twenty yards away, and I could only make out her outline. She draped a cloth over the lamp, and then she left the part of the room that I could see into.

Down on the street, some kids were rocking parked cars till their alarms went off. The wail of the sirens mingled with the noise of the city, but no one seemed to pay it any mind. I tossed my butt down on the street, shut the window, and lay down.

Chris came from Alabama. He had been living in New York for several years. He had studied politics, and had a badly paid job with a church organization. Eiko was still studying. She described herself as a heathen to irritate Chris. She was a Marxist and a feminist.

“If my mother calls,” Eiko told me once, “you’re not to say anything about Chris. She doesn’t know I have a boyfriend. I told her you’re both gay.”

Chris laughed, and I laughed as well. “And what if she comes by?” I asked.

“My parents live out on Long Island,” said Eiko. “They never come to Manhattan.”

Sometimes I went out for a beer with Chris. Then he would complain about Eiko’s political views and her stubbornness, and the way she had a different view of their relationship from his. He loved her, but he wasn’t sure she loved him back. “She doesn’t believe in anything,” he said, “not even me.”

I had stopped going out with my colleagues. After work I usually went straight home. Then I would sit in the window and smoke, and sometimes I saw my dancer.

Summer came, and it got unbearably hot on the streets. Eiko went back to Japan for three months. Before she left, she and Chris invited me to supper.

“Will you look after Chris for me while I’m away,” said Eiko. “He’s so helpless on his own.”

We drank Californian wine, and sat up past midnight talking.

“Chris is really warped,” said Eiko. “He likes country music.”

Chris was embarrassed. “My parents always used to listen to it. It’s just nostalgia for me. I don’t really like it.”

“You’ve got to listen to it,” said Eiko. “Home, sweet home.”

She put in the cassette. Chris protested, but he made no move to take it out.

“No more from that cottage again will I roam, be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home,” sang a deep voice. I had never heard Eiko laugh so wholeheartedly. I laughed as well, and finally Chris did too, reluctantly and slightly shamefacedly.

My head was spinning from the wine and lots of cigarettes and all our talk as I finally turned in at about two in the morning. But I noticed right away that the light was still on in the window opposite. As I smoked a last cigarette, I saw the dancer lean over the lamp and switch it off. I kept watching a while longer, before finally switching off my own light, and going to sleep.

Eiko left, and Chris often came home late. Sometimes I could tell he’d been drinking. “I miss her,” he said.

The first of August* was a Monday. My boss was organizing the celebrations for the Swiss Club, and gave us the afternoon off. A group of us went to the beach, which was almost deserted during the week. We swam, and as evening fell we lit a fire behind a sand dune and grilled some steaks. Someone had brought along a tape recorder, and was playing Swiss rock music.

I ate my steak and walked over the dune, and across the wide beach down to the sea. Sky, sand, and sea were almost indistinguishable now, all a dusty pink or tan color. I took my clothes off, and swam out till I could no longer see land beyond the waves. I felt I could swim on and on, till I got to Europe. Then for the first time since coming here, I wanted to go home. Suddenly I was afraid I might not make it back to land, and I turned and swam back. As I was climbing the dune again, I heard whispering voices. I saw one of my colleagues lying in the sand with his girlfriend. She had just recently come to America to visit him, and the pair of them had been lovey-dovey all evening.

It was after midnight when I got home. There were no lights on in the apartment, and it was very quiet. There was a whiff of marijuana in the air. Dirty dishes were piled up in the kitchen.

In the middle of August Chris went away on vacation. He was going to stay with his parents in Alabama.

“Look after yourself,” I told him.

He laughed. “My mother will look after me. You’ll see, I’ll have put on ten pounds by the time I’m back.”

It no longer cooled off at night. The city was swarming with tourists, but the subways were less crowded than usual. In my part of town, you could hear samba and salsa music till late at night. Everywhere people were sitting on their front steps talking. Young men stood around in groups, leaning on cars that weren’t theirs. Young women strolled back and forth in twos and threes and looked around at the men and sometimes called out a few words to them. There were hardly any couples. I hadn’t thought about my dancer for a long time, but now I looked at the women on the street and thought which one of them might be her.

A postcard came from Eiko. It was addressed to Chris, but I read it anyway. There was nothing in it of a personal nature. She signed off, “Love, Eiko.”

One evening toward the end of the month, I was sitting in my room in the twilight. Then I heard the wailing of sirens outside closer than I ever had yet. I looked out the window and saw firetrucks turning into our street. Men in protective clothing leaped out of the trucks, but then they just stood there without doing anything. They took off their black helmets, and wiped the sweat off their brows. They stood there individually posed, like statues. A large crowd had assembled, and some of the firemen blocked off the end of the road. But that was all that happened. After a while, the sirens stopped their wail. I was going to shut the window, and then I saw my dancer standing on the fire escape of the house opposite. It was the first time I had ever seen her completely, though her face was indistinct in the dark. She was leaning on the railing, and looking across at me. As soon as she saw I had noticed her, she turned away. She was slender and not very tall. She had long black hair that fell over one shoulder, because of the way she was leaning on the fire escape. She was wearing a knee-length skirt and a tight top. She was barefoot. When she turned away after a while to climb back through the window into her room, the light from the red lamp caught her face momentarily. I was certain I had never seen her on the street.

After weeks of incessant heat, it finally started to cool down. The sky was still radiant blue, but at least there was usually a breeze blowing through the city streets now. When I rode out to the beach with friends on the weekends, the extensive parkland behind the dunes was almost deserted. Then we would just lay ourselves flat on the sand to be out of the wind, or else we would walk along the beach in our clothes and watch the gray water scoop up the sand.

One day, an empty Sunday, I finally decided to pay a visit to my dancer. I hadn’t spoken to anyone for two days, and I felt completely wretched. It was a radiant afternoon as I crossed the street. I stopped in front of the building and lit a cigarette. It began to rain. First a couple of fat drops splashed down on the crooked cement slabs of the sidewalk, and then the heavens opened. I jumped into the little glazed-in porch where the doorbells were, and from where a further, locked door led to the stairwell.

Outside, the rain was teeming down, and spurting against the panes. There was a smell of drenched asphalt. I peered through the iron grille into the entrance hall, which was dark and silent. There was a mosaic tiled flooring, which had been patched with cement. The walls were ocher. In the background I saw the door of an elevator, and beside it a narrow staircase going up, dimly lit by the light through a grimy window. There was a stroller, and a rusty bike in a corner.

A woman with a dog emerged from the elevator, and came across the hallway toward me. She opened the door, held it open for me, and said: “This rain. You must have just missed it. Were you on your way to see someone in the building?”

I said: “I was just sheltering here till the rain stopped.”

“I was going to walk the dog,” she said, “but with this weather I’m not so sure … Where are you from?”

“Switzerland,” I said.

“A beautiful country,” she said, “so clean. I come from Puerto Rico. But I’ve been living here a long time. Years.”

“Do you like it here?”

“I couldn’t live in Puerto Rico, and I can’t live here either,” she said. “I don’t know. I’m not going out in this. Good luck.”

She went back to the elevator, dragging her dog after her. I slid my foot in the door, then took it back, and the door crashed shut. Once the rain eased, I ran back across the street. I was shivering. I took a hot shower, but it didn’t do any good. I felt cold and damp in the apartment.

A week later, Chris came back. We spent a few nice evenings together, eating and talking till late. The day before Eiko was due back, we cleaned the place and listened to country music.

“Please don’t tell her I’ve been smoking marijuana,” Chris said.

“Of course I won’t,” I said, “it’s none of my busines.”

“We’re friends,” said Chris. “We men need to stick together.”

“Stick together against who?” I asked, and thought: we’re not friends.

Chris laughed. “I used to smoke a lot more. But since I met Eiko, I’ve almost given up. She doesn’t approve. And I don’t need it when I’ve got her.”

Then Eiko came back, and Chris didn’t have any time for me anymore. The two of them often invited their friends over, and I took myself to the movies, and when I was home I generally stayed in my room. On the weekends I would sometimes spend whole days reading, and only go out to buy beer or to pick up Chinese take-out. My interest in the dancer had faded. I tried not to think about her. Sometimes I still saw her. She was now often sitting at the back of her room, where I could only dimly make her out.

One evening, when I was sitting by the window smoking, someone called up to me from the street. I looked down and saw a young woman standing on the sidewalk with a poodle. She waved up at me.

“I’ve come on behalf of my friend,” she called. “She lives opposite, and always sees you in the window.”

“Yes,” I called back, “I see her too.”

“She would like to meet you,” the woman called up, as if to stick up for her friend. “She didn’t want me to tell you.”

“Right,” I called. I felt paralyzed. For a moment, neither of us spoke.

Then the woman said: “She’s called Margarita. Do you want her number?”

She gave me the number and told me once more: “She didn’t want me to tell you.”

“Sure,” I said, “it’s nice that you came and told me anyway.”

I looked across at the window with the red light, but I couldn’t see the dancer. I sat down on my bed, and took a few deep breaths. Then I picked up the phone from the bedside table, and dialed the number.

“Hallo,” I heard a warm woman’s voice.

“Hallo,” I said, “I’m the man in the window opposite.”

The girl laughed in embarrassment.

“Your friend gave me your number.”

“I didn’t want her to,” she said softly.

“Would you like to meet?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “My name’s Margarita.”

“I know,” I said, “what about right away?”

“Sure,” she said. Her English wasn’t very good.

“We could go for a beer.”

She hesitated. Then she said: “Tomorrow.”

“Okay, I’ll be outside your house at eight o’clock,” I said. “Is that good?”

“Yes. That’s good.”

“Goodnight, Margarita.”

“Goodnight,” she said.

I was nervous all the next day, and wondered whether I should turn up at all. At eight I was waiting outside Margarita’s house, but she wasn’t there. I waited for a quarter of an hour, then I went up to my room and called her number. I stood by the window, and kept my eyes on the street.

Margarita answered. “Hallo,” she said.

“Hallo,” I said. “I thought we were going to go out for a beer.”

“Now?” she asked in surprise.

“It’s eight o’clock.”

“Eight o’clock.”

“Yes.”

“Are you at your window?” she asked. “Hang on, I’ll wave.”

I looked across at the dancer’s room, but all I could see was the faint outline of the standard lamp. Then I heard Margarita’s voice on the phone again.

“Did you see me?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“Top floor,” she said, “middle apartment. Wait, I’ll go out again.”

“Oh, okay,” I said in alarm.

I looked up at the top floor of the opposite building, but I still couldn’t see anyone. Finally, two buildings along I spotted someone standing by the window, and waving both arms.

“Did you see me that time?” asked Margarita shortly after.

“Yes.”

“I’m coming down now.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be right over.”

Margarita was pretty and quite small. She was wearing jeans and a brightly colored blouse. I can’t say I didn’t like her, but she wasn’t who I expected. She wasn’t the woman I thought I’d known for months. We walked down the street together. As we turned into Broadway, I saw Chris coming the other way. There was nothing else to do but to introduce them to each other. Chris smiled and wished us a pleasant evening.

We went into the nearest bar, and sat down at a table. It was noisy. Margarita didn’t understand much English. She said she came from Costa Rica, and had been in the States for a couple of months. She was living with her sister and brother-in-law. They both worked, and she was alone in the apartment all day. She was very bored. When I asked her if she was looking for a job, she became suspicious, and said she was here on vacation.

“What do you do with yourself all day?” I asked.

“I go to the beach,” she said. “In Costa Rica there are very beautiful beaches.”

“New York has some beautiful beaches as well,” I said.

She laughed and shook her head in disbelief. “Palms,” she said, “in Costa Rica. And the sand is so white.”

I asked her how long she planned on staying, and she said she didn’t know. I told her I came from Switzerland, but she didn’t know where that was. The conversation was sticky, and we sat and looked at each other in silence, and drank our beers. Once, I picked up Margarita’s hand, but then I let it drop again. She smiled at me, and I smiled back.

We said goodbye outside her building. I was going back to Switzerland soon, I explained, it was too bad. Margarita smiled. She seemed to understand.

“Thanks for the beer,” she said.

“Good luck,” I said.

For the next few days, I avoided the window. When I felt like a smoke, I went outside to Riverside Park. If it was raining, I sheltered at the tomb of General Grant. Sometimes I went as far as 100th Street, and spent a long time in front of the statue of the Buddhist monk. The bronze plaque on the statue said it was a depiction of Shinran Shonin, the founder of the sect of the true pure land. It came from Hiroshima, where it had survived the first atom bomb. That evening, I asked Eiko about the sect of the true pure land.

“Do you want to be a Buddhist?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I don’t want to be reincarnated.”

Eiko said, according to Shinran’s precepts it was enough to say the name Amida Buddha to be admitted to the pure land.

“Do you think there is a pure land?” I asked.

“Switzerland,” said Eiko, and laughed. Then she shrugged her shoulders. “Life would be simpler if you could believe in such a thing.”

“I don’t know,” I said. And Eiko said: “More hopeful.”

My departure was now so close that it somehow paralyzed me. I had a few last days off, and toured the city with my camera, taking pictures of the places I wanted to remember, my neighborhood, my regular bar, the ferry to Staten Island, and the midtown area where I had worked. But it was as though the city was slipping away from me even while I clicked, as though it were stiffening, flattening, into a photograph, a memory, before my eyes.

All at once I had the feeling of being at home here. At first I couldn’t explain why, then I realized that, for the first time since I’d been in New York, I was hearing church bells.

On the day before my departure, it snowed. In the space of a few hours, a thick blanket of snow covered the city. The radio was full of news of closed subway lines, and jams on the main exit roads. There were reports of flooding in Monmouth and Far Rockaway. Chris, who had gone to a party with Eiko, called to say they would have to stay the night there, and so wouldn’t be able to say goodbye to me.

“I’ll visit you,” I said.

“Sure,” said Chris. “Good luck.”

I had packed my bags, and was watching TV to kill the time. Every station had reports on the flooding and the snow. Eventually I sat down in the window once more, and smoked. There was no light on in the dancer’s window, nor in Margarita’s either. Down on the street, some kids were playing in the snow. I watched them, and thought about my own childhood, and how we used to play in the snow. I felt happy to be going back to Switzerland.

Then one of the kids spotted me, and lobbed a snowball up in my direction. The others all looked up as well. They interrupted their game, and now all of them were throwing snowballs at me. It was too high up for them, but one of the snowballs hit just below me, and some of the snow splattered in my face. I shut the window, and took a step back into the shade. The children went back to whatever game they had been playing before. They seemed to have already forgotten all about me.

* National holiday in Switzerland.

BLACK ICE

I was amazed to see how small a heart was. It was lying in the patient’s opened chest, beating quickly and regularly. The ribs were pinned back by two metal clamps. The surgeon had had to cut through a thick layer of fat, and I was surprised that the wound wasn’t bleeding. The operation took two hours, and then the green cloths surrounding the patient were taken away. In front of us was an old man lying naked on the operating table. One of his legs had been amputated above the knee, and he had three large scars on his belly, from previous operations. His arms were spread wide, and tied down, as if he wanted to embrace someone. I turned away.

“Was it interesting for you?” asked the surgeon as we drank coffee together later.

“A heart’s such a small thing,” I said. “I think I’d rather not have seen that.”

“It’s small, but it’s tough,” he said. “Originally, I was going to go into psychiatry.”

I had come to the clinic to write up the case of a young woman patient. She had tuberculosis, and, in the course of her treatment at a different lung clinic, had contracted an incurable form of the illness.

At first, the patient had agreed to be interviewed, but when I came to the clinic she changed her mind. I waited two days, walked in the park, looked up at her window, and hoped she would agree to see me. On the second day, the consultant asked me whether I’d like to see an operation, to shorten my waiting time. On the morning of the third day, the tuberculosis specialist called me in the hotel, and said his patient would see me now.

The TB ward was in an old, separate building. There was no one to be seen on the large, glazed balconies. There were Christmas decorations up in the windows and the corridors inside. I read the information on the notice board, the business card of a hairdresser who did home visits, television rental offers. A nurse helped me into green scrubs that buttoned at the back, and handed me a mask.

“Larissa isn’t actually infectious,” she said, “as long as she doesn’t cough in your face. But it’s best to be safe.”

“I would like to talk to you as well,” I said, “if you have any time on any of the next few evenings …”

Larissa was sitting on her bed. I wanted to shake hands, hesitated, and ending up just saying hello. I sat down. Larissa was pale, and very thin. Her eyes were dark and she had unkempt thick dark hair. She was wearing a tracksuit and pink fluffy slippers.

We didn’t talk very long on our first meeting. Larissa said she was tired, and feeling unwell. When I told her about myself and the magazine I was working for, it seemed hardly to interest her. She no longer read much, she said. To begin with, she had, but not anymore. She showed me a doll without a face and just one arm.

“She’s for my daughter, a Christmas present. I wanted to give it to her on her birthday, but I couldn’t get it together. I feel like knitting, but instead I watch television, or the doctor comes, or it’s mealtime. And the evening comes, and I’ve gotten no further. And every day is like that, and every week, and every month.”

“She’s pretty,” I said.

The doll was ghastly. Larissa took it out of my hands, hugged it, and said: “I can only knit when I’ve got company. If I have company, then I can knit.”

Then she said she wanted to watch a film with Grace Kelly and Alec Guinness. She had seen it the day before, on a different channel. Grace Kelly played a princess who was in love with the Crown Prince. To make him jealous, she pretended to be in love with her tutor. And the tutor had been in love with her for a long time.

“The professor says to her, you’re like a mirage. He says you see a beautiful-looking picture in front of you and you rush toward it, but then it vanishes and you’ll never, ever see it again. And then she falls in love with him, and kisses him on the mouth. Just once. But the priest — he’s an uncle of hers — he says, if you think you’re happy, then your happiness is already over. And in the end she marries the Crown Prince. And the professor leaves. Because he says you’re like a swan. Always on the lake, majestic and cool. But you’ll never come ashore. Because if a swan comes ashore, it looks like a silly goose. To be a bird and never to fly, he says, to dream of a song but never be able to sing it.”

The clinic was some way out of the city, in the middle of the industrial park, right on the highway. I had taken a room in a hotel in the vicinity, an ugly new construction in rustic style. So far the only time I had seen the other occupants had been at breakfast time; most of them seemed to be sales reps. Later on, while I was reading the paper, a couple walked into the dining room. She was much younger than him, and he seemed so besotted with her I assumed he must be married, and she was his lover, or else a prostitute.

The hotel had a sauna in the basement, and that evening I put the fifteen marks on my bill, and went down. I found myself in a large, unheated room, empty except for a couple of exercise machines, and a ping pong table. “Roman Baths,” it said on a door. Inside, there was soft music coming from loudspeakers in the ceiling. The walls and floor were covered with white tiles. There was no one else around. I sat down in the sauna cabin. I sweated, but then, as soon as I went out to take a shower, I shivered.

The following day I went out to see Larissa again. She said she was feeling better. I asked her to tell me something about herself, and she talked about her family, her home in Kazakhstan, the desert there, and her life. I avoided asking her any questions about her illness, but eventually she got onto the subject herself. After a couple of hours, she said she was tired. I asked if I might come again the next day, and she said yes.

Before I left the room, I looked around and wrote down: “A table, two chairs, a bed, a washbasin behind a yellow flowered plastic screen, everywhere used paper tissues, pictures of her daughter on the wall, and a chocolate Advent calendar, empty. The TV on throughout. Sound off.” Larissa looked at me questioningly.

“Atmosphere,” I said.

When I got back to the hotel, the photographer had arrived. I had made a date for that evening with Gudrun, the nurse on the TB ward. I called her to ask if she had a colleague she could bring along. The four of us ate in a Greek restaurant, the photographer and I, and the two nurses, Gudrun and Yvonne.

“How long have you been smoking?” Yvonne asked me, as I lit up after supper.

“Ten years,” I said. She asked me how many I smoked, and together we toted up the number of cigarettes I had smoked in my life.

“Well, it’s still better than TB,” I said.

“TB is no problem,” said Yvonne. “You can be cured in six months. And it heightens desire. Your sex drive.”

“Is that really true?”

“It’s what they say. Maybe it just used to. In the days when people still used to die of it. A kind of terminal panic.”

“He’s writing about Larissa,” said Gudrun.

“That’s a bad case,” said Yvonne, shaking her head.

I liked Yvonne better than Gudrun, who seemed to prefer the photographer. Once, I winked at him, and he laughed and winked back.

“What are you doing, winking at each other?” said Gudrun, laughing as well.

When I went in to Larissa the next day, with the photographer in tow, she insisted on getting changed. She pulled the yellow curtain rather carelessly, and I saw her pale, emaciated body, and thought she must have gotten used to changing behind curtains. I turned away and went up to the window.

When Larissa came out from behind the curtains, she was wearing jeans, a loud patterned sweater, and black patent leather pumps. She said we could go out on the balcony, but the photographer said the room was better.

“Atmosphere,” he explained.

I could see him sweating under his mask. Larissa smiled as he took her picture.

“He’s a good-looking man,” she said, after the photographer was gone.

“All photographers are good-looking,” I said. “People only want to have their picture taken by good-looking people.”

“The doctors are good-looking as well,” said Larissa, “and healthy too. They never get sick.”

I told her about the high suicide rate among doctors, but she refused to believe me.

“That’s something I would never do,” she said, “take my life.”

“Do you know how much longer …”

“Half a year, nine months maybe …”

“Can’t they do anything?”

“No,” said Larissa, and she laughed hoarsely, “it’s spread all over my body. All rotten.”

She talked about her first spell in a clinic, and how she had left thinking she was cured. Then she had become pregnant, and had got married.

“I would never have dared before. And when I was in the hospital for the birth, that’s when it all began again. Slowly. They treated me at home for six months, and then they said it was too dangerous. For my baby. I was so afraid, so afraid they might catch it from me. But they’re healthy. Thank God. They’re both healthy. I was still living at home this Easter. My husband cooked. And he said, in six months the doctor said you’ll be better. By the time Sabrina has her first birthday, in October, you’ll be home again. In May, on my birthday, he came with a ring.”

She slid off the ring she had on her finger. She held it in her fist, and said: “We had no money before, we bought furniture, a television, things for Sabrina. The ring wasn’t a priority, we told each other. In May he brought me the ring. Now we need it, he said.”

Then Larissa said she wanted to see my face. She tied on a mask, and I took mine off. She looked at me for a long time in silence, and only then did I notice her beautiful eyes. Finally she said, all right, and I tied my mask back on.

That evening we went to the sauna with the two nurses. When the photographer suggested it, Gudrun giggled, but Yvonne agreed straight off. I hardly broke a sweat during the first session, and remained sitting long after the sand timer was empty. The photographer and Gudrun had left in quick succession.

“Shall I pour on more water?” Yvonne asked, and, without waiting for my agreement, poured water on the heated stones. There was a hiss, and a smell of peppermint. We sat facing each other in the dim sauna. In the low lighting, Yvonne’s body glistened with sweat, and I thought she was beautiful.

“Don’t these mixed saunas bother you?” I asked.

“Why?” she asked. She said she belonged to a gym, and often used saunas.

“I don’t like it,” I said. “Being naked, as though it didn’t signify anything. We’re not wild beasts.”

“Then why did you agree to come?”

“There’s nothing else to do here.”

As we finally left, Gudrun and the photographer were just returning. And from then on, we took turns. While we rested, they sweated, while we sweated, they rested and showered. I lay next to Yvonne on one bench. I turned to the side, and watched her. She was flipping through a car journal, whose pages had gotten dulled and wavy with the moisture.

“Somehow I can’t reason myself out of it,” I said, “a naked woman is a naked woman.”

“Are you married?” she asked rather indifferently, without looking up from her magazine.

“I live with my girlfriend,” I said. “What about you?”

She shook her head.

After three goes, we had had enough. When Yvonne got dressed, she seemed more naked to me than she had in the sauna. Then we played ping pong, and the photographer and Gudrun sat down on the exercise machines to watch. Finally, Gudrun said she was getting cold, and the two of them went upstairs to the bar. Yvonne was a good player, and beat me. I asked her for a rematch, and she beat me again. We had built up a sweat, and so we had another shower.

“Shall we have a drink?” Yvonne asked.

“Men are so straightforward,” I said, and I had the feeling my voice was trembling.

“How do you mean?” she asked, coolly doing up her shoes.

“I don’t know,” I said. And then I asked her: “Will you come upstairs with me?”

“No,” she said, and looked at me with disbelief, “absolutely not. What’s going on?”

I said I was sorry, but she just turned and walked off. I followed her upstairs to the bar.

“Are you coming?” she said to Gudrun. “I want to go home.”

When the two of them had gone, the photographer asked me what had happened. I told him I had asked Yvonne to come upstairs with me. He said I was a fool.

“Did you fall in love with her?”

“I don’t know. How should I know? What are we doing here?”

“So long as you don’t fall in love with your beautiful patient.”

“Do you think so?”

“Yes, she’s got something. But don’t expect a writer to see that.”

He laughed, threw his arm around me, and said: “Come on, let’s have another beer. We can enjoy our evening even without those two.”

The following morning, the photographer left. The nurses on the TB ward were less friendly than they’d been before. I didn’t see Yvonne, but I assumed she’d talked. I didn’t care.

“How many more times do you plan on coming?” asked the head sister.

“Till I have enough material,” I said.

“I hope you’re not taking advantage of your situation.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Frau Lehman has been in isolation for the past six months. She is very receptive to any kind of attention. If she experienced a disappointment, it might affect her adversely.”

“Does she not get any visitors?”

“No,” said the ward sister, “her husband’s stopped coming.”

Larissa was wearing her jeans again. She had combed her hair, and was wearing make-up. I looked at her, and thought the photographer was right.

“That’s the worst thing,” said Larissa, “the fact that no one ever touches me. Not for six months now. Except in rubber gloves. I haven’t kissed anyone in six months. I sensed … when my husband brought me here, I sensed he was scared of me. He kissed me on the cheek, and said in six months … It was as though that was the moment that I got sick. The night before we slept together. That was the last time. Though I didn’t know that then. And when we arrived here, he was suddenly afraid of me. I can still picture him shaving in his shorts, while I’m packing up my toilet articles. And he says to me, take the toothpaste with you, I’ll buy a new tube. And I took it.”

She said she sometimes kissed her hand, her arm, the pillow, the chair. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. Larissa lay down and cried. I went up to her bed, and put my hand on her head. She sat up and said: “You must disinfect your hand.”

I had enough material for my story. That evening, I went downtown for supper. But I couldn’t stand the racket, and soon took the bus out to the industrial park. As I got out at the terminus, I thought of Larissa. She told me she had tried running away one evening. When a nurse had forgotten to lock her room. She had gone as far as the bus stop. She had stood a little separately, and watched the people arriving from the factory. They must have imagined she too had come from there. Was on her way home. Would pop into a store on the way, and get home and fix dinner for her husband and child. That they would watch television together afterwards. And then she had gone back to the clinic.

It was still early. I walked through the industrial park. In among the ugly factories were a few new homes. They were dwarfed by the structures around them, as if they had been built to a different scale. Outside one of the homes, a man was hanging electric lights on a tree. In the doorway, a woman and a little child stood and watched him. The woman was smoking. A man in an apron was setting the table. I wondered whether he was expecting guests, or if he was cooking for himself or for his family. In the distance, I could hear the traffic on the highway. Then I went back to the hotel. It had gotten cold. Yvonne was sitting at the bar. I sat down next to her and ordered a beer. For a while we didn’t speak, and then finally I said: “Do you come here often?”

“I’ve come to see you,” she said.

I said I hadn’t meant it unpleasantly.

She said: “I’m not like that.”

“I’m not either. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. All those sick people … I had the feeling that nothing that happened here counted. That everything was excused. And that we had to hurry. Because there’s not much time.”

Yvonne said we could go back to her place, if I liked. She said she lived in a village a few miles from here. Her car was parked outside.

Yvonne drove far too fast. “You’ll kill us both,” I said.

She laughed and said: “My car is my favorite thing. It spells freedom for me.”

The furniture in Yvonne’s apartment was all chrome and glass. There were some red weights in a corner. In the hall there was a little cheap frame, with a piece of paper in it that said: “You can get it if you really want it.”

“It’s cold in your place,” I said.

“Yes,” said Yvonne, “I expect that’s the way I like it.”

“Do you believe that,” I asked, “that you can get it if you really want it?”

“No,” said Yvonne, “though I’d like to. What about you?”

“I didn’t get you.”

“You don’t ‘get’ people,” she said. “If you really wanted … And if you were patient …”

I said I didn’t have much time. Yvonne went into the kitchen, and I followed her.

“Water, orange juice, wheat grass, or tea?” she asked.

We drank tea, and Yvonne told me about her job, and why she had gone into nursing. I asked what she did in her time off, and she said she was into fitness. In the evenings, she was usually too tired to go out. On the weekends, she visited her parents.

“I’m all right,” she said, “I’m doing fine.”

Then she took me back to the hotel. She kissed me on the cheek.

In the morning, it was snowing gently. The puddles on the way to the clinic were frozen. In the newspaper I read that there had been four fatal accidents on the roads that night. “Black ice,” the headlines said.

Larissa was already waiting for me. She told me about a film she had seen the night before. Then we were silent for a long time. Finally, she said she would die of increasing weakness, when her weight loss got to be too great. Or of a hemorrhage. That meant coughing up blood, not a lot, a small glass of it. It didn’t hurt, but it happened quickly, in a few minutes. And it could happen quite suddenly.

“What are you telling me that for?”

“I thought you were interested. Isn’t that what you’re here for?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “maybe you’re right.”

“I can’t talk to anyone here,” Larissa said. “They don’t tell me the truth.”

Then she looked down and said: “Desire never stops. No matter how weak I am. At first, when I was with my husband, we made love every single day. Sometimes … once in a forest. We went for a walk. It was damp in the forest, it smelled of earth. We did it standing up, against a tree. Thomas was worried in case someone saw us.”

Larissa went up to the window and looked out. She hesitated, and then she said: “Here, I do it for myself. At night, only ever at night. Do you do that? Because I can imagine … and because … and because the nurses don’t knock before they come in … Desire never stops.”

And then she fell silent. There was a documentary on the natural world on television. The sound was off. I saw a herd of antelope gallop silently over a plain.

“The old films will be on again soon. Christmastime, you know,” I said.

“This will be my first Christmas in the clinic,” said Larissa, “and my last.”

When I left the ward, I ran into Yvonne in the corridor. She smiled and asked me: “What are you doing tonight?”

I said I would have to work.

I crossed the hospital grounds. For the first time, I was struck by the many faces in the windows. And I was struck by the way the visitors walked faster than the patients. A few were crying, and their heads were down, and I hoped I wouldn’t feel ashamed if it was ever my turn to mourn for someone. The mini golf course beside the hospital was littered with fallen leaves. There were deer in the forest, Larissa had told me. And squirrels. And she fed the birds from her balcony.

As evening fell, I was walking through the industrial park again. I bought a hamburger at a fast-food joint. I came to a vast building, a furniture warehouse, and went in. In the entry hall were dozens of deckchairs; dozens of TV lounges had been simulated. I walked through the series of model lives, and was surprised at how much they all resembled each other. I tried to imagine this or that item in my apartment. And then I thought of Larissa, and I wondered which easy chair she and her husband had bought. And I thought of her husband, who was sitting in their apartment all alone, maybe drinking a beer, maybe thinking of Larissa. And I thought of their little girl, whose name I couldn’t just now remember. I thought she was probably asleep now anyway.

Beside the exit to the superstore, there were Christmas decorations in big baskets, chains of lights, illuminated plastic snowmen, and small crudely carved cribs. “We look forward to your visit, Monday to Friday, 10 A.M. — 8 P.M., Saturdays, 10 A.M. — 4 P.M.,” I read on the glass door, as I left the store. Darkness had fallen.

The next day was my last. I looked in on Larissa to say goodbye. Once again, she started telling me about her childhood in Kazakhstan, the desert, and her grandfather, her father’s father, who had gone east from Germany.

“When he was dying, the priest came. And they talked together for a while. He was old. And then the priest asked him, well, Anton — my grandfather’s name was Anton — what sort of life did you have? And do you know what my grandfather said? It was cold, he said, all my life I was cold. Even though it got so hot in the summer. He said, my whole life, I was cold. He never got used to the desert.”

She laughed, and then she said: “It passes so quickly. Sometimes I switch the television off, so that it doesn’t pass quite so quickly. But then I find it even harder to stand.”

She talked about one of her neighbors in Kazakhstan, whose television screen was broken, but who kept switching it on anyway and staring at the black screen.

“Just as you look out the window when it’s dark, because you know there’s something there. Even if you can’t see anything,” she said. “I’m scared. And fear won’t leave me. Not till the very end.”

She said fear was like losing your balance. The way that, before you fell, you had a momentary feeling of being torn into pieces, of bursting open, in all directions. And sometimes it was like hunger, or like suffocating, and sometimes like being squashed. Larissa spoke fast, and I had a sense she wanted to tell me everything she had thought in the last few months. As though she wanted me to be a witness, tell me her whole life for me to write down.

I got up and said goodbye to her. She asked if I would come to her funeral, and I said no, I probably wouldn’t. When I turned around in the door, she was watching television. I went home that afternoon.

Two weeks later, I sent Larissa some chocolate. I didn’t send her copies of the photographs. She looked too ill in them. She didn’t write. Yvonne sent me a couple of friendly letters, but I never replied.

I came back from another assignment six months ago, and found a death notice in my mailbox. The chief consultant had written “with best wishes” at the bottom of it.