Peter Stamm
On A Day Like This

It is on a day like this, a little later, a little earlier,

that everything will start over, that everything will begin,

that everything will go on as before.

— Georges Perec, Un homme qui dort (A Man Asleep)

Andreas loved the empty mornings when he would stand by the window with a cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and stare down at the small, tidy courtyard, and think about nothing except what was there in front of him: a small rectangular bed in the middle of the courtyard, planted with ivy with a tree in it, that put out a few thin branches, pruned to fit the small space that was available; the shiny green containers for glass, packing material, other rubbish; the even pattern of the cement paving blocks, some of which were a little lighter, having been replaced some years back for some unknown reason. The noise of the city was only faintly audible, reduced to an even roar, interspersed with distant birdcalls and the rather clearer noise of a window being opened and shut.

This unthinking state only lasted for a few minutes. Even before Andreas had finished his cigarette, he remembered last night. What did emptiness mean to him, Nadia had wanted to know. For her it meant lack of attention, lack of love, the absence of people she had lost, or who paid her insufficient attention. Emptiness was a space that had once been filled, or that she thought might be filled, the absence of something she couldn’t put her finger on. He didn’t know about that, Andreas had said, he wasn’t interested in abstract notions.

Evenings with Nadia always followed the same pattern. She would arrive half an hour late, and give Andreas the feeling that it was he who was late. She would be wearing full makeup, and a short, tight skirt and black fishnet tights. She would drop her coat theatrically on the floor, sit down on the sofa, and cross her legs. As far as she was concerned, that was the high point of the evening, her entrance. She put a cigarette in her mouth, and Andreas gave her a light, and complimented her on her appearance. He went into the kitchen and came back with two glasses of wine. Nadia must have had something to drink already, she was a little bit excitable.

Usually, they ate in a local restaurant. The food wasn’t bad, and the gay waiter bantered with Nadia. Sometimes, if the restaurant wasn’t too busy, he sat down at their table with them. Nadia drank and talked too much, and together with the waiter made fun of Andreas’s being a vegetarian, and the fact that he always ordered the same thing off the menu. He said he wasn’t a vegetarian, he just didn’t eat meat that often. By dessert, if not before, Nadia would have gotten onto politics. She worked for a PR company. One of her clients was a group connected to the Socialist Party, whose views she represented in a way that drove Andreas crazy. By that point, he would often have stopped speaking, and she would ask him in an aggressive undertone if she bored him.

“I bore you,” she said.

No, he said, but he was a foreigner, he didn’t understand French politics, and wasn’t that interested either. He obeyed the law, he sorted his trash, he taught the syllabus. Apart from that, he just wanted to be left in peace. Nadia would be annoyed by his lack of interest, and would lecture him, and they quarreled. Andreas tried to change the subject. Then every time Nadia would start to talk about her ex-husband, his lovelessness and his inattentiveness, Andreas got the feeling she was talking about him. Nadia couldn’t stop complaining. She smoked one cigarette after another, and her voice got a little teary. All the other guests would have gone by then, and the waiter had emptied the ashtrays and wiped the espresso machine. When he came to their table and asked them if they wanted anything else, Nadia was suddenly a different person. She laughed and flirted with him, and that would go on for another fifteen minutes until Andreas was allowed to pay the bill.

On the way home, Nadia was quiet. They hadn’t touched all evening. Now she linked arms with Andreas. He stopped in front of the building where he lived. He kissed her, first on the cheeks, then on the mouth. Sometimes he kissed her on the neck, and then he would feel a bit ridiculous. She seemed to like it, though. Presumably, it accorded with her own glamorous sense of herself. The sort of woman that men prostrated themselves in front of, who gets kissed on the neck, who laughs her lovers to scorn. Andreas would have liked to be alone now, but he asked her all the same if she wanted to come up. It sounded like capitulation.

Nadia was not one of those women who became more beautiful once you had slept with them. Her tight clothes were like a suit of armor; once she was naked she seemed to lose confidence, and looked old, older than she really was. She permitted everything to be done to her, enjoyed Andreas’s caresses without reciprocating them. That — he should have said to her — was his idea of emptiness. These evenings with her, every other week, or rather the same evening over and over again, followed by the same night, and no sense of getting closer to her. But he didn’t say anything. He enjoyed the sense that Nadia was somewhere else in her head, that she left him her body to do with as he pleased, then, after an hour or two, suddenly got impatient, shoved him away, and told him to call her a taxi. Emptiness meant those evenings with her, the afternoons with Sylvie, or the weekends by himself at home in his warm, comfortable apartment, where he would watch TV, play a computer game, or just read.

Emptiness was his life in this city, the eighteen years in which nothing had changed, without his wishing for anything to change. Emptiness was the normal state of things, he had said, nor was it anything he was afraid of — quite the opposite.


Sometimes, when Andreas crossed the street on his way to work, he imagined what it would be like to be run over by a bus. The collision would be the end of what had been thus far, and at the same time a sort of fresh start. A blow that would put an end to entanglements and create a little order. Suddenly, everything seemed significant, the date and the hour, the name of the street or boulevard, and that of the bus driver, even Andreas himself, the date and place of his birth, his profession, his religion. It was a rainy morning, winter or fall. The gleaming asphalt reflected the lights of the electric signs and the car headlights. The traffic piled up behind the bus, which blocked the road. An ambulance came. Pedestrians stood and gawked. A policeman waved the traffic past the site of the accident. The passengers in other buses craned their necks or stuck their heads out of the window. They failed to understand what had happened, or else forgot it straightaway when a different scene caught their attention. A second policeman came and tried to reconstruct the accident. He asked the bus driver, the woman in the bakery who had seen it all happen, a further witness. Then he would write up a report in duplicate, a file that would be stored in some archive somewhere, arranged in an alphabetical sequence of fatal accidents. Andreas imagined the measures that would have to be taken to remove him from the system. His brother would have to be informed, it would be for him to decide what would be done with the body. Andreas had withstood the temptation to draw up a will, it had always struck him as rather narcissistic to leave instructions in the event of one’s own death. Presumably Walter would opt for incineration, that was the simplest and most sensible course. Even so, there would be a lot of paperwork to be done, and all sorts of official business. The embassy would certainly have to become involved.

Andreas asked himself whether a detailed account would be drawn up of the last working days before his death. The school authorities would know what to do. Perhaps there was even a memo somewhere listing the steps that had to be taken in the event of the unexpected death of foreign members of the teaching staff.

And then, after a few days of excitement, following letters and phone calls and sotto voce conversations in the staff room, there would be a modest funeral, a wreath from the school, a floral tribute from his colleagues. Walter would buy a big bouquet from the discount florist at the corner. He would have traveled up from Switzerland, found a cheap room somewhere in the neighborhood, and he would now be trying, with his bad French, to organize everything. He had got hold of Andreas’s appointment and address book. There was insufficient time to place an announcement in the newspaper, but he would call some of Andreas’s friends and invite them. He would be surprised by the number of women’s names in the address book, perhaps he felt a bit jealous of his brother’s bachelor existence. In the evenings he would call his wife and complain about the officiousness of the authorities, and ask how the children were doing. Then he would go out for a meal locally, and go for a walk in the rue des Abesses or the rue Pigalle. Andreas asked himself whether his brother might take in a peepshow or go with a prostitute. He couldn’t imagine it.


From the Gare du Nord, Andreas took the suburban train out to Deuil-la-Barre. He took the same train every day. He studied the faces of the other passengers, ordinary, unremarkable faces. An elderly man sitting across from him stared at him with expressionless eyes. Andreas looked out the window. He saw rails, factories and storage facilities, an occasional tree, electricity towers or lampposts, brick or concrete walls spattered with graffiti. He had a sense of seeing only colors, ocher, yellow, white, silver, a dull red, and the watery blue of the sky. It was a little after seven, but time seemed not to matter.

He asked himself whether Walter would leave the clearing out of the apartment to a moving company. The furniture hadn’t been exactly cheap, but what use would he have for it? That aside, Andreas didn’t have many possessions. Personal effects — he had always asked himself what that meant. A little statuette of Diana with bow and arrow, frozen in mid-step, that he had bought at a flea market shortly after his arrival in Paris, a couple of posters from art exhibits long ago, and framed vacation photos of deserted landscapes in the dazzling heat of Italy and the South of France. He owned hardly any books, a few CDs and DVDs, nothing special, nothing of value. His clothes and his shoes wouldn’t fit Walter, who was bigger and bulkier than he was. The apartment itself was the only thing that could be turned into cash. Andreas had bought it at a time when the neighborhood wasn’t as sought-after as it was now.

It was a strange thing that his brother, with whom he had so little in common and whom he didn’t even resemble, was the person who would have to deal with all this. Andreas didn’t like to think his death would put anyone to any trouble. But probably that was unavoidable.

He looked around at the other passengers, a pair of lovers kissing by the door, two children whispering, old women with tired faces, businessmen in cheap shiny suits, reading the business section of the paper with grave expressions on their faces. In a hundred years you’ll all be dead, he thought to himself. The sun would shine, the trains would move, children would go to school, but he and all the other people traveling with him today would be dead, and along with them, this moment, this journey, as though it had never been.

The passengers who got off the train with Andreas seemed to be different every day. He stopped on the platform for a moment and watched as they dispersed in all directions. Even though it was still cool, he took off his jacket. He felt a chill, but he loved the cool of the morning, which felt like a superficial caress.

He used to teach in a suburb that was even further out. He had always applied for jobs in the city, but every time he had lost out to colleagues who were older or who were married or had children. Ten years ago, when they built the secondary school at Deuil, Andreas gave up his dream of a job in the city. At least he didn’t have so far to go to work as before.

He was always there half an hour before the beginning of classes. The staff room smelled of cigarettes, even though smoking was not permitted anywhere in the school. Andreas got coffee from the machine and sat down by the window. After about fifteen minutes, Jean-Marc came in, one of the gym teachers. He was wearing a tracksuit.

“Have you been smoking?” he asked, as he washed his face in the sink. Andreas said nothing.

“I can’t believe you’re allowed to smoke in staff rooms in Switzerland.”

Andreas said he hadn’t been in a staff room anywhere in Switzerland for a very long time.

“Can I ask you a personal question?” said Jean-Marc.

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

Jean-Marc laughed. He had pulled off his tracksuit top, and was washing his armpits. He said it was too bad they hadn’t installed a shower for the teachers. He squirted on a deodorant, the smell of it spread through the room. Jean-Marc got dressed again. He got a glass of water, and sat down right next to Andreas.

“You must know Delphine?” he leaned back with a smug expression. “What do you think of her?”

“She’s nice,” said Andreas. “There’s something refreshing about her.”

“That’s exactly it.”

Andreas went over to the window, opened it, and lit a cigarette. Jean-Marc gave him a glare.

“We went for a drink together,” he said, “and somehow I ended up staying with her.”

“And what’s that to do with me?”

“Well, since then she’s pretended nothing happened. As though she didn’t know me.”

“You should be pleased. Do you want her calling you at home?”

Jean-Marc stood up and raised his hands. “God, no,” he said, “but it’s strange. You sleep with a woman, someone … not even beautiful. Did that ever happen to you?”

“I’m not married,” said Andreas. It seemed grotesque to him that he would certainly have described Jean-Marc as his best friend.


After Andreas turned off the light at night, he lay awake a little. He had drawn the curtains, and the only light in the darkened room was from the TV, the DVD player, and the stereo. The red luminous diodes had something calming about them, they reminded him of the light that doesn’t go out, of the presence of Christ, whom he didn’t believe in.

He spent Saturday as always, cleaning the apartment, and shopping for the week ahead. Some years ago, a film that had achieved cult status had been shot in the street, and since that time people came there from all over the world to check out the reality of the dream scenes. Andreas had bought a DVD of the film, and when he watched it from time to time, it seemed to him the pictures were more real than the street outside, as though the reality were just a pale imitation of the silvery film world, a cheap stage set. You had to close your eyes to hear the soundtrack and see the images. Then Paris was the way he had always imagined it.

Andreas liked being part of this stage set. He liked the sense he had of himself sitting in a café reading the newspaper, or strolling down the street with a baguette under his arm, and carrying bags full of vegetables that would spend the week rotting in his fridge before he threw them away. When tourists stopped him and asked for directions, he was only too glad to tell them. He answered them in French, even when he noticed they were German or Swiss and had trouble understanding him.

He was both an extra in the imaginary film and a member of the audience, a tourist who had walked these streets for twenty years now, without ever having a sense of arriving anywhere. He was quite happy with his part, he had never wanted to be anything else. Great undertakings and major changes had always alarmed him. He walked through the streets of St. Michel or St. Germain, went up the Eiffel Tower, or took a look around the church of Notre Dame or the Louvre. He strolled across the Pont Neuf and went shopping in the big stores, even though the prices were ridiculous. Sometimes he would follow people on the street for a while, see what they bought or watched them stop in a café for a drink, and then he let them go. When he talked to friends who had spent all their lives in Paris, he was amazed by how poorly they knew the city. They barely left their quartier, and hadn’t visited the museums since their school days. Instead of rejoicing in the city’s beauty, they complained about the striking Metro workers, the polluted air, and the lack of parks and playgrounds.

Late in the afternoon, he would go to the cinema and watch an American action film, some routine story with spectacular stunts and special effects. On his way home, he would be accosted by the doormen at the sex clubs. Previously, they had always been rather slimy young men, but for some time now they were women, who were even more persistent than men. Andreas looked straight ahead and waved them away with his hand, but one of the women followed him as far as the next traffic light, talking to him, and saying, well, how about it, come on in. We have new girls.

“I live here,” he said, and crossed the street against the red light, to get rid of the woman.

It annoyed him that he was always accosted. It was as though they could see through his disguise, as though they knew something about him that he didn’t know himself. Life must be pretty hard behind the scenes, behind the blacked-out doors of the sex clubs and bars and sex shops. The thought that that life might be more real than his own upset him. In all the years he had lived there, he had never once gone to one of those places.

He slept in on Sundays. He ate breakfast in a café, read the newspaper, and listened to a young German couple argue about their plans for the rest of the day. She wanted to go to the Louvre; he didn’t. When she asked what he wanted to do instead, he had no suggestions.

At twelve o’clock, Andreas was back home. He corrected a batch of homework, then he leafed through a couple of little books he’d picked up on Friday in the German-language bookstore. They were part of a series of instruction books that he sometimes read with the more advanced pupils, little thriller texts about art thieves or smuggler bands, written in simple vocabulary of six or twelve or eighteen hundred words, that was somehow enough to describe an entire world. Andreas liked the stories, even though they were incredibly banal and predictable.

He quickly laid aside the first volume. It was about ecoterrorism, a subject that depressed him, and seemed to him unsuitable for his pupils. The second was titled Love Without Borders. On the cover, it had a line-drawing that reminded him of the Sixties, and that he found strangely moving: a young couple sitting at a sidewalk café under tall trees, smiling at one another. Andreas read the jacket copy. The story was about a girl from Paris called Angélique, who takes a job as an au pair in Germany, and falls in love with Jens, a marine biology student. The host family live in Rendsburg, up near the Danish border. Many years before, Andreas had attended a conference there once, on Scandinavian literature. He had liked the town, even though it had rained the whole time, and he hardly saw anything of the countryside.

He didn’t like reading love stories with the kids. Every kiss was accompanied by giggles and whispers and stupid remarks. But when he was younger, he had fallen in love with an au pair himself. He began reading.

I couldn’t concentrate on the traffic. I had to keep looking at her. The Volkswagen smelled of her, and of summer, sun, and fields of flowers.

Andreas thought about Fabienne, and going swimming with her and Manuel in the lake. He had gone to school with Manuel, and later, while they were both away at college, they sometimes ran into each other on the train home. Andreas was studying German and French, Manuel was qualifying as a gym teacher. He owned an ancient 2CV that was always breaking down.

Fabienne and Andreas was a love story that had never quite happened. He had been in love with her all right, but he had never been sure where she stood. One summer, they had met almost every day, had spent a lot of time together, but he had never dared to declare his love to her, and Fabienne seemed not to expect such a declaration from him. When he was already living in Paris, he wrote her a letter where he finally talked about his feelings; he never sent it.

Andreas hadn’t thought about Fabienne or Manuel for a long time. He hadn’t heard anything from them for ages. He had a vague recollection of a birth announcement, a bland baby face, with the weight and height of a newborn, as though that meant anything. Presumably he had offered his congratulations, maybe sent a gift, he couldn’t remember anymore. He had seen the two of them again, briefly, at his father’s funeral, and not since.

He turned over a couple of pages.

I took her hand and kissed it. Shortly afterward, we were lying on the canal bank.

“You are an amazing person. How can I understand you?”

“You’re not to understand me, Butterfly,” I replied, and looked at her. “I don’t understand myself. Often I don’t even know what I want, you see.”

“Too bad,” she said quietly. “It would be nice if you knew what I felt like now.”

For the next twenty minutes, neither of us spoke much. When we got up, Angélique brushed the grass off her pants.

“I like you.”

“You’re sweet.”

Andreas stared at the book. Butterfly was what he had sometimes called Fabienne, in English, because her German then was as bad as his French. And she had said he didn’t know what he wanted, in her over-distinct pronunciation. You do not know what you want.

He remembered the scene. It was a hot day. The three of them had driven out to the lake. They changed into their bathing suits in the undergrowth. Manuel said he would swim to the other side, and disappeared. Fabienne was sunbathing on her back, eyes closed. Andreas remembered her ivory-colored bathing suit, and that she had put her hair up. He looked at her, and then he bent down over her. She must have felt his shadow cross her face. She opened her eyes and looked at him.

He kissed her, and she let it happen. He laid his hand on her throat, caressed her shoulder, and gently brushed over her bosom. Then she broke free, and ran down to the lake.

Andreas stayed lying there for a while. He was stunned that he had actually dared to kiss Fabienne. He dived into the water, and set off after her. Fabienne swam slowly, head out of the water in an effort to keep her hair dry. Andreas had to hang back if he wasn’t to pass her. After a while, Manuel swam out to meet them. They turned back with him, and returned to their spot on the bank.

Later, Manuel tried to teach Fabienne the butterfly. In the past semester he had learned all the various swimming styles, and he showed off his expertise. Perhaps that was why Andreas had started calling her Butterfly. Or was it Manuel who had started that? Suddenly Andreas didn’t feel sure.

Manuel stood next to Fabienne in the shallow water, and tried to grab her by the waist, but she took a couple of quick steps away from him, and gave him the slip. Manuel set off after her. When he didn’t catch her, he splashed water at her, and she ran to the bank.

They had stayed by the lake for a long time that day. When it got dark, they lit a fire. Manuel started to talk about religion in his bad English, and Fabienne argued with him. She was Catholic and couldn’t deal with his Protestant views, his love of Jesus, who, the way he talked about him, sounded like a good friend. Andreas played the nihilist. He got excited. Now it was his turn to show off with glib remarks on the futility of human existence. In the end, Manuel and Fabienne joined forces against him, and he hurled accusations at them that he later regretted. He looked at Fabienne and tried to read some lingering trace of his kiss in her eyes. But all he saw in her look was distaste.

On the way home, she sat in the front, next to Manuel. It was a warm night, they had the roof of the 2CV down, as they drove back over the hill to the village. Manuel drew up in front of Andreas’s parents’ house. They said their good-byes. Fabienne leaned back between the seats and kissed Andreas on both cheeks. He stopped by the garden gate and watched the car disappear around the corner. Then he remained sitting on the front steps for a long time, smoking and thinking about Fabienne and his love for her.

When he next saw her, a couple of days later, she was different, still friendly but distant. They went swimming again, but Fabienne seemed to take care not to be alone with Andreas. Eventually the weather changed, and it got too cold to swim. Then they only saw each other with the rest of the group, going to the cinema or meeting in a restaurant. In the autumn, Fabienne returned to Paris, to study German. Andreas hadn’t gone to the station to see her off — why, he could no longer remember.

After Fabienne was gone, Andreas felt how little he and Manuel had in common. They saw each other once or twice still, but without Fabienne there, their meetings were boring.

He read the scene a second time. The footnotes explained those words that were not part of the basic vocabulary.

canal: man-made waterway


alongside: next to, by the side of


kiss: two people pressing their lips together

At the end of the chapter there were some comprehension questions.

Why is Jens disappointed?


What do you know about Angélique?


Where is Schleswig-Holstein?

That time at the lake, Andreas felt glad that Fabienne had run away. He was in love with her, but for the time being that first kiss was enough for him, that first touch. In the ensuing weeks he sometimes imagined what would have happened if she had kissed him back. They would run into the forest together. They would hide in the undergrowth, take off their bathing suits. They would lie on the forest floor, which was warm and soft in Andreas’s imagination. Then Manuel would come calling for them, and they would hurriedly pull their bathing suits back on and stroll down to the lake, as though nothing had happened. Fabienne would look at Andreas, and smile. Manuel surely must have noticed what had happened, but Andreas didn’t care. In his imagination he felt strangely proud and solemn. They were all quiet on the drive back. Andreas sat in the back, studying Fabienne, her tanned neck, with little tiny, almost invisible hairs on it, her pink translucent ears, her pinned back hair. Through her T-shirt he could see the outline of her shoulderblades and the straps of her bra.

Fabienne’s beauty had always taken his breath away. It was the flawless beauty of a statue. He imagined his hands gliding over her body, which would be cool as bronze or smooth marble. In his projection, Fabienne had remained the young girl he had first met, and when he thought of her he felt as young and inexperienced as he had been at the time. He couldn’t imagine Fabienne sweaty or tired, or aroused, or in a temper. He couldn’t imagine her naked.


In the winter after Fabienne’s departure, Andreas’s mother died of breast cancer. She had known she was sick for some time, but she had first concealed it from the family, and then played it down. Even when she had only a little time to live, she still pretended everything was OK. The atmosphere in the house was unbearable, and finally Andreas rented a room in the city, and came home only at weekends. He would usually arrive after lunch on Saturday, and go straight up to his room. He said he had to work. Then he would lie on his bed and read his old children’s books, and only come down for supper. After supper, he disappeared as quickly as possible into the village, to meet friends. He drank too much, and when he came home late at night, drunk, he would sometimes run into his mother, who was unable to sleep. She was standing in the kitchen, swallowing some homeopathic remedy that she tried to keep him from seeing. She would say good night, and pad down the dark corridor to her bedroom, but, once Andreas was in bed, he could hear her getting up again and restlessly pacing about the house.

In those months he started going out with Manuel’s younger sister, Beatrice, who worked as a teller at the Canton Bank, and had just broken up with her boyfriend. The relationship lasted just six months. Beatrice was still living with her parents, who were religious people and wouldn’t have allowed Andreas to spend the night with their daughter. Sometimes, Beatrice visited him in the city, but she never wanted to stay over. Andreas said she was legal, but she shook her head and said, no, she couldn’t do that to her parents. She let him undress her to her underwear, then she said she wasn’t ready yet, she wanted to get to know him a bit better first. Even when she touched him, Andreas thought she didn’t really want to, and it was just to please him. Eventually he had enough. He called her at the bank and said he didn’t want to see her anymore. She said she was working, and wasn’t able to talk, and he said there was nothing to talk about, and hung up. After that he didn’t answer the phone for a week. He saw Beatrice at his mother’s funeral. She had come with Manuel. The two of them offered him their condolences, and they exchanged a few meaningless sentences. Years later, Andreas heard that Beatrice had got back together with her ex, and married him.

During his time with Beatrice, he started writing letters to Fabienne. He had thought about her a lot after her going away, and sometimes when he was lying on the bed with Beatrice, he shut his eyes and imagined it was Fabienne beside him. From that time, she had accompanied him through all his relationships. She was always there, as a shadow, fading a little over time, but never quite disappearing.


Andreas went into the kitchen to make some tea. Then he lay down on the sofa, and started reading the little book from the beginning.

The love between Angélique and Jens was almost as chaste as that between him and Fabienne. Sex did not play any part in the basic vocabulary, and Jens appeared more interested in the beauty of Schleswig-Holstein than in Angélique’s. He drove her around the area in his old Beetle, showed her the Viking museum at Haithabu and the famous Bordesholm altar in Schleswig, and walked along the North Sea-Baltic Canal with her, one of the most important waterways of the world, as he explained to her. He kissed her for the first time on the Rendsburg ferry, and then they went on excursions even further afield. A visit to Lübeck gave Jens the opportunity to deliver himself of the stupidest sentence on Thomas Mann that Andreas had ever read. He turned over a few pages, and it was fall. The date of Angélique’s departure was moving nearer, casting its dark shadow on the young happiness. Just as Jens was on his way to the station to say good-bye to Angélique, and promise to visit her in Paris, his car developed another problem, and by the time he finally got to the station, all he could see of her train were its two taillights. Foolishly, the two of them hadn’t even exchanged addresses, and for a couple of pages it looked as if they would never see each other again. But then Jens managed to get a place to study in Paris. In the spring, he set off after Angélique, and only a few days later, by a wildly improbable coincidence, he met her strolling down the Champs-Elysées. A happy ending in spring light, a jerky pen-and-ink sketch of bliss.

The story was implausible and badly written, but it had extraordinary parallels to Andreas’s own. He too had set off in pursuit of Fabienne, though only after two years. They had exchanged letters that whole time. Andreas had never referred explicitly to the kiss by the lake, but his letters had been full of hints. Fabienne must have sensed what he felt for her.

She was never the first to write, but she replied to all his letters. She wrote about her studies, her family, her friends. She did not mention that Manuel had come to visit her in Paris, just as she did not mention her trips to Switzerland. Not until Andreas had finished his degree and got an assistantship in a school on the outskirts of Paris did she tell him, in a postscript, that she would be going to Switzerland in October. She and Manuel were an item, and all the to-ing and fro-ing had gotten a bit wearing, and a bit expensive as well.

Andreas was stunned. He asked himself why he had never thought to visit Fabienne. He thought of turning down the job, but then he went there anyway. He resolved to speak to Fabienne. For weeks he thought about what he would say to her. He couldn’t imagine what she saw in Manuel, who had just taken a job as a gym teacher in the village where he and Andreas had grown up.

No sooner had he got to Paris than he called Fabienne. She said she was very busy, she was sitting her exams. They ended up arranging to meet on one of the following days in the tearoom of the mosque.

In the two years they hadn’t seen each other, Fabienne had grown still more beautiful. She had lost some weight, and her features were clearer, more mature. She looked utterly self-possessed, walking across the crowded café to greet Andreas, ordering mint tea and pastries for them. Andreas talked about his job, his pupils, and his new colleagues. Fabienne talked about her exams, which had gone well, about her summer vacation, about the books she had read. She said she was going to Zürich to finish her degree. Her German was still not good, she badly needed to spend time in a German-speaking environment. Andreas said she didn’t have the trace of an accent, and anyway Switzerland was the last place she should go to for that. Fabienne just laughed. He didn’t say what he had meant to say. After an hour, Fabienne got up and said she had to go, she was due to meet a girlfriend.

In the two months that Fabienne remained in Paris, they met four or five times. They drank tea or coffee, and once they went to the cinema to see a Fritz Lang film. Just before the end, the film tore, and after a long pause the house lights came on, and a woman walked to the front and said that for technical reasons they were unable to show the ending of the film. In a few sentences she told them how the story ended.

Andreas asked Fabienne to have a drink with him. She was tired, she said. He walked her back to her place. The whole evening they had spoken only banalities. As they walked along side by side, he wanted to say at last the things he had wanted to say, but he couldn’t get a syllable out, only a wheeze. Fabienne asked if he had said something. No, he said, it was just a frog in his throat.

Andreas never supposed that falling in love with an au pair was a particularly original thing to do. It had probably happened lots of times. But what was striking were the many details of his story that chimed with the book. The nickname he had given Fabienne, her appearance, the fact that she had bought herself a cat in Paris, and liked seeing old German films. That she sang him French nursery rhymes, and that her father was a doctor.

The author of the little book was named Gregor Wolf. There was a little biographical sketch of him at the front of the book. Apparently, he was born in 1953, and after training to be a bookseller, he had done various jobs, among them waiter and night porter. He had lived abroad for a long time. As of 1985, he was a freelance writer, living in Flensburg and Majorca. The biography sounded like every other author biography. Andreas had never heard of him, but that didn’t mean much. At the back of the book was a list of other books by Gregor Wolf, and there followed a dozen or so catchpenny titles.

Andreas asked himself whether Fabienne had ever met the author, and told him her story. It seemed unlikely, but what was even more unlikely was that all the coincidences were accidental.

He put the book down and turned on the TV to catch the news. Afterward he switched it off. The programs that would have interested him were generally on too late. He went to bed early, and was soon asleep. When the alarm went off, he still felt tired. He went to the bathroom, cleaned his teeth, and showered, first hot then cold. He didn’t eat any breakfast, just gulped down a cup of coffee, and set off.


On Wednesday, Andreas met Sylvie. They always arranged to meet on afternoons of no school, but other things often got in the way. Sylvie had three children, and when one of them was ill, or had a music lesson canceled, she would send him a text message to cancel their meeting. When they did meet, she would always make a joke about their relationship. Sometimes Andreas suspected she had other lovers besides him, but he never asked. He thought it was none of his business, and in fact he didn’t care either way.

Sylvie would arrive on her bicycle. She was out of breath when she walked past him into the apartment. He asked if she wanted a drink, but she said she didn’t have much time, put her arms around him, and dragged him into the bedroom.

Once they had slept together, Sylvie was a little calmer. She talked about her husband and her children, and the little catastrophes that always seemed to befall her. She had numerous relatives and close friends who always seemed to need her help, and Andreas listened to her, and got the people she talked about all mixed up. She only ever used first names. That’s your brother, right? asked Andreas. No, said Sylvie, with a show of irritation, he’s my best friend’s husband, or my husband’s cousin, or Anne’s French teacher. Sometimes Sylvie asked him why he never talked. He said he had nothing to say. His life was too formless, and at the same time too much of a tangle to give rise to any stories. Sylvie didn’t listen. She stood by the window looking out. She was naked, but she behaved quite as if she were dressed.

“What a horrible yard,” she said. “What kind of people live here?”

“I’ve hardly met any of the neighbors.”

“How long have you lived in this building?”

Andreas figured it out.

“Almost ten years,” he said.

Sylvie laughed and returned to bed. She kissed him on the mouth. Andreas grabbed her around the waist, and pulled her down. Sylvie sat up.

“Now you can offer me a drink, if you like.”

Andreas put on his pants, and went into the kitchen to make coffee. Sylvie followed him. She said she didn’t understand how he could stand to live in such a tiny apartment.

“I can’t afford a bigger one.”

“I’ve got some friends in Belleville who want to sell their apartment. It’s three big rooms, and not expensive. I’m sure you’d get four hundred thousand for yours. The area’s become so fashionable.”

Andreas said the apartment wasn’t as small as all that. And he felt at home in it. He didn’t need any more space. Then he told Sylvie about Angélique and Jens, and his love for Fabienne.

“It’s the exact same story,” he said. “Isn’t that amazing.”

“But your version of it ended badly.”

“Yes, for me,” said Andreas. He handed Sylvie a cup, and sat down on the kitchen table. “Maybe she met the author. He lives on Majorca. Stranger things have happened.”

“Then why should she tell him the story with a happy ending?”

“I’ve no idea,” said Andreas.

“Perhaps she was in love with you. Perhaps she wanted it to end well.”

“I was an idiot,” said Andreas.

Sylvie asked what was special about Fabienne. Andreas said she was very beautiful when he first met her. But that couldn’t be the whole story. If he met Fabienne now, he would still find her attractive, maybe he would approach her, have an affair with her. She wouldn’t be the great love of his life, not now, not anymore. Presumably it wasn’t even Fabienne herself that he longed for, so much as the love of those years, the unconditionality of the feeling that still floored him now, twenty years later.

“The bull that’s led to the cow probably thinks he’s in love too,” said Sylvie, and laughed. She said she’d better go, and went into the bedroom to get dressed.

“Write to her,” she said, as she said good-bye.


Andreas had decided to write to Fabienne, but he kept putting it off and putting it off, until he finally forgot all about it. There was some trouble at school, a couple of pupils started a fight during recess. One of them was in Andreas’s class, and there were meetings with the headmistress and the parents and a social worker. Then a letter came from Walter. Andreas was very surprised to hear from Walter. They talked on the phone every other month or so, and never had very much to say to each other. Sometimes Walter would send him a postcard from his vacation, which they would all sign, and at Christmas there was a round-robin letter containing all the news of the past year; apart from that, they never wrote to each other. The letter was accompanied by a form. Clearing of a grave, Andreas read. Under that heading were the names of his parents, handwritten, and under the heading, Client, was Walter’s name and his own.

The undersigned client is prepared to meet the expenses of the cemetery gardener in the removal of the grave. The leveling and refurbishment of the grave space will be paid for by the community.

Walter had signed the form. Normal practice was for graves to be given up after twenty years, he wrote in his accompanying letter, but the grave counted as that of their mother only. When their father was cremated, they had signed a disclaimer of burial rights, perhaps Andreas remembered. He was sorry to bother him over something like this, but he hadn’t wanted to make the decision on his own. He had thought Andreas might want to visit the grave once more. It wouldn’t be cleared until fall at the earliest. If he did decide to come to Switzerland, he would of course be welcome to stay with them. They would be pleased to see him again. Walter had signed the letter as “Your Brother,” which struck Andreas as being in poor taste.

He remembered his father’s funeral. It was a hot day. At that time, Walter and his family had still lived in an apartment, and Andreas had refused their offer of spending the night there. He had booked a room in the hotel on the market square. Walter had asked whether he wanted to be picked up in the morning, but Andreas said he didn’t want to put him to any trouble.

During that whole stay, he had had the feeling of being in a kind of trance. The simplest decisions had been incredibly difficult for him, and he was only able to think about absolutely insignificant things. But his physical awareness had been strangely heightened. Everything seemed to him unbearably loud and intense. Colors, sounds, even smells were more vivid than usual. When he crossed the road to the cemetery, a car braked, and the driver lowered his window and yelled at him. Andreas walked on, not turning around. He felt a trickle of sweat break out on his brow and down his back.

There were a couple of cars in the cemetery parking lot, but no one to be seen. The heavy wrought-iron gate lay in the shadow of heavy conifers. Andreas had his suitcase with him; he intended to leave right after the funeral. Now he didn’t know what to do with his suitcase. He thought briefly of shoving it in some bushes near the entrance to the cemetery, but rejected the idea immediately. He took off his jacket and lit a cigarette. His shirt was sodden with sweat. A breeze cooled the wet cotton on his back and under his arms.

The funeral party was standing in little groups outside the chapel, engaged in quiet conversation. There were a lot of his old school friends there. They nodded to him as he walked by, one or another of them muttered something, asked him how he was doing, and what his plans were. Andreas looked around for Walter, but couldn’t see him anywhere.

With a surprisingly loud clang, the church bells started to ring on the other side of the road, and the funeral party moved with slow, reverent steps to the entrance of the chapel. The situation struck Andreas as grotesque, the grave expressions, the whispering, the embarrassment. His father had been old, he had lived a retired sort of life, and Andreas was sure most of the people here had barely known him.

He stopped outside the chapel. When the bells ceased, and the sexton emerged from the chapel door to look around for any latecomers, Walter and his wife came out of one of the lying-in rooms, which were all housed in a low, long annex. Walter looked more surprised than grieving. He looked nervously at his watch. Bettina’s face was tear-stained.

They hadn’t seen Andreas. He followed them into the chapel. He was still holding his cigarette butt in his hand. It occurred to him to drop it in the holy water basin by the entrance. He stood his suitcase on the floor and leaned against the back wall.

Walter and Bettina walked down the nave. They took their places in the front row, where Bettina’s parents were already sitting, and the children. The children were all dressed in colors. Presumably that was Bettina’s idea. When Walter sat down, he half-turned his head, and the movement became a sort of bow, as though he wanted to greet the mourners. He smiled sheepishly. At that moment, Andreas felt sorry for him, and he would have liked to go up to him and give him a hug.

Walter lowered his head. The children slithered about, bored. Then the organ began, the mourners relaxed, and settled into their pews.

Only then did Andreas see Fabienne and Manuel. They were sitting in a row near the back, not far from him. As Fabienne leaned over to Manuel to whisper something in his ear, Andreas could see her profile. She had hardly changed at all. She was wearing a sleeveless black dress. Andreas wished he could touch her shoulders and her neck. Manuel was wearing a dark suit. He had lost a lot of hair, and had gotten rather chubby. As a young man he had been good-looking in a not particularly interesting sort of way; now he looked old to Andreas, though they were the same age.

The vicar seemed to be suffering from the heat. He was pale, and rattled through his sermon and a fairly interchangeable vita of the deceased, that was all work and births of children and memberships of clubs. Some of it Andreas had never heard of — or forgotten it. The little he did know he had heard from his mother.

The lady organist played a couple of wrong notes. Andreas was glad there wasn’t any singing. For the prayers he put his hands together without folding them. He dropped the cigarette butt quietly on the floor. He didn’t close his eyes, and as he looked at the swaying figures of those praying, he didn’t know who was more ridiculous — the others in their adherence to a meaningless ritual or himself in his pose of rebellion.

During the service, the coffin had been brought out into the churchyard. It now stood there, but no one seemed to be paying it any attention. Andreas couldn’t imagine that the dead man had anything to do with him. His father had been a quiet and reserved man. If he had still been alive, he would probably have stood on the periphery somewhere, in the shade of one of the pines, and observed the gathering with a nervous and at the same time amused eye. Andreas felt no grief at the time. Grief came later, when he was back in Paris, in his customary surroundings, and with a violence that had taken him aback.

Walter went up to Andreas, shook hands, and took him to his family. Bettina’s face had a somehow complicated look on it; she resembled an old woman. They said hello, and then the vicar came up to them and said something comforting, and the mourners got in line to offer their condolences. All of them looked bashful and did their best to make their grief appear genuine. Walter’s face had the startled expression it had had before, and sometimes, when he was shaking hands with someone, a forced cheerfulness.

Fabienne and Manuel came along right at the end. By the time it was their turn, the first mourners had already left the cemetery. Manuel shook Andreas’s hand with an encouraging-looking smile.

“Glad we could see each other again,” he said, rather too loudly.

Fabienne stood next to him. Andreas looked at her. She smiled, and once again he longed to touch her.

“Your father was a nice man,” she said. She spoke correct German, her accent was barely detectable.

Andreas kissed her on both cheeks, and asked whether she and Manuel would stay to eat with them. He turned to Walter, and asked where the wake was being held. Manuel said unfortunately they wouldn’t be able to stay. His mother was babysitting the boy. They had to be back for lunch. He laughed for no reason. Fabienne asked whether Andreas was staying for any length of time. Why didn’t he come and visit them. She looked at him expectantly. When Andreas said he was going back today, he thought he saw disappointment flash across her face. But he wasn’t sure. Fabienne had composed herself again. She said he hadn’t changed at all.

“Come and see us the next time you’re in the country,” she said. “We’d like that.” But it didn’t sound like an invitation.

“Definitely,” said Andreas. He was annoyed with Fabienne for talking of we and us, and not I.

After the funeral meal, he went back briefly to Walter and Bettina’s place. The wine and the heat had made him tired. It was cool in the apartment. They sat in the sitting room, talking about their father. Walter showed Andreas a stack of old school notebooks. The square paper was divided into vertical columns of dates and numbers.

“You know he kept a record of the temperature each day, highs and lows, plus the humidity and pressure. Always at the same time of day. An endless list. He did it for forty years.”

Andreas said the notebooks seemed familiar. He had never quite understood what his father did it for.

“He stopped a couple of weeks before he died,” said Walter, suddenly bursting into sobs. Andreas couldn’t recall ever having seen him cry before, and felt embarrassed.

Walter had taken care of everything, the cremation, the thanking people, the execution of the will. Andreas had been sent the papers, and signed without reading them. Then Walter and his family moved into their parents’ house, and paid Andreas his share. That was the money he had bought the Paris apartment with. He had been to Switzerland a couple of times since, but never the village.

The thought that the grave was being cleared bothered him. For a moment he thought of going. Then he signed the form and put it in an envelope. He looked for an appropriate postcard. Finally he selected a Gauguin of a Breton village in warm colors. He wrote to say that unfortunately he didn’t have any time to visit Switzerland. He sent his love and best wishes to the family. He mailed the letter right away. He wanted to be free of the matter.


Andreas met Nadia and Sylvie, he did the shopping, he cleaned the apartment, he went to the cinema. The kids at school were difficult, and for the first time in many years, Andreas derived no satisfaction from his job. When the class complained to him about a test, he lectured them. Did they really think he did all that just to give them a hard time? He was doing it for them. He had a syllabus and goals. He hadn’t chosen his profession by chance; he was a teacher by vocation. He said he believed that education made people better. And that as long as they were in school, they had a chance to learn something, while other people had to spend their whole lives doing some stupid job. Knowledge of German would open doors for them, intellectually speaking, especially philosophy, which one couldn’t hope to understand without learning German. German was the language of philosophy, it had a clarity and purity that no other language could claim to have, and at the same time …

The longer he went on, the more hollow his words sounded to him. He looked at the kids slumped across their desks and whispering and giggling and trying to avoid his eye. He broke off in mid-sentence and sat down.

From that day forward, he saw the students with different eyes. He no longer deluded himself that he had any influence on them. Even the good boys and the eager girls who tried hard, who did their homework diligently and participated in the classes, annoyed him. They reminded him of himself, and of what had become of him.

He no longer enjoyed going to school. He suffered from the monotony of his days and felt tired and burned out. In the staff room there were endless discussions about the banning of head-scarves, even though there were no Muslim girls in the school, and head-scarves had never been an issue. The teachers formed two opposing camps. Andreas wanted to belong to neither one. It seemed to him they were both merely trying to settle old accounts. In Switzerland, he once heard himself saying, they dealt with these problems more calmly. After that, he was attacked by both sides, one called him racist, the other misogynist. Even Jean-Marc had come across all political, and defended the values of the republic that he seemed barely to have acknowledged before. Andreas spent his spring break in Normandy. Once again, he had intended to read Proust, but he ended up sitting around in the hotel, watching TV or reading the newspapers and magazines he bought at the station newsstand every morning. He spent a night with an unmarried woman teacher he had met on one of his long walks along the beach. He had been fascinated by her large breasts, and invited her to supper. It took a lot of effort to talk her into going up to his room, and then they talked for a lot longer while they emptied the minibar. While they made love, the woman kept moaning his name out loud, which got on his nerves. He was glad to be alone when he woke up late the following morning. She had left him a note, which he glanced at briefly before balling it up and throwing it away.

In May, it got really cold again, and Andreas came down with a cold that turned into a persistent cough. After three weeks, he still had it, so Andreas went to the doctor. The doctor listened to his breathing, and said to be on the safe side he wanted him to have a computed tomography scan. Andreas called the hospital and got an appointment for Wednesday afternoon. When Sylvie called, he made up an excuse. She laughed and accused him of having found some new hobby.

The tomography didn’t take long, and it wasn’t as bad as Andreas had expected. He shut his eyes, and tried to imagine he was lying on the beach in the sun, but the clattering of the machine kept bringing him back to reality.

The weather improved, and with it Andreas’s mood. The doctor had prescribed some medicine, and his cough got a little better. He had almost forgotten about it by the time of his follow-up appointment. Even before he had sat down, the doctor said the results were a little worrisome. He held the picture of Andreas’s lung up against the window and with his silver pen circled an area between the two wings of the lung.

“There’s a chance that it’s just tubercular scarring,” he said.

He sat down, and twiddled with his pen. To be on the safe side, he wanted to have a biopsy done, a very minor operation sampling the tissue, which could be done on an outpatient basis.

“They make a little incision above the sternum, and insert a probe. You won’t feel a thing.”

“What else could it be?” asked Andreas.

The doctor told him not to worry. Andreas asked what the chances were. The doctor said it was meaningless to talk about chances.

“It’s either-or. You have it or you don’t.”

He stood up, returned his pen to the top pocket of his white coat, and shook hands with Andreas. He said he was sorry not to have had any better news.


Andreas stood in the empty classroom. The corridor rang with the running steps and shouts of boys and girls going home. He remembered his own time at school, the last day of term before the summer holidays, the way the kids ran off in all directions once the final class was at an end. The haste with which everyone disappeared, as though they were going somewhere. His best friend hardly stopped to say good-bye as he ran off, and Andreas felt betrayed. He had dawdled, gone home slowly with the big cardboard folder containing all the drawings he had done in the year. The folder was much too big for him; he needed both arms to carry it, to prevent the drawings from slipping out. Back then, summer had been something horribly, outlandishly long, and the beginning of the new school year was unimaginably far off.

He got his things together. On his desk was a little potted plant, a yellow primrose that one of his girls had given him as a good-bye present. The pot was wrapped in tinfoil. Andreas hesitated for a moment, thought about taking the plant home with him. Then he left it. He imagined it slowly withering and dying in neglect. In the fall, other children would be sitting here, shyly eyeing the new teacher.

He stowed books and papers away in desk drawers and in his case. Then he took down the posters on the walls, the collages and placards that the kids had made over the course of the year. Germany’s Constitutional System, German Cuisine, The Life of J. S. Bach. He rolled them all together, and rammed them into the wastebasket.

He walked through the empty school. He looked down at the yard through one of the tall windows. One of his pupils was sitting on a bench and kept looking anxiously toward the door. It was the boy who had been involved in the fights. Andreas wondered what he was waiting for, why he didn’t go home. The boy didn’t budge from where he was.

In the staff room there were still the white plastic cups for the end-of-term drinks that had been given out during the lunch break. Andreas tidied them away, along with the dirty napkins and the half-eaten rolls. He poured himself the remains of the white wine and took a sip. The wine was lukewarm and tasted sour. There was a knock, and Delphine stuck her head around the door.

“No one’s here?” she asked.

“Aren’t I anyone?”

“I wanted to say good-bye,” said Delphine. “It’s my last day today.”

“Come on in,” said Andreas. He found her a cup and poured her some of the wine. Delphine took a sip and shuddered.

“Disgusting,” she said. But she went on drinking it just the same. When she started helping Andreas clear the table, he stopped and said the janitor would take care of it.

“Aren’t you going home?” she asked.

“In a minute,” said Andreas. He said he felt a little envious of her.

“Why?”

“Because you’ve finished here. Because you’re about to walk out, and you’ll never come here again.”

“I’m sure I will. I’m going to visit my class. I promised them.”

“Don’t kid yourself.”

Delphine did not speak. Presumably she knew that Andreas was right. She would go to work at a different school, teach different classes, go out with different colleagues, and wrangle with different parents.

“There’s no point,” said Andreas. “You can’t go back.”

Each time a class graduated, a couple of the pupils promised they would come back and sit in on his new class. Once, someone really had, one of his favorite pupils. He had sat right at the back on an empty chair, and had listened in for half an hour. Then he had disappeared during the break, without saying good-bye.

“I think he was just as embarrassed as I was. I felt like a con artist. The same stories, the same jokes. Only a different audience.”

From his perspective her situation might indeed be enviable, said Delphine. But she would have to get used to a new place, and that wasn’t easy. She had settled here, and wouldn’t have minded staying.

“Do you know where you’re going to go?”

“To Versailles,” said Delphine. “Assuming I pass the exam. I would have preferred to go back to the South, where I come from. But for that I would have needed two hundred and seventy points. The only way I could get that many was if I were married and had a couple of kids.”

Andreas asked where she lived. She said she lived in a chambre de bonne nearby. Before that, she’d lived in Arles, with her parents.

“My father’s a policeman. I grew up in police barracks. We moved every other year.”

She wanted to go back South or to the Atlantic coast. Somewhere near the sea. She loved the sea. With a name like yours, that’s a surprise, said Andreas dryly. From Arles it wasn’t such a long way to the sea, said Delphine. And in the summer vacation, she had always gone to the Atlantic coast with her parents. There was a police campsite near Bordeaux. It was paradise.

By the time they left the school, the boy whom Andreas had watched out of the window was no longer there.

“I’ve got to go this way,” said Delphine, and she pointed down the street. Andreas said he’d walk her some of the way, if she didn’t mind. He didn’t feel like going home.

They walked along slowly side by side. Delphine talked about her class, and her qualifying exams, which she’d found difficult. Andreas asked her whether she was going to the Atlantic this summer.

“End of July,” she said, “after I’ve found myself somewhere to live in Versailles.”

They stopped in a bistro for a drink. First they stood at the bar, then they sat down in one of the little booths. Their legs touched, perhaps by chance. Andreas looked at Delphine. She was pale and her complexion was poor, but she had pretty features. Her dark hair was cut short and kept simple. She wasn’t very slim, but she looked fit.

They stopped talking. Delphine looked Andreas in the eye, smiled, and lowered her gaze. She said she lived just around the corner. Her room was tiny. Andreas said the room he’d lived in for the whole of his first year in Paris hadn’t been much bigger than the bed in it.

“It was in one of those cheap hotels by the station. They have wonderful names and terrible rooms. Mine was called Hotel de la Nouvelle France. I happened to walk past it the other day. The hotel doesn’t exist anymore. The building was gutted. The sign bearing the name is still there, but only the facade is left.”

He hadn’t passed that way by chance. It was in a fit of nostalgia that he had gone to the neighborhood, without really knowing what he was looking for. The streets hadn’t changed much to look at, but apart from the bakery and the Metro, there was no shop and no restaurant that he could recall. Over the door of his local pub there was still the sign, Le Cordial, but in the window there was a dusty scrap of cardboard that said Fermé, which was more accurate. In that first year, when Andreas came back from his nocturnal wanderings, the curtains of the bar would be drawn, and just a thin strip of light would indicate there was still anyone inside. He knocked on the glass door, and the owner pulled the curtain aside, and after looking at him suspiciously, he would unlock the door and admit Andreas. Back then, almost every night had come to an end in the Cordial, with crazy conversations that got ever stickier until they finally completely dried. In the morning, when Andreas took the train to work, he still felt the alcohol from the night before, and he had to make an effort not to fall asleep and miss his stop. The little room was filthy beyond description. The shelf that had once had bottles on it was empty. Tables and chairs were piled into one corner. Behind that was a photo screen that Andreas suddenly remembered one day. It was a yellowed mountain landscape, a small lake surrounded by trees, against a backdrop of snow-topped mountains. The picture must date from some previous owner. The host and most of the clientele were Algerians. Andreas wondered where Paco had got to, and his lovely wife, who had bossed her husband about like a kid.

“The hotel was wretched,” said Andreas, “but I was still young. There was one shower and one toilet for twenty guests. In summer, if it was hot, you had to queue up for a shower. You had to buy coupons for warm water. If we had no money, we made do with cold showers.”

“I couldn’t stand that,” said Delphine. “I need my own bath.”

She said she would stay here until she had found a place in Versailles. But she did want to leave before the vacation.

They paid and left the bistro. Delphine went on, without either of them having said anything. Andreas loved such moments, when basically everything had been decided, but nothing had been said or done. He followed Delphine. Before, they had walked side by side, now she was in the lead, and he so close behind her that he almost touched her. She was wearing cheap clothes, jeans, a white T-shirt, and a jacket with rhinestones. Andreas had a sense that she was walking differently from before, more confidently, as though she knew what he had in mind. They didn’t speak, not even when Delphine stopped in front of a building and entered a code on an electronic pad beside the door. She held it open for him, and he followed her through a courtyard and up a flight of stairs. On the fourth floor he came to a stop. He was out of breath, and coughing.

“You smoke too much,” said Delphine, who was already on the next landing.

When he got to the top floor, she had disappeared. A door stood open.

The room was furnished rather basically; you could tell it had been assembled by someone who wasn’t planning to use it himself. There were hardly any books on the shelf, and apart from an almost bald basil plant on the table, there were no plants. On the bed there was a sleeping bag on a bare mattress. Next to it on the floor was a huge blue IKEA plastic bag full of dirty laundry. Delphine said she would have to do her laundry tonight. Andreas went up to the little window and looked out.

“A pretty view.”

“I only come here to sleep.”

He turned around toward her. She had sat down on the bed and was looking at him inquiringly. He knew what she expected of him. They would kiss, make love on the stained mattress, then he would accompany her to the launderette before taking her out to dinner. Afterward they might make love a second time, while he kept an eye on his watch to be sure he didn’t miss the last train. He would get dressed, and she would see him to the door, and he would turn to look at her once more on the stairs, to leave a good impression. And that would be the last either of them would ever hear of the other.

Delphine had got up and joined him in front of the window. Their shoulders brushed, and he smelled her perfume, a fresh, lemony scent. Summer, sun, and flowering meadows, he thought — it made him laugh.

“What’s so funny?” asked Delphine irritably.

“I just remembered something,” said Andreas, “a story I was reading. A love story.”

He asked her what scent she used. She asked him whether he liked it. Yes, he said, he did. He started to laugh again. The whole situation seemed so hackneyed.

“What’s the big joke?”

“You certainly confused Jean-Marc.”

Delphine didn’t say anything for a moment, then she asked what Jean-Marc had said.

“That you had slept with him. And that you didn’t want anything to do with him.”

“What a moron.”

Andreas laid his hand on her shoulder. She shrugged it off.

“Don’t worry,” he said.

“I’m not worried.”

Andreas sat down on the bed. Delphine sat down next to him. The tension was gone.

“Well?” she asked.

“He really is a moron. My best friend, the moron.”

Andreas laughed, and then he started coughing. Delphine said it didn’t sound good. He thanked her. Delphine said he was a strange person, and that got Andreas laughing and coughing again.

“Don’t worry,” he said, once he had recovered himself a little. “I won’t say anything to him.”

“Say what?” asked Delphine. She said Jean-Marc had been a mistake. It had been one of those evenings where you would go along with anyone at all, purely not to be alone. Did he have those, ever? She couldn’t know that Jean-Marc was going to fall in love with her.

“He didn’t fall in love with you,” said Andreas. “It’s just his vanity. If you’d followed him, called him on the phone, pestered him, he would have dropped you soon enough.”

“Thanks for the compliment.”

“I don’t mean it like that. I know Jean-Marc. I bet he showed you photographs of his children.”

“I could have murdered him,” said Delphine, laughing.

They lay side by side on the mattress, and looked silently up at the ceiling. It had begun to get dark outside. Andreas felt very calm. At last, Delphine sat up. She turned and looked at Andreas.

“The launderette shuts in two hours.”

“Is this one of those evenings you would go to bed with absolutely anyone?” he asked.

“No,” said Delphine, and she started to undo Andreas’s shirt. Her face looked quite impassive. She took off his shirt and pants, and then his shorts. Then she disappeared into the bathroom, and came back with a condom, which she carefully opened and put on him. With a few movements, she stripped off her clothes and left them bundled up on the floor. For a moment, she stood naked beside the bed, with her hands hanging down. Andreas was amazed by her pallor. He took her hand, and pulled her down on top of him.


He had meant to go to Brittany to visit Jean-Marc, who came from there, and went back every summer with his wife and kids for a few weeks. He telephoned him, and said he had to put off his visit by a few days. He gave no reason. Nor did he say anything about the biopsy to Sylvia or Nadia. He could imagine their reactions. Nadia would feel sorry for herself, first and foremost. She would be furious with him, the way people are furious with a glass when they break the glass. And Sylvie would straightaway set herself to solving the problem. She was bound to have a friend who was a lung specialist, and who would agree to examine Andreas, and treat him. He left them both thinking he was off on holiday. The only person whom Andreas told was Delphine. He was surprised himself that he talked to her, but maybe it was because she had no great role in his life, that he didn’t know her better than someone you meet on a trip abroad, and then soon lose track of. Even the fact that they had slept together didn’t seem to have brought them together. She asked him what he liked, and told him what she liked, and told him when he was too fast or too rough. When it was over, he really did go to the launderette with her, and while they sat in front of the machines waiting, he told Delphine about the biopsy. Once again, she was cool and objective. She didn’t try to comfort him, or to play down the whole thing. She listened to him carefully, and asked him what time he was due at the hospital and how long it would take. Then she said she would drive him there. He said he could perfectly well walk, it was only fifteen minutes, but Delphine insisted on driving him.

Five days later, she rang the bell punctually. She had left her car in the middle of the road, and when Andreas came out of the house, she was arguing with a truck driver who couldn’t get past. In the middle of a sentence, she broke off, got in the car, leaned over to the passenger seat to let Andreas in. She gestured at the truck driver, and drove off.

The hospital was right behind the Gare du Nord. Andreas walked right past it every day on his way to work, and had never noticed it was there. Delphine drew up outside the main entrance, and kissed him on the mouth.

“Good luck,” she said. She said she wouldn’t be far away. He was to call her when he was finished.

“I’ve no idea how long it’ll be,” said Andreas.

“Doesn’t matter. I’ve got something to read.”

The operation itself didn’t take long, but afterward Andreas had to go and lie down for a couple of hours, even though he’d only been given a local anesthetic. When they told him he could go, he called Delphine. She said she’d be there in fifteen minutes. He was to wait for her at the entrance. He went out into the big hospital forecourt, ringed by three-story buildings of light-colored sandstone. The complex put him in mind of a barracks or prison. In the middle of the yard was a piece of lawn surrounded by a low hedge, at the far end of it was a tower with a clock. It was half past four. The yard was deserted, except for the occasional doctor or nurse crossing it with quick steps. It was astonishingly quiet, with no sense of the bustling city beyond.

Andreas tried to imagine what it would be like to have to spend weeks or months here, to have a bed behind one of the windows, and lie there weakened after an operation or a course of therapy. He would barely be able to take the few steps to the window, or out into the corridor. He was too weak to wish to be anywhere other than in bed, back in the semi-stupor in which he spent his nights and days. Then, in the middle of the night once, he found himself wide awake. He listened. It was raining outside, and the noise of the rain mingled with the sounds of his neighbor breathing. He got up and left the ward. He walked through darkened corridors and down wide staircases to the exit. He snuck past the porter, walked through the city, barefoot and in pajamas. Catch cold, he was thinking, catch my death of cold. Those strange sentences. A patrol car followed him for a while, but he slipped away through a pedestrian street.

Andreas emerged onto the street. A couple of tourists were hurriedly lugging big plastic suitcases across the road to the station. For a moment he thought of catching the next train, never mind where to, anywhere they wouldn’t be able to find him. He failed to spot Delphine, who was parked only a few yards away. She had to wind down the window and call his name. Delphine moved freely about the apartment, as if she had been there many times before. She made tea for Andreas. She found everything right away, the teabags, the teapot, the matches to light the gas.

Andreas, wearing pajamas, was lying down on the sofa. He felt freezing, though it wasn’t cold. Delphine brought him a blanket from the bedroom, and sat down in a chair opposite him. He smiled, and she furrowed her brow.

“What are you, my lover or my nurse?”

“I’m used to it,” she said. “My mother was often sick.”

Andreas was surprised his situation didn’t feel more awkward to him. When he’d been ill before, he would crawl into a corner, and refuse any offers of help or visits. Now, though, he was glad Delphine was with him, looking after him and talking to him.

“Was it very bad?”

“It didn’t hurt, and it doesn’t hurt now. But the idea of them cutting you open and shoving something inside you, that’s terrible.”

He said he didn’t want to talk about it now. He wanted to rest. Delphine asked him whether he would like her to read aloud to him. She went over to the bookshelf, and browsed through the titles.

“Jack London,” she said, “wasn’t he that gold miner? What are you in the mood for? Understanding Germany? Switzerland from the Air, The Judge and His Hangman? A Short Grammar of the German Language, Bertolt Brecht?”

She groaned.

“Can you read German?”

Delphine said she had taken it at school, but forgotten most of it. Andreas pointed her to the little book on the coffee table. That was fairly simple, he said, school level. Delphine worked out the title.

“Love Without Frontiers,” she said. “And you give that kind of thing to your kids?”

“No,” said Andreas, and shut his eyes. Delphine cleared her throat and began to read.

It was on a warm spring day that I saw Angélique for the first time. I knew right away that she wasn’t from here. She wore different clothes from the local girls. The girls here all go around in jeans. They ride bikes, and they talk as loudly as the boys. Angélique was wearing a skirt. She was walking through the village. She was carrying a shopping basket, and she was looking around curiously.

Delphine read softly and slowly. Sometimes she got her stresses so wrong that Andreas had to concentrate hard to follow the text. After a while he gave up the effort, and just followed the sound of her voice.

He tried to picture Fabienne walking in the village, but he couldn’t do it. He could barely remember her face. He saw Sylvie and Nadia and the teacher with the big breasts, and, when he briefly opened his eyes, Delphine, leaning over the book and slowly and with difficulty forming German sentences that she could probably not understand more than half of. He remembered the first lessons in the German book, the language tapes, the friendly detached voice speaking nonsensical sentences: The grass is green. The sky is blue. The pine is tall. And then the expectant silence that made the sentences into questions. Was the grass really green? Was the sky blue? And then the voice a second time, repeating the sentence. The grass was green, and the world was the way it had always been.

Andreas remembered meeting Fabienne for the first time. It was at a twentieth birthday party for Manuel’s sister Beatrice, with whom he went out later. At the time he barely knew Beatrice. He had met her a couple of times while doing homework with Manuel. Presumably she had invited him because of her brother, who didn’t have many friends. At the time, Fabienne was newly arrived in the village. He couldn’t remember where Beatrice knew her from.

The party was in a cottage in the woods. The woods were bordered on one side by industrial terrain and a gravel pit, but the hut was on the other, by the river. When Andreas arrived, there was a big fire already going. Young men and women stood around talking. He propped his bike against a tree, and watched as they went around getting things ready. Most of the guests he knew vaguely by sight. A couple of young men came out of the forest with huge bundles of wood, which they dropped on the ground beside the fire. Beatrice was peeling clingwrap off bowls of salad, and Manuel was pricking sausages. Fabienne caught Andreas’s eye right away. She never left Beatrice’s side.

After they had eaten, Beatrice unpacked the presents, and asked who each one was from, and thanked the people without looking at them properly. Andreas’s present was a book by Albert Camus that he had only recently read himself. The two young men who had brought the wood were now burning cardboard plates and napkins on the fire. Andreas watched as the laminated finish on the plates bubbled up before the plates suddenly caught fire and were consumed with a greenish flame in a matter of seconds.

A birthday cake was produced, and Beatrice and Fabienne pumped coffee from a giant thermos flask.

One of the young men had brought a guitar, and Christian songs were sung that Andreas didn’t know.

Time hurries by, the hours fly,


and no one stops them.


Your years too are rushing by


like a bird in flight.

Fabienne looked ravishing in the firelight. When their eyes met, she smiled. She seemed not to know the songs either.

Someone began telling jokes. Then Beatrice suggested playing hide and seek. Everyone paired off, and because most of the guests knew each other from the Christian youth group, and a few of them were couples already, at the end only Fabienne and Andreas were left over. Beatrice explained the rules, and told people not to go too far. She and her friend stayed by the fire, and started counting down.

The wood was bright, the moon was almost full, but it was hard keeping your bearings. The noise and the laughter of the others could be heard from all sides, as they stumbled over the uneven forest floor. Andreas followed a narrow path. Fabienne followed him at a distance. They had yet to exchange a word. After about fifty yards they left the path and came to a little hollow.

“What about here,” whispered Andreas. He crouched down and looked back in the direction of the hut, where the light of the fire, now almost burned down, shone weakly. Then he heard Beatrice call: “Ready or not, here we come!”

Fabienne was leaning against a tree, as though she didn’t care whether she was found or not. They waited. Shouts and laughter were heard in the forest. The first couple were found, and joined in the search. They seemed to be walking along the edge of the forest, their voices getting louder and then quieter. The fire had flared up once more, and then collapsed into itself. Now you couldn’t make it out anymore.

“They’ll never find us in the dark,” said Fabienne. It was the first sentence that Andreas heard from her mouth. She spoke French. He asked her where she was from. Paris, she said, her parents lived on the outskirts of Paris.

After some time, Andreas got up, and they crept back to the hut. Only Manuel was there, poking the embers with a branch. The others had gone to the gravel pit, he said. Fabienne and Andreas sat down, and Manuel started asking Fabienne questions. And in the end, they arranged to go swimming on Sunday.


When Andreas awoke, it was still dark. Delphine was still sitting in her chair, her legs stretched out on the coffee table, asleep. The book was in her lap.

Andreas wondered what she was doing here. He was almost twice her age, and had no idea what there was for her in making tea for a sick man and reading him children’s stories. They barely knew each other.

He undid the top buttons of his pajama jacket, and prodded the bandage over the wound. It didn’t hurt, but the thought of the incision beneath the bandage made him feel nauseous. He got up to go to the bathroom. When he returned, Delphine was up. He asked her if she didn’t have to go. She said she had nothing planned.

“If you like, I’ll stay the night with you.”

“I’m not up to much, I’m afraid.”

Delphine told him not to be stupid, sex wasn’t everything. She asked him if he was hungry. He shook his head.

“You must eat.”

She went into the kitchen. Andreas heard her open and shut the fridge. She called over to say she would go out and buy a couple of things, was there a store nearby that was still open. Andreas said there was a greengrocer on the corner who stayed open till midnight. She said she’d be back right away. He wanted to give her some money, but by the time he was in the hall, she was already gone. Andreas had never lived together with a woman. It was a strange feeling, having someone moving around in his apartment, and going shopping and cooking for him.

He went back to the sitting room, and stopped in front of the mantel. His eye fell on a little framed photograph there. His father had taken it before Andreas had gone to Paris. It was one of the few things Andreas had wanted to keep when his father died. He picked up the picture and looked at it, and then at himself in the mirror over the mantel. He was startled by how little he had changed. His features had gotten a little harder, but the basic expression was still the same, an expression of friendly indifference.

Andreas studied the inscrutable expression, just as strange to him now as it was at the time it was taken. When pictures were put up in the staff room from a party or a graduation, he often couldn’t recognize himself in them, and when he looked at them he couldn’t remember how he had felt when they were taken. He remembered his father taking that picture. They had gone out into the garden together. His father had got Andreas to stand in the shade under the sumac, and then sheepishly clicked the release a couple of times. It was the hopeless wish to capture his son. Presumably that had occurred to Andreas too, because he had a smile on his lips, half sympathetic, half-mocking. Only much later did it dawn on him how brave and affectionate it had been on the part of his father.

Not many days later, Andreas had left. He still remembered the silent leave-taking from his father. It was a Saturday, and the local train was packed with people going to the next village, or to the city, to go to the cinema or the theater. Andreas felt he stood out, with his big suitcase and his far-off destination. When the train pulled away, his father waved. His lips moved, perhaps to say something. Andreas briefly raised his hand. He was embarrassed. Only later had he understood that he would never be able to go back to the village. A few months later, when he went home for a visit during the vacation, everything felt different. After that, his visits were rarer and rarer, and finally they stopped altogether.

Andreas put the photograph back on the mantelpiece. He had never had many pictures of his family. The few that he had been given lay in a drawer somewhere. He wondered what had possessed him to put this one out — a picture of himself.


It was ten o’clock. Delphine was in the kitchen, chopping vegetables. Andreas watched her. She said he could go and lie down, it would be at least another quarter of an hour till the soup was ready.

“Why are you doing this?”

“Doing what?”

“You could be going to the cinema or meeting friends or what do I know.”

“It’s second nature. If a friend is ill … Anyway, I went to the cinema yesterday.”

“I can make soup for myself,” said Andreas. “Anyway, we’re not friends. We hardly know each other.”

Delphine put down the knife and looked at him in astonishment. She said if he was bothered by her being there, he just had to tell her. Andreas apologized. He said he hadn’t meant it in a bad way.

After supper, he said he would go to bed, the operation had taken more out of him than he had first thought. Delphine carried the dirty dishes out. He heard her washing up, and putting the plates away.

She had her toiletry bag with her, but no nightie. She said she hadn’t been sure what she intended to happen, and so she had struck a sort of deal with herself. Andreas lent her a T-shirt, and she went to the bathroom. He heard her showering, then she came out and lay down next to him on the bed. She leaned across him, kissed him on the mouth and said good night.

“Come here,” he said, “I’m not that sick.”

She said he ought to be careful. She pulled the T-shirt over her head, and scooted over to him. Her body was soft and warm and sluggish. I don’t love her, thought Andreas, I don’t even want her really. Delphine sat on him, and slowly began to move. They were both very calm and quiet. Once, Andreas almost fell asleep, he dropped into a dream for a moment, and then he opened his eyes and saw Delphine, still sitting astride him and moving in a very concentrated way, as if in a slow dance.

“You almost fell asleep,” she said with a smile.

“Don’t stop,” he said.


The next day Delphine went to Versailles to look at a few apartments. In the early afternoon she was back. She was carrying a sports bag with a few clothes.

“Are you planning on moving in?”

“Would you mind?”

“Well, if it’s just for a few days.”

Delphine said he needn’t worry. She was going away on vacation at the end of the month anyway.

“The end of the month!” said Andreas, with mock-horror. “And what do I do then?”

“Come and visit me if you want. I’ve got my own tent. And my parents are nice people.” She grinned and said her parents were about his age.

He said he had intended to go to Brittany to stay with Jean-Marc.

“Don’t worry,” said Delphine, but then she didn’t say anything else.

Andreas was less tired than he’d been the day before. They took the Metro down to the Seine, and walked along the banks. The sun was shining, and there were a lot of people out enjoying themselves, with dogs and bicycles and rollerblades.

“Sometimes I think Paris is one gigantic stage set,” said Andreas.

“Have you ever tried that?” asked Delphine.

“Rollerblading? I’m too old for that. I can remember a time when skates had four wheels, like cars.”

“Did cars even exist back then? Have you got a thing about being old?”

Andreas asked her how old she was.

“When you were born, I was in the middle of puberty,” he said.

“So?”

He didn’t often think about his age, said Andreas. He had never had the feeling of being old; he thought of himself as somehow ageless. Perhaps his cough was getting to him a little bit.

On his fortieth birthday he had had a little party, largely because Jean-Marc and Marthe had forced him to. But he had never understood the fuss about those so-called round-numbered birthdays. The only thing that had bothered him then was that he wasn’t too sure whom to ask. He got on all right with most of his colleagues, but he would never have described them as friends, and he certainly didn’t feel like celebrating his birthday with them. He couldn’t invite Sylvie and Nadia together, and various other ex-girlfriends he was still in touch with weren’t really guest material either. In the end, it was a small gathering, a dinner party, not a party. And Jean-Marc and Marthe needed all their persuasive powers to make Andreas go out dancing with them afterward.

“Do you have a bad feeling about the result?” asked Delphine.

They had sat down on a bench, and watched people strolling by.

“I don’t know,” said Andreas. “I try not to think about it.”

“Then let’s go and do something. Let’s see a movie.”

He didn’t feel like it, he said. He just wanted to sit here a bit and look at the people and enjoy the sunshine, like cats, or like old people. “Did you notice how many old men stand around in the city, on corners or in front of building sites? Always standing around, with frightened-looking expressions on their faces, watching their time go by.”

They walked on. Later they ate in a restaurant near the Tour Montparnasse. Delphine said she had never been up the tower. Did he feel like going up with her? Another time perhaps, said Andreas, he was tired after their walk.

“Did you know there was a rue de Départ here, and a rue d’Arrivée?”

“Of course,” said Delphine, “and in between is the Place Bienvenue.”

“That I didn’t know.”

“And I’ve only been living here for a year,” Delphine said proudly. Three days later, Andreas got a call from his doctor’s office. The assistant said the hospital had sent the results, and asked him to drop by. Andreas asked whether the results were positive. The assistant said that, even if she knew, she wasn’t allowed to tell him. He asked if he might come over right away. In half an hour, she replied. Delphine was off in Versailles again, looking at more apartments. He left her a note, saying he had gone out and would be back soon.

On the way to the doctor’s, he told himself a hundred times that the result, whatever it was, didn’t change his condition, that it was already decided whether he was healthy or sick. Even though he walked slowly, he started to sweat, and felt a little nauseous. He could hardly make it up the stairs.

The assistant told him he would have to be patient a little longer, and asked him to take a seat in the waiting room. He thought she was looking at him rather pityingly. The waiting room was bare. There were chairs along the walls, a table in the middle of the room, with a few tattered magazines on it. A woman was sitting on one of the chairs. She had a child on her lap whose face was half-covered with a purple birthmark. The child was whimpering. The woman spoke to it quietly, and promised it chocolate if it was quiet. Andreas had taken a magazine off the table, a Catholic parents’ magazine. He read an article on the advantages of breast-feeding, but without being able to concentrate on it. The assistant came out and called a name. The woman got up and took her child by the hand. It started to scream, and clung on to the chair with its other hand.

“Always the same fuss,” said the woman, with an apologetic look in Andreas’s direction.

The assistant unclasped the child’s hand, finger by finger, and together the two women dragged the screaming child out onto the corridor. Andreas stared at the wall, which had a faded Chagall poster on it, from an exhibition he had actually been to many years ago. At the time, he had liked those pictures; now he had no use for them anymore. He took a couple of deep breaths, then he got up and left the room.

The assistant was standing with her back to him in the doorway of the surgery. The mother and child were not to be seen, though the shrill screams of the child were clearly audible. Andreas crept to the exit. He left the office and shut the door after him.

He stopped for a moment at the top of the stairs. Then he heard someone coming up the stairs, and he started to panic. He felt as though no one must see him here. He climbed up a flight of stairs and waited until he heard the door open and shut downstairs.

He left the building, and walked briskly down the street. He asked himself how many people knew about his condition. It alarmed him that there was a file with his name on it, and that there were photographs of his insides, and somewhere some tissue samples that had been taken from him. Someone had made a diagnosis and come to certain decisions about him, someone he didn’t even know. He had no choice. The machinery was in motion. We’ll take a tissue sample, the doctor had said. It wasn’t a question, it wasn’t even a command. You didn’t bother issuing commands to a victim, you just got on with it. The doctor who had performed the little operation had shaken hands with him and introduced herself. He couldn’t remember her name. The nurse and the anesthetist didn’t have names, just their functions. They were as anonymous for him as he was to them.

Andreas walked on and on in a straight line. He wasn’t going anywhere, he just wanted to get out of the neighborhood. He was running away from the disease that was his life, his work, his apartment, the people he called friends or lovers. Here on the street no one recognized him, he was just a pedestrian like a thousand others, who passed him or whom he passed. Here he had no past and no future, only a fleeting present. He had to keep walking on, he mustn’t stop, mustn’t linger, then nothing could happen to him.

The sky was overcast, but it was warm. Andreas was sweating. His body felt strange to him, unresponsive. It moved somehow independently of him. Onward, ever onward. He reached the Seine, and followed it west. He saw the Eiffel Tower loom up, and left it behind. He was on the narrow Swan’s Island, approaching the little Statue of Liberty, the model for that other one that the French gave the Americans to celebrate their independence. He had often come here during his early time in Paris. When he was sad and alone. After Fabienne had left for Switzerland, and later, when a woman had finished with him, he had come here, and stood under weeping willows and watched the freighters, and surveyed the ugly office blocks on the south bank. It was one of the few parts of Paris that wasn’t beautiful, one of the few places that didn’t have that silver patina, the patina he adored when he was feeling good, but that he couldn’t stand at times like this.

Andreas imagined how he would tell Delphine about his illness, or Nadia and Sylvie and Jean-Marc. Isn’t it hot today. How was your vacation? Oh, by the way, I’ve got cancer. Everyone would get to hear about it, his colleagues, the school administration, the pupils. Maybe they would have to operate on him and give him radiation treatment. He would have a course of chemotherapy. He pictured himself in the school with no hair or a silly cap. Everyone staring at him, knowing the situation, pitying him. They would presume to discuss him and his “case,” his tragic case. They whispered behind his back. When they talked to him face to face, they would pretend nothing was different. But he would be a patient in everything he said and did.

He lit a cigarette, but it didn’t taste good, and he dropped it disgustedly in the river.

They would start to avoid him. He remembered a colleague from a few years back, a French teacher, who had a brain tumor. He had gone out of the man’s way himself. He hadn’t even turned up for the little drinks party the colleague had given for his leaving. He left some pathetic excuse. When they had a collection a few months later, for flowers, he put in far too much. Now he would be the one to whose health they would drink, whose grave flowers they would collect.

There had to be another way. There was always another way. Perhaps the patch really was just the scarring from some old tuberculosis, or it was a benign tumor. Even if the results were bad, nothing was certain. The lab could have made a mistake. The samples could have gotten mixed up with someone else’s. It was a tiny chance, but there it was. Andreas didn’t want to know. They couldn’t force him to know. As long as he didn’t know anything, nothing could happen to him. He had to get away from here. He had to begin a new life. That, he thought, is my only chance.

His decision spurred him on. It was as though he had got back control over his own life, as though, maybe for the first time since going to Paris, he had his life in his hands again. He would heal himself of his past life, which hadn’t been one. From now on, he would determine things himself. He would make his own decisions, and leave them all, one after another, and, last of all, himself. He called Nadia, but she wasn’t home. Sylvie was in a rush, as always. He asked if she had any time tomorrow. “But tomorrow is Saturday,” she said, “you know, family day.”

“Just very quickly,” said Andreas. “I’ve got something I want to say to you.”

Sylvie laughed. They agreed to meet tomorrow afternoon, somewhere near her apartment. Half an hour, she said, not a second more.

In the apartment, Delphine was waiting for him. She had been worried. She asked what had kept him so long. Andreas was irritated by her question and the way Delphine had taken over and claimed he owed her an explanation. He looked at her in silence.

“What’s the matter?”

“I got my results,” he said. He reflected for a moment, and then he smiled. “Everything’s fine — couldn’t be better.”

“Really?” asked Delphine, as though she couldn’t believe it. Then she flung herself at him. She kissed him on the mouth a couple of times, and said now they had to celebrate. He felt suspicious of her joy, looked for signs of disappointment in her eyes. Most people — and here he didn’t exclude himself — preferred the misfortune of others to ordinary dull day-to-day life. But Delphine seemed to be genuinely happy. She wouldn’t stop hugging him, and rubbing his chest with the flat of her hand, as though giving him some kind of first-aid.

Andreas took her to the Vieux Moulin, a restaurant that was only a short distance from his house, though he didn’t often go there. The food was expensive, and the staff were moody, because the place was usually half-empty. They ate oysters and some main course the waiter recommended, and they shared a bottle of wine.

“I thought you were a vegetarian,” Delphine said.

Andreas replied that he wasn’t a vegetarian, he just didn’t eat meat all that often. But now he felt like it.

“I’m a new man,” he said, and rolled his shoulders. “I’m going to start all over again.”

“And do everything differently,” laughed Delphine.

“And do everything differently,” said Andreas.

“Right. And now we’re going dancing,” said Delphine.

Andreas protested, but it was no use.


It was very loud in the discotheque. They bought drinks at the bar, and watched the dancers for a while. Then Delphine took Andreas by the hand and led him out onto the dance floor. She went on ahead, dodging through the mass of people. She walked on light feet, like a cat, or a model, he thought. Andreas stared at her bottom, then she spun around, pushed his hand aside, and drew him against her. She beamed, kissed him on the mouth, laid her other hand on his shoulder. She seemed to be unaware of the rhythm of the music, until Andreas took over. When that happened, Delphine laughed, a silent laugh that the music drowned out. Her head went right back, and Andreas thought either she’s drunk or she’s happy, it doesn’t matter, comes to the same thing. He too was drunk with the wine and the loud music and the flashing lights. And perhaps he was happy as well, or just excited, he couldn’t tell. He wasn’t sick, for a moment he almost believed it himself. He turned his head this way and that while he danced, he looked at other women, but it was only Delphine he wanted to dance with, who held his face in her hands to make him look at her, and then let him go again. A strobe light cut the movements of the dancers into individual stills, and then the colored lights came back on, and everything gleamed in red, and blue, and red again. Delphine spun around Andreas’s hand, lost the beat, and hugged him clumsily, while the other couples jigged up and down around them.

The music seemed to have gotten quieter, Andreas had the sensation of floating, he was moving in slow motion. He held Delphine, and she gripped him, then he picked up the beat and took Delphine with him. The music was back again, and louder than before. The DJ sang something, and the dancers sang along, no one seemed to have understood the words, they were all just mimicking the sounds, as though they were in a foreign language that was all vowels, meaningless words, a pounding rhythm, a song that imperceptibly segued into another, and then another.

Delphine leaned up to Andreas and shouted in his ear that she wanted to sleep with him, right now.

“Here?” Andreas yelled back. Delphine didn’t understand him, so he yelled “Here?” again.

She punched him playfully on the shoulder, and dragged him off the dance floor.


Andreas didn’t turn the lights on in the apartment. He opened all the windows. There was a light in the yard, and its orange glow suffused everything in the apartment. Delphine had followed Andreas into the bedroom, and he started undressing her. When she was naked, he took off the ring she wore on one finger, and her little earrings as well. She laughed and asked him what he was doing. He didn’t answer. While they made love, he told her to look at him. At first she wouldn’t and turned her head away, but then she did, and it seemed to excite her as it excited him. Her pupils were dilated in the dim light, and her eyes looked as though they were made of glass.

Andreas and Delphine lay side by side, sweating. She had her palm on his thigh, and was stroking it mechanically. She asked him what he was thinking.

“I want you to leave,” he said.

“Leave where?”

“Go home.”

“Now?”

“Yes,” said Andreas. “Don’t be upset, just I’d prefer to be on my own.”

He had thought Delphine would resist. But instead she got up without a word, went in the bathroom and showered. She came back, and got together her clothes and her jewelry in the dark. Andreas felt like making love to her again, and for an instant he regretted having sent her away. He got up and embraced her from behind. She shook him away.

“Can you understand how I might feel used?”

“I might as well say I’ve been used by you.”

She laughed, a cackling sort of laugh, bewildered, not malicious.

“If you want to feel like a victim,” said Andreas, “fine by me. Just go.”

Delphine turned the light on and furiously got dressed. She stuffed her things in the sports bag.

When she was gone, Andreas showered and got dressed. Even though he’d drunk a lot of wine, he felt clear-headed. He felt like a secret agent, carrying out a plan that no one besides him knew. He looked at the clock. It was a little after midnight. He thought of giving Nadia a call, but then he had another idea.


He walked quickly, and was rather out of breath as he stood outside Nadia’s house, twenty minutes later. He rang the bell. It took a long time until he heard her voice on the intercom. She sounded tired.

“Can I come up?” he asked.

“Are you mad? It’s … Do you know what time it is?”

“Half past midnight,” said Andreas. “I wanted to say good-bye.”

“I thought you were already on vacation.”

“I’m not going anywhere. I’m leaving Paris.”

There was a click on the intercom. The lock buzzed.

The front door of the apartment was open. Just coming, called Nadia from the bathroom. Andreas hadn’t often been here. He went into the kitchen. The sink was full of dirty dishes, on the table was an empty wine bottle and a couple of glasses. In the fridge, Andreas found an almost empty bottle of champagne, with a silver spoon in its neck. He looked around for a clean glass. He didn’t find one, and finally just tipped the end of the bottle into a teacup. When he threw the bottle in the trash, he saw some Chinese takeout containers on top. In a little cardboard box that had a few dried scraps of rice in it lay a used condom.

The living room was a mess as well. Books, magazines, and clothes were scattered on the floor. On the sofa was a brimming ashtray that fell on the ground when Andreas sat down. He stood up again, and went into the corridor.

After a while, Nadia came out of the bathroom. She was wearing her nightdress with a loose robe thrown over it. She had put on makeup and done her hair.

“An unexpected visitor,” she said and smiled, a mixture of uncertain and offended. She seemed not yet to have made up her mind how she was going to respond to him.

“I should have called,” said Andreas. “I didn’t know it was someone else’s turn today.”

“I had a visitor. An old girlfriend.”

Andreas said he hadn’t come to check up on her. He didn’t care who she slept with. He had spent the evening with someone else too. Nadia said she wasn’t interested. She said she’d had enough of him. He used her like a prostitute. She didn’t want to see him anymore.

“I came to say good-bye to you,” said Andreas.

Nadia told him not to act so sensitive. It was nothing to do with her, said Andreas, he was leaving Paris. Nadia sighed and said, if he must know, her ex-husband had been around.

“Your horrible ex,” said Andreas. “You’ve been seeing him the whole time, haven’t you?”

That was none of his business, said Nadia. Why shouldn’t she, anyway. They were both free to do as they pleased. She and her husband got along better now than before their separation.

“But who will you go to to complain about him when I’m gone?” asked Andreas. “Oh, you’ll find someone soon enough. Or I can put you onto someone, a friend of mine. Do you want his number?”

“Bastard,” said Nadia icily.

“I’ll miss you,” said Andreas. “I always used to feel so alone when I was with you.”

“You’re always alone, no matter who’s with you,” said Nadia.


The next day Andreas got up early. He had left the windows open all night, and the apartment felt chilly. He had a violent coughing fit. He felt a little ashamed of the way he had behaved with Nadia and Delphine. He was surprised at the malevolence there had been in him. But what was done was done. They would get over it. At least they wouldn’t miss him.

After breakfast, he wrote a letter to the school administration, handing in his notice. He wasn’t sure how long the notice period was, but he didn’t care. If I’m not there anymore, I’m not there, he thought. Then he went to the realtor who had sold him the apartment ten years before. The realtor remembered the apartment, or claimed to. He said Andreas probably stood to get twice what he had paid then, even though it was tricky selling an apartment in the middle of summer. Andreas said the price was not so important, the main thing was getting the apartment off his hands. He was going to Brittany for a few days. The realtor gave him a form to fill out, and promised to do his best. Andreas gave him a key.

At noon, he called Sylvie at home. Her husband picked up. Andreas asked him to tell his wife he couldn’t make this afternoon. In fact, he wouldn’t see her again, ever.

“Who is this?” asked Sylvie’s husband.

“Well, put it this way, I’m not her hairdresser,” said Andreas, and hung up.

In the afternoon, his mobile rang. When he saw Sylvie’s number flash up, he decided not to answer. She left him a message saying, had he taken leave of his senses? He knew he couldn’t call her at home. It had taken her half an hour to calm her husband. And what did he mean, he couldn’t see her again? Her voice sounded equally amused and annoyed. What a great woman, thought Andreas, she won’t have any trouble finding someone for her afternoons.


The journey to Brittany was ghastly. Every last seat was taken on the train. There weren’t any smoking compartments, and only in Rennes did they stop long enough for him to get out and smoke a cigarette. The platform was full of people greedily smoking, listening nervously for loudspeaker announcements, and looking up at the clock.

Andreas arrived in Brest a little before half past nine at night. It was still light. No sooner had he got out than he lit a cigarette. Jean-Marc was waiting for him at the end of the platform. They shook hands.

“Finish your cigarette,” said Jean-Marc. “Are you hungry? We’ve eaten already. We had to put the children to bed.”

Andreas said he had eaten a sandwich on the train. Jean-Marc offered to carry his bag. Andreas declined. He wasn’t that ill, he said.

“Are you ill?”

“Just an irritating cough. It’s nothing really.”

The drive to Lanveoc took an hour. It was a winding road, and Andreas had to concentrate so that he didn’t feel sick.

“Is the sea warm?” he asked.

“Warm enough,” said Jean-Marc. “We’ve been swimming every day we’ve been here. Only Marthe doesn’t go in the water. For her, it has to be twenty-five degrees.”

Andreas thought of Marthe as a typical Parisian. She was interested in culture, read a lot, and went to exhibitions and classical concerts. She was slim and seemed taller than she was. She wore elegant but practical clothes, and had dyed her hair, which she wore in a bob, for as long as he’d known her. He often asked himself what she saw in Jean-Marc. It was hardly possible for two people to be more different. In spite of that, they seemed to get along pretty well. Sometimes Andreas envied them their life, which seemed to be so straightforward. When Jean-Marc talked about the children, clamoring for new running shoes or clothes like the clothes their friends had. When he planned his vacation and dragged back piles of brochures for holiday cottages that all looked the same. Was there money for a new car? Maybe next year. Or they might do it on installments. He comparison shopped for weeks, poring over technical data and prices. Once, Jean-Marc had entered a marathon. The preparations for that took up six months. He managed to finish in the first third, and told everyone about it with such childish pride that no one could be offended. Andreas pictured Jean-Marc and Marthe sitting at home in their living room, calculating, planning their vacation, watching TV. How easily they laughed, as they told each other the most ordinary things. Even when they complained, they did it laughingly, as if it was all a joke.

“How did you two meet?” he asked.

“I was in the same soccer team as her brother. I knew her already when she was a little girl. But it only really started when we met again at his wedding, years later.”

He seemed to want to say something more, but then he didn’t. His good humor had something artificial about it, and even though he was tanned, he seemed tired.

The house was on the edge of the village, on the road in. It had belonged to Jean-Marc’s parents. They had moved into an old people’s home some years ago, and since that time he and his siblings had used the house as a holiday home. Marthe was sitting in the living room, watching a political debate on TV. She greeted Andreas casually, without getting up. She too looked tired. Jean-Marc showed Andreas up to his room.

“Well, you know where everything is,” he said. “Come down whenever you’re ready. I’ve opened a bottle of wine. It’s good stuff.”

Andreas unpacked his bag and washed his face and hands in the bathroom. He tried to be quiet, so that he didn’t wake the children. As he came down the stairs, he heard loud voices from the kitchen. The door was ajar. He knocked and walked in. Jean-Marc was sitting at the table, and Marthe was leaning against the sink. Neither spoke, but they had clearly been arguing.

“Everything all right?” asked Jean-Marc, getting up. He put his arm around Andreas. “I’m glad you’re here.”

He got a glass out of the cupboard, filled it, and handed it to Andreas.

“Shall we sit outside?”

“It’s too cold,” said Marthe.

“Then put something on,” said Jean-Marc irritably. “I’m sure Andreas will want to smoke.”

Marthe walked to the door. As she passed Andreas, she briefly put her hand on his arm, and asked him how long he planned on staying. Andreas said he didn’t know. As long as they could stand to have him.


Marthe and Jean-Marc sat shoulder to shoulder in a rusty love seat. Andreas refilled their glasses. It was very quiet. There was only the croaking of frogs to be heard, and the occasional car that whined past.

“They drive like madmen here,” said Marthe. “Last year someone killed himself, just a couple of hundred yards away.”

“On purpose?”

Jean-Marc shook his head. “No, a drunk,” he said. “It was the middle of the night. He didn’t take the corner and went head-on into a tree. The tree was OK.”

“Jean-Marc’s little brother was here when it happened. Pascal, you’ve met him. He repaints cars.”

“He’s got his own business now,” said Jean-Marc, and pushed off with both feet. The love seat swung back and forth a few times, creaking. Marthe said she was glad Andreas was here. Jean-Marc was out all day with the kids, and she got bored all by herself in the house.

“They’re just like him. Nothing but sports. The idea that they might sit down and read a book …”

“That’s not true.”

“When was the last time you were at an art exhibition? Or the theater?”

Jean-Marc pretended to think about it.

“That was the time with that … what’s her name? The blond,” he said at last.

“A German artist,” said Marthe. “That was six months ago.”

“She paints naked men,” said Jean-Marc. “Of course Marthe thinks it’s wonderful. She pretends she’s interested in art. All she wants to see is cock.”

Marthe rolled her eyes and said, God knew, there had been enough naked women in the history of painting. Why not men for a change. Of course, there was a tremendous fuss over it. But there were just beautiful paintings. Anyway, the woman painted clothed men too. And landscapes. She asked if Andreas knew Robert Mapplethorpe. He nodded.

“You should have seen Jean-Marc at the exhibition,” said Marthe. “He was going crazy.”

“They’re not really that big,” said Jean-Marc. “If you use a wide-angle lens, the foreground always looks bigger. It’s a distortion.”

Marthe laughed maliciously. She said it was a pity she didn’t have a wide-angle lens at her disposal. There was obviously something going on between them. Andreas made some remark about Mapplethorpe’s flower photographs, and Jean-Marc started swinging again. They talked about one of their colleagues, a French teacher, who had got divorced recently.

“Andreas did the right thing,” said Jean-Marc. “He never married.”

“Are you with someone at the moment?”

“You can’t ask him that.”

“Delphine,” said Andreas. “Do you know her? She was a trainee at the school this past year.”

Marthe and Jean-Marc glanced at each other and said nothing. Andreas wondered whether Marthe knew anything about Jean-Marc’s infidelity with Delphine, and whether that was what they’d been quarreling about. In the end, Jean-Marc sat up straight. He looked furiously at Andreas.

“Obviously, she’s sleeping her way round the entire staff room,” he said.

Marthe laughed aloud, and rather artificially. Jean-Marc stood up and went inside. He walked slowly, as though he was very tired.

“More wine?” asked Andreas.

Marthe leaned forward and held out her glass. He poured. He sensed there was something she wanted to say, and he waited for her. She drank.

“Cold,” she said, and she laughed again. She said she and Jean-Marc had a kind of tacit agreement.

“What do you mean?”

“He can do whatever he likes. As long as I don’t get to hear about it. And as long as he doesn’t fall in love.”

“What about you?”

“Same with me, naturally.”

She said that of course the agreement had failed. Jean-Marc had fallen in love with Delphine. He had admitted it to her last night. They hadn’t slept all night, and talked about separating. The fact that Andreas was now going out with Delphine of course changed everything. She stopped to think.

“Or then again, maybe not,” she said.

They drank their wine in silence. After a time, Marthe said she sometimes dreamed of going to bed with another man.

“We’ve been married for fifteen years. We’re old hands. But sometimes you find yourself longing for another pair of eyes, a different hand on your neck.”

She spoke very softly. Andreas had sat down next to her on the swing. He put his arm around her. She drew up her knees, and leaned against him. She said again she was glad he was there. Andreas began to stroke Marthe’s hair. She didn’t seem to object, and he caressed her ear, her cheek, her neck. When he began to nuzzle her neck, she stood up, and looked at him with amusement.

“Come on, you’ve already taken Delphine away from him,” she said.

“I’m not thinking about Jean-Marc,” said Andreas. He didn’t like the way his voice sounded. He felt like a caricature of a seducer. He was a little shocked himself, that he was prepared to give up a male friendship that had lasted many years, in order to sleep with the man’s wife. But that was the way of it.

Marthe ran her hand through his hair as one might do to a little boy, and said she had enough trouble as it was. He got up and followed her into the house. Jean-Marc was sitting in the kitchen. He had his elbows on the table, and was staring into space. He looked like Andreas’s idea of a Breton farmer. Marthe and Andreas passed him in silence, and walked upstairs.

“Good night,” said Marthe, and kissed Andreas on the mouth.

He took her around the waist again, but she shook him off.

“No,” she said. “Maybe another time. When everything’s over.”

“You’ll get through it OK,” said Andreas.

“I don’t think so,” said Marthe.


When Andreas came down in the morning, Jean-Marc wasn’t up yet. The children were at the beach, Marthe said. Did he want coffee?

“He won’t be up for ages,” she said, and gestured at a couple of wine bottles by the bin. She poured Andreas’s coffee, and sat down at the table, facing him.

“About yesterday,” she said. She seemed to wait for him to say something. He didn’t.

“I’m sorry about what happened,” she finally said, and got up. “I’m not sure I want more than what my imagination can provide.”

“Don’t apologize,” said Andreas. “After all, it’s not as though anything happened.”

“I have an idea of a marriage,” Marthe said. “The way a marriage ought to be. This sort of thing doesn’t fit it. It might sound a bit stupid, but there’s something unaesthetic about it. I don’t want to play the part of the unfaithful wife. I can’t.”

Marthe stood in the window against the light. Andreas couldn’t make out her face very well. She said she had often deceived Jean-Marc in her imagination, and once, it had almost happened. It was when her younger son had started school.

“That’s years ago.”

She raised her hands and let them sink again. She had suddenly found herself with a lot of time, and not known what to do with it. She had gone into Paris and bought clothes and shoes and kitchenware that she didn’t need. She had seen all those young people, and she had suddenly had the feeling that life had passed her by.

“You know, the old story. Married young, and had children right away. Jean-Marc was my first proper relationship.”

A couple of times, Marthe had gone to Enghien, one or two Metro stops from Deuil. She wandered around the little lake, had a drink in the casino restaurant, watched the people, and was happy when men turned around to look at her. There she had run into Philippe, the French teacher who had later died of a brain tumor. He told her he went to Enghien every week to play blackjack in the casino.

“I was fascinated. Everyone thought he was going to the library in Paris, to research some book or something, and all the time he was going to the casino. He didn’t look anything like a gambler.”

Philippe had taken Marthe along to the casino, and explained everything to her. The gambling didn’t interest her, but she was fascinated by the atmosphere.

Marthe sat down again, and took a sip from Andreas’s coffee.

“Have you ever been to a casino?” she asked. He shook his head.

“The people are completely single-minded. You get the feeling they don’t even see each other. If they walk into you, they don’t say excuse me. Once, there was an argument about some winnings. Two people both claimed the money as theirs. It wasn’t a big sum, but it was as though it was life and death.”

Philippe played for small sums. He said he gambled for fun, never winning much, never losing much either. When he was with Marthe, he bet more than he usually did, maybe to impress her. Once, he got lucky, in half an hour he won two thousand francs. They went to the bar and drank champagne.

“Then he suggested we go to a hotel room. I was shocked and ran away.”

Philippe started to write her letters. At first, she never answered. Eventually, she got so mad that she wrote to him to stop it. After that they wrote each other regularly. The letters became more and more intimate, they told each other everything about their relationships and their fantasies.

“I wrote him things I’ve never talked about. Not with anyone. That I had never even given a thought to. It happened while I was writing. We got each other going, stimulated each other.”

They met in Enghien a couple of times, but Philippe didn’t try to seduce Marthe again. They walked around the lake, not speaking, not touching. They looked at each other, one walked behind the other, or they moved apart and observed each other from a distance. Sometimes they went to the casino and played at the same table, pretending they didn’t know each other. Or they went into a bookshop, and followed each other among the shelves, or squeezed past each other, so that their bodies touched fleetingly. When Marthe went to catch her train, Philippe stood on the other platform. She waited for a signal from him, but he just stood there, looking at her. A few days later, he sent her a letter describing how he slept with her, long, obscene descriptions that were completely unerotic, and therefore excited her.

“It was weird. I didn’t know I could do that,” said Marthe, laughing. “It was like a game.”

Then Philippe’s wife stumbled upon Marthe’s letters. She sent copies to Jean-Marc, and there was a huge fuss, even though Marthe and Philippe had never slept together. Perhaps it would have been easier for Philippe’s wife to deal with if we had, said Marthe.

“If we had slept together. She could have laid into me, and the whole thing would have been dealt with. But she must have noticed that we shared something that she would never have.”

“Passion?”

Marthe shrugged her shoulders.

“A secret. What do I know.”

They had talked once more on the phone. Philippe had been in tears. He was suffering like a dog. Sometimes, later, she thought that was why he had gotten sick. Of course that was nonsense.

“Did you love him?” asked Andreas.

“I don’t know,” said Marthe, “all I know is that I was ready to leave all of this behind, Jean-Marc, the children, all of it. I don’t know if that’s love.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“He didn’t want to. He said he would never forgive himself for destroying my family. He never had any children himself. Do you know his wife?”

Andreas nodded. “Did you ever see him again?”

“From a distance. I didn’t go to the funeral.”

Andreas suddenly felt jealous of Philippe. He couldn’t explain it. He liked Marthe all right, but he wasn’t in love with her. Perhaps he didn’t envy Philippe because of Marthe exactly, so much as because of her love for him. He had always been careful not to be loved too much himself, with every step that a woman had taken toward him, he would take a step away. He hadn’t been able to take the turbulence, the dependency.

“I was never for marriage,” he said. “You can’t own another person.”

“This wasn’t about possession,” said Marthe. “It was more like an addiction, having to be near him.”

She said she never wanted to go through something like that again.

“Do you think that was Jean-Marc’s revenge? Sleeping with Delphine?”

Marthe shook her head. Those kind of things had happened before. She had noticed it, each time. Anyway, he wasn’t like that. He wasn’t that subtle. He had probably really fallen in love. Now he was going to have to go through what she had been through. She felt sorry for him, really.

“Are you not afraid he might leave you?” Marthe didn’t reply. She stood up and said she was going to the beach to check up on the kids. Did Andreas fancy coming with her?


The sun was shining, but there was a cool wind off the sea. The children ran squealing into the water, and were thrown back by the waves. Andreas and Marthe sat down on a big rock to watch them. Andreas felt like going for a swim, even though he was shivering in his clothes. He got up and went down to the water. Marthe followed him. They took their shoes off, and let the water wash over their toes.

“You’re very quiet,” said Marthe.

“I don’t know how the children can stand it,” said Andreas. “The water’s ice cold.”

He thought about telling Marthe about his illness, but then he didn’t. He mustn’t talk about it. Not to anyone. That was his only chance.

Marthe started talking about Philippe again. She said she thought about him every day. It might sound strange, but she felt closer to him now than when they had to break up.

“Now he doesn’t belong to anyone anymore. He’s free.”

“Who was it who said he always wished his lovers were dead?”

“What a terrible sentence,” said Marthe. “Great beach conversation.”

She called the children. They came out of the water, and ran over to pick up their things. They dried off, and put their clothes on.

When they were smaller, Andreas had sometimes looked after them. He had taken them to the cinema, and watched kids’ films with them and enjoyed himself almost as much as they had. He had bought them ice cream and gone to the park with them, where they had run around and played. They had laughed and screamed they were having so much fun. Then, from one moment to the next, they had clammed up and said they wanted to go home. It was as though they were suddenly afraid of him. On the way home, they almost hadn’t let him take them by the hand, and when they got home, they had flung themselves at Marthe and buried their heads in her skirts, and Marthe had apologized and said she didn’t know what had got into them. What’s the matter with you, she had asked, but the children had stood there sullenly and not said anything. Andreas hadn’t minded. Perhaps he understood them better than Marthe, or Jean-Marc, who told them to snap out of it.

The older the children got, the more they learned to mask their feelings, to conceal their love, and their dislike and their fear. Now they greeted Andreas amiably when they saw him. They weren’t afraid of him anymore, but they had lost their trustingness. They told him about school and tried out their little bit of German on him. How do you do? And Andreas corrected them: How are you? I’m fine. Yes, I’m fine.

Michel, the younger, asked Andreas if he had seen the ships in Brest. Marthe said the big harbor festival was happening again.

“Weren’t you here four years ago?”

Andreas nodded, and Michel talked enthusiastically about the Sedov, a Russian training ship that they had visited a few days ago.

“It’s the biggest sailing ship in the world, a hundred and twenty meters long.”

“Michel wants to be a sailor now,” Marthe laughed.

“Yes, but only on a sailing ship,” said the boy.

“The ship comes from Murmansk. Do you know where that is? It’s way up in the north. And then it’s always at sea. There’s no mama there to look after you.”

When they returned to the house, they found Jean-Marc sitting at the kitchen table, reading the sports section of the paper. He had a headache, he said. Marthe said he had only himself to blame for that. The children disappeared upstairs. They must have felt the atmosphere was wrong. Marthe stood behind Jean-Marc, and laid her hands on his shoulders. He turned his head around and looked up at her with a doggish expression. The scene was pathetic and moving at the same time, a couple of drowning people clutching onto one another. Andreas said he would take the train at quarter to four. Marthe said why didn’t he stay a couple of days. He shook his head, and she said she would give him a ride to the station.

“I’ll do it,” said Jean-Marc.


The way back seemed to Andreas to take longer than the way there, even though Jean-Marc drove fast. The winding road followed the bay inland, and then crossed the river and doubled back along the coast. Jean-Marc didn’t speak for the entire drive, and Andreas closed his eyes, and dozed off. They got to Brest fully an hour before the train was due to leave.

“Do you want to stop for a drink?” Andreas asked, out of politeness.

They went to a café next to the station. Some of the tables were occupied by sailors in dark blue uniforms.

“They must be from the Sedov,” said Jean-Marc. “That’s a Russian training ship. They’re here for the big harbor celebrations.”

“Michel was talking about it,” said Andreas.

They stood at the bar, drinking coffee. Jean-Marc appeared to want to say something. It took him a couple of run-ups before he could ask his question.

“Are you really together with her?”

“It’s nothing serious,” said Andreas.

He looked at Jean-Marc, but he had lowered his eyes, and seemed to be looking for words again. Finally he said he didn’t hold it against Andreas. He wasn’t to know …

“Know what?” asked Andreas.

“I don’t know what to do,” said Jean-Marc. “I can’t get over her. And I don’t even know what she thinks about me. Did you talk about me?”

“No,” lied Andreas.

“What was she like?”

Andreas said he didn’t know what Jean-Marc meant.

“What she was like in bed.”

Andreas said Delphine had moved in with him for a couple of days. He felt sorry for Jean-Marc. The way he was suffering, and didn’t even try to conceal it. There was something humiliating about a man of his age not having more self-control.

“I’m crazy about her,” said Jean-Marc. “Do you really think she’ll sleep with anyone?”

“That’s rubbish,” said Andreas. “She said you showed her pictures of your kids.”

“Oh, so you did talk about me. What did she say?”

“She said you were a moron.”

Jean-Marc’s head jerked up. He looked questioningly at Andreas, then he lowered his head, and said he’d better go. His voice sounded washed out, almost inaudible. See you soon, said Andreas. Jean-Marc raised his hand in greeting, and walked out. Andreas watched him cross the road, get in his car, and sit there for a moment, quite still, before driving off. Andreas asked himself how he had struck up this friendship with Jean-Marc, why he had spent so much time with him, when he was someone to whom he felt totally indifferent. He was back in Paris by eight o’clock. He didn’t feel well, and he took a taxi from the station. There were a couple of messages on the answering machine. The first was from Nadia. She said she forgave him, and then she went straight into a new round of reproaches. He wiped the message before he’d got to the end. The second was from the doctor’s office. A woman’s voice asked him to call back. It was a completely unemotional voice. Andreas deleted the second message as well.

He started tidying up his things. First, he stashed everything in cardboard boxes that he brought up from the basement. Then he started throwing away more and more. He had taken the books off the shelves and sorted them into two piles. He looked through them a second time, and pulled out a Jack London book and the book about the au pair girl. All the others went in the junk. He carried the full trash bags out into the corridor. It was eleven o’clock. He felt exhausted. He lay down on the bed without undressing or turning off the light.

In the middle of the night he was awakened by a fit of coughing. He got up to go to the bathroom. He felt cold. He turned on the central heating, slid under the blankets with his clothes on, and turned off the light. The stand-by lights glowed in the dark. One day, when there are no more people left in the world, he thought, there will still be stand-by lights glowing, and the clocks on electronic devices will continue to tell the time that no longer exists, until the last power plants have switched off and the last batteries are dry.

In the morning, he woke up late. It was hot in the bedroom, and the air felt dry. He had another fit of coughing that seemed to go on for ever. After he’d drunk his coffee, he felt a little better. He went back to tidying. The things he’d stowed in cardboard boxes the night before he now threw away.

At noon, he carted all the garbage bags down to the yard. He went to McDonald’s and bought something to eat. When he came back, there was a message on the answering machine. It was the realtor, to say he had found some potential buyers for the apartment, and that he would be there in fifteen minutes to show them around. No sooner had Andreas heard the end of the message than the bell rang, and the key turned in the lock.

He had thought Andreas was on vacation, the realtor said. Andreas said he had come home earlier than he’d expected. He was just clearing up in the apartment. They should have a look around, by all means. The realtor introduced him to the potential buyers, who were a couple from Perpignan by the name of Cordelier. The woman was pregnant, and looked rather teary. The man had black hair, a tanned face, and a brutal expression. He said he worked for a wholesale florist, and had been moved to Paris to give things there a bit of a shaking-up.

“He’s been promoted to assistant director,” said the woman, visibly proud of her husband.

Andreas stayed in the kitchen while the realtor showed the couple around the apartment. He heard little exclamations of delight. Finally the three of them arrived in the kitchen.

“It’s such a bijou apartment,” said the woman.

“A bit on the small side,” said the man.

The realtor said they wouldn’t find anything bigger for that money, not in that neighborhood.

“Prices have risen steeply these past years,” he said, “and they’re continuing to climb. The apartment is a great investment.”

Andreas was surprised that they didn’t ask him why he was moving. The woman asked about playgrounds, kindergartens, and schools in the vicinity. Andreas said he didn’t have kids. There were a couple of little parks nearby, said the realtor, and the cemetery of Montmartre was just around the corner. Of course, it was nothing like Perpignan.

“Your first?” he asked.

The woman nodded eagerly, and said they’d been married just a year. She leaned against her husband, and he wrapped his arms around her neck and kissed her on the cheek. It looked as though he was strangling her.

“I love the furniture,” said the woman, “it’s very stylish. Don’t you think, Hervé?”

“We’ve been staying with my wife’s parents up until now,” the man said.

“They have an enormous house,” she said, “and a big garden with old trees.”

Andreas said he didn’t need the furniture anymore. If they wanted any of it, that was something they could talk about. Suddenly, the woman’s expression turned sad. The man put his hand on her belly, and said everything would be fine.

“It’s all so new to me,” she said, “the baby and the city, and all the things we need to get.”

“Just take a look around,” said the realtor. “I’ll leave you alone, so you can discuss it together in peace.”

The couple took another turn around the apartment. The realtor nodded at Andreas and made the thumbs-up sign. Then he rubbed the fingers of his right hand together.

“The fellow’s a bit dim,” he said quietly. “The company he works for belongs to her parents. That’s where the money’s coming from.”

Andreas offered him coffee, but the realtor declined. He put his hand on his stomach, and asked if he could have a glass of water. They waited in silence. After a while, Andreas stepped out into the corridor and looked in at the living room. The couple were standing by the window, kissing. The man had dropped to his knees, he had pushed up the woman’s skirts, and was stroking the inside of her thigh. Andreas crept back to the kitchen. The realtor looked at him questioningly, and Andreas made a face.

“It really is a lovely apartment,” said the woman, coming back into the kitchen. The man was still in the corridor, and seemed to be studying the fuse box.

“Well then, shall we?” said the realtor. He said they had another apartment to see. He shook Andreas’s hand. “You’ll hear from me.”


The hamburger was stone cold and tasted disgusting, but Andreas ate it anyway. Then he went and lay down. He lay on the sofa, and imagined the Cordeliers moving into his apartment. He stood in the yard, looking up at the lit windows behind which the family was living. The kid went up to the window, and pulled the curtain aside, and looked out. He was a little boy of about five. While Andreas watched him, he seemed to grow and get older. His mother came up behind him, pushed him away from the window, and drew the curtain shut. Her face looked worn and tired. Then Monsieur Cordelier — Hervé—came down into the yard. He was carrying two bags full of empty bottles. He dropped the bottles in one of the green recycling containers. He said something to himself, and laughed out loud. His laugh sounded rather unpleasant. Then the boy was playing ball in the yard. Someone opened a window and told him to clear out. The boy walked through the yard. He tried not to step on the cracks between the paving slabs. He skipped from stone to stone. His mother called down to him to run and play with the others. The yard opened out, and a wide landscape appeared. Andreas was on his bicycle. The road was as straight as a die. He was heading into the wind, and seemed not to be moving at all, but when he turned around, the wind was still in his face. He got off, and pushed the bicycle across the flat plain. He felt he wasn’t moving. In the sky, dark clouds slid by, but he knew it wouldn’t rain, not yet. Then it did rain. Andreas was in his room in the attic. The rain was pelting on the skylight. It was cool in the room. Andreas lay down on the bed. He was reading a book, but the words blurred before his eyes. He was on a desert island with a couple of other children. He didn’t know how they had gotten there. They were on the beach. When it got dark, they went into the forest, which was a tropical forest. They came to a crumbling tenement house, a bombed-out ruin. The children stood in front of the house and debated what to do. Andreas seemed to know the other children. They were older than him.

The telephone woke him. He looked at his watch, it was five. He hesitated for a moment, and then picked up. It was the realtor. He said things were looking good. The Cordeliers were very interested. The woman had tried to get him to lower the price, but he hadn’t budged. Her parents were coming up from Perpignan at the weekend, to look at the apartment. Would he be there? Andreas said he didn’t know.

“I know these kind of people,” said the realtor. “If they like the place, they’ll move fast.”

Andreas emptied out the cupboard in the landing. He was surprised he had so many things he had completely forgotten about. Whole boxes full of notes, letters, records. He leafed through them, stopped to read the occasional page, and then threw everything away without hesitating. A couple of cassettes he had recorded years ago, carefully writing down the tracks, he kept for a long drive sometime.

He found a box full of letters and postcards from friends, and from his mother. Letters she had written to him during his time doing national service, in which she talked about ordinary day-to-day things, illnesses, excursions, visits. The last traces of a life that was snuffed out. Traces that weren’t traces, just words without any weight. At the bottom of the box were some letters from Fabienne. He must have collected them together some time, wrapped them in packing paper, and sealed the parcel. He broke the seal and read a couple of the letters. Their banality astonished him.

Fabienne wrote to say she had a paper to write about The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, and had he ever read it? She had been out to a restaurant with some friends where people ate with their bare hands, like the ancient Gauls. She had met three Americans who had wanted to take her picture. Why had she written him that? One October, she had gone to Normandy with friends and gone swimming, even though the water was cold. Another time, she had eaten oysters and gotten sick. Andreas was surprised at the many friends and girlfriends she mentioned. With one letter was a photograph showing Fabienne in the middle of a group of young people. They were wearing colored paper hats and laughing drunkenly at the camera. On the back of the photograph she had written: “Best wishes for the New Year.” Best wishes for a new year that was long gone, and that Andreas couldn’t even recall. He wrapped up Fabienne’s letters in the packing paper, and put the parcel on the table. He threw away the other letters. In another carton he found a pile of his old appointment diaries, little books that left about a line of space for each day. He had never kept a diary as such, the thought of keeping a record of his life always seemed to him absurd. It was only these calendars he had kept, where the years were summed up in very few words, the names of people he had met, vacation places, dates of exams and doctors’ appointments. In his first years in the city he had written down the titles of all the films he had seen, the restaurants he had eaten in. With time, he had gotten more and more casual and remiss. He always went to the same restaurants anyway, and the films he went to see weren’t important. His meetings with Nadia and Sylvie were so regular that he didn’t need to write down dates and times. Over the last few years, there were more and more months where the calendar had remained blank, where it contained no traces. Slipped into one of them was a list of all the women he had slept with. He read the names. In some cases he couldn’t even put a face to the name, or only after long thought. The list was a couple of years old. He added a few more names, then crumpled up the sheet and threw it away.

One list among many, he thought. His life was an endless sequence of lessons, of cigarettes, meals, cinema visits, meetings with women or friends who basically didn’t mean anything to him, incoherent lists of little events. Sometimes he had given up trying to get the whole thing to make sense, trying to look for sense on it. The less the events in his life had to do with one another, the more interchangeable they had become. Sometimes he appeared to himself like a tourist, racing from one sight to the next in a city he doesn’t even know the name of. Loads of beginnings that had nothing to do with the end, with his death, which in turn would mean nothing beyond the fact that he had run out of time.


At the weekend, Mme Cordelier’s parents came and looked at the apartment. They liked it, and that same day drew up a purchase agreement. The Cordeliers wanted to have the walls painted, and the floors sanded. They didn’t want to keep any of the furniture.

The realtor said they wouldn’t sign the final contract for another six weeks at the earliest. Andreas said he would be moving out in a couple of days, and going abroad. The realtor said he could give someone power of attorney to represent him in front of the notary. The money would be transferred to his account after the sale.

On Monday, the furniture dealer came and picked up the furniture. He was about to pick up the statue of the Huntress when Andreas said he’d prefer to keep it. The junk dealer said it was valueless. He offered Andreas a sum for the furniture that was far too low. Andreas argued with him for the sake of it, and managed to get a little more money out of him.

Everything he owned now fitted into a suitcase, the same red artificial leather suitcase he had arrived with in the city eighteen years ago: a few clothes, toiletries, a sleeping bag, Fabienne’s letters, the cassettes, and the two books he had decided to hold on to. He wasn’t even taking his address book. He felt light, free of all his ballast. It was as though he had been asleep all those years, grown numb like a limb that hadn’t moved for ages. Now he felt that same pleasant pain that you feel when the blood shoots back into an arm or a leg. He was still alive, he could move.

That night was Andreas’s last in the apartment. He spread the sleeping bag out on the floor as on the first nights he had spent there, and, just as then, the apartment felt strange to him and a little frightening. He slept badly. When he woke up, it was just getting light. His footfall echoed in the empty rooms, and his cough sounded quite threatening. Andreas went up to the window and threw it open. It had rained a little overnight, and the cement slabs in the yard all glistened darkly. He lit a cigarette and smoked it without enjoyment. He watched a blackbird whistling and skipping from branch to branch. When he shut the window, he frightened it and it flew off. He had meant to stay a little longer to take his leave of the place that he would never see again, but suddenly it no longer interested him. It wasn’t possible to say good-bye to anything or anyone, he thought. The last look was just like the first, and memory was no more than one of many possibilities.

He wrapped the statuette in one of the curtains he had taken down from the windows. Then, without a last look back, he left the apartment. In the mailbox he found a couple of flyers and a letter, which he pocketed without looking for the sender’s name. He thought he should have gotten in touch with the post office before leaving, but then he had no forwarding address, and didn’t know where he was going. Presumably his mail would be returned to sender, with a little stamp, Addressee Unknown.

He dropped the key in the mailbox, as he’d agreed with the realtor. When the front door shut behind him, he stopped for a moment, uncertain which way to go. In the end he went the way he had gone almost every day for the last few years. He walked down the street to the Boulevard de Clichy. At the bank, he withdrew all the money he had in his account. Then he walked on, straight on, to the Boulevard de Magenta, and from there to the Gare du Nord. When he reached the hospital, he walked a little faster, as though afraid someone might recognize him and stop him. Behind the station, he was approached by a woman of about his own age.

“Excuse me,” she said, as their eyes met.

Andreas raised his hand to ward her off. Though the woman didn’t look poor, he was certain she would ask him for money. He wanted to say something, but his voice failed him. Only his mouth moved. The woman mouthed something back to him, and they each went on their own way. Maybe she just wanted to ask me the time, he thought, or directions to somewhere. He turned around. The woman was nowhere in sight.

He took the train to Deuil. He was later than usual, the rush hour was over, but the train was full just the same, and he had to stand in the corridor with his suitcase and his wrapped statue. In Deuil, he didn’t walk to school, but took the other direction.


The used car dealer would have preferred to sell Andreas a different car than the old 2CV. He said he had higher performance models on offer, for only a slightly higher price.

“It’s a collector’s item,” he said, “what you’re paying for is the name. Let me show you something a bit sportier.”

“I am a collector,” said Andreas. He said he would pay cash. He took a wad of banknotes from his pocket, and counted out the money in front of the astonished seller.

“Can I take it right away?”

The salesman said he had to get registration papers issued for it first. That would take at least five days. Andreas asked if there was a hotel anywhere nearby. The salesman didn’t know of any hotels here. There were the spa hotels in Enghien, but they were expensive. If he didn’t want to go back into the city, there were plenty of cheap places to stay on the Périphérique.

Andreas took a taxi to the Porte de la Chapelle. Right on the motorway, he found a cheap Etap hotel, and took a room. He said he wasn’t sure how long he’d be staying, and paid for one night.

It wasn’t midday yet, and he had to wait until his room was ready. He sat in the lobby. Along a wall were machines for drinks and candy, and one that sold maps, dictionaries, toothbrushes, and condoms. Everything a man could wish for, thought Andreas. A couple of young blacks stood around in front of the machines, talking loudly. Not hotel guests, he thought.

Andreas watched a couple with their son, standing at the reception desk, talking to the clerk. The father was not much older than he was, but he looked tired and unhealthy. He was wearing jeans and an old-fashioned knitted sweater, over a little beer belly. The son, who was as old as Andreas’s pupils, was almost as tall as his father. He was thin and pale and had a spotty face. The mother had short, bleached hair. Andreas was sure they were German. The man looked lost and uncertain, and the woman ill-tempered. The porter was talking to them a little exasperatedly.

Andreas went up to the reception desk, and asked, in German, if he could help. The man looked at him in surprise, and then explained that he had thought the car park was included in the price for the room. Andreas translated. The porter said the price for the underground garage was separate. It wasn’t a very great amount, but the father seemed not to have been expecting the extra expense. The family didn’t look well-off, presumably they were on a budget, and maybe had spent more money than they had.

The woman said once or twice they didn’t have to stand for it. She looked disapprovingly at her husband, as though he was to blame for the mix-up. For a brief moment, Andreas thought of paying for it himself, but he knew it wouldn’t help in the end.


The room was small, and you could tell that all possible economies had been made on it. There was a toilet, but no bath. The door to the shower was glass, and opened directly into the room, the washbasin was mounted on the wall just next to it. Tucked behind the head of the double bed was a narrow foldaway cot for a third person. Andreas imagined the German family spending the night in a room like this, the parents in the bed, the boy above them in the cot. He imagined them showering in the morning, the nakedness and the lack of space, the boy’s embarrassment as he treated his face with an acne preparation without being able to lock the bathroom door, the way he did at home. He imagined them traipsing through Paris, looking for the beauty of the city, and he asked himself whether they had found it. Their feet were hurting, they stopped for lunch in a restaurant with a German menu, where the waiter cheated them. Then there was an argument, because the parents wanted to go to a museum, and the boy didn’t. And then, when they asked him what he wanted to do, he couldn’t say anything.

Andreas was glad he had missed all that. He was glad he had never had a family. It was as near as he wanted to get, the times when his pupils went up to him at the end of class, and told him of their problems, and when he called the parents, and tried to mediate. Once or twice a pupil had even slept on his sofa, when home had become completely impossible.

He stood by the window and looked out at the many lanes of the highway. You couldn’t open the windows. They were soundproofed; only rarely you could hear the stifled sound of a car horn or an especially loud gear-change.

Andreas had been in his room since midday. He spent hours watching the traffic, sometimes the cars drove very close together, sometimes a little less, and then toward evening they solidified in columns, and now they were just starting to crawl forward again. The drivers had switched on their headlights. Night fell. They will drive like this forever, he thought, the traffic will never get any less. He thought about his death, or tried to think about it. But his life had been so uneventful that he couldn’t imagine his death. He could only see himself lying in some hospital somewhere. And then the road again, the numberless cars. God Almighty has counted them up, to be sure that none is missing. The stars, the grains of sand, the sheep in His herd. Even when he was a child, Andreas hadn’t believed in that.

Fear, fear wasn’t a thought. Fear seemed to come from outside. When Andreas thought of being sick he didn’t feel fear. He was desperate, confused, he struggled with himself, he reproached himself. Whereas fear came suddenly, without warning. It was like a darkening of his thoughts. Fear made it impossible to breathe, crushed his body until he felt ready to explode and break apart into a fine spray consisting of billions and billions of tiny droplets, spinning into the void. In the morning, the whole hotel stank of disinfectant. For breakfast there was coffee in plastic cups, the bread was soggy, and the orange juice watered.

Andreas left the hotel. The sky was gray, but it wasn’t cold. He strolled through the neighborhood. Not since he had first come to Paris, had he ever been out here. He had driven through St. Denis every day, but only ever seen the huge residential blocks from the train window, and in between them streets with dinky single-family homes in postage-stamp gardens, and further out, near the Stade de France, the new commercial district that had sprung up over the last few years.

Not far from the hotel was a cemetery, behind a high wall. Next to it was a funeral parlor, with a display of various sample gravestones in different shades of marble. In the window was a poster for their summer sale item, which was a stone in pale granite, and a stele with your own choice of top, all at a very low price. Andreas entered the cemetery. A man in a tracksuit came out of the toilet right beside the entrance, and walked past him. Andreas felt reminded of a joke he had once heard. It was something to do with death and tracksuits. He couldn’t remember how it went. A plane crash, maybe? He walked slowly between the rows of graves. There were some in which whole families were buried together. The lists of names were like family sagas, the names of the oldest were barely decipherable, and the newest had a brassy gleam. He stopped in front of one particularly ugly grave with heavy iron chains and a roof copied from some Greek temple. He read the names and dates. Between the Fifties and the Eighties no one in the family seemed to have died, but then in the space of a few years, there had been five deaths. There was a withered bunch of flowers on the grave, so there had to be descendants, people who remembered the dead. There was room on the slab for another one or two names anyway.

Andreas left the cemetery, and walked on through the quartier. He was astonished how clean and tidy everything looked. He read the names by the doorbells, foreign-sounding names, he couldn’t tell where they came from. Some sounded Arabic, others Eastern European or Asian. There was almost no one on the streets. There were no shops, only a community center with public baths and showers. In the windows of a kindergarten hung some colored drawings, a dozen terrifying android beings all with extra-large heads, that looked exactly the same.

At noon Andreas was back in the hotel. He paid the room for another night. He had bought a few magazines, and spent the afternoon lying on his bed, reading articles about the most scenic golf courses in the world, and about plastic surgery, and about film festivals. In a women’s magazine he found a list of a hundred tips for good sex. Try to look attractive at all times, comb your hair and freshen your lipstick. Small gifts spread happiness. Complimenting your partner’s physique will intensify your pleasure and his.

He fell asleep. When he awoke, it was nighttime. He felt restless, he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep anymore. He left the hotel, and prowled through the neighborhood. After a while, he got to the new business centers that he had been able to see every day from the train. A few of them were only just completed, and not yet occupied. The glass facades had a blackish sheen in the light of the streetlamps. There were security cameras everywhere, but not a soul around.

On the way back, he passed the cemetery again, which was closed now. He wondered who would visit his grave, who would think of him when he was dead. Walter and Bettina, maybe. And apart from them? From time to time someone would read the inscription on his stone, and calculate the age at which he had died, and think he didn’t get to grow very old. And in twenty years’ time, Walter or one of his children would sign a form, and Andreas’s grave would be cleared, and there would be no more trace of him.


Andreas stayed at the hotel for a week. Every morning after breakfast, he paid for another night, and then he headed straight back upstairs. When the chambermaid came to do his room, he would wait out in the hall until she was finished. He slept a lot, and tried to read, and spent whole afternoons motionless on his bed, lost in vague drifts of thought. Sometimes he felt so weak, he was barely able to get up and put his clothes on, and at others he paced through the neighborhood, as though he might be able to escape his illness that way. Once or twice he thought of calling the doctor’s office because he could no longer stand the uncertainty, but then he put off the call until office hours were safely over.

On the day he was able to collect his car, he felt better. He got up early, showered, and packed his things. Then he called Delphine and asked if he could see her. She asked him where he was. She sounded sleepy. He said he could be with her in an hour. On the bus to Deuil he wrote a text message to Sylvie. She had sent him a message the day before, and asked him in her telegraphic style how he was feeling and what he was up to. He hadn’t replied. Now he wrote to say he was doing fine, and he wished her a nice summer. No sooner had he sent it off, than he got her reply. Sylvie wished him happy holidays and sent him a hug.

At half past nine, Andreas was standing outside Delphine’s house. It took a while from when he’d rung the bell to the buzz of the door opener. In the courtyard, Andreas looked up, but he couldn’t remember which window was Delphine’s. Slowly he climbed the stairs. When he was on the third floor, he could hear a door opening above him. Delphine stood there on the landing. She was in her nightie, but that didn’t seem to bother her.

“What do you want?” she asked. She looked serious, but not hostile.

“You left your toothbrush behind.”

“Don’t play games with me.”

“I’m sorry,” said Andreas, “about what I said.”

“And that means everything’s all right?”

Delphine looked at his suitcase. She smiled, and asked him if he was intending to move in with her. Andreas said he had to talk to her. Delphine let him in, and led the way into the kitchen. He sat down, she remained standing. She stood very close to him. He put out his hands and grabbed her around the waist. Through the thin material he could feel the warmth of her body. She took a step away from him, and said she was going to have a quick shower and get dressed. While she was gone, Andreas poured himself a glass of water, and drank it in quick gulps.

“To see you sitting there like a poor sinner,” said Delphine, returning. She was wearing the same dress she had worn at their last meeting.

“Weren’t you going to go to the seaside?” asked Andreas.

“Not till the end of the week,” replied Delphine. “But I’m not quite sure whether I’m going yet. My parents are being annoying.”

She hadn’t found an apartment, she said. She no longer even felt sure she wanted to go to Versailles.

“I got my exam results last week. I passed. Now I’ve got a guaranteed job for life. I’m not sure how I feel about that.”

Andreas asked her what else she could do. Delphine looked at him in a bored way, and said that was exactly what her parents were saying. She didn’t know. She felt too young to be tied down like that. She wanted to live.

“I’m going to Switzerland,” said Andreas. “Do you fancy coming with me?”

Delphine seemed less surprised by the question than he was. She asked why didn’t he go to the sea with her. He didn’t say anything. She thought about it for a moment, and then she said OK, she would come. She had never been to Switzerland. When were they leaving?

“I bought a car,” said Andreas. “I can go and collect it today.”

Delphine said she had to take care of a few things, and make some necessary purchases. They arranged to meet at four o’clock. Andreas said he would pick her up.


When Delphine saw the 2CV, she suggested they take her car instead. Andreas shook his head.

“My best friend had a 2CV,” he said. “When I was young, we used to drive to the lake in it.”

They rounded Paris on the Périphérique. The sun was high in the sky, the city swam in a milky haze. The sky and the buildings were one and the same color, only different in shadings. The roads were choked with holiday traffic. Delphine had opened the roof, and turned on the radio. They were listening to a jazz station, and Andreas tried to guess the titles of the standards they played.

“When I was pretty new in Paris, I saw Chet Baker in the New Morning,” he said. “He was incredibly thin and hollow-cheeked. He sat slumped on a barstool, with his trumpet jammed between his legs. Then he started singing, very quietly, and with a cracked voice. I can’t remember the name of the piece, ‘The Touch of Your Lips’ or ‘She Was Too Good to Me,’ but I can still hear his voice today. After a few bars he breaks off, and makes an angry gesture, and the band starts over. His performance was like the echo of an echo. Shortly after, he died.”

He said he preferred Chet Baker’s late recordings to his early ones. It was no longer a matter of getting the perfect sound. There were cracks, little mistakes and imprecisions. The music was more alive, failure was a possibility, even a certainty. Delphine asked him who this Chet Baker was. She said she didn’t listen to jazz much.

When they came off the Périphérique at the Porte d’Italie, Delphine asked whether they shouldn’t rather drive to Italy or the south of France.

“We can do whatever we want,” she said. “We’re completely free.”

Andreas didn’t say anything. It was a long time since he had last driven, and he had to concentrate on the traffic. Delphine leaned back and looked out the window. Later, they listened to the cassettes Andreas had packed, rock music he had liked once, and chansons that Delphine thought were horrible. Andreas sang along to Francis Cabrel:

J’aimerais quand même te dire


tout ce que j’ai pu écrire


je l’ai puisé à l’encre de tes yeux

Delphine laughed and said her eyes were brown, not blue. Andreas said the music took him back to his youth. At the time he had written poetry when he was in love.

“Erotic poetry?”

“Sentimental would be more like it.”

“I wouldn’t have thought you capable of that,” said Delphine. “A spark of love within a frozen heart.”

She said it in jest, but Andreas was a little surprised, just the same. He had never thought of himself as a cold person, but it wasn’t the first time he had heard such an accusation. C’était l’hiver dans le fond de son coeur, sang Francis Cabrel. Andreas remembered how the song had moved him once, and how he had joined the singer in grieving for the death of the girl who kills herself on the eve of her twentieth birthday. Delphine said she couldn’t bear it, it was too mawkish. She pushed the eject button, and pulled another cassette from the plastic bag at her feet. She put it in, there was a moment’s silence, and then a woman’s warm voice. Part seven: Reflexive pronouns.

Andreas wanted to take the cassette out, but Delphine put her hand over his, and they listened to the woman slowly and clearly speak the examples.

Tomorrow I shall see you again. Tomorrow you will see me again. Tomorrow we will see you again. Tomorrow you will see us again. The parents see their children again. The children see their parents again.

Then a man’s voice, equally warm, intoned:

My day. I get up at half past five in the morning. I always get up at that time, because I have to be in the office by eight. It is only on weekends that I can sleep in. After getting up, I go to the bathroom, clean my teeth and shower, first warm, and then cold at the finish. After that, I feel thoroughly awake, and well. Then I get dressed and comb my hair. I go to the kitchen to have breakfast. I make myself some coffee, eat bread with jam, or cheese or sausage …

The man’s voice had something strangely cheerful about it. It sounded as though he had yielded completely to the course of such days and years, a destiny without subordinate clauses.

“I me, you you,” said Delphine, and then she repeated it, running it together like one word.

“You are the I-me,” she said.

“I-you,” said Andreas. He took the cassette out of the player, and the radio came back on. He asked her if she had understood the text. Most of it, she said, she wasn’t surprised no one wanted to learn German if that was how they taught it. Sausage for breakfast.

At Beaune, they left the Autoroute. A little outside the center, Andreas found an Ibis hotel, and parked.

“I imagined my holiday a bit more romantic than this,” said Delphine.

Andreas said he didn’t feel like driving into the town. Anyway, they had an early start tomorrow.

They took a room, and went back out to pick up their suitcases.

“They’ve even got a pool,” said Delphine. “What have you got in that bundle?”

She tugged at the curtain, in which Andreas had wrapped the little statue.

“Don’t,” he said, and shut the trunk.

Delphine thought she would swim before supper, to cool off. Andreas said he would have a drink meanwhile. It was not a large swimming pool, surrounded by a fence, and just a few steps from the terrace of the hotel restaurant. Andreas sat at a table at the edge of the terrace, and ordered a Ricard. It didn’t seem to bother Delphine that the diners could watch her as she climbed into the water and swam a few lengths. She came out, squeezed the water from her short hair with one hand, and dried herself. Then she wrapped herself in the towel, and came up to Andreas’s table. She sat down, and looked at the menu.

“Do you want to eat here?”

“Don’t mind.”

“Well, then, let’s go somewhere else.”

Andreas went up to the room with Delphine, and watched her as she got changed. She put on a little green skirt of rough cotton and a thin black cardigan. She went into the bathroom, and came back with pink lipstick on. Andreas had never seen her with lipstick on. He said she looked nice. He wondered what she liked about him, or what she had liked about Jean-Marc.


They walked along the main road, heading for the town center. They passed a lot of hotels, a shopping center, and roundabouts decorated with wine barrels and vines. The old center was all done up. Every other house was a restaurant or a wine cellar. Delphine wanted to look at the cathedral. The nave was dark. If you pushed a button, some lights came on that lit up the altar and one especially noteworthy chapel. Delphine lit a candle. Andreas asked who that was for. No one in particular she said, just on account.

“Now God owes me.”

“I wonder what sort of miracle you’ll get for one euro,” said Andreas.

The town was full of tourists, they choked the streets and occupied the tables of the garden restaurants. It was all too noisy and full for Andreas. Finally he said they had passed a cafeteria near the shopping center. Delphine protested, but in the end she gave in.

When they were back at the shopping center, they saw that the cafeteria was due to close in half an hour. The woman behind the counter told them they would have to hurry. They picked up a first course at the counter, and ordered the dish of the day. Delphine chose a bottle of wine.

Not many of the tables were occupied. There were a few men by themselves, a group of Japanese tourists, and a woman with her three children. She took two of them to the bathroom. The third, a boy of about seven, stayed behind on his own. He sat there very still, lost in thought. Suddenly Andreas felt enormous sympathy for him. He felt like going up to him and speaking to him or buying him an ice cream. Then the mother came back with the other two.

“Don’t you like it?” asked Delphine.

Andreas said he had been thinking about how they used to eat in restaurants like this one when he was a child.

“I could never decide what I wanted. My parents pressured me, and in the end I always ordered the wrong thing. I had been looking forward to going so much, and it was always a disappointment in the end.”

Delphine said going out to eat had always been a treat for her. It hadn’t happened often, and her mother wasn’t an especially good cook.


The hotel restaurant was shut. A group of girls were sitting in the lobby, talking in German. Presumably they were here on a school trip. They talked and laughed together loudly.

Andreas recalled the graduation trip for his class in high school. They had gone to Paris, four days of sightseeing, three nights in a cheap tourist hotel. For the first time, he remembered Paris as he found it then — not the city in which he had spent the subsequent eighteen years. It was a big city in autumn. The air was as clear as glass, and yet a strange fog seemed to hang over everything, impeding your vision, and shading the edges of what you saw. People moved a little more slowly here, as though they were in an atmosphere that was heavier than air.

Their hotel was somewhere in the northwest of the city, a part Andreas hadn’t been back to since. He remembered the name of the Metro station, La Fourche — a line divided there. Their class teacher had been nervous, and hadn’t let the boys and girls out of his sight. Only rarely had they had an hour or two for themselves, after sightseeing trips and museum visits, and before supper. Then Andreas had set out on his own, exploring the quarter in ever-widening circles.

He remembered feeling extraordinarily happy to be standing in a bistro between two men stopping off for a drink on their way home, watching youths playing pinball, and women clicking rapidly past outside the big windows. It was the freest Andreas had ever felt.

He got the map out of the car. In the room he studied the route they would be taking tomorrow. Delphine was in the bathroom. He tried to imagine her as his wife, the two of them newly married, and on their honeymoon. The fantasy both calmed and excited him.

Delphine came out of the bathroom in a short nightie of flowered terrycloth and got into bed. Andreas undressed, turned the light out, and lay down beside her. When he put his hand on her thigh, she said she would get a condom. He held her tight. What if I get pregnant, she asked. He didn’t say anything. They made love in the dark, more energetically than usual, and without exchanging a word. Then Delphine switched on the bedside lamp, and went to the bathroom. Andreas heard the faucet running, and then the flush, and then water again. When Delphine came back at last, he said they would have to be careful not to fall in love. Delphine jumped on him, and they wrestled together. She sat on his belly, and grabbed his wrists and pushed them down on the mattress.

“You are such an idiot,” she said.

He wanted to say something back, but she kissed him on the mouth, and bit his lip until he freed himself, threw her down on her back, and held her down.

“Stop it,” he said. “You’ll hurt me.”

She tried to free herself, but couldn’t. Her breath was coming hard, and she repeated that he was an idiot.

“All right,” said Andreas. “That’s enough.” Around noon the next day they crossed the border into Switzerland. During the entire drive, Delphine talked about her childhood and teen years, about the police barracks she had grown up in. She had always lived in pretty reduced circumstances, and with lots of other families with children. It had been like a big commune. All the fathers had had the same job, and the mothers were in and out of each other’s apartments, drinking coffee and chatting. When Andreas asked her if it had been a happy childhood, she hesitated.

“Sometimes happy, sometimes not. Moving was always tough. Losing my friends. It’s only a few that I met up with again, years later, in other barracks.”

The best thing had been the summer vacation, three or four weeks on the Atlantic coast.

“That was Paradise. There were always the same people there. All year, we would be out of touch, but when we arrived there, there they all were again. We were like brothers and sisters, swimming in the sea together, and playing on the beach. Those summers were never-ending. In the evenings, there were parties, people eating, drinking, dancing. All of them together. Fireworks sometimes.”

Once, there had been a forest fire, that was when she was about ten or so. The fire had approached to within a few miles of the campsite, but she hadn’t been scared.

“People assumed it was arson. For days they talked about nothing else. But I still remember thinking nothing can happen to us. No one will find us here.”

It was at the campsite that Delphine had learned to swim and surf, and this was where she fell in love for the first time as well. It had been a brief episode, and hadn’t lasted beyond the summer.

“We met at night on the dunes. He was clumsy, and I didn’t have much of a clue either. Actually, it was pretty horrible, sand everywhere, and afraid of being caught. After that everything changed. Suddenly, everyone had a boyfriend or a girlfriend, and our group fell apart. One year, I didn’t go at all. I went hitchhiking around Europe with a girlfriend. But since then I’ve gone every year. Even if it was just for a few days. My old friends still go. Some have joined the police themselves, married, had babies, and now the kids are playing together. That’s the way of it.”

She asked Andreas when he had fallen in love for the first time. He said it was so long ago, he could hardly remember.

“Where are we going anyway?” asked Delphine, after they had passed Basel.

“To my village,” said Andreas. “We’ll be there in a couple of hours.”

“And what will we do there? Is there something worth seeing?”

Andreas shrugged his shoulders. The landscape was quite pretty, he said.

The nearer they came to the village, the more unsure he was whether it was a good idea to have taken Delphine with him. He didn’t know himself what he had in mind. To see his brother, his parents’ grave, maybe Fabienne. And then? He would have enough money from the sale of the apartment to live for a couple of years. But did he really want to go back to his village? He thought of fish that go back to the place they were born, in order to die. Or was it to spawn? Or both together? He couldn’t remember.

And what if Delphine really was pregnant? Andreas had never been particularly careful where birth control was concerned. For a long time he had thought he was infertile, then one day Nadia told him she had aborted a baby of his. She said it in her typical, indifferent way, which she only ever set aside when speaking about politics, or her ex. It didn’t seem to have occurred to her that Andreas might want the child, though in fact he was relieved she had taken the decision away from him. She had spoken, if he remembered correctly, not about a baby but about a condition. What had depressed him at the time wasn’t that the baby would never be born, it was that he seemed to accept it so easily. He had long since abandoned the idea that there might be some turning point in his life. Some time long ago he had chosen a certain path, a certain direction, and there was no going back on it. Even now, when he had given everything up, it was as though there was only one possible way. He didn’t have the feeling of freedom that he had had as a very young man. Everything was already decided. A baby wouldn’t change that either. He was reminded of what the doctor had said, that there was no sense in talking about odds. It was either-or. People were born, people died. It happened, or it didn’t happen. In the end, it barely mattered.

He looked at Delphine, sitting beside him silent and with eyes closed. He wondered what she was thinking or dreaming of. What had he dreamed of when he was her age? He did the math. It would have been at the end of his first year in Paris.

He came off the Autoroute a little earlier than necessary, and they took country roads through tiny villages, consisting of no more than a couple of farms apiece, a pub, sometimes a church. The road led straight along a wide valley. Only a very few cars met them, and once a boy on a tractor, pulling a mower. Either side of the road were meadows and fields and apple orchards. It was a hot afternoon. Andreas remembered afternoons like it, that felt like holidays, brooding heat on the land and the air every bit as hot and still as the earth. Over everything was a hazy brightness, in which even the shadows looked somehow pale. The forests too were silent, but for an occasional crackle, as if there was a fire burning somewhere.

They crossed the river, which was very low. It had been straightened a long time ago, and flowed in a line across the plain. Andreas stopped next to an old wooden covered bridge.

“What’s up?” asked Delphine.

“I just wanted to stretch my legs a bit.”

When he was a child, the road had gone over that bridge. Now it was closed to traffic. They crossed it on foot. Delphine took Andreas’s hand, but let it go after a few steps.

On the other side was a wooded slope and an abandoned inn, that had once been a customs house. After the bridge was closed to traffic, a small circus had made the place its winter quarters. Barns had been erected, and paddocks for the animals. There was a half-collapsed caravan by the side of the road, and some rusty tubs for a number involving lions. The terrain looked deserted, but for the screams of some exotic birds in a big cage on the very edge of the forest. Stinging nettles had sprung up in the shadow of the trees.

“How much further is it?” asked Delphine.

Andreas pointed to a hill on the horizon.

“We’ll be there in fifteen minutes. That’s the village over there.”

“What is it you want to do here?”

“I haven’t been for ten years. My brother still lives there. And probably a couple of my old friends.”

“Is it that you want to introduce me to your family?” asked Delphine, and laughed.

The door of the inn opened, and an old woman stepped out. She stopped on the top step and eyed the two newcomers suspiciously. Andreas and Delphine turned around, and returned to the car.

“Shall we go on?” asked Delphine.

Andreas hesitated, then he turned the key.

It was four o’clock when they reached the village. In the industrial zone, which sprawled across the plain, there were a couple of buildings that weren’t familiar to Andreas. Other than them, not much seemed to have changed in the last ten years. He was surprised at how well he remembered everything. But there was no emotion accompanying his memory. When he remembered the time of his growing up, it was as though he were leafing in some unknown person’s biography, and looking at pictures that weren’t anything to do with him.

On a wooden trestle table outside the local food-store, fireworks were on sale for the upcoming national holiday. Andreas parked behind the hotel, which had been built in the 1970s as part of a convention center. He had worked here as a night porter during his student years. Back then, the building had seemed to him luxurious; now it was small and a bit poky. Inside, it was dark and cool. There was no one at the desk, and it took a long time before anyone answered the bell.

The room smelled of cold cigarette smoke and air-freshener. There was a thick brown carpet on the floor, and multilayered orange curtains in the windows.

Andreas opened the window and looked out. He saw the foot of the hill, the reform church with its bright red roof, and the secondary school where he had gone for three long-forgotten years. He shut the window and drew the curtains. They were so dense that almost no light penetrated the room. Delphine had lain down on the bed, without pulling back the cover. Andreas lay down beside her.

“I can show you round the village, if you like. But it’s too hot for that really,” he said. “We could go to the swimming pool.”

“Is that what you want?”

“I’m sure it’ll be full of kids. With weather like this. We always used to go to the lake to swim. There are lots of lakes in the area.”

“I’d like to rest for a while,” said Delphine.

He kissed her. She said the place had a depressing effect on her already, she couldn’t say why. After all, she had hardly seen any of it.

“It’s all so perfect here, so spic and span. And everything seems just a little bit small. As if it was built for dwarves.”

“The Swiss are taller than the French,” said Andreas.

They lay side by side in silence. After a while, Delphine’s breathing became deep and regular. She must have fallen asleep.

Andreas thought of summers in his childhood. He pictured himself lying in his parents’ garden, reading a book under shady trees. He rode his bike to the river. He jumped from rock to rock in the almost dry riverbed, stumbled, and picked himself up. Then he lay in the tall grass at the edge of the woods up on the hill. He couldn’t remember how he had gotten there. A fire was burning almost invisibly, its flames lit and quenched by sunlight. Acrid smoke and the smells and sounds of the forest. Walks, alone or with the family, and always this tiredness and heaviness, that only got better when evening fell. Long evenings outside in a garden restaurant, or once again by the edge of the forest or the side of a lake. Parties that went on until it got cool, and nocturnal rides down the hill on his bike. And then, on the road in front of his parents’ house, endless conversations — about love, about life, about everything under the sun. The plans they had made. The world had been so big, then, so full of possibilities.


When Andreas awoke, it was eight o’clock. Delphine was sitting up. She was leaning against the wall, reading a women’s magazine she must have brought with her. He asked her if she had been awake a long time.

“I watched you sleep,” she said. “I think you were dreaming.”

“Something nice?”

“You’d know better than me.”

The cigarette machine downstairs was out of his brand. He walked out of the hotel. The air was still heavy and moist. He crossed the market square. The center of the village was little changed, one or two businesses had closed, and one or two new ones taken their place. Where the butcher’s shop had been before, there was now a store that sold tools for the do-it-yourselfer; the erstwhile dairy was now a children’s clothing shop. There were only a handful of people around, and no one Andreas knew. The people looked to him like extras in a film, faceless figures who had taken possession of his village, pretended they were walking their dogs, looking at shop windows, were on their way home, or to an evening in the social club. They seemed to feel at home here, knew their way around, and eyed him curiously or suspiciously, as though he were the stranger here, not they.

He looked at the houses, the streets, and the trees as though somewhere on them would be some traces of his life here. He saw only silent, apathetic surfaces. He leaned against one of the old chestnut trees on the market square, rubbed his hand over its dirty gray bark. He could picture himself walking this way as a child, going to school, going to music lessons, going home. The square was empty, and it was very quiet, but the air seemed somehow animated. Andreas felt strangely happy, perhaps it was memory, that strange feeling of happiness that disappeared the second you tried to focus on it. He tried not to think of anything, but he couldn’t manage. A couple of youths came across the square toward him, talking and laughing in loud voices. He pushed off the tree, and walked on to the station. The kiosk there was already shut. He heard a car accelerating away on the other side of the tracks, and then another immediately after. Across the road was a garden restaurant. Andreas went there, passed through the garden into the restaurant. He found a cigarette machine there; it was where he had always gone.

Delphine was sitting on the bed in the room, as though she hadn’t moved. She said she had thought he might have abandoned her.

“I would really be in trouble,” she said. “I don’t even know the name of this place. And I don’t speak a word.”

They walked around the village, and Andreas pointed out the important places of his childhood, the school, the church where he was confirmed, and the restaurant where he had used to meet his friends. He couldn’t imagine what the village looked like to someone seeing it for the first time, and who didn’t know its history, and the stories of its inhabitants.

The cemetery was locked. They walked on, crossed the railway line, and reached the swimming baths, and then Andreas’s parents’ house, where his brother was now living. There was no light on in the windows. They stood at the gate.

“Maybe they’re on holiday,” suggested Delphine.

“There used to be a place where the key to the basement was hidden,” said Andreas. Mechanically, he opened the gate. It squeaked, and Andreas remembered the noise, which hadn’t changed from his childhood. He passed through the garden, to the back of the house, and walked down the steps to the basement. Delphine remained at the top. The key was where it always had been, an ancient, rusty thing.

“Come on,” whispered Andreas.

It was dark in the basement, there was only one low window through which a little light came in. Andreas remembered the smell right away, a mixture of earth, mold, and heating oil. He took Delphine by the hand, and led her carefully up the steps. The connecting door to the ground floor was not locked. Andreas opened it, and stopped for a moment to listen.

On the kitchen table were a dozen flowerpots, and a little red plastic watering can. Next to it was a sheet of paper with instructions as to which plants needed watering once a week, and which more often.

“They must be on vacation somewhere,” he said. “We’d better not turn on any lights. If the neighbors see any, they’ll call the police.”

“I don’t like this. Let’s go,” said Delphine.

Andreas went into the sitting room. He counted the newspapers piled up on the coffee table, and said presumably they’d be back in the next couple of days. He went out onto the landing, and then up the stairs. Delphine stayed downstairs, and said she didn’t want to be arrested. Then she followed him upstairs after all.

The air was warm and stuffy. Andreas’s eyes had got used to the darkness, and he found his way around quite easily, though the window shutters were all closed. He stood in his former room, and looked around. The bed and desk were where they had been when they had been his, but the walls were covered with posters of footballers and pop stars who were unfamiliar to him. The room was tidy. Andreas remembered that they had always been made to tidy up before going on holiday. His mother had cleaned the whole house, as though she was afraid she might not come back, and leave dirt and untidiness behind.

Delphine stood next to Andreas.

“Come on,” she said. “This is wrong.”

“I grew up here,” he said. “This is my room.”

“It was your room, you mean,” said Delphine. “Now you’ve seen it. Can we go?”

“I don’t know my brother’s children very well,” said Andreas.

He had only met his niece and nephew on a couple of occasions. At their grandfather’s funeral they had been shy and awkward. And once, a few years ago, the whole family had visited him in Paris. He had booked a hotel for them, and taken them to museums and inexpensive restaurants. But he had mainly spoken to Walter and to Bettina. The children struck him as quiet and polite, but of no interest. They seemed bored when he explained or demonstrated something to them. They looked up at him briefly, and seemed not to hear what he was saying. In restaurants, they only picked dishes they were already familiar with, and they always seemed to be tired, or thirsty, or needing the lavatory. The idea that the family would live on in those individuals, that these were his descendants, his heirs, had always irritated Andreas. And now Maia was eighteen. He knew her age because she was born in the year he moved to Paris. Lukas was three or four years younger.

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