On A Day Like This

He should have been more engaged with the children, he thought. It was too late now. He was sure he meant no more to them than they did to him. Their peculiar uncle in Paris, whom their father always talked about with an undertone of anxiety in his voice. If he talked about him at all, that is. Andreas had never been close to his brother. Now he had the feeling of being very close to him, and at the same time, of losing him altogether. He was standing in an empty house.

“It’s all gone,” he said.

“Come on,” said Delphine again, but this time it sounded as though she wanted to comfort him. He followed her slowly down the stairs, and into the open.

It was late when they got back to the hotel. The door was locked, and they had to ring the bell. The night porter was a young man. Andreas asked him what his name was. It was a familiar name, one of his classmates at school had been called that. The young man said he had finished his military service in the spring, and was going to college in the fall. In the meantime he was filling in here. Andreas didn’t say anything about his own time as a night porter. It was another hotel, another village, another time.

The next morning they went to the swimming baths. Delphine swam half a mile, and then she leaped from the ten-foot diving board. There was something touching about the way she was showing off in front of Andreas. For the first time, he had a sense of her as younger than himself.

They lay on the river bank, reading. Andreas still felt cool from swimming, the sun that burned his back and legs didn’t seem to warm him; only his skin was scorching. For the first time in a while, he felt well. For lunch they bought hotdogs at a stand, and sat down at a wooden table in the shade of some trees.

“What now?” asked Delphine.

“We could go on a trip,” said Andreas. “We could go hiking in the mountains, or drive to Lake Constance or to the Rhine Falls.”

“But that’s not why you came here.”

Andreas was silent for a moment. Then he said he had come to the village in the hope of seeing someone.

“A woman?”

“An old girlfriend.”

Delphine groaned. “I knew it.”

“Knew what?”

“Knew that you’d leave me stranded here, in the middle of nowhere.”

“I’m not leaving you stranded. It’s ancient history. I’ve seen her once in twenty years, and that was ten years ago.”

“When are you meeting her?”

“I don’t even know if she’s here at the moment. Maybe she’s on vacation as well.”

“You drive from Paris to Switzerland to meet her, and you don’t even know if she’s here?”

Andreas said he would phone Fabienne, he would be back in a moment. He went back to the changing area, and got out his mobile. He called information, and got the number. The idea that he could find himself talking to Fabienne in the next minute made him nervous. He walked rapidly to and fro a couple of times, to the end of the big meadow. He leaned against the wire-mesh fence, and stared out into the forest, which began here. It smelled of earth and mold. When Andreas punched in the number, he wasn’t sure that he’d remembered it correctly. Fabienne picked up, using Manuel’s family name. Andreas said his name, and there was silence for a moment.

“This is a surprise,” said Fabienne, but her voice didn’t sound surprised, and Andreas couldn’t say whether she was pleased, or whether his calling her was disagreeable to her. “How are you?”

“I’m here.”

“What, here in the village?”

“At the baths.”

He said he would like to meet her. Did she have time? She said Manuel had taken Dominik to the lake. They would be back around five. Why didn’t Andreas come to supper.

“I’m sure Manuel will be pleased.”

“I can’t make it this evening. Could I see you before that?”

Fabienne hesitated, then she said she was home all day.

“What about three?”

“All right.”

Andreas went back to Delphine and said he had arranged to meet Fabienne at three.

“I expect you don’t want me at this meeting of yours.”

“She’s married,” said Andreas. “But I don’t think it would be very interesting for you. You wouldn’t understand anything. And we’ll only be talking about old times, anyway.”

In the afternoon, more and more children had come into the baths. They played Frisbee and ball and ran around the meadow screeching.

“Shall we go?” said Delphine.

She said she would go and lie down in the hotel for a while. Andreas said if she liked they could go and eat fish together by the lake in the evening. He would book them a table. The restaurant was one they had often gone to for family celebrations.

The afternoon was muggy, and it looked as though a storm was on the way. Andreas walked through a part of the village with single-family homes that had been put up on the other side of the highway. Fabienne had had to tell him the way. When he was a child, it had all been fields and meadows.

The roads in the new subsection were named for wildflowers. Every house was built differently, but they all looked the same, with their white facades and red tiled roofs. Fabienne and Manuel’s house was at the end of a cul-de-sac. The garden was enclosed by a picket fence, and looked tidy and well cared for. On the lawn stood a plastic slide and a blue igloo tent.

Even before Andreas had rung the bell, the door opened and Fabienne came out. She was wearing white jeans and a white shirt, and she looked very lovely, fresh and relaxed. Andreas sensed the awkwardness that had always come over her in his presence.

“Our little castle,” Fabienne said smiling, and offered Andreas her hand. He took it and kissed her on both cheeks. She invited him in. Would he like a tour of the house? She showed him around from attic to basement and told him about the gas heating and the washing machine. The rooms were not especially distinctive, but it was all nicely done. Other than innumerable family photographs, there were no pictures on the walls. When Fabienne showed him Dominik’s room, he asked how old he was.

“He’s crazy about water,” said Fabienne. “We’ve got a camper by the lake. In the summer we go there every week, and sometimes on weekday evenings.”

“On Manuel’s parents’ land?”

“It’s in the nature reserve,” said Fabienne. “You’re not allowed to build there, but they allow the camper.”

“I’ve been there with him a couple of times,” said Andreas.

In the master bedroom there was a thin foam rubber mat on the floor. Fabienne explained she did exercises. Suddenly she bent down, and did a headstand, stayed on her head for a moment, and then jumped back on her feet. The blood had shot to her head.

From the living room, a sliding door opened on to the terrace. Outside was a white plastic table and chairs, in the shade of a parasol. The table was set. Fabienne said she had baked a cake, and brewed some ice tea. The cake was still warm. Andreas said she needn’t have bothered. She told him to go out, and she would follow.

He sat down on the terrace. The traffic from the highway was only faintly audible, but someone was mowing the lawn on one of the neighboring plots. The smell of freshly cut grass wafted across. Fabienne came out with a tray that had on it an apple cake and a big glass jug of iced tea, with peppermint leaves and ice cubes floating in it. It all might have come out of a housekeeping magazine. She poured a couple of glasses, and sat down opposite Andreas. For a moment they looked at each other in silence. Fabienne smiled, then she looked at the garden, where a lawn sprinkler was moving back and forth.

“Nice you’re here,” she said. “How do you like my garden?”

She got up, and Andreas followed her over the lawn to a flowerbed, where she showed him some special flowers she’d planted recently. A little further back, she had a couple of plots for vegetables. She said her garden was her empire. Manuel had no interest in it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t big enough for everything she had in mind. They strolled back to the table and sat down, and Fabienne asked what Andreas had been doing with himself all this time.

“What can I say?” he said. “If we’d last seen each other a week ago … But now, after so many years.”

He said he had worked, eaten, slept, and gone to the cinema. He shrugged. Nothing special.

“I get up early, make coffee, go to work. I lead a regular life. I’m content.”

Fabienne asked if he was married, had a family, or a girlfriend. He raised his hands, showed her his bare fingers. He said he had come here with a woman he had recently met, a trainee teacher at his school. But it wasn’t anything serious. She was far too young for him. In Paris he had a lover, Sylvie, who was married with three children. Fabienne said nothing. Perhaps she regretted her question. She looked out over the garden, and smiled again, as though she hadn’t heard what he had just said. Andreas said that was a nice thing about growing older, that you could take a more relaxed view of these things than when you were, say, twenty. Fabienne didn’t take up the subject, and began to talk about people in the village whom Andreas had once known. He had the feeling she was only talking to prevent a silence. She asked him if he remembered Manuel’s sister, Beatrice. “She’s divorced now. She has three children.”

“But she was so religious.”

“Not so much now,” said Fabienne.

Andreas said he had gone out with Beatrice for a while, but she was so repressed he had left her not much later.

Fabienne said Beatrice had declared one day that she no longer loved her husband. And she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life with someone who didn’t matter to her. Andreas said that was brave of her. He wouldn’t have thought her capable of such a step.

“Everyone thought there was some other man involved. But she lives alone. She seems to be doing fine.”

Her brother-in-law often came to talk to Fabienne, but she didn’t know what to tell him. No one really knew.

“I don’t believe in everlasting love,” said Andreas.

For a while Fabienne didn’t say anything. She seemed to be thinking. Then she said she and Manuel had been through a couple of rough patches too. Twenty years was a long time. But somehow they had always managed to get back together again. Andreas couldn’t imagine strife with Fabienne, raised voices, arguments. He couldn’t imagine her depressed, sad, or aggressive.

“For a while, I was doing very badly,” she said. “That was ten years ago. I moved out, and went back to my parents in France. Manuel was really sweet to me. He called every day and asked how I was doing, and said Dominik was missing me. I missed them too. After ten days I went back.”

“Why?”

Fabienne didn’t say anything. She looked at Andreas as though he ought to know, really. Then she got up and went into the garden again. Andreas followed her. The wind had dropped, and the sun was obscured by clouds. The lawn mower had stopped, and it was very quiet. The few sounds you could hear sounded very distinct, as if they were happening nearby, and in an enclosed room. Fabienne had kicked off her slippers, and was walking barefoot on the grass. Andreas saw that she was wearing ankle chains, which didn’t go with his idea of her. She turned off the lawn sprinkler and picked up a few garden tools that were left by the flowerbeds. Then she peered over to the edge of the forest, as though she was looking for something.

“Did you see the photos we have in the house?”

Andreas said he had noticed that they didn’t have any pictures, just family photos.

“Manuel is a keen amateur photographer,” said Fabienne. “He must have taken thousands of pictures. He photographs us all the time. Dominik. Dominik when he’s sick. Even when he’s asleep.”

He had a video camera now, she said. He filmed them all the time. Recently he had begun to copy all his video tapes onto DVDs. Tapes she had never seen before. An uncertain smile. She said sometimes Manuel struck her as very strange, even though she’d known him for such a long time. The uncertain smile again.

“I’ve never lived with a woman,” said Andreas. “I’ve no idea what that’s like.”

They went back inside the house. Fabienne put away the garden tools, and asked if Andreas wouldn’t have a piece of cake after all. He shook his head, and she seemed to be relieved. She carried the dirty glasses into the kitchen and rinsed them under the tap. Andreas was reminded of detective movies, where the criminals removed all trace of themselves, and ended up forgetting something, like a cigarette butt or a handkerchief.

The light in the hall was dim and yellowish, and the air felt so close that Andreas felt they were underwater. There was a long rumble of thunder outside, echoing away in the distance. Fabienne sat down on a step. Suddenly she looked very tired. Andreas remained standing in front of her, looking down at her. She asked what time it was.

“Half past four.”

“Manuel will be back soon.”

Andreas sat down beside her. For a moment they sat there in silence, then Fabienne began to speak softly. It was as though she was talking to herself. Her voice sounded mildly amused, as though she didn’t take herself seriously, what she was saying, or as if she was talking about somebody else. Sometimes she felt afraid, she said, she didn’t know what of.

“It began when Dominik was born. Everything went well. He was an easy child, and not ill very often. Perhaps if I had a reason to feel afraid, it wouldn’t be so bad.”

On the occasions when Dominik was stung in the mouth by a wasp, when Manuel had fallen down the basement steps and torn a couple of ligaments, she had been afraid too. But she had known what to do, she had provided first aid, she had driven Manuel to the doctor. The fear she really had in mind was much more diffuse, a feeling of strangeness, of not belonging. Manuel and Dominik sometimes appeared really strange to her. When they were down in the basement tinkering with something, or when they went out fishing together, she had these strange notions about what they were all doing. The life they were living, this house they had built, the photographs on the walls. Sometimes she imagined the house burning down, or some other disaster, and these imaginings had a somehow liberating effect on her. Andreas asked her if she ever talked about it with Manuel. She shook her head and stood up. “What would I say to him?”

Andreas said he had brought her something. He took the book out of his pocket, and passed it to her.

“What is it?”

“A little book. Do you know the author?”

“Never heard of him.”

“Read it,” said Andreas. “It might remind you of something.”

“How long are you staying in the village?”

“I’ll be here for a while. I’ll call you.”

The storm hadn’t begun yet. The clouds had pushed past, only in the east was the sky still dark, as though night had begun to fall. It was five o’clock when Andreas got back to the hotel. Delphine wasn’t there, and she hadn’t left him a message either. He called her on her mobile, but only got put through to her mailbox. He waited for her in the room. At seven she still wasn’t there. He turned on the TV. An early evening series was on, and Andreas tried for a time to follow it, but the characters all looked too alike, and he soon lost track of what was happening.

A little after half past seven Delphine walked in. Her hair was wet, and she was carrying a plastic bag under her arm. Andreas was furious. He asked her where she’d been, and why she hadn’t left a message. She said she hadn’t known when she’d be back. He could hardly expect her to sit in the room all afternoon.

“You could at least have left your cell phone switched on.”

“It doesn’t work abroad.”

Again Andreas asked her where she’d been. She said she’d gone for a walk. In a garden restaurant she had gotten into conversation with a group of young people. One of them was the night porter here at the hotel. She had asked him what there was to do here. He said there wasn’t anything.

“They asked me where I’m from, and what I’m doing here, and we talked for a bit.”

The young people said they were going for a swim in the lake, and did Delphine fancy coming with them.

“You mean to say you went swimming with a bunch of total strangers?”

“It’s not so bad. They were really friendly. Their French isn’t up to much, but somehow we managed to make ourselves understood.”

“Our table’s booked for half past seven. It takes half an hour to get to the Untersee.”

Delphine said she’d agreed to go to a barbecue with the young people. She had only gone back to the hotel to fetch him. He had told her he was booking a table, said Andreas. He didn’t want to have a barbecue with a load of total strangers.

“Don’t be a spoilsport,” said Delphine. “I spent all day doing what you wanted.”

The young people were parked in front of the hotel. There were three men and two women, and all of them seemed to be younger than Delphine. All evening Andreas was unable to establish who was going out with whom, or if they were all just good friends. He asked the night porter whether he wasn’t working. He shook his head and said not until tomorrow. One of the men had completed a business studies course, the other one seemed not to be doing anything. One of the women was still at school, and another was helping out in her parents’ bakery. They shook hands with Andreas, and made room for him and Delphine in one of the two cars.

“Where are we going?” asked the night porter, who was driving.

“To the Dreispitz. That’s a place on the river.”

Andreas said he knew; he had been there himself many times.

At the sewage plant, they had to leave the cars, and do the last part on foot, through the forest, and over the dam and across an unmown meadow full of molehills. The fire site was at the very end of the meadow in a sandy hollow, where the canal joined the river at an acute angle. The young men had collected wood in the forest, and one of them lit a fire.

The river had been straightened a long time ago, and its banks were reinforced with untrimmed blocks of stone. Andreas scrambled down to the water. He sat on a stone, and lit a cigarette. The conversations of the others were boring. With their lousy French, they were asking Delphine what music she liked, her favorite films, her plans for the future. They made jokes about her name. They drank beer and ate sausages they grilled over the fire.

Gradually it got dark. One of the guys had brought a portable CD player, and put on music that Andreas didn’t know, and that he thought was dreadful. He felt old and out of place, and hardly spoke all evening. It got a bit chilly. He hoped they would all go home soon.

Finally, at midnight they packed everything away. The fire was not quite out, and one of the men said, OK, guys, do your duty, and he unzipped his pants. The others did the same, and all three of them stood around the fire. The women took a couple of steps back. The embers hissed, and the smell of piss spread through the air. The baker’s daughter said they were revolting, and the other woman laughed, as did Delphine. She shot Andreas a triumphant look.

It was pitch-black in the forest. The night porter had a flashlight with him, and went on ahead. Delphine took Andreas’s hand. When they reached the cars, one of the women said they were going dancing in a discotheque in the next village. She asked Delphine and Andreas if they wanted to come. Andreas said he was tired.

“I’d better put this old man to bed,” said Delphine, and the others laughed. Presumably they found Andreas just as boring as he found them.

“The night porter was staring at you the whole time,” said Andreas, once he was lying in bed with Delphine.

“Did you think?”

“It made me wonder if I was like that when I was their age.”

“Are you starting that again.”

Andreas said he was only wondering what she saw in such company.

“Well, if you don’t see it, then you just don’t see it, I suppose.”

Over the next few days, they went on a couple of side trips. One day, they went to the lake where Andreas had kissed Fabienne. Everything looked just as it had then, only there were some cigarette butts in the grass and empty plastic bottles. They had the place to themselves. They swam a bit, and then lay in the sun to dry. They walked around the lake, and then into the forest, until they came to a little hollow.

“Just like a bed,” said Andreas.

They took off their clothes and made love on the dry leaves. Andreas closed his eyes and tried to imagine he was with Fabienne, but he couldn’t do it. The ground was hard, and Delphine said there was something sticking in her back, and Andreas ought to try lying underneath. Then they swam some more. When the sun disappeared behind the trees, they packed their things and drove back to the village.

On the national holiday, they climbed up onto the hill and watched the fire. The inhabitants of the village stood in a large circle around the wooden pyre. The children were setting off fireworks. Their faces glowed in the sheen of the flames. After a while Andreas pulled Delphine out of the circle, and they strolled along the ridge. Down in the valley and on hills opposite, they saw the fires of the other villages, and from time to time they saw the little detonations of fireworks that looked tiny in the distance. The moon was full, and the landscape was in plain view, the village, the road, the cars, and, once, a short train, heading for the village, and disappearing between its houses.

“It looks like a toy landscape,” said Delphine. “Little people driving in little cars. Little houses, a little church, you see, it’s all there.”

Andreas said he sometimes wondered what his life would have been like if he had never left the village.

“Then I wouldn’t be here,” said Delphine. “You’d never have met me.”

Maybe I wouldn’t have got sick, Andreas thought, or not so suddenly. He would have slowly grown older, would have fallen in love, married, had children. He would be here for the national holiday with his whole family, slowly they would climb the hill, saying hello left and right. Then the children would light the fireworks they would have brought with them. Andreas told them to be careful. He would be standing beside his wife with the other grownups, watching the children, who were now chasing around the fire, throwing in boughs they had gotten from the forest. At his back he felt the chill of night, in his face the heat of the fire. Then they would all go home. In the house it would be oppressively warm, and the light would dazzle him. He sat down on the hallway steps, and took his shoes off. Then he would lie down beside his wife. The window shutters would be closed, but the window would be open. He lay awake and listened to the night outside. From the neighbors’ gardens would come the sound of laughter and the jingle of glasses. and from further afield the bang of a firework, and shortly afterward the barking of a dog who couldn’t settle.

“Let’s go,” said Delphine, “I’m cold.”

The next day they went swimming again. Then the weather took a final turn for the worse. It was sultry all day long. Finally, late in the afternoon, the storm broke. Andreas and Delphine were sitting in the garden restaurant eating ice cream, as the sky turned black in a matter of minutes, and violent gusts tugged at the umbrellas. They barely had time to pack their things and take shelter under the roof before the rain broke loose. When the storm was over, they saw clouds of steam rising off the asphalt road. The next day, it rained all day.

Andreas was woken by Delphine. He watched her for a while. He pushed up her nightie. As he tried to take her panties off, she half woke, and, without saying a word, helped him. It was close in the room, and Delphine was wet with night sweat, and somehow cool. She had only briefly opened her eyes, and quickly shut them again. She was smiling, bit her lip, threw her head back, and turned it to the side. Little beads of sweat formed on her upper lip; Andreas kissed them away. Her face grew serious, looked strained, concentrated, for a moment she seemed to be in pain, then she relaxed again.

“Tu es gentil,” she said, and her eyes opened. “What’s that in German?”

“Friendly,” said Andreas, “kind, nice.”

“Nice,” repeated Delphine. She got up and went to the bathroom. She came back and got straight into her underwear.

They only just made it down to breakfast in time. Then they went back upstairs. Andreas read the newspaper, Delphine rummaged around in the bathroom, painted her toenails, and plucked her eyebrows. It was almost noon. Andreas opened the window and looked outside at the rain falling on the parking lot. The air had cooled down, and there was a smell of wet asphalt. Delphine came out of the bathroom, and leaned out of the window beside him.

“The forecast is poor,” he said. “It’s supposed to rain solidly for the next few days.”

“How much longer do you want to stay here?”

Andreas hesitated for a moment, then he said he felt good here, everything was familiar, the landscape, the climate, the names of the plants. Here, he said, he knew what was coming. Delphine countered that he had spent more of his adult life in Paris than in Switzerland.

“But this is where I grew up,” said Andreas. “I feel I never really arrived in Paris.”

He said his walk to school went around a large field. When the ground was frozen in winter, he would take a shortcut across the field. One time, it was the morning of Christmas Eve. It was still dark, and there was fog over the field.

“The teacher asked us to bring candles. In the middle of the field, I came to a stop. Over by the highway, the fog was dyed orange by the streetlights. I knelt down and pushed my candle into the earth and lit it. Don’t ask me why. I knelt down on the frozen ground, and watched it burn down. And then I went on to school.”

“Children are peculiar,” said Delphine. But she didn’t understand why he was telling her this. Andreas said he wasn’t going back to Paris.

“How do you mean?”

“I’ve given my notice.”

“Are you crazy?” Delphine looked at him in horror. “What’s gotten into you?”

Andreas didn’t reply. There was nothing he could have said. A truck drove up, and a man got out, and began to unload crates of bottles.

“What do you want to do here? Work as a German teacher?”

Andreas said he had enough money.

“Is it that woman?”

“I don’t think so,” said Andreas.

When he turned toward Delphine, he saw she was crying. He put his arm around her, and held her close. She broke away, and they stood silently side by side, watching the delivery man at work.

“If you need money for the train,” said Andreas.

Delphine looked at him, and shook her head.

They went to the station, and Delphine bought a ticket and reserved a berth. The train didn’t leave until ten, they had a lot of time. They drove up the hill to a restaurant with a view of the village, and down to the valley. From there you could see the river, and the wooded slopes and the mountains on the horizon. You could hear the traffic all the way from the highway. It had stopped raining, but the sky was still cloudy. Only in the west was there a little patch of brightness. The low sun made the clouds look darker.

It was cold out on the terrace, and the tables and chairs were wet with rain. Andreas and Delphine sat inside, at a table by a window. The place was almost empty. The landlady came. Andreas remembered her from before, she was only a few years older than him, and she had been a pretty girl then. Now she was a heavyset woman with a tired face. She seemed not to recognize him, and he didn’t say he was local.

Delphine had ordered a salad, but she hardly touched it, and pushed it away after a little while. Andreas wasn’t hungry either. He said it was a pity she was going already.

“What would have been the point of staying?” said Delphine, and she started crying again. The landlady came. She didn’t let on, only asked whether they were done, and if everything had been all right.

He just wasn’t cut out for steady relationships, said Andreas, after the landlady had gone.

“That’s not even the point,” said Delphine. “Do you think I want to marry you?”

“So what is the point, then?”

“I don’t know what to say to you,” said Delphine, half crying, half laughing. “If you don’t know that, then I can’t help you either.”

She could tell his mind was on this other women, she said. Andreas angrily shook his head.

“Nonsense,” he said. “She’s happily married.”

“That’s your problem.”

They were at the station far too early. Andreas parked the car on the other side of the road, in front of the post office. Old chestnut trees surrounded the parking lot, giving a dense canopy of leaves, and keeping away the light of the streetlamps.

Andreas got Delphine’s suitcase out of the trunk. She took it from him and said she was going to say goodbye to him here. She didn’t want a scene on the platform. She embraced him and kissed him on the lips and went away without another word. She crossed the road, and disappeared around the corner of the station building. Andreas waited in the car until the train had pulled in and left again. He had the radio tuned to a classical station, and remembered the train they had seen three days before from the top of the hill, the toy train running through the toy landscape.

He had opened the side window a bit, and cool air flowed in. He asked himself if it was true that he really wasn’t made for long relationships. It was what he had always told himself. Maybe he just hadn’t met the right woman. Perhaps Fabienne would have been right for him — or Delphine was.

He drove to the part of the village where Fabienne lived. He parked by the side of the road, and went on on foot. A white camper was parked outside Fabienne’s house. The windows facing the street were curtained off. There wasn’t much to see from the pavement, just that the light was still on in the kitchen. Andreas pictured Manuel and Fabienne sitting in the kitchen, drinking a glass of wine together. He imagined Manuel having a headache, and getting up to take a painkiller. Fabienne woke up and followed him. She asked him what the matter was, and Manuel said it was nothing, he was coming straight back to bed. She stayed in the doorway for a moment. Then she went to the toilet, half-numb with tiredness, went back to bed, and fell asleep. The light in the kitchen went out.

Andreas felt very tired. He stood outside the house, staring at the dark windows. When a woman with a dog passed along the street, he walked on. Their paths crossed. The dog barked, and the woman pulled at the leash and told it off.

The next day the sky was still cloudy, and a cool wind blew. When Andreas put his jacket on, the letter that had been in his mailbox on his last morning in the apartment dropped into his hand. It was from Nadia. Andreas couldn’t recall ever having seen her handwriting before, which was big and a little wild and hard to decipher.

The letter was several pages long. Once again, the subject was emptiness, neglect, and the lack of love. She had tried, wrote Nadia, to make up for the shortage of love in her life with sex. Following her separation from her husband, she had embarked on a rather wild phase, in which she had gone with men pretty casually. It was at that time that they had met. Perhaps she had misused him for her own ends, as he had misused her for his. But she had felt empty from the very beginning. In the meantime, she had got back together with her ex-husband, and they were going to try a fresh start together. She wrote to say that she hoped he would be happy, and that — and then there were some words that he couldn’t read — and that he too would feel the peace that she now felt.

Andreas put the last page of the letter on the table with the others. He was glad there were no hard feelings from Nadia. It had never occurred to him that she was exploiting him. That idea fascinated him. He knew people could ask for anything from him. He would do whatever was required, and if he noticed he was being taken advantage of, then at the most he would be angry with himself. Everything would be much easier if you could see yourself as a victim, he thought, a victim of your childhood, of fate, of the people you had grown up among, and finally too, as a victim of illness. But in order to feel himself a victim, he had to believe in the possibility of another, better life. Andreas believed in nothing but chance. He loved the curious coincidences and repetitions that life threw up, against all logic. He loved the surprising patterns that came about in the sky, or on a body of water or in the shade of a tree, the continual tiny adjustments in the same overall context. Nadia called it nihilism; his own word for it was modesty.

After breakfast, he called Fabienne. She asked if he wanted to speak to Manuel, who was down in the basement.

“Did you tell him you saw me?”

There was quiet for a moment, then Fabienne said, no, she hadn’t, she wasn’t sure if he would have wanted that.

“Can we see each other?”

“Manuel and Dominik are building a hot-air balloon. I don’t know if they’re going out today or not. Maybe if the wind drops, they will.”

“Can you get away?”

“I’ll have to be back here at twelve by the latest.”

She thought about it. Then she said they could meet by the camper. Would he remember the way? She said she’d be waiting for him in the parking lot in half an hour.

As Andreas drove down the narrow gravel track, he saw Fabienne’s white camper in the empty parking lot. He was a bit late, but he hadn’t been here for twenty years, and had taken a wrong turning and gotten briefly lost. He parked next to Fabienne, and for a moment they looked at each other, as if they had happened to stop together at a traffic light or in a department store parking garage. Andreas got out, and walked around the car. He could hear music softly playing. Fabienne leaned forward, and the music stopped. She climbed out and kissed him on both cheeks. She was wearing jeans and a yellow slicker.

“You’re prepared for anything, aren’t you,” he said. As for himself, he had his swimming trunks with him.

“It’s supposed to rain again in the afternoon,” said Fabienne.

Even though she had already told him on the phone, he asked her again how much time she had. She said she would have to go back at half past eleven at the latest. She asked him what he had done in the past few days. She unlocked the gate, and locked it again after them. If she ever forgot to lock it, she said, people would be in there in no time, lighting fires and leaving their trash lying around.

They stood in a big meadow with old trees. To either side of them, the land was bordered by wild hedges, and on the lake side by a wide growth of rushes. A wooden boardwalk led through the rushes to the water.

They strolled over the meadow, as though aimlessly, just to stretch their legs. Fabienne bent to pick up some toys in the grass, and put them away in the camper.

“Do you think the season’s over for this year?” asked Andreas.

“We often come here in the autumn too,” said Fabienne. “Even in winter. We have a little rowboat. Manuel and Dominik go fishing in it.”

The sun shone in between the clouds, and everything glistened in its light. There was an almost transparent haze in the trees and the reeds. Andreas and Fabienne walked along the boardwalk through the rushes. At the end of it, they sat down on the wooden planking, and looked out across the lake. The air was very clear, and the German shore seemed almost within reach.

“Look,” said Fabienne, pointing to a crested grebe, diving not far from where they were. They waited in silence until it emerged on the surface again. Andreas lay down on his belly and dipped his hand in the water.

“The water’s warmer than the air,” he said. “Do you fancy a swim?”

“Why not,” said Fabienne. “Seeing as we’re here.”

She got changed in the camper, he outside in the meadow. She appeared in the doorway and took his bundle of clothes from him, and put it in the camper.

He walked across the meadow after her. She was walking faster than a moment ago, perhaps she was cold, or she sensed his eyes on her. She was wearing a one-piece bathing suit and had tied a scarf around her waist. Andreas tried to remember what she had looked like when he had first met her. Ever since he had seen her again, his old images of her were rubbed out. He had told her she hadn’t changed, but she must have in all that time.

The water was colder than he’d expected. The chill took his breath away. They swam a little way out into the lake, and then parallel to the shore. Andreas had overtaken Fabienne, and was swimming on ahead in short strokes, so as not to pull away from her. After a few hundred yards, they turned and swam back.

Andreas climbed out of the water. Fabienne held on to the metal ladder, and did some leg kicks. She looked up at him and smiled. He paced up and down the pier, shaking his arms, and once or twice jumping up and down. Then Fabienne too came out. They wrapped themselves in their towels, and sat side by side on the pier, so close that their shoulders touched. The sun was gone. Andreas was gibbering with cold.

“Aren’t you cold?” he asked.

“A little bit.”

For a while they looked out across the lake in silence, then Andreas laid his hand on Fabienne’s shoulder. Suddenly he felt very young and unsure of himself. He cleared his throat.

“Yes?” said Fabienne, and Andreas asked her if she remembered how he had kissed her twenty years before. She said it hadn’t been so cold that day. He said he had loved her very much back then.

He looked at her from the side, her profile, her slender neck and shoulders, on which a few drops of water glistened, the hair, darker at the ends. She looked out at the lake, and said in a slightly throaty voice that she hadn’t been aware of anything.

“I wrote you a letter. But I never mailed it.”

“You’re freezing,” said Fabienne. “Come on, let’s get dressed.”

They ran along the boardwalk, and through the damp grass to the camper. Andreas got out of breath and started coughing. He followed Fabienne into the camper. She passed him his things. He was still hesitating while Fabienne peeled off her suit and hung it on a clothesline that already had a boy’s trunks on it. For a moment she stood naked in front of him. She smiled, half uncertain, half provocative, then she turned her back to him and got dressed.

They left the place. Andreas looked at his watch, it wasn’t ten yet. In silence they walked along a path, away from the parking lot, past a couple of fenced-in estates, and a large meadow. The path was winding back toward the lake, but the water couldn’t be seen for the reeds. After a few hundred yards, the path divided, and one half led into the reed bed. Fabienne went ahead, Andreas followed. The path ended in a wooden observation platform. They climbed up the ladder-like steps. On top was a sign that said the platform had been built by the birdwatchers’ association, “for bird-lovers everywhere, who have not lost the capacity for wonder.”

Fabienne leaned over the handrail, and looked out at the lake. She asked if Andreas was still feeling cold. No, he said, it was better now. He was standing just behind her. He grasped her shoulders with both hands. She lowered her head, and leaned forward a little. He held her hips, and pushed his hands under her waterproof jacket. She stood up a little straighter, otherwise she barely moved. He kissed her neck, stroked her breasts. She turned around. When he tried to kiss her mouth, she turned her face away. He tried to shove his hand in her jeans. She broke away, and undid her belt and top button.

“It’s easier like this,” she said.

They made love on the observation platform. The boards were wet and cold. Fabienne took off her jeans and shoes. She pushed up her sweatshirt and her bra, but left on her jacket. She kept her eyes shut, and lay there motionless. She seemed very naked and vulnerable. Andreas was put in mind of police photographs of crime scenes, pale, lifeless bodies by the side of the road, in forests or rushes.

They said good-bye at the parking lot. Andreas got in his car and watched Fabienne put on her seat belt, get into reverse, and drive off. She seemed perfectly calm, as though nothing had happened. Andreas put on his seat belt, but didn’t drive away. It had begun to drizzle, and the landscape was half-obscured from sight. It was cold in the car, and Andreas’s breath made clouds of steam. He thought about Fabienne. He was surprised by the purposefulness with which she had guided his hands, the calmness of her surrender, and her sudden quick pleasure. The whole thing was over in fifteen minutes. Then Fabienne had got a packet of Kleenex out of her jacket, and carefully wiped herself. She seemed very strange to Andreas. It was as though her face had also changed from being naked. He didn’t recognize her until she was dressed again.

He didn’t know what he expected from her. He didn’t even know what he wanted. That she leave her family for him? That she go with him to France, or wherever? That she become his mistress, meet him every other week somewhere, always with a guilty conscience where she was concerned? They would get used to each other, maybe even quicker than two spouses got used to each other, because they wouldn’t share anything but their love.

He hadn’t returned to the village to start a relationship, but to end one, to have certainty at last. If Fabienne had slapped him when he tried to kiss her, either back then or today, he would have gotten over it, as he had gotten over other unhappy relationships. He was concerned to get an answer from her, to know at last whether she loved him, whether she might have been able to love him. But in fact she hadn’t given him an answer. She told him not to call her at home. He asked her how else was he going to get ahold of her. She said she would call him tomorrow.

He ate in the fish restaurant where he had wanted to take Delphine. Earlier, it had been renowned for its good cooking, but he didn’t enjoy the food. It would be nice if Delphine were here, he thought.

He stayed up in his room all afternoon. He hoped Fabienne would call. Suddenly he wasn’t sure whether he had given her the correct room number. Maybe she had forgotten the number, and she was calling reception, and no one was answering.

Fabienne called the next morning, as she had said she would.

“Can we meet up?”

“Manuel and Dominik are flying their hot-air balloon,” she said. “I’m free till twelve.”

“Do you want to meet at the camper?”

“They’ve taken the car.”

They arranged to meet at the hut in the woods where they had first met.

Andreas walked through the village, and through the business district. The sky was clear, except for some little shreds of cirrus clouds. The forecast was for warm weather in the afternoon, but the morning felt cool. It was the first day of autumn, the sky looked suddenly darker, and the air was so clear that everything seemed very close.

Andreas got to the rendezvous too early. There were wet charred branches on the campfire site, and garbage on the ground. The hut belonged to the community, and on the wall, in a little metal frame, was a list of rules. Andreas perused it: garbage in the containers provided, no loud music, no dogs without a leash.

Fabienne came almost exactly on time. Once again, she was wearing the yellow slicker. She propped her bike against a tree. Andreas hugged her, she kissed him on both cheeks.

“Do you want to go for a walk?”

They walked through the forest. It was probably the same path they had taken that night when they played hide and seek. It led on and on in a straight line. In the distance you could see where the forest ended. For a while they walked in silence side by side. Then Fabienne asked Andreas what was in the letter that he had written but not sent.

“That I love you,” said Andreas. “Not much more than that, I think.”

He asked what she would have done if she’d received the letter.

“I don’t know,” said Fabienne. She seemed to be thinking. She said she was really fond of Manuel. They had a good relationship.

“When did it begin, with the two of you?”

“I suppose it was the day you kissed me. He was very attentive. He took me home. I was a bit confused.”

“Ah, if I’d had the car.”

“But nothing happened,” said Fabienne. “We just talked. You were so dismissive, after you’d kissed me. You behaved as though it was nothing. And then you got really aggressive. I told Manuel about your kissing me. We talked about you a long time. That brought us closer. The next day he brought me flowers. We didn’t kiss until much later.”

Andreas said he didn’t suppose he’d ever loved a woman as much as he’d loved her. Fabienne didn’t say anything. They walked slowly through the forest, side by side. Andreas was a little surprised he didn’t feel angry with Manuel, that he didn’t even feel jealous of him. He wouldn’t have wanted to trade places with him. He stopped and pressed Fabienne to himself. He kissed her on the mouth, but she didn’t reciprocate. She hugged him like a good friend, and laid her head against his chest.

“There’s no point,” she said.

“One night,” he said. “Let’s spend one night together. To give us something to remember. Not just those ten minutes.”

“Love lasts for ten minutes,” said Fabienne. “What difference would it make?”

“What made you sleep with me, anyway?”

“I was curious,” said Fabienne, and then, a while later, she couldn’t just stay away from home for a night, she didn’t know what he was thinking of. In the fifteen years she’d been married to Manuel, she had spent very few nights away from him.

“Do you remember our meetings in Paris?”

“I just remember the fact of them,” said Fabienne, with an apologetic smile.

“In the mosque,” said Andreas. “And one time we went to the cinema. The film tore, and they were unable to show us the ending. Someone came up to the front and told us the ending.”

“I don’t remember.”

It was all so long ago, said Fabienne. So much had happened in the meantime.

“Not in my life,” said Andreas.

They had gotten to the edge of the forest, and stopped. The path led on, past the gravel pit, and through fields and meadows to the next village.

“Are you happy?” asked Andreas.

“I’m not unhappy,” said Fabienne. “Let’s go back.”

Andreas said he had the feeling of having done something incredibly stupid that would never be made up for.

“I can still remember writing the letter. I had something to eat in a pizza place near the Opera. It was evening, I was alone, and I started writing in my notebook, about our first meeting, and driving to the lake, and kissing you. Our story. And that I wanted it to continue. If I’d had an envelope and a stamp, I think I might have mailed it to you right away. But the next morning, I no longer dared.”

They were silent. Andreas wondered if the relationship could have lasted. They had both been so young. Maybe he would have made Fabienne unhappy, maybe they would have split up long ago. Or they would still be together, one of those couples that stick together because they’re each so afraid of being alone. They didn’t really fit. At that time, it hadn’t seemed to matter to him. He wanted to convince himself that the only reason his love had lasted so long was because it had remained unrequited. He asked Fabienne what she was thinking. Nothing, she said.

“What does your girlfriend say about you going to meet me all the time?”

“That’s over. She went back to France. It wasn’t anything serious.”

“Tell me about her.”

Andreas said he didn’t know what to say about Delphine. He didn’t want to think about her or talk about her, least of all with Fabienne.

“What does she look like?”

“Short brown hair, quite a pretty face. About as tall as you, but not such a beautiful figure.”

“How old is she?”

“Twenty-four.”

“Do you love her?”

“I don’t think so. Certainly not as much as I loved you.”

As I love you, he thought, but didn’t say it. He said there had been a time that he could imagine starting a family, having children, settling down somewhere. But that time had passed. He couldn’t even claim to regret it. He wasn’t sure he still wanted to love someone as passionately as when he was twenty.

“What about her? Does she love you?”

“I don’t know. I think she might.”

“And isn’t that enough for you?”

She asked what had made Delphine go back. Andreas wanted to tell her that he wasn’t going back to Paris, that he would stay in the village, but suddenly his plan struck him as absurd. He had come here on her account. If the story with her was over, there was no sense in staying here. He said he had quarreled with Delphine. Something trivial.

“That’s none of my business,” said Fabienne.

They were back at the hut. Fabienne said she was expected at home, her menfolk would be back soon.

“And you’re making lunch for them.”

“Yes,” said Fabienne. “I’m making lunch for them.”

“Will you tell Manuel? About what happened?”

Fabienne shook her head. What for? She gave Andreas her hand and said good-bye. He shook hands, and kissed her on the cheeks. She got on her bike. She had ridden a few yards when she stopped.

“I almost forgot something,” she said. She got down, and pulled the little book Andreas had given her out of her jacket pocket. He came a little nearer, but he didn’t take the book.

“Did you read it?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“There must be hundreds of stories like ours.”

“But all the details. The fact that I called you Butterfly …”

“That wasn’t you. That was Manuel’s name for me.”

“And the cat she buys herself when she returns to Paris?”

“I never had a cat.”

Andreas asked if she was sure. Fabienne laughed at him.

“That must have been a different girl.”

“I suppose it’s the story of you and Manuel, then,” said Andreas.

“No,” said Fabienne, “it is our story. What I have with Manuel isn’t a story. It’s reality.”

They stood and faced each other. Then Fabienne put her arms around Andreas and kissed him on the mouth. It was their first kiss. Her lips were dry and a little rough, it was the kiss of a young girl. They kissed for a long time until they were both out of breath.

“Keep the book,” said Andreas as they finally broke.

Fabienne smiled. Without another word, she got on her bike and rode off. Andreas watched her go. She stood on the pedals, the bicycle swayed from side to side. The road led along the edge of the forest, past a meadow full of old fruit trees and a farmhouse. By the time Fabienne reached the first houses in the village, she was just a yellow dot.

Andreas went back to the hut, and sat down on the wooden bench that ran along the front of it. He felt weak, but his head was clearer than it had been for months. He felt nothing but a kind of jaunty indifference. It was as though he had got rid of a weight, something that had been oppressing him for eighteen years. Presumably his life would have been different if he had mailed the letter then. There was even something mildly consoling about that. If Fabienne had turned him down then, his long wait would have seemed even more pointless.

He tried to remember time spent with her, but he kept coming back to the same scenes. The forest, the lake, the cinema in Paris. He remembered every particular, saw Manuel, Beatrice, the other young men and women they hung around with that summer, he even saw himself. Only Fabienne looked oddly out of focus in those scenes. But with that last kiss — their first kiss — Fabienne had finally come to life. It was only the kiss that counted.

Andreas thought about his childhood, his growing up, the time when happiness or misery, love or panic had been able to fill him completely. When time itself seemed to stand still, and there was no way out. He no longer wanted to love the way he had at twenty, but sometimes he missed the intensity of feeling he had had at that age. And those moments, in which everything suddenly was over, that feeling of total insignificance, and at the same time of complete freedom. A pure perspective on the world that almost took his breath away with its beauty, the patterning on a piece of wood, some peeling paint, a little shred of paper left under a thumbtack, the rust stain on the head of a nail. He ran his hand over the bench he was sitting on, over the wall of blackened, weathered boards he was leaning against. He inhaled deeply, and smelled the damp and moldy smell of the forest, and the sweet accent of some late-flowering bush. He could remember how he had felt, but he couldn’t feel like that anymore.

He probably wouldn’t see Fabienne again. Anyway, it didn’t matter if he did or not. Their story was at an end. One story among a very great many that began and ended at each moment.

Andreas walked along the road toward the village. He passed the little general store where he had sometimes bought candy when he was a boy. He came by here on his way to school, and when he had money he would go in and buy chocolate or biscuits. Back then, he had always been hungry, and had always eaten a lot of sweets between meals. Over the years, his appetite had decreased. Some days, he didn’t eat much more than a sandwich at lunch, and another one at night.

He walked into the store, and went up and down the aisles. He bought a bottle of wine, and a couple of bars of chocolate. There was a young woman sitting at the cash register. To go by her accent, she wasn’t from around here. She made some comment about the weather. It had been a bad summer, she said, and Andreas nodded and said one could only hope that the fall would be nicer.

“Maybe it’ll warm up again.”

The checkout girl said she doubted it.

Andreas walked down the street where he had grown up. It was midday, and there was no one out in any of the gardens. One house had got a new coat of paint, another had had a garage built on to it. Apart from that, nothing seemed to have changed. The enormous pine opposite Andreas’s parents’ house had been cut down. Where it had once stood, there was now only a stump, and, beside it, a newly planted sapling. It will take decades to grow as tall as the old tree, thought Andreas. It wouldn’t happen in his lifetime, or his brother’s or Bettina’s — maybe not even the children would get to see that happen.

As Andreas stepped through the squeaky gate, Walter appeared at the open window. He looked at Andreas in bewilderment.

“What are you doing here?” he called out.

The next moment he came running down the garden path, then stopped. He seemed to hesitate. Andreas also hesitated, then he put his arms around his brother. Clumsily, Walter did likewise.

“Come in,” he said. “We were just about to have lunch.”

Andreas handed over the bottle.

“A Bordeaux,” said Walter, looking at the bottle appraisingly.

Andreas said he just wanted to look over the house and take a peek at the garden.

The flowerbeds were choked with a low growth of weeds, and the hazel bush on the west side had spread, and was now almost as high as the roof. Walter said the garden was his responsibility, but he didn’t have enough time. He was glad if he got around to mowing the grass every other week. Things grew pretty much as they pleased.

As they walked into the house, Bettina was just setting a fifth place. She must have seen the visitor through the window. She too seemed to be so happy about his presence that Andreas felt a little embarrassed. She hugged him. Maia had grown into a pretty girl. She was taller than Bettina, and had a confident air about her. Lukas was a couple of heads shorter, a quiet boy, who reminded Andreas of his brother. He gave them each a bar of chocolate, and said he hoped they weren’t too old for such things. Maia laughed and said you were never too old for chocolate.

Over lunch, they talked about people from the village. Walter said next door’s pine had been struck by lightning, and had had to be cut down. Some of the houses were now occupied by the children that had gone to school with him and Andreas. The two old sisters in the corner house had moved into the assisted-living center long ago. One of them had died since, said Bettina. Walter said that was news to him.

“But I told you,” said Bettina. “I went to the funeral. It must be a year ago now.”

“What about their shop?”

“It was sold. It belongs to a chain now. But it’s not doing any better than before.”

At the edge of the village, a shopping center had been built, Walter explained. The small local shops had trouble competing. There was one butcher shop left in the village. They counted the number of butcher shops there had once been, and they got to seven.

After lunch, the children grabbed their chocolate, and ran upstairs to their rooms. Walter called work to take the afternoon off. The conversation took a while, there was something he needed to explain to a colleague. Bettina put on water for coffee. She leaned against the stove, and said their living there now must feel strange to him.

“If I know Walter, you won’t have changed many things.”

Bettina laughed, and then she was serious again. She said the death of their father had affected Walter very badly.

“If at least he’d talked about it. But he didn’t say anything, not one word. He continued to function, like a machine. At first, when we moved in here, it was terrible. You couldn’t change a thing, not take a picture off the walls, nothing. He made us put all our things down in the basement. If I moved a piece of furniture, in the evening he would move it back to its old place, and not say a word. It was back and forth. Eventually, he gave up, and let me do some of what I wanted. But if it had been up to him, everything would still look exactly the way it did then.”

“The garden reminded me of before,” said Andreas. “Even though it was never as neglected as it is now.”

He said they had been through a lot, living in this house, but he couldn’t see it with the same eyes as then.

“Everything’s still there, I remember every detail. But it doesn’t have the same importance anymore.”

“There are still a couple of boxes of yours upstairs,” said Bettina. “School things, I think. Books and toys.”

Andreas said they could throw them away.

“Don’t you even want to look at them?”

“I looked through some old notes not long ago. It was weird. At times it felt as though I’d written them the day before, at times it was like someone from another planet. And I have to say neither kind was at all interesting.”

Bettina said she would hang on to the things. Maybe he would change his mind. There was enough room. Andreas asked after the children. Maia was taking her final exams next spring, said Bettina. She was very good at math. With Lukas, she didn’t know yet. He was just starting high school. There was plenty of time to decide. He was a dreamy boy, she said, like a child in many ways. He reminded her of Andreas.

“Of me?”

“That’s what Walter says too. Didn’t you see the similarity? He has your eyes. Your father’s eyes.”

They drank coffee in the garden. Walter asked how Andreas was feeling, and he said he had a persistent cough, but he thought he was getting over it. Apart from that, everything was fine.

“Do you still smoke as much?” asked Bettina.

“I’ll stop at some point.”

“That’s what they all say.”

Andreas said he’d rather talk about something else. Walter asked if he wanted to see their parents’ grave. Yes, said Andreas, why not. When Walter went into the house to get his jacket, Bettina asked about Andreas’s cough. He said he had had to take a couple of tests, but had left before the results came through.

“You’re worried.”

“Yes,” said Andreas. “I’m worried.”

“It doesn’t change it whether you know it or not. But you don’t need me to tell you that.”

“I just wanted to take care of a few things first,” said Andreas.

Then Bettina said her father-in-law had been a wonderful man. She often thought of the last Christmas they had spent together.

“I phoned him about a month before he died,” said Andreas. “I meant to visit him, but I left it too late. No one expected him to fade as quickly as he did.”

“He was always very pleased when you called.”

Andreas said the funeral had been awful. It was like being in a bad film. He hadn’t understood what was going on around him.

“I think I was closer to him than I ever realized. I didn’t see much of him in his last years, and when I called him I was often stuck for things to say. But then I would see him in the things that I said and did myself.”

“He told me once he wished he could have had a life like yours,” said Bettina. “You really are like him.”

There were steps on the gravel, and Andreas asked Bettina not to mention his illness to Walter. It would only alarm him.

“Do you have someone you can talk to?” asked Bettina.

“Yes,” said Andreas. “I think so.”

“You know you can come here any time. You can stay with us too, if you can’t manage anymore. We’ve got plenty of room.”

“Things aren’t that bad yet,” said Andreas. “But thank you for offering.”

She said she wished he got in touch more often, and he promised to try. He saw her eyes were misting over. When Walter joined them, she turned away.

Andreas said he would go from the cemetery straight back to the hotel. He was leaving tonight. Walter said that was a shame.

Andreas went up to Bettina. She turned and hugged him. Then they all went into the house together. Walter called the children.

“Andreas has to go,” he said.

They walked to the cemetery. Andreas asked Walter how he was doing, what he was up to, and Walter started telling him. He told him about the vacation in Sweden that they had just returned from, and a canoeing trip in the rain. He made some comment about good-looking Swedish women. Andreas had never known Walter to be so talkative.

Walter said these might be their last vacations as a family all together. Even this year, Maia would rather have gone hitchhiking with a girlfriend. Next year she was finishing school, and she might go to France for a few months to learn the language. She had been very taken with Paris, that time they had all descended on Andreas. Lukas had no idea what he wanted to do, but there was plenty of time to decide that. Bettina was thinking of going back to work, with the children out of the house. She was taking a computer course.

“And what about you?” asked Andreas.

“I’m fine,” said Walter. “My promotion has changed a few things.”

“You never told me.”

Walter gestured dismissively. That was a couple of years ago now. He said it wasn’t a dream job. He had often thought of doing something else. But with the economy as it was, it wasn’t a time to take risks. He imagined he would probably stay with the same firm until he retired. He laughed sheepishly.

“It must all seem terribly boring to you.”

“No,” said Andreas. “No, it’s not boring at all. Sometimes I envy you the children and Bettina. You’ve got on with your life.”

There was no one at the cemetery. Walter made straight for the grave, and Andreas thought he must have been there many times. Walter knelt down, and plucked a few twigs from a little bush that grew in front of the stone.

He didn’t mind that the grave was being leveled, said Andreas. He often thought about his parents, but his memories of them were attached to the places where they had lived, not this place where they were buried. Walter didn’t say anything. In all their phone calls over the years he had never talked about his parents. Nor did he speak about them now, but just about their grave and the flowers on it, which he had replanted in the spring, even though it was really no longer worth it.

They stood in front of the grave in silence. Then Walter said, Well! as if he had completed a task. His voice sounded a little less burdened as they picked their way through the rows of graves and he spoke of one or another deceased whom they had both known, a school friend of Andreas’s who had died very young in a traffic accident, the proprietress of a haberdashery store, Walter’s former music teacher. They parted company at the level crossing.

“The next time you come you stay with us,” said Walter. “Will you promise me that?”

Andreas promised.

“And you’ll stay for a bit longer?”

“OK.”

“Be good, then, and drive safely.”

All at once, Andreas believed there would be such a thing as a next time. He quickly hugged his brother, and then they each went their separate ways.

Andreas thought of Delphine, all the moving she had been put through as a child, such that her childhood memories were not attached to any particular place. She had said she could feel at home anywhere. Andreas wondered if that was a fault or a strength in her. Perhaps it would be simpler not to have any roots. It was like scattering the ashes of the dead. They were everywhere and nowhere. Whereas his childhood was just as much buried in this place as his parents were, but when he stood in front of their grave, he didn’t see much more than a stone with their names and dates on it. His memories were no more alive there than anywhere else. Only the sense of loss might be greater. Perhaps he shouldn’t have gone back — either that or he shouldn’t have left, like his brother. Then he might slowly have gotten used to the changes, just as you got used to the changes in your body, and yet seemed to be the same person from your childhood into ripe old age.

In the hotel, he packed his bags. He went down to the front desk and said he was leaving. It took the desk clerk a long time to make out the bill. Andreas took a postcard from a display, five sunny views of the village: the Catholic and Protestant churches, the town hall, the community center, and the steps up to some historic building, where long ago some freedom fighter had given an important speech. At last the clerk had finished adding up the bill, and Andreas put back the postcard and paid.

The easy mood of that morning had left him. Andreas felt tired and confused. He drove off aimlessly, heading west. He had the radio on, a classical music program that was comparing different recordings of the same piece of music. The host talked about the details of the various interpretations with two guests — a male and a female musician. One interpretation was too quick for them, another one dragged. They criticized soloists who made too much of themselves, and others who played with too little expression, or were imprecise, or with a show of feeling. Andreas tried to hear the differences they talked about, but for the most part he couldn’t.

The further west he got, the weaker the reception. More and more the music was interrupted by hissing, and then suddenly there was a different station, a French-language pop station, and a couple of excitable DJs who were talking nonsense and kept interrupting each other. Andreas pushed in the cassette that was in the player. It was the language course that he and Delphine had heard on the way here, the kind man who had cheese and sausage for breakfast, and took the bus to work, ate lunch in the cafeteria, where he had a choice of three delicious specials, and then went home at the end of his work.

After supper I sit down in front of the television and watch the news. The evening program is of no great interest to me. Usually, the interesting programs are on too late for me. I like to go to bed early. The night is quickly over. When the alarm clock goes off in the morning, I usually feel I haven’t had enough sleep. And the next day follows in the same way.

Andreas stopped at a rest stop. He sat in his car and listened to a man talking about his life. When the sentences stopped, his body cramped, and he started to tremble, as though in a fever. He choked, and then he sobbed, dryly and convulsively. When at last the tears came, he stopped trembling, and became calmer. He dropped his head on the steering wheel, and cried for a long time, not really knowing why.

The tape had kept on playing. When Andreas next heard it, a woman was speaking with strange emphasis.

I hurt myself. You hurt yourself. He hurts himself. We hurt ourselves. You hurt yourselves. They hurt themselves.

He took the tape out of the player. He got out of the car, and walked to the men’s room to wash his face. He dropped the cassette into a garbage bin that had thank you written on it in four languages. He sat down at one of the washable concrete picnic tables in the bright sun. When he had calmed down a bit, he drove on.

Fifty miles from Paris, Andreas took the highway west. He thought he had an aerial view of himself driving through the dark landscape, of which he had little sense. For a long time the road led through fields and woods, past scattered villages. Occasionally it brushed a town, and he could read advertisements for cheap hotels and shopping centers. Once, Andreas almost dropped off. His car had slowly drifted into the passing lane, without his noticing. It was only a loud, insistent car horn that woke him out of his dream. He jerked at the steering wheel, and the 2CV yawed off, wobbling wildly, and a car overtook him, so close that they almost brushed each other. Andreas’s heart beat wildly. He opened the window. Warm air flowed in, and the cheeping of the crickets was so loud he could hear it over the sound of the engine.

Andreas turned the radio on again. He caught one of his favorite programs, Du jour au lendemain, on France Culture. The host was interviewing a French writer, whom Andreas had never heard of and who appeared to be quite unreadable. He gave long answers, of which Andreas understood about half, even after he’d closed the window. The writer had once been religious, had even wanted to become a priest, but, having become a creator himself, a writer, he had begun to question God. Now he only believed in the strength of the Self, the life force, which was stronger than any effort, any pain, than even the death that surrounded us all. The life force of every individual was finally stronger than the absolute, sapped its strength, crushed it, brought it to its knees. This Self, upper case, he said. Andreas envied the man’s self-confidence. He had never had a very clear sense of himself. Perhaps that was why he had led such a regular life. The monotony of his days had been his only prop. Without a job, without an apartment, without a schedule, his dates with women and appointments with friends were the only fixed points in a menacingly empty landscape.

He thought of the evenings with Nadia, or rather the same evening over and over. Emptiness was repetition, he had thought at the time. But that wasn’t right. Emptiness lurked somewhere beyond repetition. Fear of emptiness was fear of disorder, of chaos, of death.

Andreas had wanted to drive all night. But when he saw the signs for motels again, he decided to take a room and rest up for a few hours. The motel was just next to the highway exit. In a convenience store next door, he bought himself a few cans of beer. The motel’s front desk was manned by a sleepy North African man, who asked him to pay for the room in advance.

Even though Andreas was tired, he couldn’t fall asleep. He drank beer and watched TV until his eyes fell shut. In his dream he was driving. He saw the center median and then he didn’t see it, he felt its rhythm like a series of dull blows to his head. The car tumbled into a dark abyss, and the center median flew by and its rhythm accelerated like a drum roll as he fell unstoppably down.

Andreas woke up bathed in sweat and feeling just as tired as when he’d gone to sleep. It was early; dawn was just breaking outside. He took a shower and carried his bags downstairs. There was no one at the desk. There was a card showing the hours breakfast was served, and a number to call in case of emergencies. Andreas didn’t want to waste any time, and he decided to drive on.

As he stowed his suitcase in the trunk, his eye caught the bundle with the hunting goddess statue. He unwrapped it, and ran his fingertips over the gleaming bronze body, the tiny breasts, and the little face, which had always reminded him of Fabienne’s, which over the years had come to stand in for Fabienne’s face, and which, as he now saw, was nothing like her. He felt the bow and the quiver with the bent wire arrows, the short tunic she wore, the legs frozen in mid-leap, the feet, of which only one touched the base, on tiptoe. He weighed it in his hands. He thought of throwing it away, but instead he wrapped it up again and carefully laid it in the trunk.

At noon he passed Bordeaux. He bought a regional map at a gas station. After looking for some time, he found the campsite that Delphine had told him about, Le Grand Crohot. A road led straight into the sea, and ended there. There were no buildings on the map, the only thing there beside the name was the symbol for a view.

The highway cut through pinewoods and low scrub. The traffic was heavy, and when the road got narrower, a few kilometers from the sea, it came to a dead stop. The very last bit of road took Andreas almost an hour. The sun burned down on the car, and he began to sweat.

The road ended in a gigantic loop. At the edge of the road were hundreds of parking spots in the shadow of tall pines. Many of them were occupied, and here and there he could see people in swim suits, unpacking their things or picnicking next to their cars. Andreas drove on, very slowly. After a couple of hundred yards, he reached the entrance to the campsite. The reception area was closed for lunch, and wouldn’t open until two. Andreas parked the car and called Delphine on her mobile. She didn’t answer. He listened to her recording all the way through, but he didn’t leave a message. Presumably Delphine was on the beach and didn’t have her phone with her.

Next to the entrance gate was a map of the campsite. There were two hundred spaces, and a couple of dozen little cabins that were marked as brown rectangles on the map. It would take forever to find Delphine, and presumably she was swimming anyway. Andreas decided to go down to the beach, and to come back here later. In the shade of the car, he changed his clothes, put on some sunscreen, and pulled on a T-shirt. Barefoot, he crossed the campsite in the direction where he thought the sea must be. The campsite seemed to be quite full, but he didn’t see many people. The few he passed wore casual clothes, tracksuits, shorts and T-shirts, and sandals. At the edge of a great expanse of sand, rimmed by some café tables and chairs, a couple of men were playing boules by themselves. So this was the Paradise that Delphine had raved about: long rows of tents and campers under a canopy of tall pine trees, a food shop and a washeteria, little paved footpaths, and every hundred yards or so a building housing toilets, and another with showers and wash basins. On some of the sites a little tent had been erected next to a big one, on others windbreaks had been put up to shield the occupants from nosy passersby. Hammocks and clotheslines with wet towels hanging from them had been suspended between trees. In front of some of the tents, the pine needles had been raked to little paths, edged on either side by pine cones.

Andreas had always had a horror of campsites. Once, he had agreed to go, and had spent a week in a tent by the Mediterranean with a girlfriend. All he could remember were damp clothes, sand everywhere, stinking toilets, crowded beaches, and dance nights, whose climax was the duck dance. He left the girl shortly afterward, for some reason or other.

Andreas got to the end of the campsite. He had no idea now where the sea was. He wandered about among the trees. Finally, the woods thinned out, and a high dune rose in front of him. He trudged through the hot sand. Only now did he feel how tired he was. Once up at the top, he turned to look back. He could no longer see the campsite, only an endless wood, and, a little way off, a mighty bunker, half sunk in sand. The thick concrete shell had cracked open, and the walls were smeared with graffiti.

He couldn’t see the sea from here either, but he could at least hear the sound of the surf. He passed through a narrow cleft, and climbed another few yards. Then he suddenly felt the wind, and saw the sea ahead of him, and below him the beach, which seemed to go on forever in either direction, before losing itself in a yellow haze. The beach was almost entirely deserted. A couple of hundred yards from Andreas, people lay a little more closely packed. Blue flags were stuck in the sand, and a lifeguard sat up on a raised chair. Children stood in the water, young people, parents with children, entire families. They stood close together in knee-deep water, in front of the back and forth of the waves, as though waiting for something to happen. They looked small in the sea, which had no scale. Andreas slithered down the dune. The nearer he got to the sea, the smaller he too seemed to become. He felt very alone, abandoned — a feeling he had often had as a child. He turned south, and away from the blue flags.

There were only a few people dotted about on the sand, bronzed couples, lying side by side or in embraces. One woman lay limply across the back of a man, her legs dangling off to the side, it looked like a failed attempt at some outlandish copulation. The distances between the bathers grew larger. Only here and there did Andreas pass groups of towels and umbrellas that looked like the final outposts of a vanishing civilization. He walked on. From time to time a naked man passed him, and as they crossed, each averted his eyes, as though the meeting was painful or embarrassing to them both. Andreas walked close to the water, where the sand was firm and the waves straightaway erased his traces. Sometimes he walked on a thin sheet of water, that was pulled away from under his feet, until he had the sensation of walking sideways. He turned around and looked behind him. There was no one there, not a sign, not a trace. He took everything off except for his sunglasses, and lay down in the sand. The feeling of solitude had grown weaker, the further he was from the last human. Now it had quite disappeared. He felt as though he himself was no longer human. He lay on his back and looked up at the sky. Its blue was so porous, that he could feel the blackness of space behind it. The wind kept up, and the crashing of the surf was a continuum, the individual waves were not identifiable. You would have to be here for weeks, thought Andreas, sit naked for hours in the sun and the wind, and turn brown, dry out in the salty air, be softened by the blowing sand like driftwood, become tough and resistant. Then nothing more could happen to you. He fell asleep and awoke again. He sat up, and looked down at the water. The sun was low in the sky. The sea had withdrawn a little, the waves were a little lower, but the wind had freshened, and pushed Andreas, drove him on. He shut his eyes. He saw himself and Delphine sitting in a sidewalk café on the Champs-Elysées. What a coincidence, he could hear himself say, and Delphine said: Why didn’t you come to the station to see me off? My car broke down, he said. I lost your address. Sentences he remembered reading, it was long ago.

What a coincidence it was that he had met Fabienne, Nadia, Sylvie, and Delphine. That he had gone to Paris, and now come here, to this wide beach. It was coincidence that his parents had met, and before them his grandparents and great-grandparents, however much they might have wanted to think the opposite, however much they might have wanted to persuade themselves that destiny had brought them together. His birth, any birth, was the last of an endless row of coincidences. Only death was no coincidence.

He thought of the chances that had brought him and Delphine together, and separated them again. A sudden shower of rain, a telephone call at the wrong moment, a whim would have sufficed to bring the whole complex edifice of little events and unimportant decisions to a crashing fall.

He got up and headed back. The wind was in his face, and sometimes it was so gusty that it sprayed his face with a fine foam. At the place where he had crossed the dune, he hesitated for a moment, and then walked on, toward the blue flags.

He imagined moving in with Delphine, in Paris or Versailles or wherever. He no longer had any possessions, and she didn’t seem to own much either. They would settle in somewhere, buy furniture and kitchen equipment, perhaps a TV and a stereo. He asked himself what they would do with their time, with such time as remained to them. But that didn’t matter. He had to find Delphine and speak to her. He had to call the doctor, to pick up the test results, even if they finally didn’t mean anything.

There were still quite a lot of people on the beach, but not many in the water. The sun was low over the sea, against the light, the swimmers were only visible as black outlines. Even so, he recognized Delphine immediately. She was standing in the water with her back to him. He shouted to her, but the noise swallowed his voice. He went up to her. The water was cold and murky with spinning sand. He stopped a few yards behind Delphine and watched as, with mechanical movements, she jumped into the waves, got up, took a few steps back, without reason and without end. Sometimes she dropped to her knees, and disappeared into the water, and then she got up again. Finally she turned around and made for him with quick loose strides. She was wearing a flowered bikini, and her body was glistening and wet. Her head was lowered, and she was looking at the water in front of her. It wasn’t until she had almost reached Andreas that she noticed him. She said something he couldn’t hear, and laughed and kissed him. They hugged each other so tight that it hurt. Delphine’s body was cool. Over her shoulder, not far away, Andreas saw another couple embracing, and he felt he was seeing himself and Delphine, as though he were a very long way away from it all. Only the crashing of the waves was very near and held him.