We're Flying

Summer Folk

WILL YOU BE coming alone? the woman on the telephone asked me again. I hadn’t managed to catch her name, and couldn’t place the accent. Yes, I said. I’m looking for somewhere quiet where I can work. She laughed a little too heartily, then asked me what my work was. I’m a writer, I said. What are you writing? An article about Maxim Gorki. I’m a Slavist. Her curiosity bugged me. Is that right? she said. She seemed to hesitate for a second, as though not sure whether to pursue the subject or not. All right, she said, come. Do you know how to get here?

In January I had taken part in a symposium on female characters in Gorki. My presentation on Summer Folk was to appear in a Festschrift, but I hadn’t managed to find time in my crowded university schedule to take it out and polish it. I had kept my calendar free for the week before Ascension and was looking for a place where I could hope to remain completely undisturbed. A colleague recommended the Kurhaus. As a child he had spent many summer vacations there. The then-owner had gone out of business, but he heard the hotel reopened a few years ago. If you’re looking for somewhere really quiet, that will be perfect. I used to hate it when I was a kid.

Buses only went up to the Kurhaus in summertime. She wouldn’t be able to meet me, the woman said on the phone, without giving me a reason, but I could walk up from the nearest village, it wasn’t far, no more than an hour or so.

THE BUS WOUND UP through steeply terraced farmland. There weren’t many passengers, and when we reached the end of the line, I was the only one remaining, apart from a couple of schoolboys who quickly disappeared into various houses. I had packed just a couple of changes of clothes, but with a stack of books and the laptop, my backpack still probably weighed forty pounds. What have you got in there? asked the bus driver, dragging it out of the luggage bay. Paper’s heavy, I said, and he looked at me doubtfully.

In front of the post office were a couple of signposts pointing in various directions. I followed one little lane, which turned into a path crossing a steeply inclined meadow, and then down into a narrow wooded gully. At the edge of the wood were larches and oaks, the interior was all spruce. All over lay felled trees, dried-up skeleton pines, with a few last traces of snow under them. The ground was boggy, and my feet sank deeply into the black mulch. I repeatedly felt spiders’ webs catching on my face and hands. I saw no signs of other hikers, presumably I was the first this year.

After a while, I realized it was quite some time since I’d last seen a signpost, and sure enough, the path soon lost itself among the trees. I didn’t feel like turning around, so I headed down the slope, which grew steeper and steeper. In places I had to grab hold of roots or branches, once I slipped a few yards and tore my pants. The rushing of the stream below grew louder, and when I reached it, I found the path again. The stream was a rapid mountain brook, with gray water. Its broad bed of gravel and light-colored stones looked like an open wound cut into the dark of the rest of the landscape. I was making better headway now, and after about half an hour I came to a little boardwalk. The ground below the supports had been washed away, and a fallen tree had come to rest squarely across the boardwalk. The impact had sheared off the rails and smashed some of the planking. I cautiously made my way over it. On the far side of the ravine, the path climbed sharply up, and I started to sweat, even though the air in the forest was cool.

It wasn’t for another two hours till I saw the Kurhaus looming through the trees. Five minutes more and I was standing in front of an impressive art nouveau structure. The valley ground was already in shadow, but the hotel, standing a little higher, caught the full evening sun and was dazzling white. All the shutters except one on the ground floor were closed, there was no one to be seen, and only the rushing of the brook to be heard. The double doors at the front were open, and I walked in. The lobby was almost dark. Through the colored glass of the inner door panels a few rays of sun fell on the worn Persian rug covering the flagstones. The furniture was sheeted over.

Hallo-o, I called softly. There was no reply, and I walked through a pair of swing doors that had the words Dining Room over them in old-fashioned script. I found myself in a large room with two or three dozen wooden tables, all with upturned chairs on them. In the far corner of the room was an illuminated table with a woman sitting at it. Hallo-o, I called out, a little louder than before, and walked across the room toward her. Even before I got to her, she was standing up and coming to meet me with hand outstretched in greeting, saying, Welcome, my name is Ana, we spoke on the telephone.

She had to be about my age, dressed like a waitress in black skirt and white blouse, with sleek, shoulder-length black hair. I asked if the hotel was closed. Not anymore, she said, and smiled. On her table was a plate of ravioli, half-eaten. Just one moment, said the woman. She sat down and, gulping it down, finished her dinner. It didn’t seem to bother her that I was standing there watching her eat. I hadn’t had anything to eat since lunch, and was starting to feel hungry, but I wanted to go to my room first, shower, and get out of my clothes. When she belatedly gestured toward a chair, I sat down facing the woman. Tell me about your work, she said. I told her once again what I was doing here. She wiped her mouth on the napkin and asked, What do you find so interesting about that? I shrugged my shoulders and said, I had been invited to the conference. Gender studies was hot at the moment. And why always women? she asked. I said I didn’t know, I supposed men were less interesting. She took a sip of wine and washed down the last of her food. I’ll show you to your room now.

In the lobby she disappeared behind the front desk and rooted around inside it. After a while she pushed a pad across to me and asked me to fill in the form. I wrote in my details. When I turned the page to look up the last few entries, she took the pad from my hand and put it away. Would you mind paying in advance? I said that was fine. Seven days full board, she did the math, that makes four hundred and twenty francs, including tax. She took the bills from me and said she would give me the change later. And a receipt please, I said. She nodded, emerged from behind the desk, and walked toward the wide stone staircase. Only now did I notice that she was barefoot. I picked up my backpack and set off after her.

She was waiting for me on the second floor at the start of a long, gloomy passageway. Do you have any special requests? she asked. When I said I didn’t, she opened the very first door and said, Then why don’t you just take this one here? I stepped into the room, which was smallish and without much in the way of furniture, except a poorly made bed, a table and chair, and a dresser with an old china basin on it containing a jug full of water. The walls were whitewashed and bare, except for a crucifix hanging over the bed. I headed straight for the French window that opened onto a tiny balcony. You shouldn’t go out there, said Ana from the corridor. I asked her where she slept. What’s it to you? I just wondered. She looked at me crossly and said just because she was on her own here didn’t mean that I could walk all over her. I hadn’t had any ill intentions, and stared at her in surprise. I asked what time dinner was. She frowned, as though concentrating hard, then said I should just come when I was ready. Then she vanished, only to reappear briefly in the doorway and drop a set of sheets and a towel on the table beside me.

THE BATHROOM AND TOILETS were at the far end of the corridor. I got undressed and stood under the shower, but when I turned on the tap, there was nothing but a faint gurgle. The toilet didn’t flush either. I went back to my room in my underwear, and washed with water from the jug and put on some clean clothes. Then I went downstairs, but there was no sign of Ana. Opposite the dining room was a somewhat smaller room, with Ladies’ Saloon over the door. There were a few armchairs in it—sheeted as well—and a big pool table. There was a white ball and a couple of reds on the green baize, and a cue leaning on the table, as though someone had just been playing. The next room, called Smoking Room, seemed to function as a library. Most of the books were old and dusty, by authors I’d never heard of. Then there were a handful of classics, Dostoyevsky, Stendhal, Remarque, and in amongst them some tattered paperback American thrillers.

I went back out to the lobby and from there to the ballroom, which was bigger than all the others and completely empty, except for a rolled-up carpet. An old brass chandelier hung from the ceiling, which rested on fake marble pillars. It felt cool everywhere, and not much light came in through the closed shutters. In the kitchen downstairs it was even darker. There was a massive cast-iron stove that evidently ran on wood, and a sideboard loaded with dozens of used wineglasses and stacks of dirty plates, as though there had just been a banquet at the hotel. I went back up to the ground floor and then headed outside.

The shadows of the tall old pines that stood some distance away from the Kurhaus had grown a little longer by now, and were just grazing the white walls. I walked once around the building. On one side was a small graveled area with a few metal tables and folding chairs lying about, and some deck chairs. There I finally saw Ana. I sat down next to her and asked her how she was enjoying the last few rays of sunshine. It’s been a long winter, she said, without opening her eyes. I looked at her. She had unusually heavy eyebrows and a strong nose. Thin lips gave her face a hint of severity. Her legs were folded under her, and her skirt had ridden up a little. The top two buttons on her blouse were undone. I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that she was displaying herself to me on purpose. At that point she opened her eyes and ran her palm over her brow, as though to wipe away my gaze. I cleared my throat and said, The showers don’t work. Didn’t I tell you? And the toilet doesn’t flush either. You’ll just have to improvise, she said with a friendly smile, at least the snow has mostly gone by now. When does the season begin here? I asked. She said that depended on various factors. For a time we sat silently side by side, then she pulled herself up, straightened her clothes, and said, I thought you were looking for somewhere quiet to do some work. I’m not so sure about that anymore, I said, and when she stared at me questioningly, I wouldn’t mind getting something to eat. She said dinner was at seven, and she got up and left.

I WENT TO MY ROOM to try to do some work. Distracted by my hunger, I went out on the little balcony to smoke a cigarette. I remembered that Ana had warned me not to use it, but it looked sturdy enough, only the iron railings were corroded and in some places rusted through. The gorge was directly under my feet, and I could hear the loud rushing of the brook. When I turned, I saw Ana lying on the deck chair again, in the graveled area.

I was down in the lobby on the dot of seven. Shortly afterward, Ana came in from outside. Oh, it’s you, she said, you’d better come along. She led the way into the kitchen, lit an oil lamp, and led me into a small pantry stacked with cans of ravioli. Ravioli all right? she asked. Is that all you’ve got? Quickly she spun around, as though to see what the choices were, and then she listed them by heart anyway: Apple sauce, green beans, peas and carrots, tuna fish, artichoke hearts, and sweet corn. I said I’d take the ravioli. She reached down one of the cans and pressed it into my hand. Back in the kitchen, she showed me where to find silverware and plates, and handed me a can opener. Don’t lose it, we’ll be needing it. Is there anywhere I can heat it up? She furrowed her brow and said, Do you expect me to light the stove for the sake of that one single can? Anyway, I wouldn’t know how. What about some wine, then? I asked. She disappeared and came back with a bottle of Austrian white, which she set down in front of me. That’s extra, she said. Now enjoy your dinner, I’ll be upstairs.

She left me the lamp and walked confidently off into the darkness. I shook the cold ravioli out onto a plate and went upstairs to the dining room. It tasted truly awful, but at least it filled me up. I returned the empty plate to the kitchen and left it on the side, with the other dirty dishes. I thought about leaving, but by now it was too late. So I sat in the library to work, with my laptop and bottle of wine. I found an outlet, but there was no power. The light didn’t work either. Luckily my laptop battery was full. I read back over my talk and saw that it needed less work than I thought. I tried to concentrate on the text, but I was tired from the long walk, the wine, and the unfamiliar altitude, and I kept dropping off. At ten o’clock I stumbled upstairs to bed through the pitch dark building, without having seen Ana again.

I RAN INTO HER the following morning in the dining room with a plate of apple sauce in front of her. Help yourself, she said, and pointed to a big jar of the stuff on the table. I said I hadn’t managed to find a working outlet for my laptop and the lights weren’t working either, perhaps there was a fuse somewhere that had blown. We don’t have any power, said Ana, as though it was the most natural thing in the world. While I was still eating, she got up and left the room. A little later, I saw her disappearing between the trees with a towel and a roll of toilet paper.

My battery was dead, and seeing as I didn’t have a printout of my talk with me, there wasn’t much more I could do. I read around in Summer Folk and in Gorki’s correspondence, and jotted down a few notes, but it didn’t make much sense. The sensible thing would be to leave as soon as possible. But instead of packing and looking for Ana, I went into the Ladies’ Saloon and played billiards. At noon, there was a table laid for two in the dining room. No sooner had I sat down than Ana came in with a can of ravioli. I put it in the sun to warm it up a bit, she said. It didn’t seem to be any warmer than the day before. Don’t you like it? she asked.

I said I couldn’t do my work without electricity. She looked at me as if I was some kind of weakling and said, Surely you’ll find something to occupy yourself with. I have to hand in the manuscript in two weeks, I said. Why do people write such things, she said, who’s really interested? That’s not the point. I have a deadline, and I have to stick to it. She smiled mockingly and said, But you don’t even want to leave. Ana was right. I wanted to stay here, I didn’t know why, maybe it was for her sake. Don’t get your hopes up, she said, as though she’d read my mind.

FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS the weather remained fine, and I often lay out and dozed on one of the deck chairs. I read a lot, and played billiards or solitaire. Ana was around, but each time I asked if she wanted to play cards with me or practice cannons, she would shake her head and disappear. When I went into the library, I would find her sitting there, staring out the window. I pulled a book off a shelf at random and started reading. If I happened to get to a bit I liked, I would read it out loud, but Ana never seemed to be listening.

After the jug in my room was empty, I washed in the stream every morning, the way Ana did. I hung back in the dining room until she was finished, and then I headed out. I had found a good spot, where the banks were flat and the stream had a quiet flow. In the soft earth I saw traces of bare feet, and assumed it was the same spot that Ana used as well. When I dipped my head in the ice cold water, it felt as though it was exploding, but after that I would feel refreshed for the entire morning. Only the noise of the rushing brook was starting to bother me a little. There was nowhere you could avoid it, even inside the hotel you could hear it everywhere. I kept thinking of Ana, the whole day we circled one another restlessly, to the point that I was often unsure who was tracking whom.

She didn’t cook and she didn’t clean, I even had to make my own bed. The only services she performed were opening cans and setting the table. One time I remarked that I wasn’t exactly getting my money’s worth. Ana’s face darkened in a scowl. She said it would be better if I stopped wasting time on Maxim Gorki and started thinking about my own attitude toward women. That has nothing to do with it, I said, surely you can at least expect running water and electricity in a hotel. You’re getting much more than that, Ana snapped back. I didn’t know what she meant, but I was careful to stay off the subject in future.

I tried to imagine what the place would be like with visitors in summer, with the dining room packed, someone playing the piano, and children running up and down the corridors, but I couldn’t manage it.

The stack of dirty plates in the kitchen grew. One time I counted them. If Ana used three plates a day, then she must have been here all winter. I asked her if she was some kind of housekeeper. If you like, she said. I didn’t believe her, but by then it was a matter of some indifference to me why she was here.

FOR LUNCH WE usually ate tuna with artichoke hearts, in the evening we lit a fire outside and heated a can of ravioli on a stone. The sun left the valley early and it got cold quickly, but even so we sat by the fire a long time in the evening, drinking wine. We had barely exchanged a word all day, and while Ana wasn’t any more talkative than before, she did at least listen to me. I didn’t feel like talking about myself, I didn’t want to think about my home life, which seemed remote and irrelevant. So I started telling her about Summer Folk. She responded to the various characters as if they were real people: she got annoyed with Olga for complaining all the time and called the engineer Suslov a bastard. Varvara and her ravings about the writer Shalimov left her cold. How could she fall for such a man, she said indignantly, he’s just a bad seducer. What would a good seducer be like, then? I asked. He would have to be honest to the woman and himself, said Ana, and shook her head disapprovingly. Her favorite was Maria Lvovna. I knew the famous monologue from Act IV pretty much by heart, and was asked to recite it several times by Ana. We are summer folk in our country, we’ve traveled here from somewhere. We bustle about, look for some comfortable niche in life, we do nothing and we talk all the time. Yes, said Ana, we all need to change. We need to do it for our own sakes, too, I said, so that we don’t feel our awful solitude so much. Ana looked at me suspiciously, and said I wasn’t to start getting any ideas. You would fit well into the play, I said. In a letter, Gorki said all his female characters hate men and all his men are rotters. Then you would fit into the play yourself, said Ana. By the flickering firelight I couldn’t be sure of her expression.

I never found out where Ana slept. When we went back inside at night, each of us with an oil lamp, she said I should go on ahead, she would be along in a while. Once I waited for her in the corridor outside my room. I had turned my lamp off, and listened in the darkness for a long time, but I couldn’t hear anything, and in the end I just went to bed.

Half dreaming, I imagined Ana coming into my room. In the middle of the night I awoke and saw her silhouette in the pale moonlight. She got undressed, pulled aside the covers, and climbed on top of me. It all happened in complete silence, the only thing that could be heard was the distant rushing of the brook through the thin windows. Ana was rough with me, or perhaps I should say she treated me like an object she needed for a particular end, but for which she had no particular regard. When she had satisfied her hunger, she left, without a word passing between us.

IN THE MORNING, as usual, Ana was already sitting at the breakfast table when I walked into the dining room. Not really thinking what I was doing, I stroked her hair on my way to my seat. She gave a jump and cringed. I tried to start a conversation, but Ana didn’t answer, and only looked at me with a grim expression, as though she knew about my dream. As she always did, she gulped down her food and got up as soon as her plate was empty.

After breakfast I browsed through some illustrated volumes in the library, and later I went along to the Ladies Saloon and knocked billiard balls around. There was no sign of Ana, and she didn’t come in for lunch either. I ate downstairs in the kitchen, and then I went back up to the library and started reading one of the American thrillers. In the early afternoon I heard a car outside. When I looked out the window, I saw a couple of men getting out of an old Volvo in the driveway. For a moment I thought of hiding somewhere, but then I just stayed put and went on with my book. It was maybe an hour later, and I had just thrown aside my thriller in irritation, when the double doors swung open and the two men walked in. They looked at me in amazement, and one of them—not replying to my greeting—asked me what I thought I was doing. I’m reading, I said. And how did you get in? asked the man. Through the door, I said, and got up. I’m a guest at the hotel. The Kurhaus has been closed since last autumn, said the man. The owner has gone bankrupt. The hotel is going under the hammer next month.

And then he introduced himself, his name was Lorenz and he was the official receiver in the next-door community. The other man was a prospective buyer, an investor by the name of Schwab, who already owned a few other hotels in the area. I told them about Ana, and went to the lobby with them, and in a drawer behind the front desk retrieved the guests’ register with my own entry. Even so, the receiver remained suspicious. Had I not suspected anything was amiss? he asked. A hotel with no running water and no electricity. True, he hadn’t canceled the telephone, how was he to know that someone was going to squat in the building? I didn’t say anything, what could I have said? And where is this enigmatic woman? he asked. I said she would be here at seven, seven was when we always had dinner. The receiver looked at me doubtfully, and said he would be grateful if I would pack my things. I would be able to get a ride with them later. They would take another hour or hour and a half to finish what they were doing. I said I had paid until tomorrow, but he didn’t respond, and said to the investor that he would now show him the basement floor. I went up to my room to pack.

When I was done, I climbed up to the higher floors for the first time since I was here. They looked exactly like the one I was staying on. I opened the doors to all the rooms, but none showed any sign of occupation. From the top floor, a narrow staircase led up to the attic, which was crammed full of old furniture, Christmas decorations, cardboard boxes full of envelopes and toilet paper. A stack of straw wreaths lay next to an old sign with Yuletide Ball written among painted icicles. I found a dozen horn sleighs and big dusty Chianti bottles, but no sign of Ana. Even so, from the time I started searching the building for her, I had the feeling she was around, and would pop up somewhere at any moment.

After I had searched the whole building without finding anything, I sat down in one of the chairs in the lobby, not bothering to pull off the sheet. Eventually the two men emerged from the dining room. Herr Lorenz had a paper roll under one arm. He looked at his watch and made a gesture of impatience. Six o’clock, he said to his companion, I don’t want to keep you any longer. If you want to wait, replied Herr Schwab, I’m not in any particular hurry. I’m curious about this woman myself. He turned to me and said, surely I knew where they kept the wine, and couldn’t I bring up a bottle for us? I’ll do that, said Lorenz quickly, and vanished downstairs. What do you think of the place? asked the investor, is it bearable? He wasn’t quite sure himself. Two bankruptcies in short order didn’t exactly bode well, but perhaps it had just been badly run.

We sat in the dining room, and drank the bottle of Austrian white that Lorenz had brought up. At a quarter past seven, Schwab said he didn’t think the woman would appear, presumably she had seen the car parked outside and had panicked. If she even exists, said Lorenz. She exists, I said. Lorenz nodded and said, It’s all right, I believe you. We sat fifteen minutes more. The receiver locked the door, and said he would send the police up here tomorrow, to keep an eye on the place. While we drove down the valley on the winding road, I thought about Ana, and wondered what she would do now, what she would eat, where she would spend the night. I was certain that it wasn’t the car that had frightened her away, but me, with my thoughtless contact that morning.

I spent the night in a little bed-and-breakfast that the receiver recommended. In the morning I went home. I had a week left to finish my paper, and I worked hard on it for the next few days, often thinking of Ana. Only now did I understand what she meant in saying that what I got from her was much more than electricity and water. After I had sent in my contribution, I called the receiver. It took him a moment to place me, then he said the police had been up to the hotel and looked everywhere, but apart from the empty cans and the dirty plates, they had found no sign of a woman anywhere.

The Natural Way of Things

I’M NOT SAYING they tricked us, said Alice, but they didn’t tell us the truth. That’s what always happens, said Niklaus with a sigh, and he put a finger in the pages of the guidebook he had been browsing. It’s always different from what you imagine. You mean, it’s always different from the way the travel agents describe it, said Alice, and it’s always worse. Whatever, said Niklaus. They had had this conversation at least five times since they got here. Alice had expected the rental to be bigger, better equipped, and with a better-kept garden. She expected life to be different, thought Niklaus, that’s the problem, no sagging sofas or grimy ovens. And the oven is filthy, said Alice. Five minutes to the beach! she said with a sarcastic laugh. You hardly ever use the oven, said Niklaus. And as for whether it’s five or eight minutes to the beach, what difference does it make, we’re on vacation. Of course it wasn’t just about the five minutes. It was about Alice feeling cheated, duped, and about Niklaus being passive and not sticking up for her. You let them get away with anything, she said. He changed the subject. What do you think about driving to Siena?

ORIGINALLY, SIENA WAS an Etruscan settlement, said Niklaus. Under the Romans its name was changed to Sena. The high point of its development was in the thirteenth century. That was when the university was founded and the town hall built.

Trying to avoid the hordes of tourists, they had gone down little alleyways and had gotten lost. Niklaus was reluctant to take out the little map in the guidebook, even though it was obvious to anyone that they were tourists. When he finally did, they had long since left the historic district and were standing on a busy traffic street that wasn’t featured on the map. Normal life, he said. Makes an interesting change, don’t you think? But Alice had seen everything she wanted to see, the Palazzo Publico, the Art Museum, the Campo, and the Cathedral. Normal life was something she could see at home. Now her feet were hurting, and the rain could begin again at any moment. You don’t have a clue where we are, do you? I think, said Niklaus, turning the map in his hands, we must be somewhere around here. Alice hailed a taxi. It didn’t even slow down.

On the way back, Alice moaned about the tourists choking the old town, just to buy a few ugly souvenirs. They had no idea of the treasures in the museums or the beauty of the architecture. If you don’t know something, how can you have any feeling for it? she said. You don’t know what they’re looking for, said Niklaus, I expect they’ll derive some good from it, otherwise why would they all have come here? They come because they come, said Alice. And when they return home, they’ll go on about the toilets being dirty or clean. And the food expensive or cheap. That’s what life is reduced to for them, eating and excreting. She laughed bitterly. I know, you’re right, said Niklaus. He was sorry he’d suggested the outing.

THE NEXT DAY it rained buckets. Alice and Niklaus read all morning. When the rain eased up around noon, they went to the beach, but it was full of noisy families and games of beach volleyball. They hadn’t been there long when it started raining again. Alice handed Niklaus his umbrella and put up her own. They watched the bathers hurriedly packing their things and racing past them laughing to take shelter under the awning of the beach restaurant. Serves them right, said Alice. Her mood seemed to have brightened slightly.

On the way back they shopped for groceries at a little store on the main strip. Afterward, on the street, Alice made fun of the other customers who had addressed the storekeeper in loud German and seemed perplexed that he didn’t understand. They could at least learn pane and prosciutto and hello and thank you.

Outside the cottage next to theirs was a shiny black SUV with tinted windows and Stuttgart plates. The trunk stood open. On the road were suitcases and bags, a kid’s bike and a tricycle. A man emerged from the house and walked toward them. Alice greeted him in Italian. The man didn’t reply. Perhaps he didn’t hear you, said Niklaus as they crossed the garden into their own house. Alice shrugged her shoulders. I only hope the kids make as little noise.

Inside it felt humid, and there was a smell of old furniture and cold cigarette smoke. There should be a law against smoking in vacation villas, said Alice. If the chimney worked, we could at least have a fire. They got the quilts out of the bedroom and spent the afternoon on the sofa reading.

OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS they didn’t really get to see much of their new neighbors. The weather had cleared, and when Alice and Niklaus had their breakfast on the terrace in front of the house, the SUV was already gone, and they didn’t see it until they returned from dinner at the end of the day, and there were lights on next door. Alice and Niklaus hadn’t so much as laid eyes on the woman and children. Maybe they don’t exist, suggested Niklaus. Once they spent all day in the hills, touring wine estates, and bought a lot of wine and olive oil. When they returned at around five o’clock, the black Hummer again wasn’t there, but an attractive young woman was lying in a deck chair in the garden. She had on a skimpy flowered bikini and was doing sudokus. Buona sera, said Alice, but the woman didn’t respond any more than her husband had a few days earlier. After Niklaus and Alice had freshened up, they went out into the garden too, to read before dinner. No sooner had they sat down than their neighbors’ car pulled up, and the man and two small children got out and went into the garden. Niklaus saw the man bend over the woman in the deck chair and give her a kiss, before vanishing inside. The children didn’t greet their mother, they had been quarreling as they stepped out of the car and were still bickering over something or other. The mother seemed to have no intention of intervening. She lay on her deck chair, puzzling over her numbers. Once, with an angry hissing tone and in broadest Swabian, she called out, Cut it out, the pair of you, but she didn’t even look up, and the quarrel went on as heatedly as before.

Alice lowered her newspaper and looked up at the sky. Niklaus pretended to be engrossed in his book. After a while, she threw it down and went inside. Niklaus waited a moment, then followed her. He found her sitting at the living room table, staring into space. He sat down opposite her, but she avoided his gaze. She was breathing fast, and suddenly she fell into a furious sobbing. Niklaus went around the table and stood behind her. He thought of laying his hand on her shoulder or stroking her hair, but in the end he only said, Just imagine if they were our children.

Alice had never wanted children. When Niklaus found that out, his first reaction had been relief, and he saw that it was only convention in him that had assumed he would one day start a family. On the occasions they had talked about it, it had been to assure each other that they had come to the right decision. Perhaps there’s something wrong with me, said Alice with a complacent expression, but I find children boring and annoying. Perhaps I have a wrong gene somewhere. They both worked hard and enjoyed their work, Alice in customer service at a bank, Niklaus as an engineer. If they had had children, one of them would have had to sacrifice his career, and that was something neither of them was prepared to do. They traveled to exotic countries, had been on a trekking holiday in Nepal and a cruise to the Antarctic. They often went to concerts and plays, and they went out a lot. All that would have been impossible with children. But sometimes Niklaus wondered if having a family might entail not just a loss of freedom, but perhaps a certain gain as well, perhaps he and Alice might have been more independent of each other, without the exclusivity of love and irritation.

Alice had grown up as an only child, while Niklaus’s siblings had no children themselves, so he and Alice knew only other adults. When friends of theirs came to have children, they usually lost contact soon after. If families came to visit, Niklaus and Alice were usually tense and impatient, and reacted clumsily to the clumsy efforts of the children to make friends. Then Niklaus would feel ashamed of himself. He had never regretted not having children, but sometimes he regretted that he had never even felt the desire to have any.

FROM NOW ON, the Stuttgarters were often in their garden. Half the time the children would be squabbling, and the rest of the time they contrived to be just as noisy. The older of the two was a girl of about six. Every so often, for no evident reason, she liked to issue a piercing scream. Her brother was maybe half her age. He was capable of keeping himself amused for fully a quarter of an hour at a time by bashing two objects together. He would only stop when his father yelled at him. Then the mother would yell at her husband, and he would shout loudly back. The coarse dialect didn’t exactly improve matters. At other times Niklaus would see through the shrubbery between the two properties how the man knelt in the grass beside the woman in her deck chair, and rubbed her with tanning lotion. She would have her bikini top off, and he was kneading away at her breasts, seemingly unconcerned whether anyone could see him. Eventually the two of them would disappear, and a quarter of an hour later, Niklaus would hear one or another of the children banging on the front door, calling for the parents.

Alice could stand the noise for ten minutes at most. A few days later, the mere sight of the neighbors in their garden made her turn on her heel. They took their meals indoors now, when they didn’t go to the local trattoria. Niklaus would propose trips, but Alice turned them all down. She was at war, and had to guard the terrain. Why don’t you say something? she demanded. Niklaus looked blank and shrugged his shoulders. What can I say? If they were playing music outside, or making noise at night, then I could complain. I can’t tell them not to talk. Children can’t help being noisy. A rotten upbringing isn’t punishable. Common is what they are, said Alice, and Niklaus nodded thoughtfully.

WHEN NIKLAUS WAS SITTING alone on the terrace, he would catch himself repeatedly looking across to the neighbors’ garden. The woman lay out on her deck chair all day long, doing her puzzles. She had taken to sunning herself topless. She had small firm breasts that reminded Niklaus of those of the Polynesian women in Gauguin’s paintings. He felt a desperate desire to go over and touch them.

Sometimes the man would take the children to the beach, and Niklaus would prowl restlessly around the property, imagining how he might get into conversation with the woman. He would make some casual remark, and she would ask him where he was from. Oh, Switzerland, we only ever drive through it. Then she would realize the laundry was still in the machine. She would put on her top and he would follow her inside, where it was cool and quiet. She would look him long in the eye. Well, what about it? she would say, and take him by the hand.

When Niklaus turned around he saw Alice standing at the window. She seemed to be observing him. He went inside. Alice hadn’t stirred, she was still standing by the window, as though he were still outside. He laid one hand on her shoulder; she tried to shrug it off, but he wouldn’t let her, and spun her around to face him, and kissed her. It took a while before Alice responded, and after a bit she freed herself, and said with a sarcastic laugh that the laundry must be finished. Niklaus followed her into the little room off the kitchen where the washing machine stood and watched as she took out their clothes, giving each individual item a shake. He followed her into the garden and helped her hang up the wet clothes. She kept the underthings separate, and draped them indoors on a little rack, as she did at home. I have the feeling nothing gets properly dry here, she said. Her voice sounded softer than usual. That’ll be on account of the high humidity, said Niklaus. And they don’t get properly clean either, said Alice. This time she didn’t resist when Niklaus kissed her.

THEY LAY SIDE BY SIDE in silence. Alice had covered herself with a sheet, even though it was hot. Her expression kept changing, switching among the most diverse feelings: surprise, mockery, tenderness, grief. She seemed unable to decide on any one of them. Niklaus tucked his hand under the sheet and stroked her breasts, which were satin soft and had grown fuller over time. They hadn’t slept together in ages, in fact he couldn’t remember the last time. If you think …, he began, and stopped. Alice turned to him quickly, smiled affectionately, and looked away again. He wanted to talk about what had just happened, wanted to use the intimacy of the half hour to influence the day ahead of them, but in the end he just asked Alice what she felt like doing. Should we drive somewhere? She said she was hungry, but to Niklaus it was as though she had said, That felt so good. We still are a couple. I’m glad. We could have something to eat in town, he suggested. No, said Alice, I feel faint, I need something right away. She took a deep breath and stood up. For a moment she remained standing by the bed, looking down at Niklaus. He liked lying in front of her like that, naked and relaxed and vulnerable. Alice often made comments about his weight, and he knew she went for slimly built men, but she was looking at him with devotion. I’ll just have a quick shower, she said. Niklaus got up too. He heard cries from outside. He went over to the window and saw the Stuttgarters evidently on their way to the beach, weighed down with bags and inflatable toys and a cooler. All four of them had on colored clogs and ridiculous sunglasses, the mother had put on a skimpy beach dress and the father was in shorts and a T-shirt with BABEWATCH on it in big letters.

IN THE AFTERNOON Alice and Niklaus set out on a trip for the first time in almost a week. They were going to the nature reserve, not far from their village. They were most of the way there when Alice realized she had left the binoculars behind, so they turned back.

Only a few of the parking spots at the visitors’ center were taken. With this heat, everyone was at the beach—who but they would think of going birding? They followed a dusty gravel path, with bushes on one side and a narrow creek on the other, toward a wood. Niklaus felt tired from lunch and he was sweating, but he was in good spirits, whistling away to himself. Alice didn’t speak much, not even to complain about the heat. When they reached the wood, it was barely any cooler than it had been out in the open. Niklaus kept stopping to consult a brochure about the reserve he had found in their house. If we keep heading in this direction we should reach the sea in half an hour or so.

In fact it was an hour later when they finally reached the sea. Alice kept herself to a few ironic remarks about Niklaus’s sense of direction. There were supposed to be nightingales in the park, but they didn’t see anything except a common buzzard and a few gray herons and moorhens on a pond.

There were lots of pieces of driftwood on the sand, limbs, sometimes whole trees, worn smooth by the wind and the waves and bleached silver by the sun. Alice took her shoes off and paddled in her bare feet. Do you fancy a dip? asked Niklaus. Alice looked at him questioningly. I’m sure there’s no one around.

They quickly undressed and ran into the water. They were both excited, and kept glancing around at the shore. Imagine if someone steals our clothes, said Niklaus. Then we’ll have to stay in the woods, said Alice, and eat berries and hunt wild boar. And I’ll break into remote farmhouses at night, and steal eggs and the odd bottle of Chianti, said Niklaus.

After their swim they lay in the sun to dry, then they brushed the sand off each other. Alice giggled when she saw Niklaus had an erection. Not that as well, she said. She left her hand on his thigh a moment, as though thinking about something, but then she got dressed.

It was getting dark when they returned to the visitors’ center, their car was the last one in the parking lot. Since they didn’t feel like cooking, they thought they would have a bite in town. It was midnight before they got back. Next door, the lights were still on.

THE FOLLOWING DAY Alice and Niklaus had breakfast outside. There was no sound from next door. They spent the entire morning reading. It was quiet. The SUV was out on the street, their neighbors had to be home, but they didn’t put in an appearance in the garden, not even in the afternoon. Maybe someone complained, said Alice, or maybe they’ve got food poisoning, and they’re all lying in bed with stomachaches. The silence didn’t seem quite real to her, she kept looking up from her book. Just be glad, said Niklaus. I never said they had to shut themselves away in the house, said Alice, of course kids need to run around and let off steam. It’s just a matter of how they do it. At one point a man in a suit showed up on the property and went inside; a little later he went away again. Later on another man came, but he didn’t stay long either.

I wish it was always this way, said Alice when things continued quiet the next day. They sat in the garden and played Scrabble. Alice had brought the dictionary from home so that they could look up any contentious words, but there were none. They both seemed a little distracted. Once, Niklaus saw someone walking past the windows next door, but he couldn’t quite make out who it was. I keep thinking about them, said Alice, it’s almost as though they were less intrusive when they were noisy. At least I could tune it out.

In the late afternoon they went down to the beach. They rubbed each other’s backs with sunscreen, and Niklaus felt as though Alice’s touch had changed since they had slept together, not more tender perhaps, but more aware. He too took his time about it, and noticed how Alice liked it when he pressed his fingertips against her spine and over her shoulder blades. It looks as though the vacation has turned out all right after all, she said. One week of rain, one week of fine weather, said Niklaus, I don’t think we can complain. Do we need anything? Bread and prosciutto, said Alice, we’ve still got some cheese. And something for tomorrow. I feel like cooking. Do you have money on you?

THE SHOPKEEPER, who usually greeted them boisterously, today merely nodded and mumbled something. Wonder what got into him, said Alice, filling up their basket. Olives? she asked, holding up a jar of black olives. Niklaus nodded, and went over to the wine section, to look at the prices and compare them with what they had been quoted at the estates. When he turned, he saw Alice standing at the meat and cheese counter. The shopkeeper was jabbering away to her. Niklaus went outside and read the headlines of the German newspapers on the rack. A moment later, Alice came out of the store, looking upset. She walked off, not turning to look for him. He caught up to her in a few quick strides and asked what the matter was. That little boy is dead, she said, the father ran him over. He was backing up into the road, and didn’t see him behind him. They walked silently back to their vacation home. Niklaus put the shopping away. Alice stood leaning against the kitchen table, watching him. What shall we do? she asked, when he had finished. There’s nothing we can do, said Niklaus, we don’t even know their names. We could ask them if they need anything, said Alice. It must have happened the day we spent at the nature reserve. The shopkeeper said the father’s cries could be heard all over town. I’m glad we weren’t here then, said Niklaus, and he felt rather cowardly. That evening, they ate standing up in the kitchen.

• • •

WHEN NIKLAUS AWOKE, it was just getting light. He checked his watch, it was a few minutes past five. Alice was gone. He found her in the living room. There was no light on, and she was by the window in her nightgown. When he came in, she quickly turned to him and then looked away again. He came up behind her and laid his hands on her shoulders. For a while they stood there in silence, and then Alice said, They’re leaving. Only now did Niklaus see that the back of the black SUV was open. Look, said Alice, and Niklaus saw the man from Stuttgart coming through the garden carrying a suitcase that seemed to be very heavy. Together they watched him come and go a few more times. Last of all, he carried the damaged tricycle to the car. He could find no room for it, and pulled out some of the already packed things, looked at everything in bewilderment, and packed everything back in. Then he went into the house.

Maybe that’s why I never wanted to have children, said Alice very quietly. Because I was afraid of losing them. We’re bound to lose each other sometime anyway, said Niklaus. That’s not the same thing, said Alice, that’s in the natural way of things.

Niklaus went into the kitchen to put on the coffee. Then he heard Alice calling him. He went to her, and put his arm round her bony shoulders. Now! she breathed, as though something long-awaited was at last happening, and she pointed. The man had left the house again, he was supporting the woman who walked beside him with slumped shoulders and lowered head, leading their daughter by the hand. The woman was wearing a heavy wool sweater over her summer dress. The man walked her to the car and helped her get in, as though she were handicapped or very old. The little girl stood quietly next to the rear door, until the father came around for her, and carefully strapped her into the child seat. Last of all, he got in himself. Through the window, they heard the engine start, then the headlights were switched on, and the car rolled very slowly away.

Niklaus heard the coffee machine spluttering in the kitchen, but he didn’t pay it any attention. He pulled off his pajama bottoms and drew Alice to him by the hips. Urgently he raised her nightie and reached a hand up between her legs. They made love standing up, more forcefully than a few days before. Alice didn’t say a word, he was hardly aware of her breathing.

Holy Sacrament

REINHOLD STOOD BY the window, looking out. A couple of men were walking by, and instinctively he took a step back. If he was honest, he was afraid of the people here, they were so moody and sullen. Their coarse language repelled him, and their humor shocked him. His predecessor had been like them, a rough, noisy man who went out drinking with his flock on Saturday night and preached to them on Sunday.

When Reinhold took the job a year ago, he had been full of good intentions. He had looked forward to the move to Lake Constance, and thought people in the south would be more open. He had been mistaken. Whatever he turned his hand to had failed. All sorts of things were held against him, the use of bread instead of wafers for Communion, and grape juice in place of wine, altogether the way that he didn’t officiate in the style they were familiar with here. Word was that he neglected the elderly of the parish, while the fact that he was on first-name terms with the confirmands put a few more noses out of joint. He had wrecked things with the lady organist because he let his wife play guitar in the service a couple of times, and with the sexton because he kept too close an eye on the books.

Reinhold drew the curtains and went next door. Brigitte was watching TV. He had stopped telling her about his troubles, she was finding it hard enough to make the adjustment, and becoming a minister’s wife was never her idea. He sat down next to her on the sofa. On the TV there was a little boy who claimed to be able to “read” the letters in alphabet soup with his mouth. Brigitte laughed. Isn’t he something? Reinhold said nothing, he knew what was on her mind.

He lay there in the dark, unable to sleep. He could hear the TV in the living room. He asked himself what he might have done wrong. He had reached out to people, explained himself, and, at moments, been conciliatory. But all that seemed only to whip up the people against him even more. He no longer had the strength to fight, and barely enough to do his job. There was a time when the Sunday service had been the high point of his week, now he dreaded the stony faces and the cold silence with which his parish met him. When he read the Bible, its verses no longer spoke to him, and when he stood in the pulpit, he felt nothing but embarrassment. Twice already he had canceled worship because he was lying in bed with cramps.

THE ALARM WENT OFF at seven, Brigitte must have forgotten to adjust it for Sunday. When Reinhold leaned over her to turn it off, she awoke. She asked him if he minded if she didn’t come to church today. She wasn’t feeling well.

Reinhold shivered when he pulled off his pajamas in the bathroom. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the reflection of his pale, stringy body. Hurriedly he turned away and got under the shower. Over coffee, he went over his sermon once more. He would speak on Romans 9. Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?

Then, still far too early, he set off. It was cold and damp. The area had been fogbound for weeks, and the forecast was for more of the same. No one was out and about at this time, only a few tousled seagulls pecked around in the overflowing trash cans in the little pedestrian precinct. The church was still locked. Reinhold was relieved not to have run into anyone. He walked down the dark nave to the vestry. There was an electric heater there, but still it was so cold he could see his breath. Reinhold pulled on his surplice, and read the Luther prayer that one of his predecessors must have pinned on the wardrobe door. O Lord God, dear Father in heaven, I am indeed unworthy of the office and ministry in which I am to make known Thy glory and to nurture and serve this congregation. But Reinhold didn’t even feel unworthy. He sat there, brooding, until he happened to hear the church door fall shut, and a few minutes later a few random notes from the organ. For a long time his only communications with the lady organist had been via email, and the sexton did his job in silence and without looking at him. Reinhold’s hands were stiff with cold. He started marching up and down, to get his blood moving. His predecessor had been in the habit of greeting his congregation at the door, but Reinhold needed these moments of silence, and he only entered the nave during the organ prelude. That, too, was taken amiss.

When he heard the organ, he cleared his throat, gave a little tug at his surplice, and emerged from the vestry. With rapid strides and eyes lowered, he went to his place behind the pulpit and sat down in such a way that the congregation could see him in profile. When the organ finished, he waited a moment for the last echo to die away, then he stood up and walked behind the altar, where the bread and grape juice were standing along with two lighted candles. The church was empty.

It took a moment for Reinhold to grasp the fact. No one had come to Communion. Only the sexton was standing by the mixing console, and up in the loft was the organist, with her back to him. He was sure she was watching him in the little rearview mirror that was fitted up there. He breathed deeply, then he said, Peace be with you. Let us pray. He hesitated, as though waiting while the congregation got to their knees, then he spoke the prayer as he did any other Sunday. Amen, he heard himself say. Let us sing Hymn 127, verses one through three. No sooner had he spoken than the organist began to play, her slight body and head in vigorous motion, though her playing lacked feeling and lacked love. The sexton stood there, holding his unopened hymnal in both hands. Dearest Jesus, speak to us. Reinhold sang loudly, though his voice cracked. If at least Brigitte were here, he thought, but maybe it was better that she wasn’t, to experience this final humiliation.

At the end of the second verse, the organ suddenly stopped, and Reinhold saw the organist get up and leave. Now there was only his own voice to be heard, and the footfall of the organist, hurriedly and not at all discreetly clambering down the narrow flight of steps from the loft. She stopped in front of the sexton, whispered something to him, then slipped on the coat she had been carrying over her arm and left the church. The sexton followed her out, and the door crashed shut.

Dear Jesus, when to you we come in need, allow our prayers to succeed. The last words echoed away in the empty space. Reinhold waited for complete silence, then he leafed through the big Bible to the text for this Sunday, and began to read from the Epistle to the Romans. I say the truth in Christ, I lie not. He stumbled and had to cough. He took a sip of grape juice from the eucharist and continued. I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart. For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ.

He had meant to speak on the relations between Christians and Jews, on developments in the Middle East, and on quarrels and reconciliations in general, but now he felt like the boy on TV yesterday, as though he had to laboriously spell out every word, every letter. After the reading he prayed and sang once more. Then he called out, as loud as he could, We are all invited to share in the holy sacrament. And suddenly he felt as though he could see the church full of people, full of the shadows of those who for hundreds of years had celebrated Mass, had been baptized and married here and been given comfort as they lay dying. They arose, they came to him, and he gave them the bread and the wine, an endless stream of humanity. At that moment a bright ray of sunshine fell through the stained-glass windows of the church, and the space was transformed, becoming an explosion of light. The beams cracked and the organ boomed, it sounded like mighty breathing, an awakening from a long sleep.

Reinhold felt the blood shooting to his head. He took the basket with the bread, and he proceeded down the aisle and out of the church. The fog had begun to lift, in one or two places there was a glimpse of blue sky and in the east the sun lit up the earth, as it had on the very first day. In the square in front of the church, various community members stood in little groups. They seemed to have been waiting for him, perhaps the lady organist or the sexton, who were also standing there, had alerted them. Even Brigitte was there.

Reinhold walked up to them and held the basket aloft. The staff of life, he cried out. The people looked at him with hostility and shrank away. Then Reinhold heard a mewing cry, and raising his head, saw a gull hovering in the air above him. He took a piece of bread from the basket and threw it up, and with a tiny flick of its wing, the gull leaned forward and caught it in its beak. It flew so close to his head that he could feel the draft of its wings. And suddenly he was mobbed by a whole flock of seagulls. He threw bread around in gay abandon, and finally flung the whole empty basket into the air. All are invited, he shouted merrily. The seagulls’ mewing sounded like crazed laughter, and Reinhold too was moved to laugh; in fact, he couldn’t stop laughing, for at the end of many weeks of darkness, he finally saw the light.

In the Forest

THE HUNTER MUST get into position very early in the morning. By the time Anja is awake, he’s already there. He keeps very still, and he is so far away that she can only just make him out, but even so, she has a sense of knowing him and being close to him. All day she thinks about him. When she zips herself into her sleeping bag at night, she imagines him approaching her sleeping place, to watch over her while she sleeps. His gaze is calm and friendly. He picks up her clothes, sniffs them, as though looking to find a scent. Then quietly he takes off, climbs up the ladder into his high stand, and waits.

Even before the sun reaches Anja, she is woken by the confused singing of many birds. She lies there a moment longer, looks secretly across to the high stand, and sees the hunter sitting there, and her heart starts to beat faster. She takes a little more time in the mornings now, and risks getting to school late. She notices herself moving more consciously, and she feels her body’s beauty and freshness, as though it were she observing it and not he. She is in her underwear, but she is in no hurry to get dressed. She stretches, combs her hair, squats down to wet her hands in the dew, and looks around, as though she were seeing the forest for the first time. She hums a tune and wonders if the hunter can hear her. It’s a shy form of courtship. Because all the time Anja knows she would run off if he left his stand and took so much as a single step in her direction.

I LIVED IN THE FOREST for three years, that’s the most Anja will say on the subject, even years later. It was no secret, even the children knew, but at that time it was grownups who were asking questions that Anja didn’t want to answer, couldn’t answer. The school psychologist was asking them, after she’d been found. Why? Others gave answers for her: a broken home, father and mother both violent and both alcoholics, often disappearing for days on end. No, Anja said, this has got nothing to do with my parents. No one could understand that she wasn’t running away from something, but toward something.

When she looked out of the kitchen window at the wooded hill on the other side of the expressway, she didn’t feel anything. You could only feel the forest when you were in it. That was the thing that made it so special, the way you could step into it as if into a room. You needed to be in it to be able to absorb it and be absorbed by it. She didn’t go into the forest much anymore, and people didn’t understand that either if they happened to know her story, and took her for some kind of forest creature. She didn’t pick mushrooms, she didn’t watch birds or animals, she didn’t know more names of trees than other people. Nor was she one of those bleeding hearts who got agitated about every tree that was cut down. On the contrary, it was a relief to see how people dominated the forest, which sometimes seemed to her like a disease, something that proliferated and spread. Only the noise of chain saws still bothered her, because back then it signified the threat of being found. The routes taken by the foresters were less predictable than those of the hikers, the joggers, and even the hunters, who had their fixed places that they liked to drive up to, if they could, in their pickup trucks. But over time, Anja noticed that the lumberjacks didn’t proceed without a plan either, and that they tackled a forest a piece at a time. Once or twice, because of that, she had to move camp, which was bothersome but not threatening.

All this was twenty years ago. In the meantime she had trained as a bookseller, had worked, married, had two children. What was left of her old self were memories and a sensitivity, an alertness, that Marco mistook for nervousness.

THERE WAS ALWAYS SOMEONE Anja was trying to catch up to, her parents, her school friends, dream characters she didn’t know and who still seemed to be somehow familiar to her. She was always running after people, in the certainty she wouldn’t be able to catch them. Anja wanted to be quicker, but it was as though her limbs were lead, and the air was a viscous soup that required a violent exertion for each movement. She sought to free herself, but that only made the invisible bonds tighten around her. Then she woke up, her forehead burning, her pajamas soaked in sweat. The screaming had awoken her, it was two in the morning. Anja pulled the covers over her head, but she could still hear the screams, hear things being knocked over, the crash of the front door. Often she was all alone in the apartment in the morning. The door was ajar. On the floor lay the wreckage of whatever had fallen over in the night, a sort of still life with destroyed objects.

School was the only secure place. Where Anja liked best to be was in the physics lab on the lower ground floor, with its dim light and metallic smell, or in the library, among the tightly packed shelves full of the past. When the library was closed, she hung around the school grounds until it grew dark. The worst weren’t the shouts or the blows. The worst was coming home, and no one there. The expectation, the certainty, practically, that they would arrive sometime in the night.

YOU HAVE TO LEARN to live without expectations, that’s the only way of getting by. Patience by itself isn’t enough, because in fact nothing happens. In the forest there is no future and no past, everything there is either instantaneous or takes place over periods that cannot be measured in mere years. Sometimes Anja imagines what it was like when the whole country was covered with forest. Then she climbs up the lookout tower, peers down at the city, and sees nothing but trees. She sees the trees in the parks and gardens and along the streets, envoys from a past or future time, and everything in between loses its brashness and its significance. Even the old town, the houses that are many hundreds of years old, seem no less provisional to her than her shelter of branches and canvas.

Eventually the ice will return and efface everything that people have built and made. Glaciers will lie over the land for thousands of years, rivers of ice miles deep, and what they will finally leave behind will be a new landscape; there will be new rivers and valleys, the moraines will form chains of hills, enormous piles of rubble that will soon be colonized by the first pioneer plants. Trees will grow on the humus, a thin forest to begin with, then ever thicker. Wild animals will come over the mountains in the south: insects, birds, deer and antelope, and with them their predators, foxes and wolves and lynxes and the first man. And then it will all be as though nothing had happened.

THEY WERE JOGGING through a residential district, past small detached houses. There were people working in the gardens, people walking their dogs, children playing on the streets. The gym teacher was out in front, along with the fast runners. A little way behind was the main group, followed by three or four slower girls, the overweight ones or the artsy ones, who didn’t care. Anja brought up the rear. She made an effort, she wanted to be quicker, but her legs felt leaden.

By the time they reached the edge of the forest, the others were out of sight. After a few hundred yards along a narrow footpath, she reached a dirt road, which led straight up. Way ahead she saw the others, heard the distant padding of their feet on the gravel, their shouts and laughter. Anja stopped. She had a stitch, and she was panting hard. Her T-shirt was sweated through, and now that she had stopped running, she felt a chill. She leaned down to touch her toes, took a couple of deep breaths, and slowly set off again. The others disappeared round a bend, and it was quiet.

Something has changed. To Anja it feels as though she’s considering the forest for the first time, as though the forest were turning to her. Her thoughts have stopped, and so too has time, everything is connected to her, becoming a single, exquisite feeling, the light, the smells, isolated sounds that make the sudden silence still deeper. She stands there, studying the play of the light in the treetops. She touches the trunk of a beech tree, its cool silvery bark. Later, whenever she is tempted to give up and return to her parents’ apartment, she will evoke this moment. And then time once more stands still, and nothing matters, and she can get through the night, the week, the year.

She had thought the class would take the same route back, but no one came down the hill toward her, and by the time she finally reached the lookout tower, there was no one there either. She climbed up the tower and stared out over the forest and down over the city, where the first lights had already come on.

The next day, Michaela asked what had kept Anja. I told the teacher you weren’t feeling well, and had stayed home. Thank you, said Anja. She had been home. Her parents weren’t in, and she packed a few things in a backpack, clothes and books and something to eat and a sleeping bag, and she left.

That was her first night in the forest. She wasn’t afraid, on the contrary, she felt freer than she had in a long time. In front of a fire she had built, she sat and thought until it started to get light. Over the weeks and months she thought less, and learned just to be there, in a state of alert indifference.

SNOW FALLS FROM A BRANCH, it’s like the opposite of a noise, this fall without acceleration that changes the depth of the silence and the configuration of space. Relieved of the weight, the branch rebounds upward in slow motion, and loose snow crystals drift through the air.

The deer sink deep into the snow on their thin legs. Anja watches them from the lookout, their strutting movements, their breath steaming with exertion. When it starts to get dark, she sees the lights coming on in the city. Now she yearns for a home, a room, a warm bed, and a fridge full of things to eat. It’s a yearning she is unable to satisfy. She knows too much about what life in the houses is actually like.

In the forest her dreams are different, more alive, even though nothing seems to happen in them. In these dreams, she crosses the terrain, quickly but without haste. Perhaps they are like animal dreams.

It is very quiet at night. If Anja happens to wake, it’s on account of the cold. There are some nights when she puts on all her clothes in layers and layers, and it’s still not enough. Then she lies awake for a long time, but it feels as though morning won’t come unless she falls asleep. Hours later, the quiet bleeping of her alarm wakes her. She quickly turns it off. Though she’s a long way from any street or footpath, she’s afraid someone could hear the sound and find her.

Anja has her clothes in the sleeping bag with her, so that they’re not quite so cold in the morning. She gets dressed in the dark and crawls out of her shelter. Outside, she stretches, cleans her teeth, drinks some water, eats a hard-boiled egg and a couple of slices of bread. She stole the food yesterday. She’s due to get her allowance in a week, her father has at least got it together to set up a standing order, but it’s never enough to last her through the end of the month. Carefully she wraps the eggshells in a napkin and packs it in her schoolbag. She doesn’t want to leave any traces.

AN HOUR BEFORE the beginning of classes, Anja was at school. Luckily, the sports hall was already open. It was cold in the girls’ shower room. Anja piled her clothes in a corner and walked right across the changing room, naked as a wild animal. She turned on the water and took a jump back, waited for steam to rise. She showered for a long time, but the hot water seemed only to warm her skin, the chill inside her would take all morning to thaw.

Once she was almost caught. She was just putting her clothes on when she heard the changing room door, footsteps, and the door of the shower room. She stood motionless in the corner, holding her breath. She heard a man clearing his throat and, shortly after, the door falling shut. She waited another fifteen minutes before daring to go out.

She had the afternoon off. Michaela asked Anja if she felt like coming back to her house to eat. She knew her friend had trouble with her parents, and often invited her back. Michaela’s parents treated Anja like a sick child, which she sometimes enjoyed and sometimes found unbearable. After lunch the girls sat on Michaela’s bed together, listening to music and talking, but at three, Anja said she had better go, she had some things to do.

On such clear days she couldn’t stand to be indoors. And the light would start to fade at five. She went to the grocery store. There weren’t many customers, and she had to take care she wasn’t caught. She stole three small cans of tuna, a jar of mayonnaise, and some chocolate biscuits. She bought a pack of gum, to deflect attention. She thought the checkout girl eyed her suspiciously, but perhaps that was just her own bad conscience. It wasn’t until she was back in the forest that she heaved a deep sigh and felt free once more.

SHE HAS CHOSEN her sleeping place carefully, a little dip on an incline. That way she’s hidden from sight, but if she walks or crawls a few steps, she can overlook a big piece of forest. She builds a fireplace from a few rocks. At night the firelight can be seen reflected in the treetops, a little dome of light, but at night she’s all alone in the forest. The last people here are the joggers who come in groups, and in winter have little miners’ lights on their headbands. They make an amazing amount of noise. But noise doesn’t protect you, as Anja learned quickly. You have to be very quiet, learn to disappear in the forest, become invisible and inaudible. She was always puzzled that the walkers hardly ever leave the footpaths, that all of them stick to the paths that others have used before them. Three years in the forest have taught Anja that you can blaze your own trail.

MARCO RECKONED she was unhappy because she didn’t want to go to the cinema with him, and because she didn’t like it when he asked people back to the apartment. Ever since living out here, Anja had stopped seeing her friends—she had long ago broken with her parents—and she didn’t like to visit his family either. Marco concluded she was depressed. He didn’t understand that it all seemed like a waste of time to her, every moment she wasn’t on her own.

For ten years they had lived in the city and done a lot together, gone to clubs and concerts, hung out with friends. Anja had her job, and everything was good. Her time in the forest was long ago, and she felt she could lead a perfectly normal life. It was when she got pregnant that she noticed herself beginning to change. The doctor said that was to be expected, it was hormonal, but Anja could feel something returning to the surface that had long been buried. Without really thinking about it, she had done what was expected of her, and deceived Marco and herself. Now she felt she was waking up, her senses were sharpened, and nothing was obvious anymore. She thought about the forest more often, and about the way she had felt when she was there, that strange mixture of unconsciousness and a higher pitch of being. She began to withdraw.

After the birth, they looked for a bigger apartment. Anja gave up her job, she simply didn’t go back once her maternity leave was over. Marco’s earnings alone weren’t enough for most apartments in the city. After looking for some time, they found a four-room apartment in a new development on the edge of one of the exurbs. The apartment buildings stood between the expressway and the business park. They were occupied almost entirely by young families, there was a school and a kindergarten smack dab in the middle of the complex, and a good direct bus line into the city. Marco’s work was nearby, his commute was half an hour less per day. He asked Anja if she would be happy there, if she felt sure. To begin with, she hardly left the apartment. Then, by and by she started to explore the area and take possession of it.

IT’S AN EVER-CHANGING no-man’s-land, construction going on all the time, and even the finished buildings look like prototypes. Next to the shopping center and the media mart an OBI home improvement store is going up, and there are a couple of big pet stores, a carwash, and an erotic megastore. On one of the last empty lots there are used cars for sale, but even this lot is spoken for. The area is riddled with access roads. There are young saplings on the slope, made fast to stakes in the ground, as though to stop them from running away. There is heavy traffic all day long, with one rush hour at lunchtime and another at the end of business hours; the middle of the afternoon brings a slight letup. When Anja goes out exploring with the stroller, she hardly sees anyone, only the occasional cyclist zipping past her on a racing bike.

She is pregnant again, and walking is getting harder and harder, but only a few days before her due date she sets off once more. When, exhausted, she looks for somewhere to rest, she can’t find a bench anywhere, and ends up having to sit on the grass by the side of a road, with the stroller next to her. The traffic pulls up at a red light, the cars are just a few feet away. The drivers stare, but Anja couldn’t care less. Only when one winds down his window to ask if she needs help does she stand without a word and walk off.

OUTSIDE, IT WAS COLD and rainy. The children were out of the house, but Anja had no energy to do any chores, the mess didn’t bother her or the dirt. The idea of fixing up the apartment, tidying it, making it nice, was alien to her. She paced through the rooms, sat on a chair, picked up a magazine. By lunch she had no idea what she’d done all morning. She ate whatever happened to be in the house, with the children. She didn’t often cook, sometimes she stuck a pizza in the microwave or she took the kids to McDonald’s.

Marco had made her see the doctor about what he felt was her listlessness. But the doctor had just gestured dismissively and prescribed Vitamin B. Maybe it’s the others that aren’t normal, she said to Marco that night, the ones who are always out and about doing something. But Marco shook his head and stared at her as though she was mad.

What she liked best were those days when the kids were away in the afternoon as well, at school or on play dates with friends. Then she would wander around the neighborhood, or if the weather was bad go to the mall or one of the supermarkets. She had started shoplifting again. Once, she was caught, it would never have happened before. A security guard had gone up to her after she passed the checkout, and asked her to follow him. He was very polite, a young man with good manners and a neatly trimmed beard. He took her to a back room and asked her to empty her bag. It gave Anja a strange feeling of satisfaction, to spread out her things in front of him, the key ring with the little toy sea lion, paper tissues, her purse, coins and paperclips, and various leaflets she had picked up. When she pulled out a lacy bra with the price tag still on it and laid it on the table, she fixed the young man with her eyes, and he looked away. Then with a casual gesture he pushed away the things that weren’t hers, and said, You can put away the rest.

The amount at issue was not large, but the store manager made a huge fuss, and threatened that if it happened again, she would be banned from all branches of the store. The way he carried on, it was as though she had robbed him personally, and he seemed to expect her to be remorseful. Asked what made her do it, Anja shrugged her shoulders. I just did it, was all she said, all she could say. She paid the fine unprotestingly. The affair seemed to embarrass the security guard, but Anja got a kick out of the whole business. Still, she would have to be more careful in future.

She kept running into the young man after that. Now that she knew him, she was surprised she hadn’t noticed him before. When they saw each other in the aisles, they looked each other in the eye briefly but didn’t speak. Anja was certain that he remembered her, and that made her happy. It was as though they shared some dark secret. Sometimes Anja saw him walking along behind her. Then she would purposely take things off the shelves and turn them around in her hands, as though wondering whether to take them or not. When she saw the security guard eating in the store cafeteria, she would sit down close to him. More important than seeing him was knowing that he could see her. It was as though his glance in some way ennobled her.

WHEN ANJA ENTERS THE FOREST, it feels to her as though she has stepped outside herself. She sees herself as a stranger, a girl walking among trees. She dreams of the forest in a similar way, always seeing herself from above, from a height of fifteen or twenty feet. She once read somewhere that people dying could see themselves like that, as their souls left their bodies.

The lookout tower is at the center of a complex web of places. There are places for fair weather and places for foul, places to sleep in and others that she only spends time at in the daytime. When it rains, she often sits in a shelter for forest workers, or she climbs up into one of the high stands on the edge of a clearing. The main thing is to stay on the move.

She sometimes runs into Erwin in the shelter. He went to elementary school with her, but it was only in the forest that they got to know each other better. Erwin is training to be a forest warden. He never asks Anja what she’s doing there, and why she wants to know where they’re going to be working next. Sometimes he loans her some money, though he doesn’t have much himself. For a time they meet almost every day. After work, Erwin goes to the shelter. To begin with, she was afraid he might have fallen in love with her. But all he does is bring her books he wants to talk about with her or that he thinks would interest her. Tuiavii’s Way, Erich Fromm on love, books by Nietzsche that he doesn’t understand, and Walden. Erwin is someone who thinks he understands himself, but almost nothing he says is original. Even so, Anja likes being with him. They are close. She hasn’t told him her secret, but he knows the forest.

A strong west wind has been blowing all day, and by evening it’s become a gale. The treetops are individually seized by the wind and hurriedly let go, hundreds of small motions that in their totality become enormous, a rushing and soughing. Look, says Anja. But Erwin doesn’t seem to notice. He is thinking about his books. When he leaves, she says she is going the other way. You always seem to be going the other way, he says. Yes, she says, and laughs, it’s true.

For some reason it’s a time of frequent nosebleeds, almost one a day. She leans over so that her clothes aren’t soiled, and lets the blood drop on the ground. Fascinated, she watches the dark splotches on the forest floor. She feels light-headed, as though something has cleared in her. Sometimes she catches the drops in her hand and licks them up.

THE DIFFERENT PLACES are connected by paths that are not logging roads and not trails, which she will only use at night or in bad weather. They are paths known only to her, that she has discovered over the months and years, and that she has walked again and again, safe paths that are hard to spot. She has hiding places where she keeps her clothes, her school things, one or two personal items, little dumps with cans of food she has stolen or bought, those few times she had money to spend, food she can eat cold when it’s raining and she can’t start a fire. Early on, she sometimes lost things, she isn’t sure why, maybe wild animals took them. Since then, she has become more cautious, more adept. In winter she heaps leaves on the hiding places to keep the food from freezing. Winter is the most difficult time, but also the most beautiful. When there is snow on the ground, and she has the forest all to herself for days on end. The only thing she’s afraid of is that her footprints might give her away.

Once all humans used to live that way, she told the school psychologist. It’s the others who’re not normal, sitting in their houses behind their lowered blinds. He looked at her pityingly, and she thought, you wouldn’t last a week in the forest. There it was never a question of why. Everything was just the way it was, food was food, sleep was sleep, warmth was warmth.

The psychologist looked at her the whole time. When she walked out, he followed just behind. He had a little shiny car, he offered to give Anja a lift somewhere, but she refused. When he drove off, she saw the child seat in the back, and a little sticker in the rear window in the shape of Lake Constance. Anja felt nothing but contempt for him.

SHE NEVER MANAGED to find out whether the hunter had betrayed her or whether it was her own fault. Perhaps she had dropped her guard. The forest wasn’t about power or fleetness of foot, the only thing that mattered was alertness, attention, living wholly in the present. That was an advantage animals had over humans, for them memory was only experience, and not another world in which you could lose yourself.

It was just before her final exams, Anja was eighteen and could do as she pleased. Even so, one morning a policeman visited the classroom to ask her some questions. He was friendly enough, but the fact that afterward they all spoke to her as to an invalid, that offended her. Michaela’s parents offered to put her up temporarily. She declined and moved back in with her parents, who were intimidated by the police and treated her like a stranger. After a few weeks, she managed to persuade her father to pay the rent for a staff room in a nurses’ hostel. No sooner had she moved in than she stopped going to school. It was spring, and the exams were in fall. Anja was a good student, and everyone urged her to stick it out, but she stood her ground.

It wasn’t difficult to find a job. Anja had always spent a good deal of time in the bookstore when she was feeling low, or it was raining. The bookseller knew she had no money, and had given her reading copies of recent publications and asked her afterward how she’d liked them. Anja had done errands for her, or minded the shop when she had to be away for a while, to go shopping or to a doctor’s appointment. She had been pleased when Anja turned to her to ask if she would take her on as an assistant.

During her training, Anja lived in an attic room above the bookstore. Apart from the customers and her boss, she had very little contact with people. Erwin visited the shop from time to time, and now it was she who was recommending things to him, books, novels, stories, to divert him from his introverted musings. Eventually he stopped coming. To begin with, she didn’t even notice, later she heard from another customer, who had also been to school with her, that a forestry worker had died and Erwin had been responsible. He had been cutting down a tree, the other fellow wasn’t paying attention and had been crushed. The customer explained how there had been an inquiry but no charges had been filed. Anja wondered about writing Erwin, but she didn’t know what to say, and eventually it was too late for that. Soon after, she heard that he had given up his job, and begun to train as a psychiatric nurse. When she bumped into him on the street a few months later, he had joined a free church, and wanted to talk to her about God. She gave him the brush-off. Back home she cried over him.

HAVE YOU HAD YOUR BREAK TODAY? Anja sees the poster everywhere. She has taken the kids to McDonald’s. The little one is telling her how his neighbor gave him an apple to eat. That was months ago, and he’s told her a dozen times, but it doesn’t bother him. The only significance the story can have for him is that it’s something he remembers. To Anja, it’s as though he’s using his memory to escape from her. She watches a world come into being in him to which she has no access. After lunch, the two boys argue over the presents that came with their Happy Meals. One of them wants the other’s, but he’s not prepared to swap. Anja sends them out, and tells the older one to take his brother to kindergarten. He sulks and fusses, and only agrees after she promises him an ice cream.

When the children are gone, she gets herself some coffee, then she goes to the shopping center. This is her territory, she knows every nook and cranny of it by now. She walks through the shops as though she worked there. On the ground floor there’s a discount bookstore, it’s a chain, and the stock is all best sellers and cheaply produced coffee table books on popular topics. Marco thought she might apply for a job helping out there, just a few hours a week. He probably thought it would do her good. But Anja has had enough of books. Ever since they’ve been living out here, most of life strikes her as a waste of time, especially television. Only music is an occasional exception.

She likes the provisional quality of the buildings in the shopping center, which will be knocked down after a couple of decades and replaced by others. She likes the piles of merchandise, the soulless items sealed in plastic. She is capable of walking around for hours on end and picking up the things on display. She tests the fabric of clothes, sniffs them, tries them on. In the food sections, she opens packaging and quickly crams some of the contents into her mouth.

The customers in the stores seem somehow incomplete, they are missing something in their present, provisional setting. Anja doesn’t perceive them as people, not even the salespersons. On the rare occasions she is addressed, she gives a start and mutters something, No thanks, just having a look, and goes on her way.

She concentrates so hard on her walking that it ceases to be automatic. Her sensitivity becomes extreme, the cracks between the tiles irritate the soles of her feet. When she comes home after such expeditions, she is exhausted and can barely tolerate the children, and yells at them over everything and nothing.

FOR A TIME, Anja lives in a clump of pines so dense that almost no light gets in. Only the moss on the forest floor glows with a fluorescent green. She has been on edge for months, and this is the safest place. Like a diseased animal, she has retreated here. It’s difficult to force herself to go to school every day, the only thing that gets her up in the morning is her fear of being found. When Michaela asks her to come around after school, Anja shakes her head. She spends whole afternoons in her sleeping bag under an old army groundsheet that she bought at a flea market. The ground under her is covered with a dense layer of pine needles that set up a little cracking and rustling. It’s been a long winter, in some spots the snow is still there in late March. Once it’s thawed away, Anja dares to leave her pine refuge. She sets up on the edge of a clearing, on a little piece of boggy meadow ringed by trees that’s hard to get to. Only animals come here, and sometimes a hunter. A week before Easter it finally gets warm, and the forest seems to change from one day to the next.

Anja hears the twittering of the birds and the quiet rush of distant traffic on the highway, and shouting children crashing through the undergrowth. A low-flying plane approaches slowly, seems to hang overhead forever, and moves away. The wind picks up and shakes the last of the dry leaves on the trees, which make a sound like rain. When she shuts her eyes, the space seems to expand; when she opens them again, the colors are unexpectedly pallid. Only the green of the pines is strong, and that of the fresh grass, just starting to peep up among the old dead grass, crushed by the snow. Everything here is alive, even dead wood is swarming with creatures, with funguses and beetles and ants. At the far end of the meadow is a high stand, creaking in the wind.

In autumn, there’s a hunter sitting up there. Anja has got up, put her clothes on, and brushed her teeth, when she suddenly becomes aware of him. Perhaps he made a noise, or she had a sense of being watched. He hasn’t leveled his rifle at her, even though for a moment she’s afraid she might get shot. Then fear gives way to a feeling of security. She carries on calmly, stowing her things under the groundsheet, and dives into the bushes.

The man comes again. For a whole week he’s sitting up there every day, watching her. He must realize she’s seen him, but he gives no indication of it, not so much as a nod or a little wave of the hand. She relishes the attention, but at the same time she can feel something being broken. The spell is shattered. One morning the hunter is no longer there. For a while, Anja carries on as before, waits for him to come back. She is impatient, comes up with various theories. For the first time she feels bored in the forest, and the cold weather gets on her nerves. She can feel that she won’t last out much longer. When she is found shortly afterward, she is almost relieved.

WITHOUT BEING WHOLLY AWARE of it, Anja expects to find the hunter in the bookshop. Even though they’ve only seen each other at a distance, she is sure she would recognize him. He has dark green trousers, a fleece top, and a funny little hat. His rifle is slung over his shoulder. He doesn’t say a word, only looks at her and smiles. His smile is kind, but it spells danger. Anja shrinks back, hides behind a bookcase, waits for him to come after her. She flees from him, luring him farther into the darkness of the shelves, the vaults full of books, full of boxes. She hurries through a labyrinth of passageways she has never seen before. The hunter is close behind. He won’t let her escape.

ANJA MET MARCO. He liked to visit the shop from time to time, to order books on automatics and robotics. They got talking, and finally he asked her out for coffee, so awkwardly that she couldn’t refuse. He courted her, she knew for ages that he would eventually try to kiss her, she was almost counting on it. It took a couple of dates before he finally got up the courage, and then everything happened very quickly. They married when Anja was pregnant.

Shortly after their tenth anniversary, Marco confessed one evening that he had a girlfriend. For weeks he had been troubled and nervous, and Anja couldn’t really say she was surprised. The indifference with which she greeted the news infuriated him. She didn’t hold it against him, he had to get rid of his agitation somehow, and the way he did it was blaming her, and shouting at her, and then immediately apologizing and weeping and then shouting again. Be quiet, she said, the children.

The separation passed off without strife or scenes. Only when Marco asked her to forgive him, she impatiently shook her head. She kept the apartment and the kids. Marco and his new girlfriend moved back into the city. The kids spent more and more time with their father, and before long got on with the girlfriend better than they did with Anja. Each time she handed the children over to Marco, he would ask her casually whether she was seeing anyone. He was hoping she would remarry, so that he could stop paying her support. Anja would have been happy for that to happen, but she didn’t need a man, or companionship wasn’t what she needed.

One time, the security guard sat down at her table. It felt as though he was in breach of a tacit agreement between them. Anja shook her head in annoyance. She walked off, leaving her half-empty plate. After that she avoided the supermarket for a while.

When Anja passes the school building, she can look through the large window into the classroom, but she doesn’t recognize any of the children. She walks through the business park. The sky is clouded over. She looks at the display of the domestic appliance store, which is right next to the erotic center. She feels the glances of the men walking in and out, they simultaneously disgust and fascinate her. At the pedestrian crossing, she has to wait for a long time after pressing the button. Trucks are bringing fresh goods; cars have their music turned up so loud, they seem to be throbbing. Behind the main storehouse and the rail tracks is a little creek, along which a footpath leads. Anja looks at the mural on the high wall around the recycling center, it’s of a jungle scene. Some things are merely hinted at, green and gray cross-hatched areas, a pale blue sky. Only a few details have been fully executed, crumbling temple ruins, a few enormous trees, a leopard that seems to leap out of the wall at the onlooker. The painter seems to have given up his work long ago, in one or two places the picture has been daubed with graffiti.

The path ends at a railway line. The other side of the line is the soccer field. The humming of the mower blows across, and the damp air carries the smell of freshly mown grass. Anja sits down on the field and watches the passing trains. She lies down and shuts her eyes. She has one more hour before she has to pick up the kids from school.

SHE IS STANDING in front of a staircase that leads straight up. She runs up it, encounters a heavy, battered steel door. She hurls herself against it, the door swings open, and she is standing in a back courtyard. Quickly, but without haste, she walks on. She has never been here before, but it feels familiar, she doesn’t hesitate for a moment. The hunter is close behind her, she doesn’t turn around, but she can feel his presence, his nearness. It’s early in the morning, there’s no one out. Only now does it dawn on Anja that she can’t hear anything, not a sound, it’s as though she were deaf. The road leads through a tangle of alleyways. Eventually Anja comes out on a large square. She walks to the middle of it, then stops and looks around. At this point she sees the hunter. He has emerged from one of the alleys and is standing quite still. Slowly he takes his rifle down from his shoulder, goes down on one knee, and takes aim. His face is rigid with concentration, his eyes expressionless. Even though they must be twenty yards apart, Anja can see his finger slowly curling round the trigger, and then the flash of flame in the muzzle, and at the same instant she feels a great exquisite pain in her breast and a warm dribble of blood—it feels a bit as though she has stepped into a hot bath. Then she is lying on the ground, and the hunter is kneeling at her side. He strokes the hair back from her brow. There are tears in his eyes. He makes to speak, but she shakes her head and smiles. It’s all right.

Ice Moon

IT WASN’T UNTIL I locked my bicycle that I registered there was something different from usual. I walked back to the entrance of the industrial park and saw the lowered blinds in the porter’s lodge. With the annual Christmas whirl, I had forgotten that Biefer and Sandoz were both retiring at the end of the year. A month before, someone had organized a collection to buy them each a retirement present. I had contributed, signed a couple of cards, and then not given the matter any more thought. Now I felt sorry I hadn’t said good-bye to them.

On the glass door of the little porter’s house was a map of the premises. Below it was a list of numbers in case of emergency: fire, police, ambulance, and a number for the administration. In a transparent document wallet next to that was a letter from the administrator. He wrote to wish all the tenants a happy holiday, with many happy returns for the New Year. The letter was decorated with an illustration of a fir twig and a candle.

Time was, hundreds of people had worked in the factory, but after production and development had been contracted out abroad, the industrial park emptied, until there were only the two porters left. The manufacturing company had transformed itself into a shell, and moved into offices near the station. The old brick buildings on the lakeshore were left deserted for a while, and then rented out piecemeal. Artists, graphic designers, and architects were now working in the labs. An ex-employee opened a little bar in the weighing room, where we sometimes met at lunchtime, for coffee or a sandwich. A violin maker and a furniture maker set up their workshops in the old production halls. A couple of start-ups that no one knew what they did had leased space. There were rooms that people moved into and then vacated almost immediately.

The lakeside location was nothing short of spectacular, and every couple of months the newspapers would run stories about ambitious redevelopment plans for luxury apartments or a casino or a shopping center. But the necessary investors never came through. We were all on short-term leases, which were regularly extended each time one of these projects went down the tubes. Sometimes the administrator would show up with a bunch of men in dark suits. We’d see them standing around outside, and with sweeping gestures tear down the buildings and run up new ones. Whichever porter happened to be on duty followed them at a distance across the site, and only stepped up when there was a door that needed unlocking. To begin with, these tours had given rise to wild, panicky rumors and speculations, but by now no one seemed to think anything would ever change.

When I got to the office in the morning, one of the porters was always there. Biefer generally sat in the lodge—which was glazed on three sides—smoking his pipe and reading the paper. Sandoz preferred to stand outside—even when it was well below freezing—with his hands in his coat pockets.

Earlier, they had both delivered the mail, but since we now all had mail boxes, all they did was take in occasional parcels or tell the bicycle messengers where our studios were. They took down the numbers of illegally parked cars, and sometimes you could see one or the other of them walking around the site with a huge bunch of keys in one hand and a pointed stick in the other, to scrape the litter away from the disused rails. Mostly, though, they would be at the main entrance, which was now always open, quietly overseeing the comings and goings on the site.

Biefer and Sandoz were never there together. There was a shift change at noon, and they seemed to be at pains never to meet. In the beginning, I couldn’t tell them apart, even though they could hardly have been more different. It was only superficially that there were similarities, both of them being short and squat and thinning on top. They wore blue coveralls, and in bad weather Sandoz added a black coat and a leather hat. He came from the French part of Switzerland, and—even though he’d been working here for over thirty years—spoke in heavily accented German. He was a moody fellow, there were days when he’d chatter away, and others when he’d barely get a word out, and would act as though he’d never seen you before when you said hello. Biefer, by contrast, was a local and almost exaggeratedly friendly. Whenever I ran into him, he would ask about my children, whom he’d seen once or twice, no more. We would talk about the weather and football and communal politics—not often about himself or his family. Biefer occasionally referred to his wife, but only once did he tell me about his two sons, who were both living abroad.

One cold foggy morning, maybe two months ago, Biefer stopped me. From a distance I could make out a fuzzy outline beside the porter’s lodge, and I assumed it was Sandoz. When I was a lot closer, I saw it was actually Biefer. I waved to him, but he held up his hand like a traffic policeman. I pulled over in front of him, and he asked me if I could help him with something. I asked what it was about. Not here, he said, oddly conspiratorial, and turned around.

I had never seen inside the porter’s lodge. In spite of the large windows that seemed to bulge outward, the room was cozy enough. A small oil stove produced a dry heat, and there was a sweet smell of pipe smoke. Biefer sat down at his desk and opened a drawer. He pulled out a worn-looking folder and placed it, closed, in front of himself. Then he got up and brought, not asking, two cups of watery coffee. He gave one to me, and pointed to a plate with cake on his desk.

Gingerbread, he said. If you like that kind of thing.

There was only one chair. Biefer had sat down, and I stood behind him in the shadow, looking down at his rather squat head and the strands of gray hair between which one could see plenty of pinkish scalp. He filled his pipe but didn’t light it. He didn’t seem to know where to begin. He made a couple of false starts, got tangled up, coughed. Perhaps he was distracted by having to wave to people who were arriving on the site. He said he had once upon a time been a baker, but was forced to switch jobs because he developed an allergy to flour. He had always enjoyed travel, whereas sport held no interest for him. Except for soccer, that is. He said he had married young, which had been the way, back then. He didn’t regret anything. He said that several times. He didn’t regret anything.

After he had been talking like that for a while, I finally realized what was going on. At the end of the year, when he was due to retire, Biefer was planning to emigrate to Canada and open a bed-and-breakfast there. Why Canada? I asked, but Biefer ignored me. He talked about the visa application he had submitted a few months ago, some points system in which his training and knowledge of French and English all counted in his favor, along with his age and financial status. Then he had got a letter back from the Canadian embassy in Paris, which he didn’t understand. He said he hadn’t spoken French since school, which was now fifty years ago. For a few months he had been taking English lessons, but he was probably too old to learn a new language. He opened the buff folder, pulled out the top sheet of paper, and hurriedly slammed the folder shut. He handed me the letter. In fussy legal French, the applicant was required to complete his dossier by supplying an itemized account of his personal wealth, complete with documentary proof, all to be supplied on the same day. When I explained to Biefer what it was about, he seemed relieved. He asked me not to breathe a word of his plans to anyone, and least of all to Sandoz.

I had almost forgotten this when Biefer hailed me the next time, a couple of weeks later. He was looking terribly mysterious, and waved me to follow him into the porter’s lodge. It was shortly before Christmas, on the desk was a frail assemblage of fir twigs, two shiny silver Christmas tree ornaments, and a stout candle that hadn’t been lit. Beside it was the buff folder. Biefer opened it, pulled out a sheet of paper, and, beaming, handed it to me. His visa application had been approved. He thanked me for my help. I said I hadn’t done anything. He hesitated, then he opened the folder again and left it open between us. On top was a red envelope from a photo shop. Biefer pulled out a sheaf of pictures and laid them carefully side by side on the table. The photographs—which were barely distinguishable one from the next—showed forest, low trees and bushes, and sometimes a gravel track in the foreground. Biefer’s hands hovered over the prints, he was like a soothsayer trying to predict the future from a deck of cards. This was his land, he said finally, in Nova Scotia. He took some papers out of the folder and spread them out in front of us, a contract of sale, a passport and flight ticket, tourist brochures, and postcards. At the bottom of the folder lay a poor photocopy of a surveyor’s map, on which a lumpy-looking lake and a few plots of land were sketched in. One of the plots was carefully marked in red. In the middle were two rectangles in pencil, under them were the smudged traces of earlier outlines that had been rubbed out. This was where he was going to build his house, said Biefer, a blockhouse with ten guest bedrooms and a big day room, and his apartment upstairs. The smaller rectangle was the garage.

I was standing beside him, and I couldn’t see the expression on his face while he told me about his project, but his voice sounded enthusiastic and full of energy. He had bought the land some years before, he said, ten thousand square meters for thirty thousand Canadian dollars. He had no direct access to the lake, but then again the land was on the main road, and that was good for trade. At the end of January he would be flying to Halifax. From there it was another two hours by car. He had been to look at it already, last year. The countryside was amazingly beautiful, a bit remote, true, but with bags of potential. A paradise for hunters and fishermen.

I couldn’t imagine Biefer in the wilds of Canada. He was pale and puffy-faced, and didn’t strike me as particularly healthy. But he went on enthusing about his property and about Nova Scotia. The area was on the same latitude as Genoa, he said, in summer it got into the nineties. The winters admittedly were snowy and cold. Building permits were no trouble to get, he said, and gas cost barely half of what we paid here.

I asked him why he wanted to emigrate in the middle of winter, wasn’t it cold enough for him here? He said that way he would have time to get everything ready for the tourist season in summer. First the forest would have to be cleared, and then the house built. There was a lot to get done. He said the movers were coming after the holidays. His whole household would be packed into a single container and put on a ship. It would have to remain in storage until such time as the house was built. I asked him what he was going to do with himself until it was time to go. He looked at me as though it hadn’t occurred to him. What about your wife? I asked. What does she think of your plans? He said they weren’t plans, they were decisions already taken. Before I left, he asked me again not to breathe a word of this to anyone.

When I came out of the porter’s lodge, I saw Jana, a young artist who had her studio on the same floor as me. She rode up on her bike, braked at the very last moment, and squeaked to a halt a few inches from my feet. She grinned, and asked if I was taking over as porter now. Sure, why not, I said. There are worse jobs, it’s not too strenuous, and there’s a regular paycheck at the end of it. I’ll miss those two just the same, she said. Albert especially.

She got off her bike and we walked to the lab building together. She had been one of the first to move to the site. Back then, nothing worked, the heating failed all the time and the electricity most of the time. She saw a lot of the two porters then. Albert had been really helpful. He was an incredibly nice person.

THE EMPTY PORTER’S LODGE had something depressing about it. I couldn’t exactly say I missed either Biefer or Sandoz, but I’d always been pleased to see someone there when I got to the office in the morning, someone who unlocked the gate and turned on a few lights, someone to start the day. Now the site seemed dead, the facades of the old buildings were even more austere than usual, and all the windows were dark. Sooner or later it would all be demolished, we were only guests here, our days were numbered, even if we carried on like the new masters.

The violin maker parked his car. I waited for him outside the entrance, and we chatted. He asked me if I felt good here, and I said it was probably just temporary for me, and I would probably leave one day. He wanted to stay here as long as he could. He would probably never find such a perfect place to work again. We were still talking when Jana came along with a journalist who had moved in to a downstairs office just a couple of weeks ago. We talked about Biefer and Sandoz. The journalist said he’d never been able to tell them apart. I asked what our retirement present had been to them. No one seemed to know.

I was meeting a client for lunch. It was about a double garage, my first proper commission for months. We ate in a restaurant in the city center. When I got back to the site at two o’clock, the fog was just beginning to clear. I went down to the lakeshore and gazed out at the water, which was smooth and perfectly clear. I suddenly felt pretty certain that I would never leave, and would stay until the end of my days, building garages or single-family homes, and if I was lucky, the odd kindergarten or tenement building. We all would stay here, the violin maker, the journalist, Jana, and the rest. Biefer was the only one who would have managed to get away.

Jana was sitting on her own in the weigh-house bar, reading the paper. I picked up a coffee and joined her. She went back a couple of pages, folded the paper in the middle, and passed it to me.

Have you seen this? she asked, pointing to an item on the obituary page.

Gertrud Biefer, I read aloud, dearly beloved wife, mother and grandmother, left us on December 27, after a long illness, borne with patience and fortitude. Family only.

That must be Albert’s wife, said Jana. There’s his last name. And the two following, I bet those are his sons.

She said it was awful. Just when he could have had a little time to enjoy life. He had often talked about the travels he wanted to go on once he was retired.

He was planning to emigrate to Canada, I said, but didn’t pursue it. Jana said she really couldn’t imagine that, not with his wife so sick.

It’s true, I said. I helped him out with his application. He showed me the letter from the embassy, and pictures of his property in Nova Scotia.

Jana said again, she couldn’t imagine that. I said she should call him if she didn’t believe me, but she said it wasn’t really our business.

Do you know where he lives? Jana shook her head. She said she’d look him up in the phonebook and send him a sympathy card.

The next morning, the weather was so nasty that I left my bicycle at home and walked to work. The fog was thick, as it was almost every morning at this time of year, but from a long way off I could still see a light on in the porter’s lodge. The blinds were open, and there at his desk sat Albert Biefer in his blue coveralls. He looked the same as ever, only he wasn’t smoking and he wasn’t reading the paper. He was looking straight ahead, as though he hadn’t seen me. I tapped on the window, but he still didn’t react. His eyes were pinched shut, and the corners of his mouth were pulled up. He looked as though he might start grinning or crying at any moment. I waved to him again. When he didn’t respond, I left. About an hour later, there was a knock on the door of my office. It was Jana. She asked me if I’d seen Albert.

I tapped on his window, I said. It was as though he couldn’t see me.

Jana thought we should call someone, a doctor or the police, or at least the administration. I said I thought it was better to wait. He’s lost his wife. I can understand him not wanting to sit around at home.

At lunchtime in the weigh house, Biefer was the only subject. Everyone had seen him and was talking about what to do. The room was full of smoke, but when someone entered or exited, a burst of icy winter air came in. The man who ran the bar turned the music down, and was talking too. He had known Biefer longer than any of us. He said he tried to open the door of the porter’s lodge, but it was locked. It might have to be forced open. I didn’t say anything about Biefer’s plans to emigrate, and when Jana made to speak, I gestured to her and shook my head. Suddenly someone called out, Hey, there he is, and pointed out the window. Biefer was just going by, shuffling along, eyes straight in front. He had nothing on over his coveralls, his face was white with cold. For a moment there was silence, then the journalist said one of us should go and try to speak to him. Who knows him best? We all looked at each other. In the end, Jana said she would give it a go.

We watched as she walked along beside Biefer, talking to him. He didn’t say anything, just looked straight ahead and kept on walking. After a while, Jana returned. She said there was no point. Albert hadn’t seemed to even notice she was there. The journalist said there wasn’t much we could do. Biefer was a free man. We couldn’t force him to talk to us. At the most, we could inform the management. But everyone agreed that that wasn’t a good idea. We decided we would wait. Feeling a little chastened, we all went back to our respective jobs.

From then on Biefer was there every day. Most of the time he sat at his usual place, and he walked across the site once or twice. Jana tried to speak with him a few more times. Eventually she gave up. She told me her note of condolence had been returned by the post office, marked No Forwarding Address. We agreed to meet on one of the following evenings at the violin maker’s, because his workshop had the best view of the porter’s lodge. We wanted to catch Biefer and see where he went.

The violin maker opened a bottle of wine and drank a glass with us. At seven o’clock he said he was going home and left us the keys. Jana and I sat by the window, drank wine, and kept an eye on the porter’s lodge. We dimmed the light so as to see better and not be seen. Even though we had known each other for quite a long time, we had never talked all that much. Now Jana started to tell me about her childhood in an Alpine village, and how she had left home at sixteen to do her exams. Since that time she had had almost no contact with her family. She went back to the village very rarely. Her parents didn’t understand her art, and she hadn’t even told them that she was living with a woman. She could imagine how they would react. I asked what her art was like. She said it was hard to describe, but I could visit her studio and she would be happy to show me. We were a bit tipsy by then. Jana laughed, and said we should ask Albert up for a glass of wine. Then we stopped talking and just looked out the window. The moon had risen, it was almost full, and as bright as the snow. Its glow dimmed that of the lights in the deserted factory yard. The snow was marked by a strange tangle of footprints and tire marks. Over in the porter’s lodge, the little lamp was still lit.

Did you see his face? asked Jana. He looked miles away. I wonder why he wanted to go to Canada of all places, I said. Having an end in sight is what matters, said Jana.

At eleven, Biefer got up and switched off the light. Then nothing. We waited a while longer, but when he failed to emerge, we finally went home.

JANUARY THAT YEAR was exceptionally cold. On the edge of the lake, ice had formed, which broke up the waves. The wind pushed the layers of ice into tangled sculptures of bewitching beauty. The snow that came shortly after Christmas remained, and grew compact and dirty. In some parts of the site it had melted and refrozen into a thick sheet. The few times Biefer left the porter’s lodge, he walked very slowly and barely picked his feet up at all.

Then, one day at the end of the month, he was gone. When I arrived at the office in the morning, there was no light on in the porter’s lodge, and the blinds were down. The door was unlocked. I opened it cautiously and went in. The smell of pipe smoke was still there, but the stove was cold. It took me a while to find the light switch. The door to the back room was unlocked as well. It was tiny. There was a thin foam rubber mattress on the floor, but that was the only sign that someone had been staying here overnight. I walked back to the front room, lit the oil stove, and sat down at the desk. I was waiting, but I don’t know what for. When a car entered the site, I reflexively raised my hand to wave. Slowly it got warmer and a little brighter, but the sky was still a forbidding gray. A little before ten, Jana arrived. I waved to her, and she parked her bicycle and came over.

Has he gone? she asked.

I’ve been waiting for you, I said.

She stood behind me, just the way a month ago I had stood behind Albert Biefer. She laid her hand on my shoulder. I turned to her, and she nodded. Only now—it was as though I’d been waiting to have a witness—did I open the drawer. I wasn’t surprised to find the buff folder.

Seven Sleepers

MAY HAD HAD the least sunshine since measurements began, about a hundred and fifty years ago, and June didn’t look as though it was going to be any better. For the past ten days there had been a batch of lettuce seedlings in the barn that Alfons had been unable to plant on account of the rain, and the next batch was due to arrive in three days. The squash field badly needed hoeing, but the ground was so sodden that the tractor would only have done damage. Even though Alfons had laid protective netting over the beds, blackfly destroyed most of the French beans, and it was too cold to plant new ones. He would have to resow the carrots as well.

When he finally put away his papers with a sigh at midnight, it was raining. At six the next morning, it was still raining. After breakfast he pulled on some rubber boots and went out into the orchard. He stood under the apple trees, feeling depressed. The fruit was already walnut-sized, but the trees were bearing poorly: it had been cold during the flowering season, and the bees hadn’t been able to pollinate them except on the odd day. He went to the hives, lifted the lid off one of the wooden boxes, and observed the swarm. Bees were the only animals he kept on the farm, he had no dogs, no cats, nothing.

He walked up to the top field, where last year he had put in a second PVC tunnel. The tomato vines were gray with the stone dust he had powdered them with, but if it carried on so wet, he would have to spray them with copper or he would lose them as well. The bell peppers were at least two weeks in arrears, only the cucumbers were more or less on schedule. He worked for a while with the hoe, even though he had weeded the tunnel only a couple of days ago. At least it was better than sitting around indoors, thinking how everything was going to rack and ruin.

He had already begun to ask himself how he was going to get the lease together in November, twenty thousand for the land and the farm buildings. Every month so far, he was relieved to make the rent on the house. He had exhausted his business credit line with the purchase of the lettuce seedlings and a new seed drill, the bank wasn’t about to offer him more. If worse came to worse, he would have to go to his father for a loan, or to Kurt, his brother, who was running the family farm with his father. Alfons could vividly remember their reaction when he told them he had found a farm on the ridge over the lake. As far as they were concerned, someone who grew vegetables wasn’t a farmer. A farmer was someone who kept cattle, produced milk, and pastured his animals in the mountains over the summer.

ALFONS NEVER LIKED COWS. As a child he had been afraid of the enormous, cumbersome beasts; later on it was having to shovel their dung, the stink of which seemed to get into everything and stay there. Even the milk smelled of dung, and the butter and the cheese. Nor did he get along with the other animals on his parents’ farm: the hens, the rabbits, the pigs. He didn’t even like the dog, an aggressive little Appenzeller, who seemed to feel his dislike and return it. All three children helped out in the cow barn, but even his younger sister Verena was a better hand at milking than he was. Whenever he found himself with some free time, he would be in his mother’s vegetable patch, where he worked selflessly. He loved the smell of the earth, the dusty savory aroma of the tomato plants and the mint, and the subtle, endlessly varied smells of compost. He managed to get things to grow that otherwise didn’t thrive in the rough climate of the Lower Alps, things like peppers and eggplants, which his mother didn’t know how to prepare.

After he finished school, he helped his father for another year, while Kurt was at agricultural college. From the outset, it was clear that his brother was going to take over the farm. His parents shrugged their shoulders when Alfons told them he had found a place with a vegetable grower by Lake Constance.

The farm was on a gently sloping northeast incline. Alfons loved the soft hills and the long views. While working, he could see the enormous body of water below him that seemed to look different in different weather. When it was clear, he could see right across to Langenargen on the German side, but what he liked best were days when the lake was hazed over, and seemed perfectly endless. That was how Alfons liked to think of the sea, an infinite expanse, behind which another world began, and a different sort of life. From day one, he felt more at home in this landscape than he ever had at home.

During his time as a trainee he lived on the top floor of the administration center, a plain and functional building that had a couple of bare rooms. He shared the bathroom and shower with a couple of Croats with whom he got on pretty well, but whom he never saw outside of working hours. He made no friends at agricultural college. He was always the outsider in the class. Most of his classmates were local, had grown up on big farms, had cars or motorbikes, and dressed like young townies. They made fun of Alfons’s clothes and the way he spoke, until he said no more than he had to. The teachers liked him, he was a good pupil, and on the practical side he was also one of the best.

WHEN HIS APPRENTICESHIP was over, Alfons stayed on for a while. He was still living in the little upstairs room over the offices, even though he could have afforded something better. But he didn’t need an apartment, he was saving to fulfill his own dream, a farm of his own, where he could put his ideas into effect.

Perhaps he acquired the farm too soon. He was only twenty-three when he responded to the advertisement. This farm was also on the ridge, but on the side facing away from the lake, on the edge of a small village. There was a small patch of woods that went with it, and twelve hectares of arable land, just enough for him on his own. The property belonged to a rich farmer from the Canton of Zurich, who had bought it for his son, who chose to follow a different calling, and so the farm was on the market. Alfons asked himself why it was that he, out of the twenty interested parties, had got the lease. Maybe the farmer saw a son in him, the young man with dreams, working to make his fortune. Alfons’s father helped with the down payment. They signed the lease in the pub and wet it with a glass of wine. Now all you need is a wife to keep the business together, said the man from Zurich. Alfons nodded vaguely and mumbled something.

His parents were always on at him about it as well. Have you got a girlfriend yet? What are the girls like in Thurgau? When can we expect to become grandparents? What do you do all the time? asked his brother. You can’t always be sitting around at home. That won’t get you anywhere. But Alfons wasn’t thinking in terms of weeks or months or years. He thought in days, and every day he said to himself, Not today, I’m tired, I need to make the payments, prepare the sower, check up on the bees. In that way three years passed, imperceptibly, without him taking any steps to find a wife.

Kurt had married a girl he went to school with. Verena had been in a steady relationship for years, and it was only a matter of time until she tied the knot. Only Alfons was still single. He was a member of the rifle club, but that didn’t take women. In the gymnastics association there was too much drinking and not enough gymnastics for his liking, and he didn’t want to join the choir, though he enjoyed singing. Once he had gone to a meeting of the rural young people, but all the others had known each other forever, and he felt excluded. Some evenings he went to the local bar, he liked the waitress there, but he didn’t know how to tell her, not under the eyes of the entire village. And with her looks, becoming a farmer’s wife was probably the last thing on her mind. He spent most of his evenings at home, doing sums. He kept precise accounts on each crop he grew, calculated the returns, compared them to those of last year and with the averages of the co-op. Every morning and every night he took note of the temperature, the air pressure, and the humidity. He made graphs and observed the changes in the weather. He also kept track of his expenditures on heating oil, water, and electricity. Whatever could be expressed in figures, he wrote it down.

At noon the rain stopped, and the gray murk turned into a layer of small clouds. Alfons picked up the lettuce seedlings in the barn and tossed them on the compost. It felt like throwing away money, but he had no choice, it was pointless to produce more than the market demanded. In the news they said the weather was on the mend. Still, by the time his fields had dried out sufficiently for him to go out on the tractor, another two or three days would be gone.

While he rinsed the plates, he heard engine noise from outside. He wiped his hands and looked out the window. A big truck stood on his neighbor’s meadow, the other side of the road, and a couple of young men were rolling up the canvas cover. Then they separated, as though each was searching for something.

Alfons stepped outside and took a few steps closer, then he recognized one of the men, it was Klemens, the carpenter’s son, and it dawned on him that these must be the guys from Open Air. The idea had struck in winter, and for weeks the whole village had talked about nothing else. The young people wanted to organize an Open Air Festival for local bands, with a bar and activities for children. In January, Klemens had come by. He had introduced himself as president of the Organizing Committee, told Alfons that the festival would take place in the meadow below his house, and asked if they could take power and water from him. Of course they would install meters, and he would be properly reimbursed. Alfons felt he had little choice but to agree. After that, he had heard nothing more from the organizers, and forgotten all about the whole thing.

He was surprised when his neighbor had part of the pasture mown a couple of days ago, even though the grass wasn’t that long. That was where the truck was parked now, and the men were starting to unload timber. Alfons walked down and asked them when the festival was happening. In ten days, said Klemens, the last weekend of June. That Sunday is Seven Sleepers. Klemens asked what that was, and Alfons explained. He had read the story in a farmers’ almanac. On Seven Sleepers’ Day, according to an old legend, seven Christians were found who in Roman times had been walled into a cave and had slept through two hundred years. From a farmers’ rule of thumb, that day predicted the weather for the next seven weeks. Then we can only hope it will have picked up by then, said Klemens, and returned to the planks.

All afternoon Alfons chopped weeds in his celery field. By the time he was finished and came home, at six, the truck was gone, but there were piles of boards and beams in the grass. The young men were busy putting up a large white tent at the bottom of the meadow. They worked until it got dark, then they lit a fire and drank beer. They had a CD player with them, and through his closed window Alfons could hear the distant music and the men laughing and shouting. It was midnight before there was quiet.

The next day, a workman came from the utilities company and laid improvised water and power mains from Alfons’s cellar across the road and down into the meadow. Alfons knew the man from the rifle club. He offered him a cup of coffee, and they talked about the festival a bit. The workman said he thought it was good for the young people to set something up on their own, instead of just hanging around and doing drugs. Even though Alfons was younger than some of the committee, he noticed the workman talked to him as though he was an old man.

THE MEN MUST HAVE got time off from work, because from now on they came every day and worked from early morning until late at night. They built a stage, fenced off the field, and put up a second tent. A portable toilet was brought along, and fridges and sinks installed. One time, a truck with a black cover was parked behind the stage, and a couple of fellows in black T-shirts set up lights and amplifiers. While Alfons was working after lunch on the top field by the edge of the woods, he could hear one of the men going one two, one two, all afternoon, one two, one two, and then a shrill whistling sound.

Occasionally someone would come up from the field and ask Alfons for a tool, or some bandages, or a wheelbarrow, whatever they happened to be short of. He fetched whatever it happened to be, and said, That’s fine. Oskar, his neighbor, turned up on the meadow almost every day, to keep an eye on things. He parked his Subaru on the grass and watched the workmen, kidded around with them, and lent a hand when asked.

The weather was cool that whole week, but sunny. At last, Alfons was able to put his French beans in and go out on the fields with his machines. At night he was tired, he just quickly filled in his weather chart and went to bed early. Then he heard the music and the voices of the men sitting around the fire after their day. The noise really didn’t bother him; on the contrary, he had the feeling of being part of the village for the first time.

On Friday morning the rain returned. Alfons worked all day in the tunnel, with a short break for lunch at home. He saw three men and a woman unloading instruments from a white minivan and carrying them onto the stage. When he finished work in the evening, there were already a few little tents up in the bottom of the meadow, and the first visitors were standing around on the festival site, mostly in rain ponchos, a few under umbrellas. From a temporary parking lot on the edge of the village, others walked up in dribs and drabs. The big feeding tent was lit up, even though it hadn’t gotten dark yet. The trestle tables were half full. Alfons wondered about going down there himself, but he had been outside all day, so he fixed himself something and ate it at home.

THE MUSIC STARTED a little after six. Alfons was listening to the evening news, then it was suddenly there, so loud it was as though the musicians were in his living room. He looked out the window. In spite of the rain, there was a decent crowd in front of the stage. From where he was, he couldn’t see the players. He sat down by the window, opened it a crack, and listened. Even though the music was very loud, the falling rain was clearly audible. It got a little quieter during the pause between sets, and Alfons sat down at his desk and did a few calculations, but as soon as the next band struck up, he couldn’t concentrate, and returned to his place by the window. In the meantime, even more people had turned up, the meadow was pretty full. Five hundred, reckoned Alfons, and he multiplied it by the entrance price. The bar must have a good turnover, and then there were the T-shirts with the festival logo on them. He had no idea what the bands were paid to perform, or what the equipment cost to rent. The building materials had presumably been provided free of charge by Klemens’s father, but if you threw in all the work the men had put in, there was probably not much left by the end.

There was another break, and a third band started to play, even louder than the two before. It had got dark by now, and there were colored lights flashing over the stage. A few people were dancing at the front. The crowd farther back was more slow-moving, swaying back and forth, as though trying to keep its balance on shifting ground. Right at the edge of the crowd, people were coming and going. A few sat on the grass, in spite of the rain.

Alfons was in bed by the time the music stopped on the dot of one. There was a fiercely strummed guitar chord, one last crash of the cymbals, and then some applause, followed by total silence. Alfons got up one more time and looked out of his bedroom window. Two spotlights under the roof of the stage were playing over the crowd. People dispersed, visitors drifted to their tents or to the parking lot. A sort of haze seemed to come off the people, and Alfons was put in mind of his father’s cows, standing steaming on the grass in the rain or fog.

There were two long lines outside the toilets, and in the campsite he could make out the uncertain beams of many flashlights. On the road a truck was parked, with motor running and lights on. Alfons watched the band climb into the truck and drive away. He was glad of his warm bed, and not to have to spend the night out of doors.

ALTHOUGH HE HAD got to sleep so late, and it was a Saturday, he was up at six. He had breakfast, got the details from the weather station, and ambled down to the festival site. It was no longer raining, but the sky was clouded over, it could begin again at any moment. There was no one on the doors. The meadow had been turned into a swamp, there was hardly a blade of grass left near the stage. There was litter everywhere, empty bottles and cigarette packs. Everyone seemed to be asleep, except in the food tent a couple of women were already at work. They said hello to Alfons, and he asked if there was coffee yet. In five minutes, said the younger of the two, and rolls should be here any moment as well. Aren’t you Klemens’s girlfriend? asked Alfons, and they shook hands. Jasmine, she said. Her father owned the farm machine store in the village, where Alfons had bought his seed drill.

Didn’t the music keep you up last night? asked Jasmine.

Alfons shrugged his shoulders. If you carry on like this, Oskar can start a potato patch here on Monday. She laughed. How many people did you get last night? he asked. Five hundred?

I don’t know exactly, we sold six hundred weekend passes in advance, but some of those people will only show up today. Or not at all, if the weather doesn’t improve.

Wouldn’t some straw help, for the meadow?

Oskar promised to put some down, said Jasmine. It would be nice if he got around to it before everyone gets up.

Klemens came across the meadow, clutching four paper bags. He said hello to Alfons and put the bags of rolls on the bar. Then he pulled a white plastic armband out of his pocket and handed it to him. I wanted to give you this, just in case you fancy coming on down. Although come to think of it, you’ve got a box seat up where you are. Or do you prefer folk?

I don’t listen to music, said Alfons, and once again he felt like an outsider.

Appenzeller bluegrass, said Klemens, and laughed.

The other woman came along with a coffee urn and filled four plastic cups. She gave one to Alfons and said, I’m Lydia. He thanked her. Conversation ceased while everyone drank their coffee and looked in different directions. Finally, Alfons asked Lydia if she lived in the village too. The question struck him as embarrassing in front of the other two. Klemens clutched at his forehead and said he had a headache, he must have overdone it last night. He sat down on one of the window seats. Jasmine went over and started stroking his head.

I’m a teacher, said Lydia, and when Alfons looked at her blankly, I live in Weinfelden, but I work here. I’m the new teacher.

Did Herr Tobler retire then? asked Alfons.

Lydia nodded. Do you run the farm up there?

Yes, he said, I’m not from here either.

She laughed and said, Yes, I can hear that.

I grow vegetables, organic vegetables.

All the veg I buy is organic, she said, pretty much.

Well, if you got it from the agricultural co-op, then you’ll have eaten something of mine, said Alfons. Lydia smiled. He didn’t know what else to say. Finally he asked what he owed.

It’s on the house, she said, and he said thank you again and left.

Alfons did the shopping, then he paid bills and checked on things in the tunnel and in the beehives. He kept having to think of Lydia. She was no beauty, she was small and stoutish, her hair was cut very short, and she had bad acne on her face. But she had a nice way with her, and her voice was beautiful and warm.

At lunchtime he went down again. It was still cloudy, and muggily warm. He showed the man at the gate his white plastic armband. The guy said he had to wear it, and they argued about that for a while. Finally, Alfons gave in. Onstage the band was playing a sort of mixture of folk and rock. It was much quieter than it had been last night, and Alfons stood for a while in the sparse crowd. Then he went to the food tent and got himself a helping of macaroni with tomato sauce. He looked around to see if he could see Lydia, but she wasn’t there. He ate his lunch and went back up to the farm.

IN THE AFTERNOON, he was fooling around with his machinery when suddenly he heard Lydia’s voice. Is there anyone there? Alfons pulled himself up and saw her standing in the doorway of the barn. Here I am, he said, and approached her. His hands were coated with grease, and he put on an apologetic expression. Lydia squeezed his forearm, shook it, and said, Hello, I was just coming by and thought I’d look in on you. Alfons asked, Can I treat you to a coffee back? Sure, she said, but did he have anything else?

Alfons scrubbed his hands in the trough, then he showed Lydia into the house and poured two glasses of his home-pressed apple juice. How come you’re not working? he asked.

I was on the early shift, she said. Of course. Alfons nodded. They all prefer the late shift, she said, and smiled. But I’m used to getting up early.

I’m an early riser too, he said.

I thought only dairy farmers have to turn out early.

My father has cows. Once you’re used to it, it’s a hard habit to break. He poured them some more juice and they drank it silently. Would you like to have a look around the farm?

Very much, said Lydia.

Alfons was surprised how much Lydia knew. When they were with the bees, she asked him if he had had trouble as well, she had read that lots of bee colonies were ailing.

I was lucky, he said, I only lost one hive, and that wasn’t because of illness. The queen must have been old. They got a new one in, in the fall, but presumably it was too late. I don’t think there were any drones left to fertilize her. In spring the hive was empty.

A few odd bees buzzed around their heads, Lydia ducked, and Alfons shooed them away with his hand. Thank you, she said, and smiled.

He was surprised how much he had to say, while he showed her around. He showed her the fruit orchard and the vegetable fields, talked about organic fertilizers and pest control. The farmers in the valley can water their fields with groundwater, or they pump it out of the Thur, he said, but up here I have no water. Just out of the mains, and that’s too expensive.

All along, the music had been quietly audible, a songwriter was singing for the children, a comedian did his show, and later an acoustic group played traditional ballads. There were long pauses between sets, while a DJ played records. It started raining again. Lydia asked Alfons if he felt like wandering down and eating something. We can always sit in the tent.

WHILE THEY WERE LOOKING for space at one of the long tables, the music suddenly kicked in again, and people leaped up and ran in the direction of the stage. As they ate, Alfons and Lydia exchanged few words, and those were shouted so that they could be heard. It’s so amazing, shouted Lydia, down in the village you can’t hear anything at all. Do you know who’s playing? Alfons shouted back. She shook her head and slid a program to him across the table. He hadn’t heard of a single one of the bands. She pointed to one of the names with her finger, and said right in his ear, They’re the ones I really want to see. He read the name of the band, Gallowbirds, and shrugged his shoulders. Never heard of ’em.

When they had finished eating, Lydia wanted to go over to the stage, and Alfons went with her. They snaked their way through the crowd, which still wasn’t all that dense, to the front. He kept in her wake. The band was playing a South American—inflected number, and Lydia began to dance. First she started to sway her shoulders and turn her head this way and that, as if she were looking for someone, then she started to move her hands about, and her arms, and she made circling motions with her pelvis like a belly dancer. Not many people were dancing, but that didn’t seem to bother Lydia. Her movements were fluent; they seemed natural and unaffected. It was as though she managed to infect the others, because after a while everyone around Alfons was dancing, only he stood there, feeling increasingly ill at ease. He was glad when the band played their last song and left the stage to applause. Lydia took his hand and pulled him out of the crowd. Her face and hair were shining from the rain and the exertion. Where the crowd was not so bunched together, she let go of his hand and they walked together to the food tent. I’m thirsty, she said, wiping the sweat from her brow. It still felt warm.

No sooner had the next band started playing than Lydia wanted to go back to the front. She pointed to Alfons’s boots and said, No wonder you can’t dance in those. She herself wore a pair of ancient, muddied flip-flops. He hesitated briefly, then he pulled off his boots and socks, stood them next to the bar, and followed her. He looked around uncertainly, but everyone was preoccupied with themselves, and no one seemed to notice him. Lydia started dancing again right away. The crowd in front of the stage was thicker now, and people were bumping into Alfons the whole time. Finally he began to move himself, at first in a spirit of evasion, then later in a sort of dance, staggering back and forth to the music. Perhaps it was the beer that had relaxed him, perhaps the falling darkness. He didn’t care that he could see Klemens and Jasmine nearby, also dancing, and he shut his eyes, and raised his face to the heavens, and felt the fine raindrops and the deep mud into which his feet sank.

During the next break they remained in front of the stage without talking much. Next up was the group Lydia wanted to hear, four men of around fifty. It must be ten years since they last played together, said Lydia, one of them works in television now, that guy over there. It wasn’t really dance music, but plenty of people in the crowd seemed to know the songs, sang along, and danced in a vague sort of way. Alfons stood right behind Lydia. During one ballad she leaned against him and he put his hands around her waist and felt her moving. You can always stay, sang the men, I’m not going anywhere. When Alfons looked around he saw Jasmine, who smiled at him and nodded, and he smiled back.

They stayed until the end. Then they went to the bar and had another beer. All around, people were standing and chatting and laughing. Alfons found his boots where he had left them, and he carried them when he left the festival site with Lydia. There was no one standing at the gate now, and he ripped off his white plastic armband. He looked down at the ground, which was covered with rubbish, and put the armband in his pocket. Are you not camping, then? he asked, once they had reached the road at the top. From the parking lot farther down, they could hear doors being slammed and the sound of car engines getting quieter, then disappearing altogether.

No, said Lydia. I thought about it, but the forecast was so rotten, I didn’t feel like it.

So now you have to drive home? Are you good to drive?

I probably shouldn’t have drunk that last beer, said Lydia, and smiled at him. They both said nothing. Well then, she said finally, and put her hand on his upper arm.

And then he finally managed to get out what he had had on his mind all evening. If you like, you could stay at my house. I’ve got plenty of room. Lydia said yes right away, and took his arm, and they walked up to the house together.

They washed their feet in the trough outside the house, Lydia holding on to Alfons. I’m a bit drunk, she said, so it’s good I’m not driving anywhere. Tomorrow is Seven Sleepers’ Day, he said. If it rains then, it means it’s going to rain for the next seven weeks. Didn’t the seven sleepers wake up long ago? asked Lydia. It’s just a farmers’ superstition, said Alfons, but it’s been proved right two-thirds of the time. It has something to do with the Gulf Stream. Then let’s just hope tomorrow’s a nice day, she said, squeezing his arm.

ALFONS STOOD IN FRONT of his bedroom closet, pulling out fresh sheets and a towel. When he turned around, Lydia was standing just behind him. Don’t go to any trouble, please, she said, taking the things from him. I don’t have to have my own bed. He wasn’t sure what she meant by that. He pushed past her and led her to the guest bedroom, which had almost never been used by guests, and had become a sort of spare office for him. I hope the computer doesn’t bother you. He began to make up the bed. Lydia helped him, and smiled at him again.

Alfons showed her the bathroom, and asked her if she needed a toothbrush or anything. Would you happen to have a clean T-shirt for me? she asked, my things are all so sweaty. While she was in the shower, he sat down at the computer and checked his emails. He wasn’t expecting any news, but the idea of being in Lydia’s room gave him a little thrill. Suddenly there she was behind him, laying a hand on his shoulder and asking him for a T-shirt again. She was wrapped in a towel. Alfons led the way to his bedroom, opened the closet, and said, Here, help yourself. She rummaged around in his things, pulled out T-shirts, held them to herself, and made funny faces. She even took out a pair of his neatly folded boxer shorts and made some remark. Alfons took them out of her hand, folded them up, and put them back. In the end, Lydia settled on a white T-shirt with TRUST A CARPENTER written on it. Dropping the towel, she spun around and stood naked in front of him. He looked at her back and shoulders, which still had a couple of drops of water on them. He had his hand raised to brush them away when Lydia pulled the T-shirt over her head and simultaneously turned to face him again. He caught a flash of her breasts, which were smaller than he had imagined. He was put in mind of the time Kurt had taught him about milking. He had shown him how to massage the udder before hooking it up to the milking machine. Not so hesitant, he said, imagine they’re a woman’s breasts. Alfons had been ten or twelve at the time, the tip hadn’t helped him an awful lot, rather confused him more. Aren’t you going to have a shower yourself? asked Lydia. Yes, sure, he said, even though he usually showered in the morning.

Lydia’s clothes were all over the bathroom floor. Alfons picked them up and ran his hands over the fine, slightly damp material. Then he folded them and put them down on the toilet seat. After he had showered, he got into his pajamas and came out of the bathroom. Lydia was standing on the landing, as though she’d been waiting for him, with a bottle of beer in her hand. I helped myself, she said, and held out the bottle. He took a big swig and handed the bottle back. Don’t suppose you’ve got anything to smoke here? she asked. I don’t smoke, he said, sorry. I thought you grew things, said Lydia with a laugh. Had he not heard of the farmer who had a little patch of hemp in the middle of his cornfield? The police stumbled on it with the help of some aerial photographs. It was quite near here too. I don’t do drugs, said Alfons. He suddenly wished he hadn’t asked Lydia back. Nor do I, she replied, a little miffed. She emptied the bottle in a couple of swallows, passed it back to Alfons, and said she’d changed her mind, she would go home after all, she wasn’t tired, and at this time there wouldn’t be any traffic cops around. She took off his T-shirt, tossed it on the floor, and went to the bathroom. He followed her and watched as she got dressed. When she was done, she looked at him, and he saw that her eyes were moist. Then he went up to her, wiped the tears away with his thumb, and kissed her, first on the forehead, then on the mouth. Don’t go, he whispered, I don’t want you to go.

The Last Romantic

MICHAEL HAD BEEN distracted the whole class. Sara told herself it was on account of the heat or the upcoming summer vacation. When he made the same mistake for the fifth time, she suppressed her irritation and said, There’s no use, in your head you’re already at the beach. Then he looked at her with big round eyes that seemed to be on the point of bursting into tears. It’ll come, said Sara, patting him on the shoulder and standing up. Michael lowered his gaze and muttered that he wouldn’t be having any more piano lessons after the vacation. There’s no reason to give up, said Sara, even the great maestros had to practice.

That’s not the reason, said Michael. His parents had told him he couldn’t carry on swimming and playing the piano, otherwise his classwork would suffer. He stood by the piano, shoulders slumped. I’m sorry.

All this is about one hour a week? said Sara. How often do you have swim training?

Four or five times, said Michael. It’s the practicing.

Sara made a face. But you don’t practice, admit it.

You’re right, said Michael.

Maybe Clementi isn’t the right thing for you. Perhaps you’d rather be playing something rockier. Or do you like jazz?

Michael lowered his head, and for a moment they stood silently facing each other, then the boy packed up his notes and held out his hand to the piano teacher. Good-bye, Frau Wenger, and have a good holiday.

I’m going to phone your parents, said Sara.

He was her last pupil that afternoon. Sara didn’t show him out onto the landing as she usually did. She sat down at the piano and waited for the apartment door to close behind him. Then she started to play—the first movement of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto, which she had been working on for two years now. The eight chords of the opening were like blows, the louder and more violent, the more Sara’s fury was dispelled. It was as though she were dissolved in the music, were transformed into music. Then the strings came in and carried her away. She saw herself on the stage of the concert hall, and the music streamed through her to the audience, which was raptly listening. Halfway through a bar, she broke off. She sat there breathing heavily, not thinking of anything at all. After she calmed down, she went out on to the landing and phoned Michael at home. No one picked up.

BUT HE’S NOT the first pupil of yours to give up, said Victor, gathering up his scores. He’s my best, though, said Sara. He’s really talented. But if he prefers sports, said Victor. Music isn’t very cool. The word sounded strange, coming from a sixty-year-old. He’s keen enough, said Sara, but his parents won’t let him. I’ll try it once more. She rang the number for probably the tenth time that afternoon. When Michael’s father answered, she didn’t know what to say. He listened to her patiently, then in a friendly tone of voice said he was sorry, but Michael needed to concentrate on just one hobby. You can’t just take him out of lessons like that, said Sara vehemently, at the very least you’ll have to pay for next term’s lessons. Michael’s father said he had talked to the school office, and everything was settled. Music isn’t a hobby, said Sara. She avoided looking at Victor, who was shaking his head and lowering his hands placatingly. Any fool can swim. Frau Wenger, Michael’s father broke in, we are grateful to you for all you’ve done, but the decision has been made.

Sara dropped the telephone and stared at Victor in consternation. He hung up on me. Come on, said Victor, have a glass of wine. He went on ahead into the kitchen and took an open bottle of wine out of the fridge and a couple of glasses, as though he were at home here. Swimming! said Sara, shaking her head in incomprehension. They shave their body hair. Victor smiled and took a sip of wine. Probably not if they’re kids. He hasn’t heard the last of this, said Sara, I’m not going to stand for it. Probably to distract her, Victor asked how she was getting on with the Rachmaninoff. I’m working on it, she said, but it’s bloody hard. Did you ask at the Academy? She shook her head. They want big names, someone like me wouldn’t stand a chance. You should at least try them, said Victor, we’ve just renewed our sponsorship deal, and I happened to drop your name. And? asked Sara. The conductor said you should get in touch with him. Say hello to him from me. Victor laid his hand on her shoulder. She liked these friendly little gestures and stroked the sleeve of his jacket in return. When are you leaving? Day after tomorrow, he said, his hand still on her shoulder. I’m exhausted, said Sara. Look after yourself. Victor emptied his glass and wished her a happy vacation. Sara said nothing back. They kissed each other good-bye on the cheek.

THE AIR IN THE PIANO ROOM was stale, the yellow curtains half drawn, and it was dusk. Sara watered the philodendron that was growing along the ceiling and sprayed its leaves with leafshine. She had taken over the plant some years back from a pupil who was emigrating to America with her parents. Philodendrons purify the air, the girl claimed, they absorb formaldehyde and other poisons. The shapeless plant with its air roots dangling in space struck Sara as an emblem of her own life, in her slow growth she put out one leaf after another, without the prospect of ever leaving this room.

In the afternoon she called the school office and demanded to speak to the director. She put him in the picture, and complained at the way Michael had simply been allowed to quit. The director said he wasn’t familiar with the particular case, but if the boy wasn’t motivated, there was no sense in forcing him to take lessons. You have enough pupils, he said. That’s not the point. Michael is gifted, it would be a pity if he stopped now. Don’t get so worked up, said the director. We have no leverage, as you very well know.

Sara called Michael’s teacher. He was still more curt with her than the director had been. When she asked what Michael’s grades were like, the teacher said he was not at liberty to divulge such information to her, she should ask his parents. What a pupil did in his or her spare time didn’t matter to him, so long as he did it willingly.

Furiously, Sara leafed through the phone book as if there was anyone there who could help her.

ALL HER FRIENDS seemed to have left town, and so for the next few weeks Sara was mostly at home, practicing the Rachmaninoff or reading. She didn’t feel like going out alone, besides it was too hot. One day she got a postcard from Michael. He had never written to her before, and she took it as a cry for help, even though it was just a few banal sentences on a card. She drafted letters to his parents, furious, factual, imploring, and threw them all away. On the Internet she found the training times of Michael’s swimming club. That afternoon she went to the pool. She hadn’t been there in ages. At school she hadn’t been a good swimmer. Once or twice during her time at the conservatory, she had gone to the lake with her fellow students, but she hadn’t seen the attraction of prancing around half-naked in public. The actual water was always too cold for her anyway.

She looked at herself in the changing room mirror. Her one-piece bathing suit was hopelessly out of fashion, the fabric cracked and dry, the colors faded. She wrapped a towel around her waist so as not to look quite so conspicuous. Then she stepped out uncertainly into the dazzling sun. The big pool was full of people, but there were no lanes. Sara turned to the attendant standing at the edge of the pool. The swimming club trains indoors, he said, not looking at her, and he blew his whistle to call a couple of youngsters to order.

Indoors it was even hotter, but quieter. The chlorine took Sara straight back to her school days and her gym teacher, a sadist who poked fun at the kids who were frightened of water. She had hated swimming lessons so much that she got a stomachache each time. Eventually, her mother had grasped what was happening—but still sent her. Only a couple of lanes of the pool were being used, in which half a dozen kids were swimming laps. A man in shorts and a T-shirt was writing figures and letters on a slate—it seemed to be a sort of code. Sara asked him if he was Michael Bernold’s swimming coach. Yes, he said, and held out his hand. He’s on vacation. I’m … I used to be … his piano teacher, said Sara, shaking hands with the man. She felt naked, and looked down at her body. In the neon-lit hall, her skin looked greenish, and she noticed a nasty-looking pimple in her cleavage. Does he play the piano, then? asked the coach. He’s very talented, said Sara, but he’s giving up, because swimming takes up too much of his time. Too much, the coach repeated, tonelessly. That’s my view, said Sara. I hate the word talent, said the coach. In the end, success comes to whoever trains hardest. That’s what I’ve told him all along. Sara smiled. What is success, in your view? Just a minute, said the coach. He went up to the board, wiped away the letters and numbers, and wrote down some new ones. The children who had been waiting at one end of the pool set off. It looked as though they were being pulled along on ropes, that’s how effortlessly and quickly they were moving. The coach went back to Sara, and pointed to one girl who was just swimming past them. Take Lea. She has an amazing feel for water. Look at her moving. But if she doesn’t train for three or four days, it’ll all be gone, and I can start over. How do you define success? repeated Sara. The main thing is they enjoy themselves, said the coach. Michael has a winner’s instincts. He trains hard. If he didn’t train quite so hard, he’d have time to play the piano, said Sara. Couldn’t you have a word with him? The trainer smiled absently and shook his head. No. Look, I’ve got to work now. Sara remained where she was for a moment and watched the swimmers. Then she circled the pool, took off her towel, and climbed down the steps until the water reached up to her belly. She glanced over at the trainer, but he wasn’t looking.

SARA FELT RELIEVED when the weather finally broke, and it cooled down. Every day she resolved to talk to the chief conductor and make an appointment, but she ended up putting it off, telling herself either he was on holiday or she needed to get a better grip on this or that passage. Victor sent her regular emails from Madeira, attaching photographs of red cliffs and exotic tropical plants. He seemed to be bored in his fancy hotel. Some of the emails, Sara could tell, he had written while drunk, they were so full of typos. She answered briskly, saying there was nothing much happening, the weather was bad, she was practicing hard. After two weeks something changed in the tone of Victor’s emails, he still wrote regularly, but it sounded as though he was just doing it out of a sense of duty. Perhaps he’s met someone, thought Sara. The idea incensed her. Strangely, she had never felt jealous of his wife, and even after his divorce, she had never wanted more from him than their weekly meetings, conversations, and his friendship. But it hurt her to imagine that he might have a lover, a woman who enjoyed more rights and privileges than she did.

The second-to-last holiday weekend, Sara finally called the sponsorship office of the orchestra. She told the man on the other end what it was about. He tried to dissuade her, told her they worked exclusively with agencies and artists of an international reputation. Couldn’t I come along after a rehearsal and play for the conductor for ten minutes? she suggested. Ten minutes isn’t asking a whole lot. He’s terribly busy, said the man on the phone. Finally, Sara had no option but to make use of her connections and drop Victor’s name. The man at the other end was silent for a minute, then he said in an offended tone of voice that he would have a word with the chief conductor and call back.

For the next few days, Sara practiced more than ever. Sometimes she played the same few bars over and over again for an hour, until her fingers hurt. On Thursday the man from the orchestra called. Once again she missed his name, and didn’t trust herself to ask. He was short with her, and said that the conductor could fit her in tomorrow after rehearsals, at half past twelve, and she should try to be punctual.

That afternoon she played through the whole concerto. For the first time she noticed that her playing was entirely lacking in brilliance and expression. She needed all her strength and concentration to master the technical difficulties, and even then she wasn’t successful. She made mistakes, many mistakes. How deluded she had been for all those years. Even when she’d been a conservatory student she hadn’t been allowed to take the concert diploma, because she hadn’t been good enough, and she hadn’t got any better since. Perhaps the swimming coach was right, and talent didn’t matter, but nor did she have sufficient enthusiasm to carry her through, the energy, the thing he’d called the winning instinct.

Left to herself, Sara wouldn’t have turned up to the audition at all, but she couldn’t do that to Victor. Perhaps she was too self-critical. That too was part of the makeup of a proper artist, that restlessness, that dissatisfaction. In the evening she drank a couple of glasses of wine, and suddenly she felt confident again.

SARA WAS AT THE CONCERT HALL far too early. The side entrance was locked, so she waited outside the front door. Even though it was a cool day, she was wearing a skirt. She had spent a long time thinking about what to wear, she had even briefly pulled out the rather garish dress she had worn to her sister’s wedding. In the end she settled on a knee-length tartan wraparound skirt paired with a cream silk blouse. She felt cold and clenched her hands, which were slowly turning clammy. At last the door opened and a mob of chatting, laughing musicians came pouring out, some of them with instrument cases. Sara recognized an oboist who was her contemporary at the conservatory, but the woman ignored her greeting. Sara walked into the lobby, where a few musicians stood around and looked at her.

She recognized the conductor at once, even though he was in a cardigan and some baggy old cords. He walked very confidently toward her and held out his hand, without saying his name. Sara was amazed by his youthful appearance, he seemed younger than she was. He led her to the soloists’ room, a small space that, apart from a grand piano and a music stand, contained only a small side table and a hideous black-and-white designer couch that reminded her of the chair at the gynecologist’s. The blinds were down and two neon tubes spread a cool, diffuse light.

The conductor sat down on the couch and stretched his legs; the attitude had something a little obscene about it. While Sara took the score from her bag and adjusted the piano stool, he asked her what sort of piano she played at home. Just an upright, said Sara. Better a good upright than a poor grand, said the conductor. What was the last concert you’ve been to? Sara thought about it. She had heard Britten’s Ceremony of Carols, but that was years ago. I don’t get to listen to as many concerts as I’d like, she said, I have to teach on some of my evenings. The conductor furrowed his brow and asked what her connection to Victor was. He takes lessons from me, she said, has done for years. We’re friends. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how extremely grateful we are to his company for their generous support, said the conductor, but of course that mustn’t play any part in the decision here … Well, whenever you’re ready. He looked at his watch.

IT WENT BETTER than I expected, said Sara.

And what did he say? asked Victor. The phone connection was poor, his words sounded chopped up and kept being interrupted by brief moments of stillness.

He said he would be in touch, said Sara, and then, louder, He’ll be in touch, he said.

I can hardly hear you, said Victor, but we’ll see each other in another week. Bye.

Sara hadn’t managed to tell Victor the truth. That the conductor had ended the audition after a few minutes by saying there was no point. He had walked up to the piano, taken her score, and flipped through it, as though to check for himself what she had been playing. Then he passed it back to her and gave a little lecture on Rachmaninoff, whom he called the last romantic. His kindliness and patience with her were perhaps the most hurtful of all; he talked to her as to a child that needed to be comforted. He said she had picked an extremely difficult piece, which was simply beyond her. She ought to try something simpler. And as far as public performances went, he could imagine that an old age home or care facility would provide a grateful public. Though best steer clear of Rachmaninoff, he added, laughing, otherwise all the old folks will get coronaries. Sara smiled dutifully and allowed the conductor to usher her to the door and wish her all the best.

At home she sat at the piano for certainly an hour, shaken with crying jags, until her throat felt sore. She drank a glass of tap water in the kitchen. She dropped the score in the recycling.

TEN DAYS LATER Victor came for his lesson. Sara said the audition hadn’t worked out. He seemed to sense that she didn’t want to talk about it, and started speaking of his holidays. When the lesson was over, they sat in her kitchen, and Victor showed her his holiday snaps of Madeira. They had to put their heads together to make out anything on the little display of his digital camera. Victor had laid his arm around Sara’s shoulder. And did you have your holiday fling? she asked. He moved away, looked at her in surprise, and asked, How can you think of something like that? So you did. Look, he said, I have my life and you have yours. We may be friends, but that doesn’t mean I have to tell you everything. Sara could feel the tears running down her cheeks. You’re so obtuse, she said, you’re so bloody obtuse. Victor stroked her shoulders and talked soothingly to her, but she stood up and coldly told him to go. Find some other woman you can exploit. He tried to placate her, but it only made matters worse.

After he had gone, Sara remained sitting at the piano for a while. She struck a couple of notes at random, but they sounded wrong, and no tune was forthcoming. Finally, she pushed the piano stool back against the wall, climbed up on it, and carefully started to unpick the raffia knots that held up the philodendron. It took a long time before she had undone every one, and the plant was a crumpled heap next to the piano. When she cut it into little pieces with her pruning shears, she felt like a murderess, but after she had stuffed it into garbage bags and stood them on the edge of the sidewalk, she felt oddly relieved.

The Suitcase

NO SOONER DOES Hermann put the list down on the unmade bed than he picks it up again. He has already forgotten everything on it. Toiletries. He goes to the bathroom and gathers up Rosmarie’s things: the olive oil soap she bought last year in the south of France, her hairbrush, toothbrush and toothpaste, her deodorant. He’s not sure which of the many shampoos is current, and packs one, hoping it’s the right one. What else? Nail scissors. He puts back the nail polish, after briefly hesitating. He goes into the bedroom, pulls the small suitcase down from the top of the wardrobe, and puts the sponge bag in it. Then he checks the list again. Several changes of underwear. He stands in front of the open wardrobe, roots around in Rosmarie’s underthings, fluffy tangles of white that remind him of peony blossoms in the garden. He has the feeling he is doing something inappropriate. How many do they want? He doesn’t know how long Rosmarie will be kept in for, he’ll be glad if she’s allowed back at all. Pajamas or nightie. He prowls through the apartment looking for her slippers. Then he remembers seeing them when Rosmarie was on the stretcher, being carried out by the paramedics. They were on her feet like two hooks. He had even wondered for a moment about maybe putting her shoes on. She wouldn’t even have gone out to the mailbox in her slippers. Stout trainers, in case physiotherapy is indicated. He doesn’t know what the doctors have in mind for Rosmarie. The very notion of her in trainers makes him smile in spite of himself. For the moment, there’s little prospect of such therapy. The doctors have put her in an artificial coma and cooled her temperature down to a constant ninety-two degrees. They’re refrigerating her, he keeps thinking.

He looks at his watch. She is under the knife right now. A swollen blood vessel in her brain, one of the doctors said after hours of tests, and explained what they were trying to do. Then the doctor gave him some hospital literature and packed him off home. Have a rest. The literature includes a message from the chief surgeon, a map of the layout, a train schedule, and various other information. At the very end, Hermann found the checklist. Please bring the following items with you on the day you are booked in.

No one was able to tell him what would happen next, no one seems to have any idea. Hermann looks at the list. Personal supports, such as glasses or hearing aid (incl. batteries). Rosmarie doesn’t need any support. If anyone needs help, it’s him. It’s decades since he last packed a suitcase. Even his army kitbag, in the time he was doing national service, was always packed by Rosmarie, and that was thirty years ago. Each time he arrived in the barracks and unpacked his bag, he always found a bar of chocolate she had smuggled in among his things. He goes into the kitchen but he can’t find any chocolate. Ever since he became diabetic, Rosmarie’s kept all the candy out of sight. Reading matter, letter paper, writing things. On the night table are three library books. He reads the titles and the names of the authors—none of them means anything to him. He’s not a reader. Rosmarie’s reading glasses are on top of them. He packs everything. Because he can’t find the spectacle case, he wraps the glasses in a handkerchief and stuffs it in her sponge bag. The suitcase is about half full. Hermann throws in a cardigan and a couple of magazines he finds in the living room, and he carefully closes the suitcase.

In the cafe opposite the entrance are patients and their visitors. Some are wearing dressing gowns, walking sticks are leaning against the tables, one trundles an IV along with him on a stand. Hermann hasn’t seen inside a hospital for years, but the smell takes him back immediately. There is a little kiosk behind the cafe, where he buys a bar of chocolate, even though he knows Rosmarie isn’t a great one for chocolate. It’s the only thing he can do to prove his love, flowers are too ostentatious. You give flowers when there’s a baby on the way, and everyone knows. He remembers seeing bouquets on hospital corridors, looking like trophies in their vases. Rosmarie will be able to keep the chocolate in her bedside table. She will think of him as of something clandestine, here, where everything is out in the open, in the bright light of the fluorescent tubes. Hermann opens the catch of the suitcase, to slip the chocolate in between Rosmarie’s things, but the lid flies open and everything spills out on the polished stone floor. He kneels down, grabs the things, and stuffs them back in as quickly as he can. He looks around—it’s as though he were doing something forbidden. The man on the drip looks his way, without expression. The clothes Hermann went to so much trouble to fold together are all crumpled.

The porter tells him how to get to the intensive care ward. The wards are all color-coded, to ease orientation. Intensive care is blue, yellow is the children’s ward, urology and gynecology are green, surgery is purple. Hermann tries to find some rationale for the pairings, but he can’t do it. Only the red of the cardiology ward makes sense to him.

He is standing by Rosmarie’s bedside. Her head is bandaged and her body is connected up to machines, she is breathing artificially, she has a stomach probe and a catheter. Drugs are being fed into her bloodstream via tubes. Her arms and legs are being kept cool, so as to keep her body temperature down. She is naked except for a sort of white loincloth open at the sides, which can barely cover her. There is a strangely flaccid quality to her features. Hermann stands at her bedside, staring at her, he doesn’t even want to put his hand on her forehead, that’s how strange she looks to him. Only her hands with the painted nails look familiar. From time to time he hears the beep of an alarm from the corridor. It sounds like the hour being struck on a grandfather clock.

A doctor says they will need to perform another operation, create a bypass. His expression is serious, but he also says Rosmarie has been lucky. If she had been brought in just half an hour later … He doesn’t finish his sentence. Hermann imagines what he might have gone on to say. We’re hoping for the best, says the doctor. Do you have any questions? No. Hermann shakes his head. He has the feeling that all of this has nothing to do with him or Rosmarie. The doctor nods to him and leaves with a look that is probably intended to be encouraging. The sister says Frau Lehmann didn’t need anything, she would rather he took the suitcase back with him, then at least nothing would go astray. He should bring her things once his wife was able to leave intensive care. She gives him a form about the patient’s habits and personal preferences. Your answers will help us to look after her, she says; she gives him a pencil and conducts him to a waiting room. He reads through the questions. Does the patient belong to any religion? What form does worship take? Does the patient like music? If so, what? Which smells does the patient like? He thinks of the olive oil soap. Which does she not like? What is her favorite color? Does she have a set ritual at bedtime? Where does she like to be touched?

He walks down several corridors, past reception and the cafe and out into the cold winter afternoon. The stop is between the hospital and the lake. Hermann sees a streetcar leave. The next one won’t be for another half an hour. He could walk home, it wouldn’t be more than an hour or so, but he’s already bought the return ticket and he’s tired, he barely slept last night. He presses the button for STOP ON DEMAND and sits down on the narrow bench. The suitcase is on the ground beside him. He looks at the lake. About a hundred yards from shore, the color of the water abruptly changes from pale blue to deep green. A couple of walkers pass down the shore promenade. They stop at a marker and look back. By the time the streetcar comes, Hermann is frozen through.

HE HASN’T BEEN to the library very often. On rare occasions he has accompanied Rosmarie, or he’s taken books back for her when he’s had to be in town. Even so, the librarian greets him by name. She takes the books from him and asks whether Rosmarie enjoyed them. Hermann is bemused by her referring to his wife by her first name. Yes, he says, I believe she did. I’ve set aside the new Donna Leon thriller for her, says the librarian, and she picks it up from a little rolling shelf next to her desk. I promised her first dibs at it. She stamps the date on the borrowing slip at the back of the book. Only then does she seem to become aware of Hermann’s suitcase, and she asks him if he’s on his way somewhere. Yes, he says. He’s not in the mood to answer questions. The librarian says she could hang on to the book if he didn’t want to take it with him right now. I’m not going away for long, he says, and he grabs the book with a quick movement of his hand. Through a Glass Darkly. The librarian makes some remark about an active retirement and laughs. Hermann thanks her and leaves.

Darkness is falling outside. He turns once more when he notices the librarian watching him through the glass doors, then he heads off in the direction of the station. On the way he runs into a neighbor. The family only moved there two years ago, the man works for an insurance company, the woman stays at home, looking after the two children. Hermann sees her in the garden sometimes. She once complimented him on his peonies and asked him for tips. She said they had lived in a condo before, and she had little experience with plants. The most important thing is to find the right place for each plant, he said. It needs to feel at home there, and then it’ll thrive by itself.

Off on holiday, then? asks the man. Hermann mutters something and the man goes on to wish him a good holiday. Same to you, says Hermann, not thinking. The neighbors seem not to have heard the ambulance yesterday.

HE TAKES THE NEXT TRAIN. When the conductor comes along, Hermann asks him where the train is going and buys a ticket to the final destination. Most of the time he just stares out of the window into the dark. Gradually the train fills up, then, after Zurich, empties again, the names of the stops get less familiar. An elderly woman—roughly in Rosmarie’s years—sits across from him in the compartment and stares at him so brazenly, he ends up moving. At the end of three hours the loudspeaker announcer says the train has now reached its final station stop, gare terminus. The announcement is in two languages, as the city where Hermann finds himself is bilingual. He can’t remember having been here before, but perhaps he has. He is on a narrow street that follows a canal. He comes to a park and then a lake. A long pier leads far out into the lake. Hermann walks along the curving, wood-planked jetty, which is lit by little lamps, till he gets to a small triangular concreted area, way out in the lake. He stands there for a long time, the suitcase beside him, like a traveler at a bus stop. It feels as though the old suitcase contains everything that’s left of Rosmarie. The objects have more to do with her than the cold body he saw lying on a metal bed in the hospital a few hours back, reduced to its vital functions. He stoops and picks up the suitcase and walks back down the jetty. Only now does he see, on the side away from the port, a sandbank, with a little fir tree on it, presumably a Christmas tree dumped in the canal after Christmas and now washed up here. He walks through the park, along the canal, and back into the inner city.

The night porter gives Hermann a funny look when he asks for a double room and pays cash, but he asks no questions, only whether he needed a parking spot or a wake-up call. Breakfast was on the sixth floor, from seven o’clock to half past nine. Over the rooftops of the city, he volunteers.

Hermann sits on the bed in his room. He hasn’t even taken his shoes off, he feels a little nauseated by the worn carpet and the coverlet that God knows who has sat on before him. The room is small, and the only light is from a dim economy bulb that isn’t enough to dispel the darkness. There’s a draft, the aluminum windows don’t seal properly. Hermann could have gone to a better hotel, but that didn’t seem appropriate. Church bells ring nearby. He counts the chimes. Ten. Then eleven. He must have dropped off. Only now does it occur to him that no one knows where he is. He has forgotten his medication, and has had nothing to eat since lunchtime. At least he’s filled in the registration form for the porter. If something happened to him, they would be able to trace him. He wonders about calling the hospital and asking about Rosmarie’s condition, but he doesn’t do it. Presumably they don’t release information over the phone anyway. He takes off his shoes but not his socks. He hangs his clothes over the back of a chair. Then he lies down in the bed. The suitcase is on the pillow next to him, in Rosmarie’s place. He leaves the light on.

WHEN HERMANN WAKES UP the next morning, it’s still dark. Before he gets up, he opens the suitcase and takes the things out, one after the other, looking at each item for a long time. He puts on Rosmarie’s cardigan, eats the chocolate bar, reads the blurb on the book jacket. Was there a family argument between the factory owner and his son-in-law? Or did the night watchman of the glassworks pay the price for being such a devoted reader? Hermann turns a few pages and finds an epigraph from Don Giovanni:

What strange fear

Assails my spirits!

Where do they come from

,

Those horrible whirlwinds of flame?

The book is full of Italian words in italics: maestro, canna, servente, l’uomo di notte. Hermann can’t imagine what Rosmarie saw in such nonsense. He puts the book away and takes the underwear out of the suitcase, counts the items, the way you might count days, with a brief lurch of memory.

That morning he washes his hair with Rosmarie’s shampoo, he uses the olive oil soap and cleans his teeth with her toothbrush. He doesn’t eat any breakfast, he feels a little sick from the chocolate. He is terribly thirsty and drinks three glasses of tap water.

On the train he puts the suitcase on the seat next to him. A lot of people get on in Olten. A young man asks Hermann whether the seat next to him is free. Yes, he says, and he puts the suitcase on his knee. Would you like me to put that on the luggage rack for you? asks the young man. No, says Hermann, more roughly than he intended. He clutches the suitcase for the whole journey, as though someone was going to come and try to take it away from him. He takes it with him when he goes to the bathroom.

IT’S THE HOSPITAL that Hermann was born in, where his children were born. At that time there was only the old building. The long brick building next to it must be from the seventies or early eighties. Hermann walks past the porter, he thinks he can remember the way to intensive care, but then he gets lost and needs to ask a nurse for directions. She asks him if he’s feeling all right, and insists on escorting him to the ward. There is no news for him there. The doctor was just in a meeting and would be out in a moment. Did Herr Lehmann want to see his wife? He asks for a glass of water and sits down. A nurse gives him the form he didn’t fill out yesterday. It’s very important.

Hermann sits in the waiting room, going through a brochure on the early detection of heart attacks, and then he looks at some women’s magazines. Franz Beckenbauer is praying for the seriously ill Monica Lierhaus, a TV sports show host Hermann has never heard of. He is not interested in sports, but he reads the article all the same. The woman had a blood clot in her brain, underwent an operation, there were complications, she was put in an artificial coma. Her life is hanging by a thread, the article ends, her closest relatives fear the worst. Why her? it says under the picture of a beautiful young woman with chestnut hair. Hermann feels tears coming on. He clears his throat and tears the page out of the magazine, folds it, and puts it in his pocket. Then he goes with the suitcase into Rosmarie’s room. He looks around, there is no one around. He hides the suitcase under the stand with medical equipment, and, without looking back at Rosmarie, leaves the room.

Sweet Dreams

THE CORKSCREW WAS made in the shape of a girl in a pleated frock of the sort Lara knew from girlhood pictures of her mother, a short light green summer dress. Only the red collar didn’t really fit, it should have been embroidered tulle, and white. Lara could see the pictures, big family get-togethers in a garden in the north of Italy, pictures full of people she didn’t know, even her mother didn’t know some of the names. That man was a neighbor, what was his name again? And aren’t those my mother’s cousin Alberto’s children, Graziella, Alfina, and what was the little one called? Antonio? Tonino? The colors were bleached, which made them somehow more garish. It was as though the pictures had caught the sun, the sun of childhood, pale and ever-present. Thereafter the family had fallen apart, people had gone their separate ways. When Lara had visited Italy with her parents, there hadn’t been any more big reunions, only visits in darkened homes with old people who smelled funny and served dry cookies and big plastic bottles of lukewarm Fanta.

The grip on the corkscrew was the girl’s head. She had a pageboy cut and a fixed smile. Lara looked at the price tag. They already had a corkscrew, and they hardly ever drank wine. She hesitated for a long while, the shop woman was already eyeing her doubtfully, then she pulled herself together and took it to the register. Is it for a present? asked the woman, unpicking the price tag and dabbing it on the back of her hand. No, Lara shook her head, no need to wrap it, I’ll take it like that. She looked at her watch. The bus wasn’t due for another half an hour.

Lara worked at the Raiffeisen Bank, and she got off work before Simon, but she liked to wait for him so they could travel home together. Generally, she would sit in the bus shelter, smoke a cigarette, and browse through the free paper. Suddenly she was aware of someone in front of her. She looked up and saw Simon standing there smiling. She jumped up and kissed him on the lips, and he made a remark about her awful habit, sometimes he meant it, at others he was just being flippant. The last few days it had been so cold, she skipped her cherished after-work cigarette and piled into the bus, which was usually standing there when she got to the station. Simon worked in a hi-fi store. After it closed, he needed to tidy things away, and when the boss wasn’t there, to do the register. The bus drivers knew him and they waited when they saw him running around the corner. I had to stay and do the till, he would say breathlessly, drop onto the seat, and kiss Lara on the lips. Have you been smoking again? They were sitting right at the back, the row with the three seats together was their favorite. There wasn’t much light there, and the noise of the engine muffled their whispering.

Lara hadn’t taken off her coat, but still she felt Simon’s shoulder against hers. He told her about his day, picky customers and new equipment and an argument with the owner. Lara loved these rides with him, especially in winter, when it was already dark outside, the half hour up and over the ridge through little villages, past meadows with old apple orchards and plowland. The radio was playing a country music song. That was “Sweet Dreams,” said the presenter, by Reba McEntire, to whom we are devoting the whole of our show today. Lara kissed Simon and laid her head on his shoulder.

They had been living together for just over four months in a little one-bedroom apartment over the station restaurant not far from the lake. It wasn’t ideal, but Simon had wanted to remain in the village he had grown up in, and even though there wasn’t much going on in the place, it proved difficult to find anywhere at all. The building was old and run down, the staircase was a mess, with an old freezer unit in the way, and stacks of white plastic chairs for the beer garden, empty cardboard boxes, and lots of other junk. On the second floor there were a couple of rooms for guests, which were rarely taken, and up on the third was their little apartment and a couple of studios. One of these was empty, in the other lived Danica, a young Serbian girl who waited tables in the restaurant. When Lara and Simon first went to look at the apartment, Lara hadn’t been able to envisage them living there at all. But after they’d been to look at a couple of other places, all much more expensive, they went back to it. Before they moved in, they repainted all the rooms: the landlady chipped in with paints and brushes and left them a free hand with the decoration. They spent whole evenings talking about various color schemes, but in the end they just painted everything white. The rooms looked cozier right away, and Lara was happy. It was the right time to leave home, even though she got on well with her parents. She was ready to decide her life for herself, buy things, move out.

Lara was twenty-one, Simon three years older. He’d had one girlfriend before Lara, but they hadn’t lived together. It wasn’t anything serious, he would say if Lara asked. He had lived with his parents so far, and still needed to get used to the fact that clothes didn’t wash themselves and the fridge wasn’t automatically kept full. But he too seemed to get a kick out of going shopping together on the weekends, and wondering what they would cook today and tomorrow and the next day. Do we need milk? You know, the coffee’s almost finished. We’re out of garbage bags. Sentences like that had an unexpected charm, and a full shopping cart was like an emblem of the fulfilled life that lay before them. When Simon wheeled it into the underground parking garage, with Lara at his side, she felt a deep pride and a curious satisfaction at being grown up and independent.

They had been to IKEA a couple of times, and bought a mattress and a box spring and various bits and pieces for bathroom and kitchen, lamps and tablecloths and silverware. Simon’s parents had given them an old table and four chairs. For a wardrobe they had a set of cheap shelving for which Lara had sewn a curtain of red material. She loved these little tasks, sewing cushion covers, fitting a new toilet seat and a showerhead, putting up posters. Simon would watch her and enjoy it with her. The electrical things were his department.

Every week there would be something new, a barely used coffee machine that Lara found on eBay, a wooden crate for their shoes, a whole stack of yellow bath towels that were on sale. Simon hardly got involved, at most he would say, Do we really need this? Or, How much did you pay for that? It’s a mistake to economize on quality, these towels will last us forever. Forever is a long time, answered Simon.

He hadn’t brought much into their household, the rented van they had driven first to his parents’, then hers, was barely a quarter full of his boxes of clothes, CDs, and old schoolbooks. Most room was taken up by his stereo equipment, the gigantic loudspeakers, and the computer. They bought a TV on the never-never, an ex-showroom model Simon’s boss had given them a good price for.

How do you like it? asked Lara, producing the corkscrew from the bag she had next to her on the empty seat. Simon picked it up and played with it, saying nothing. He furrowed his brow, pulled on the screw, and the girl raised her arms. A ballet dancer, he said. No, said Lara, just a girl. Do we even have any wine? That bottle from your parents, said Simon. He was still playing with the thing, pulling the handle up and down, causing the girl to wave her hands, as though cheering or calling for help. Was it expensive? We drank that when Hanni and Martin came, said Lara, don’t you remember?

The restaurant downstairs was a bit seedy. Lara and Simon never went there, even though the manageress was their landlady. If they went out anywhere, it was to a place a hundred yards up the road, which did stuffed chicken breasts. They didn’t go to the lakeside disco much anymore where they met. During the week they went to bed early, and if they felt like going out dancing on the weekend, they would go to the city, where there were better clubs and where not everyone knew them.

THE BUS STOPPED outside the station, and the driver wished everyone a nice evening over the p.a. and turned off the engine. The passengers got off, said a word or two in parting, and went their separate ways. Lara knew most of them fleetingly, there was only one man she hadn’t seen before. He had turned once or twice during the trip and looked at her. When the driver said the next stop was their final destination, he had got up right away and gone to the door, even though the bus was stopping anyway. While the bus took its last few corners, the man stood directly in front of Lara. He held on tight and pressed the Stop button again. He had to be about forty, and with his long black coat didn’t seem to really fit in. While she was studying him, their eyes met. The man seemed quiet, almost indifferent, but in his eyes Lara saw an attentiveness and a kind of hunger that were a little disagreeable, but at the same time provoked her. She turned to Simon, kissed him, and asked, Will you come to the market with me tomorrow during your lunch break? She could feel how her voice sounded artificial and even a bit loud, but she felt she had to say something. The man in the black coat was the first to get off the bus. Lara saw him go back in the direction of the main street. After a few steps he turned around quickly, as though to see whether she was following him, and their eyes met once again. Do you know him? Simon asked. Lara shook her head. The face looks familiar to me for some reason.

When Lara locked the door after her, she read, as she did every evening, the handwritten sign that hung there. PLEASE DON’T THROW BREAD AWAY. Beside the door was an old cardboard box filled to the top with stale bread. Lara asked herself what her landlady planned to do with it. From downstairs came music and the sound of loud laughter. When folk groups played there on Fridays, they could hear the racket up in their apartment. Even worse were the toilet smells in the passage and the smoke that wended its way up the stairs. Simon had been down to complain a couple of times, but the landlady just said if they were that bothered by the smell, they should open a few windows.

Are you hungry? Lara asked. I wouldn’t mind a hot bath before dinner, I’m chilled to the bone. The half hour in the bus hadn’t been enough to warm her up. I bought some fresh ravioli, they only take three minutes. I had a late lunch, said Simon, I’m not hungry yet. They were standing together in the kitchen, and Lara was putting the shopping away. She held up the corkscrew. Do you like the color? Green, said Simon, and Lara thought about the bleached colors of the Italian photos again. It was forty-five francs, she said. Do you think that’s too much? Simon shrugged. You could always get a bottle of wine from the restaurant while I’m in the bath, said Lara, and then we can initiate the corkscrew.

She went to the bathroom, filled the tub, and got undressed. The mirror misted over with condensation, and the smell of pine needles filled the air. She turned off the water, and the apartment suddenly seemed very quiet. Then she heard footsteps and Simon’s voice through the half-open door. He said, I’m just going downstairs for the bottle of wine. I thought you’d gone already, said Lara, and she poked her head through the crack, and he kissed her on the lips and tried to barge the door open, but she held it shut. They kissed again. See you in a minute, said Lara. It was odd, she still felt a little ashamed in front of him. When they went to bed, she would get changed in the bathroom and slip under the sheets next to him in her nightie. She would wait impatiently for him to slide across to her, but she would never dream of taking the initiative.

Before they moved in together, it had all been pretty complicated. She introduced Simon to her parents fairly early on in the game, and they liked him, but he never spent the night under her roof. Lara would have felt ashamed of sleeping with him in her childhood bedroom, she would have been scared of her parents walking in on them, or hearing them, even though they weren’t noisy in bed. The times they had slept together were at Simon’s. Lara had always felt tense, and jumped at the smallest sound. In the summer, they had done it in the forest a couple of times, but that was uncomfortable, and Lara had felt just as nervous. She had yet to get used to the new freedom. Even now, she was still scared someone would see them or hear them. Sometimes, when Simon was lying on top of her, she pulled the covers up over his head. When he tried to pull them down, she held on to them and said, I’ll get cold.

She basked in the warm water, and thought about what still had to be done in the apartment, what they were still missing. She would have liked a bedside table, but that didn’t make much sense, as they didn’t even have a bed frame. They had seen a colonial-style bed in the furniture store, a sort of four-poster in poplar, with white tulle curtains. A dream, said the salesman, who had approached them and was looking expectantly at them both. That bed came with fitted tables, and a wardrobe as well. But for the moment it was more than they could afford, and Lara wasn’t sure if Simon liked it, or if it wasn’t a bit girly for him. When they went to see the beds at IKEA, Simon’s only question each time had been, Is it strong? Will it hold up? He probably didn’t mean it like that, but Lara still felt embarrassed in front of the salesman. We don’t need to buy everything at once, she said. So now they had a mattress and box spring on the floor.

After twenty minutes she got out of the bath and pulled the plug. She dried herself on one of the big yellow bath towels. It wasn’t actually a color she liked, that slighty off-, mustardy yellow. But you couldn’t argue about the quality, the quality was excellent. She had put them through the wash a couple of times, and they still felt brand new. Lara had to think about what Simon said: Forever is a long time. Presumably the towels would outlast their relationship, she thought, and that gave her a shock. She loved Simon, and he loved her, but was there any guarantee that he would still love her in five or ten years’ time? Her notions of the future were both very precise and very vague. She wanted children, and a home, and she wanted to go on working part-time once the children were there. In a few years she would get her promotion, and maybe one day she would become branch manager. But all that seemed very far off, a different life. Sometimes she would ask herself if Simon had the same sort of dreams as she did. It made her suspicious when he said, Let’s just see, que sera sera, we’re still young. In fact he felt as strange to her as this apartment that was only slowly turning into home. She never knew exactly what he wanted, he didn’t talk much about himself, it was only when he was together with his friends that he seemed perfectly natural and relaxed.

She wrapped the towel around her, rinsed her hair in the sink, and put it up. Suddenly she felt a longing for Simon, she wanted to throw her arms around him, lie in bed with him, and press herself against him. She went to the kitchen, but he wasn’t there. Simon, she called, and went into the living room and then the bedroom. Simon? He must still be down in the restaurant, he was sure to be back any moment. She sat at the table, leafed through the free paper she had picked up at the bus station. One ex–Miss Switzerland wanted to climb Kilimanjaro to raise money for a children’s cancer hospital, Prince William had worn a toupee for a portrait photographer, or so at least the newspaper claimed, an American was put to death for a murder he had committed twenty-five years ago. Under the headline Gruesome Find on Lake, there was a story about a trout fisherman who had stumbled upon a dead body in the water just offshore. The policemen who pulled the body in were quoted as saying that the dead man had been missing for a couple of months. Presumably it was suicide, though accidental death was also a possibility. The water temperature wasn’t above thirty-eight or forty degrees, if you fell in you wouldn’t last more than a few minutes.

A drop of water fell from Lara’s hair to the picture of the yachting marina where the body had been found. With a shudder she pushed the newspaper away. She had to think about that man being found in the water no more than a few hundred yards away, while she and Simon were getting moved in, or eating their supper, or making love. She felt cold in her towel. There was only a gas heater in the apartment, and the windows were not exactly insulated. Lara went into the kitchen and put on the water for ravioli. She took two plates from the cupboard and a couple of forks off the draining board, and scrubbed at a stain on one of the units, but it wouldn’t budge. The kitchen was from the seventies, and you could scrub away at it as much as you liked, it never got completely clean. Lara went to the bathroom, blow-dried her hair, and put on some clothes.

SHE SNEAKED DOWN the creaking staircase. She didn’t turn on the landing light, she didn’t want to be seen. The music had stopped, and the voices had quieted down too. She had almost reached the bottom when the door to the bar opened, and she saw the backlit silhouette of an enormous man. At the same moment, the light went on. The man had a flushed complexion, he pulled the door shut behind him, and passed her without a word on his way to the gents, as though he hadn’t seen her. The voice of the landlady was loud and distinct. He didn’t recognize him right away, she was saying, because the man was lying face down. In summer he would probably have bobbed up sooner. Lara pushed open the door to the bar and stepped inside.

There were half a dozen men at the bar and at one or two tables, and Lara was alarmed because they were all looking at her; but then she realized their attention was on the landlady, behind the bar. She was talking about something else now. They ought to poison that son of a bitch, she said, to teach him what it feels like. Those poor dogs. Lara had seen the tabloid headline: ANIMAL HATER STRIKES AGAIN. She saw Simon standing on one of the benches along the wall, his head obscured by an enormous TV mounted on the ceiling. Right behind him and looking up at him stood Danica, the waitress. Even though they were neighbors, Lara had only run into her once or twice on the stairs. Sometimes she heard her footsteps on the landing late at night, but there was never any sound from the studio. Danica had come to Switzerland from Serbia with her parents when she was little, she told Lara and Simon the first time they met. She hadn’t managed to find an apprenticeship, even though she had good grades. Do you think she’s attractive? Lara had asked Simon later. Other women don’t interest me, he replied. But surely you’ve got an opinion? I don’t know, he said. I think she’s got bedroom eyes, said Lara, and Simon laughed and kissed her.

Simon seemed to be doing something with the TV. After a while, he jumped off the bench and said something to Danica. She smiled and switched the TV on, and together they looked at the screen, which was showing a grainy picture of a downhill skier. Simon spotted Lara and went over to her. A faulty connection, he said, and when she looked at him in bemusement, the TV’s on the blink. He turned to the landlady and said the antenna wire’s bent, he could bring her a new one tomorrow. Isn’t it practical having a workman in the house? said the landlady. What will you have to drink? A glass of red? I was going to buy a bottle of wine, said Simon. It’s on the house, said the landlady. And the young lady? Simon looked at Lara, and then he said I’d rather have a beer, and to Lara, Are you hungry? Sit down the pair of you, said the landlady, dunking a glass in murky dishwater and pouring a large beer.

There wasn’t a free table, so Simon sat down opposite an old man who seemed to have had a few already. Lara slid in on the bench next to him. She asked me if I would take a look at the TV, he said half apologetically. A faulty connection. I thought you weren’t coming back, said Lara. She sounded reproachful, which she didn’t mean to be. She had promised herself that she wouldn’t be clingy with Simon. He had just wanted to help out. She was sorry she’d come down. If she’d stayed upstairs, he would surely not have accepted the landlady’s offer, and would have returned right away. Danica stepped up to the table, bringing Simon’s beer and a glass of wine for Lara. The landlady and the men were still talking about the poisoned dogs, and what the authorities should do to the guilty party if they caught him. The drunk at their table said under his breath that he could think of a couple of dogs he wouldn’t mind poisoning. Lara wasn’t sure it was for their hearing, and she didn’t reply. She felt her hair, which was still a little bit damp.

For no obvious reason, the drunk started talking about a cruise he’d gone on almost twenty years ago, on the Black Sea. It was dull, those cruises were pretty uneventful. I’ve been in the Crimea, in Sebastopol, where the Russians have a navy base and submarines. That was an experience, that was worth it. Simon didn’t seem to be listening, he drank his beer and looked up at the TV set, where a different skier was on the piste. From the loudspeaker came the sound of cowbells and the rhythmic shouts of supporters. Lara wasn’t sure where the Black Sea was.

Danica appeared at their table, and filled up Lara’s glass before she was able to say no thank you. Now she was sitting there foolishly with her hand over the full glass. She hadn’t had anything to eat since lunchtime, and she could feel the alcohol going to her head. Will you have another beer? Danica asked. Simon glanced quickly up at Lara, as though he needed her permission. Then he said, Yes, sure, and half got up. Will you excuse me, I’ll be back in a moment. Lara let him out. No sooner had she sat down again than the drunk asked if she was from hereabouts, he hadn’t seen her before. She felt ill at ease in the bar, threatened by the loud landlady and the drunken men who were ogling her. I grew up in Kreuzlingen, she said. The man held out his hand and said Manfred was his name. She shook it and said Lara. Dr. Zhivago, he said. That was a nice film. With Omar Sharif, and … who was she again? Julie Christie, said Lara. In the streetcar. The drunk smiled. I have a sister in Kreuzlingen. Have you ever been to Russia? No, said Lara.

She wanted to say something else, it would make her feel safer if she was talking, but she couldn’t think of anything. Where is the Black Sea again? she asked finally. If you’re coming from the Mediterranean, you pass Istanbul and go through the Bosporus, then you’re in the Black Sea. The south shore is Turkey, and in the north are Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, and Russia. Have you been to all those places? asked Lara. I went on that cruise, said Manfred, that’s where I met my wife. She’s Ukrainian. She was working on the ship. But that didn’t work out. Danica came back and asked if they wanted anything. Both shook their heads. When she was gone, Manfred said in a whisper, I tell you, those women from the East, and then he laid his finger across his lips.

Lara was relieved when Simon finally returned. She thought he might have gone to the bathroom, but he was holding a dirty white cable in one hand. He had a brief word with the landlady, and then he climbed up on the bench once more and switched the cables. For a moment, there was just a streaky gray on the screen, then the picture suddenly came clear, and the sound seemed even louder than before to Lara. Simon punched through a few channels on the remote, probably to check that the reception was uniformly good. There was a brief glimpse of two men sitting facing each other. Lara was almost sure that one of them was the man in the black coat, on the bus. But the scene disappeared immediately, to be replaced by a woman arguing with a little girl, and then a group of soldiers sneaking through a forest, and then back to the skiing. Simon returned to the table. I just remembered I had an old cable lying around, he said, and smiled in satisfaction. Shall we go? said Lara, getting to her feet.

The landlady didn’t want any money for the bottle of wine. It’s in return for the cable, she said, giving Lara and Simon her hand, which felt soft and a bit soapy from the washing up. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, one of the men called after them as they left the bar, and everyone laughed.

THE WATER WAS BOILING violently, half of it had evaporated already, leaving a white chalky line at the top of the saucepan. Lara quickly turned off the gas. Never ever leave the stove on when you go out, not even for a second, said Simon. As if Lara didn’t know that. It’s not my fault, she said, I thought you’d be back right away. She felt like crying. I didn’t mean it like that, said Simon, and kissed her. Nothing happened. Lara turned away and picked up the corkscrew. Simon watched alertly as she took the plastic seal off the bottle. She had to overcome her own resistance to place her thumb over the girl’s face and apply enough strength to insert the screw into the cork. She looked Simon in the eye, let him see how furious she was. I’m sorry, he said, I know, it’s my fault. She set down the bottle and said, as if in conciliation, You do it. Simon put on a rather ceremonious expression, as though God knows what surprise was in store, and slowly pushed down on the girl’s arms. With a bright popping sound, the cork came out of the bottle.

Simon looked at Lara with a grin. She threw her arms around him and started to kiss him, went on repeatedly kissing him, and tried to undo the buttons on his shirt. Simon, not looking where he was putting it, laid aside the corkscrew, and with their mouths glued together they undressed each other and let their clothes drop to the floor. Simon almost fell over as he wriggled out of his tight jeans, he was only just able to catch himself on Lara, who was impatiently tugging at the hooks on her bra. When they were both naked, Lara lay down on the coconut matting they had bought at IKEA, and Simon knelt between her legs. He tried to enter her, but couldn’t. Wouldn’t you rather go on the bed? he asked. Wait, said Lara, and she disappeared into the living room and came back with one of the sofa cushions. She lay down again and pushed the cushion under her bum. The matting was rough, and Lara could feel it scratching her back, but she didn’t care. Soon Simon rolled off her and lay next to her, and she understood he had come.

She was still aroused, and stroked him until he was hard again. This time she sat on top of him. Simon didn’t seem to be really focused, but she didn’t care. She rode him till she could no longer feel the burning in her knees, and sensed the blood rushing to her face. She shut her eyes and moved more and more vigorously, it was as though it was all happening inside her head, as though all her sensations were merging into one overwhelming feeling. Then she heard herself scream loudly, and dropped panting onto Simon, her head beside his, not daring to look him in the eye. For a while she lay like that, then her breathing came more evenly, and she could feel her body again, the pain in her knees and the chill against her back. She sat up. Simon looked at her in astonishment, and asked with a smile, Did the earth move for you, then? She laid a finger across his mouth. Her face grew very earnest, and she said, If you stop loving me ever, I want you to promise to tell me. But I do love you, protested Simon. I mean, because you never know what will happen, Lara said. And now I have to put something on, or I’ll catch cold.

In the bathroom, she saw that the pattern of the coconut matting was imprinted across her back, and that her knees were scraped open and sore. She thought of taking a shower, but for now she just put on a fresh pair of panties and pulled on her dressing gown. When she went back to the kitchen, Simon had got dressed, put on fresh water, and laid the table. He poured two glasses of wine and passed her one, and they toasted each other. Here’s to us. The wine was awful.

Lara didn’t sit facing Simon as she usually did, but beside him, and she kept touching him during the meal, grazing his arm or stroking his neck and back. After it was over, they stayed sitting for a long time and talking. Lara was bubbly, she spoke more quickly and volubly than usual. I think I must be a bit drunk, she said. I’d better look out then, hadn’t I, said Simon with a smile. Shall we go to bed?

Simon went to the bathroom and came back in pajamas. Lara didn’t feel like brushing her teeth. She just pulled off her dressing gown and slid into bed with Simon. He lay on his back and she pressed herself against him, pushing her hand in under his pajama top and stroking his chest. Are you tired? she asked. Yes, said Simon, and with that he turned onto his side and soon his breathing was calm and even. Lara didn’t feel at all tired. After lying there awake for a time, she got up and made herself a cup of tea in the kitchen. Then she went to the living room and turned on the TV. She zapped her way through the programs. It was mostly films and talk shows. Lara stopped for a while at one station with phone-sex ads, and watched the women rubbing their breasts and moaning Call me, call me. For once, she didn’t feel disgusted, on the contrary she felt a kind of sympathy or solidarity with the women, which surprised her. She clicked onward, and suddenly there was the man from the bus again. It was the local channel, which recycled all its programs every hour. The studio was in the old town, not far away. Lara knew the host by sight, he used to be a teacher, Simon had gone to his school.

She listened for a while before it dawned on her that the guest on the show had to be a writer. She’d never heard his name before. The host’s questions were often longer than the man’s short, factual replies. Again, Lara was caught by his alert look, which had got her attention on the bus. Asked where he got the ideas for his stories, he said he found them on the street. Only today, on the bus to the studio, there was this young couple, two perfectly ordinary young people, sitting together and talking terribly earnestly. They reminded me of my youth, a woman I wanted to marry and have kids with. Then something got in the way. But I never felt so sure of anything as I did then, before I really knew the first thing about living.

He imagined the couple had only just moved in together, they were furnishing their apartment and buying things for it, and maybe with slight astonishment contemplating all the years that lay ahead of them, asking themselves whether their relationship would last. It’s that blissful but slightly anxious moment of starting out that interests me, said the writer, maybe I’ll write a story about it. And how will the story end? asked the host. The writer shrugged. I’ll only know that when I’ve finished it.

He said young couples sometimes resembled very old couples, perhaps because they both had to deal with uncertainty. The host asked if it wasn’t tricky writing from life. The writer shook his head. He wasn’t painting a portrait of these two individuals. They had given him an idea for something, but they had nothing to do with the people he might write about in his story. In actual fact they weren’t a couple at all, he said. They got off at two different stops and kissed each other on the cheek.

Lara heard the last train pull in. Quarter to one. She went up to the window and saw the train standing there, with no one getting on or off. After a while, it silently pulled away. The writer would have gone home long ago, even while he continued to speak on the TV. For a month they would keep replaying the conversation with him in an endless loop, until he himself had become just as much an imaginary figure as Lara and Simon.

Coney Island

TEAR OFF THE cardboard match in the matchbook, turn it around without looking at it. Your thumb knows the way. It recognizes the under edge of the flap, and then stops on the head of the match, and presses it against the emery board. A rasp, and the thumb jerks back, allows the match head some air to burst into flame. Carry the flame, hidden in the hollow of your hand, to the tip of your cigarette. A quick first drag, not inhaling. The flame lengthens in the air current, and quickly collapses in on itself, grows darker, having moved on to the fibrous cardboard. Then it goes out in the wind.

Sit on a lump of granite. Your legs drawn up, your arms around your knees. The cigarette in your right hand, between index and middle finger. The left hand first laid over the right, holding on to it, then it relaxes its grip, dangles down toward your knee, and stops there, hanging. The tips of your fingers not resting on your knee, so much as merely brushing against it. The cigarette hand approaches your mouth and turns through ninety degrees. As soon as the cigarette is gripped between your lips, the fingers let go. The hand stays where it is, the head turns away. By a slight forward movement of the lower jaw, the cigarette is ever so slightly raised. The head returns, the fingers lock, take back the cigarette, which detaches itself first from the lower then the top lip. The arm slowly falls back. The hands join again. Smoke flows out of the mouth, and while the right thumb flicks the cigarette filter and then lets it go, and the cigarette bounces and loose ash is dislodged from the burning cone of tobacco, the lower lip half pushes over the upper lip and wipes away the sensation left there by the touch of the cigarette.

The ash falls onto the rock, a few flakes of it break away, tumble down over the rock, driven by the wind and the unevenness of the granite, and fall over an edge and out of sight. The wind, coming off the land, has picked up. The few people walking on the beach are all heading toward me, as though we had arranged to meet here, only subtly changing direction when they have almost reached me, and walking past me. The flat waves make a feeble splash as they crest and spread out. In the distance there’s the wail of a siren. One man flies a kite, another walks over the beach with a metal detector. He walks slowly to and fro, following some system that only he knows. It’s twenty to three on October 21, 2002.

The granite block is one of several that have been dropped into the sea every couple of hundred yards or so. A Spanish-speaking family has stopped near me, a man, a woman, and two little girls. They laugh, talk, feed the gulls, which are squawking greedily and fighting for pieces of bread with jagged motions.

Down by the sea, two young women have been taking pictures of each other. Then they draw nearer. One walks past me, the other asks if she can take my picture. Her companion stops to watch. Her eyes are staring and the corners of her mouth are turned down with impatience or dismay. Her face looks like a skull.

The one taking the picture stands with feet apart. The camera masks her face. She doesn’t take forever framing the image, just squeezes the release, once, and again. I ask, Do you want me to smile? She shakes her head. No, she says. Just the way you are. That’s perfect.