We're Flying

by Peter Stamm

  Sometimes she wondered what would have happened if she’d stayed on the train and gone to Vienna, and submitted her portfolio. Most likely she wouldn’t have been asked to take the exam. Or she would have failed the exam. Or she would have passed the exam and taken the course, and she would be an art teacher now in some little town or other. The only thing you could say for certain was that there would have been no Cyril, and she couldn’t imagine a life without him, even if she did sometimes wish he had never been born, and she had remained free and independent and able to do whatever she wanted.

  She would have liked to talk about all that with Renate, would have liked to show her the new drawings, but since her return she had avoided her former teacher. She thought of that night, the smell of Renate, and her bare feet and her hands, her tanned skin, her pale skin. She felt ashamed in front of her, and secretly she probably gave her some of the blame for what had happened. She never thanked Renate for the card and the soft toy that Renate had sent when Cyril was born. She had the feeling she was making fun of her in some way.

  HEIDI WAS MAKING SUPPER. The news was on the radio. Cyril was in the living room, listening to a kids’ tape. He had the volume on much too high, and his story was mixed in with items on the news, making an absurd collage. Outside, Carmen was showing off in front of her pals. In her mind, Heidi changed to the girl, parading up and down, confidently showing off her body, dolled up for no one except herself. Heidi knew by now that Carmen wasn’t interested in the boys, she was just playing with them. She had talked to her, they had had coffee together, she had gone to buy clothes with her and underwear, which she only wore when Rainer wasn’t at home. She had let Carmen put makeup on her and do her hair. And then they had taken pictures of themselves and each other, made little videos using Carmen’s mobile phone camera, masquerades, games, whatever they felt like. Heidi had shown herself to the girl, she imagined her showing the little films to her friends with her cheeky laugh. Heidi was waiting for Carmen to look up at her, but she never did, probably she was just toying with her too.

  Heidi imagined what would happen if Rainer found the drawings when she was no longer there. Sometime, looking for a reason, he would go through all her things, and open the box and find the sketches and the photographs. She’s just a kid, he would say, and shake his head, and not get it.

  The Hurt

  AT THE AGE of forty, Lucia’s mother had gone mad. I think that was the thing Lucia was most afraid of for herself. I asked her what had precipitated it. Just life, Lucia said, shrugging her shoulders. She married this man who loved her more than she loved him. I came along, she raised me, and eventually she couldn’t take it anymore and she cut her wrists. When I found her she was unconscious. I was thirteen.

  Lucia was two years younger than me. I met her one summer, when I was staying with my grandparents in the mountains. I’d finished school in the spring, and I was going to start college in the fall. I had been hoping to go walking with my grandfather, but he had fallen ill and was slow to recover, so I had a lot of time to myself. When it rained, I read to try and prepare for college, but when the sun shone I was outside all day, wandering around, swimming in the icy lake, and coming home late.

  It was at the lake that I first met Lucia. We hit it off right away, and spent all our time together. We went walking in the mountains, lay in the grass for hours, and when the weather was bad we put on slickers and went out anyway. The meadows were springy underfoot, and when the sun came out the sky was blue like you wouldn’t believe.

  Often Lucia asked me to tell her stories. I’d hardly experienced anything in real life, but I always came up with something to tell her about. I can’t remember what, I just remember we used to laugh a lot. Lucia told me about her dreams, places she wanted to visit, things she wanted to buy. A car and clothes and a house. She had it all planned. She wanted to work in one of the hotel bars and make a lot of money in no time at all, and then she wanted a husband and two kids and a house on the edge of the village, near the lake. Then I can sit at home, she said, and look out the window and wait for the kids to come home from school.

  Once Lucia got sick. She was alone at home, her mother was away in the clinic, and her father was in the shop downstairs. He sold radios and TVs, and he was a nice, rather shy man. She’s just got a bit of a cold, he said, and he sent me upstairs to her.

  Lucia answered the door in pajamas, and I followed her up to her room. It was my first time in the house, and I had a mildly alarming sense I was doing something forbidden. It was that afternoon Lucia told me about her mother. It’s only in summer, she said, she sits upstairs in her room all day long, doesn’t speak, doesn’t do anything, and my father keeps having to go up and check how she is. He’s worried she might try to do it again, said Lucia. Will you make me some tea?

  She wasn’t really sick, but I made her some tea anyway, it was like a game of house. Lucia told me where to find everything. When I opened the cabinets, I had a feeling I was under observation. Then Lucia walked into the kitchen and watched me and smiled when I looked at her. When she coughed, it sounded like she was pretending.

  Lucia showed me photographs. We lay on the bed together, she was under the covers, I was on top. Eventually she asked me to kiss her, and I kissed her. About a week later, we slept together, it was the first time for both of us.

  We thought we would go on a circular walk over two mountain passes. We would spend the night in a youth hostel in the next valley. We had been walking all day, had climbed up a long way, crossed stony landscapes, and only late in the afternoon reached our destination, which was a tiny village way up a barren valley. The youth hostel was a small stone house at the edge of the village. On the door was a sign telling you where to pick up the key.

  The house was cold and empty. On the ground floor was a kitchen and a little dining room. There was a guest book on the table. The last entry was a couple of days ago. Two Australians had written something about the end of the world. The dormitory was up in the attic. It was dark, because there were only two dormer windows and a single weak lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. I dropped my backpack on one of the narrow mattresses along the wall on the floor, and Lucia took the one beside it. At the foot end of the mattresses were piles of brown woolen blankets. We went down to the kitchen, made coffee, and ate provisions we’d brought with us, bread and cheese and fruit and chocolate.

  The sun dipped over the mountain early and it quickly got cold, but the sky was still blue. In a little general store we bought a liter of red wine. Then we strolled up the valley out of the village. We could hear marmots whistle, but we couldn’t see them. After a bit, Lucia said she was getting cold. I offered her my jacket, but she declined and we turned back.

  The youth hostel was situated next to a stream we could hear even with the windows closed. It was barely warmer inside than out. I opened the wine and we got into our sleeping bags, not undressing, and drank wine out of the bottle and talked. Tell me a story, Lucia said, and I told her about things I wanted to do and films I’d seen and books I’d read.

  Lucia slipped out of her sleeping bag to go to the bathroom. When she came back, she sat on my sleeping bag for a minute, then she stripped to her underwear and scooted in beside me.

  Autumn came, and Lucia got a job at a hotel bar. I went home and enrolled at university. I had a good record at high school, but I had trouble making the adjustment to college. I found it hard to meet people, and spent most of my evenings alone in the little attic room my parents had found me.

  I wrote regularly to Lucia, who rarely wrote back. If she did, it was a postcard that barely said anything, just that she was doing fine, that there was nothing happening in the village, the weather was good or bad or whatever. Sometimes she filled in the space with little drawings, a flower or an Alpine hut, and one time a heart with a drop of blood squeezed from it. The drawings looked like tattoos to me.

  The summer after, my grandfather died. I drove out to the funeral in the village with
my father. I hoped to see Lucia. She wasn’t there. I left messages for her but she didn’t get in touch. When we returned to the flatland, we took Grandmother with us.

  A couple of times I tried to phone Lucia. Usually her father picked up and said she had just gone out. Once it was her. I said I wanted to visit her, but she didn’t seem interested. When I insisted, she said I was free to do what I liked, she couldn’t tell me never to come to the village. After that I wrote to her less often, but I didn’t forget her either. I had promised her that summer that I would be back, and when I’d finished at college, I applied for the job of teacher at the village school. The headmaster told me it was only on account of my grandparents that I got the job.

  YOU WON’T COME BACK, Lucia had said four years ago. Now she said, I never thought you’d be back. I had come up by train at the beginning of the week. My father promised to bring my stuff up to the valley by car that weekend, my books and the stereo and the little TV. But on Friday it snowed and the pass was shut. My father called and said did it matter if he came the following week? I was sitting in my grandparents’ little house. I was sleeping in the bed my grandfather had died in, and presumably my great-grandfather before him. I lay under the heavy comforter, my arms pinned to my sides like a dead person’s, and I tried to imagine what it would be like if I really couldn’t move them, just to lie there and wait for death.

  When the rest of my stuff comes, I’ll have you around to dinner, I said to Lucia. I’d gone to the bar where she worked. She said she was still living with her parents. She was working a lot, she said, in summer she’d totaled the car, and she wanted to buy another one in the spring. I said my grandparents’ garage still had the old Volvo standing in it, she could always borrow that. That piece of junk? she said, and she smirked.

  Work at the school was difficult. I had taken courses in education at college, but the kids here were rowdy and badly behaved and didn’t make it at all easy for me. My colleagues were no help either. Most of them were local, and the talk at break was about going hunting and village gossip and the weather. Once I rang the father of one especially difficult girl. He was a hotelier, and he treated me like a schoolboy on the phone. A few days later the headmaster came into my classroom after lessons and said if I had trouble, I should talk to him, and not blame the parents for my failures. Astrid stays up half the night watching TV, I said. And then she can’t stay awake during class.

  The head looked at the cut-paper shapes I’d done with the kids and that we’d hung in the windows. Snowflakes, he said. As if we didn’t have enough snow here. He took them down one after the other, slowly and without saying a word. When he was finished, he put them down in front of me and said, You ought to work on the syllabus instead of cutting fancy paper shapes.

  He left. I could hear the kids yelling outside. I went to the window. They were fighting, and then, just like that, they all ran out of the yard and disappeared down the street. They all ran off together, and I was put in mind of a swarm of scruffy birds I’d seen scavenging on the rubbish dump outside the village.

  The days were short and getting shorter. For a long time that year the snow held off, instead it was cold and rainy, and often I couldn’t see the tops of the mountains because the clouds were so low. It’s worse than in other years, said Lucia, at least when the snow comes everything gets brighter. She said she sometimes feared she might lose her mind like her mother. We had gone for a walk one afternoon when there was no school, out of the village and up the slope. It was one of the few fine days that autumn. But soon enough the sun disappeared behind the mountains, and only the upper slopes still had light on them.

  If only it would snow, Lucia said, then we could at least go skiing. I asked her back for supper, but she said she had no time. On Saturday then, I said, and she said, Oh, all right. She said she could smell snow in the air, and that the old people said it was going to be a cold winter. But that was what they said every year. I tried to kiss her on the mouth, but she turned away and offered her cheek. Tell me a story, she said. You must have stories you can tell. All that time you’ve been away. I haven’t been away, I said, I’ve been at home.

  THE NEXT DAY we went walking again. We went the same way and sat down on the same bench as on the day before. From there we could see the whole village, and the ugly modern hotels on the lake. The sky was cloudy, and soon after we had sat down it started snowing, small flakes the wind blew in our faces and that settled in the folds of our clothes. The snow melted away as soon as it touched the ground. Lucia had got up. I asked her to wait, but she shook her head and ran down the steep slope, leaping from boulder to boulder like a little girl. I watched her until she was back in the village. I stayed a while longer, then I walked down the road. I got to the school just on time. The headmaster was standing in the doorway, and watched silently as I walked past him and into my classroom.

  On Saturday Lucia came around. I had gone shopping that morning and cooked all afternoon. Lucia ate in silence. I asked her how she liked the food. She said, Yeah, and went on chewing. When we were finished, and sitting on the sofa drinking coffee, she got up and switched on the TV. I said did she have to do that. Not really, she said. You can tell me a story, if you like. She left the TV on, but turned the sound down a bit. I’ve been waiting for you, I said. I haven’t kept you waiting. I mean since that time … since we … you know, since we slept together. Lucia furrowed her brow. You mean you haven’t slept with any other woman? No, I said, and suddenly I felt stupid. Lucia laughed out loud. She said I was crazy. That’s just weird. I said I’d often thought about her. Lucia got up and said it was time she went. I switched off the TV and put on a CD. I asked if she’d slept with a lot of guys. She said that was none of my business, and after hesitating briefly, Of course, what else was there to do up here? Then she said she had brought some condoms, but she didn’t feel like it anymore. She took the little pack out of her pocket and tossed it to me. Here, they’re all for you, she said, and she put on her shoes and jacket.

  A WEEK LATER we went to the movies together. From the beginning of winter, the community center had one screening per week, and we often went to see them together. But Lucia wouldn’t come back to my house again. I was allowed to walk her home, and sometimes we would stand around chatting on the doorstep for a while. When she got cold, she gave me her hand and went inside.

  Finally, early in December, it started to snow in the village, and this time the snow stayed with us. For one week it snowed almost solidly, then it stopped. It was very cold now, and the sky was clear. At night I saw loads of stars, they seemed to be much nearer than they were down in the flatland. Once, just before Christmas—we’d watched an American comedy together—Lucia said I could come in if I liked. On the landing she kissed me.

  Have you had any more practice since? she asked me, laughing. And when I shook my head: Do you even remember how it’s done?

  She left me standing in the hallway and went into the living room. I could hear her talking to someone, then she came out again. She opened the door to her room, and I just caught her father sticking his head around the corner of the living room door to see who it might be.

  When Lucia was sitting on top of me, she got a nosebleed. She leaned forward and cupped her hand under her nose, but even so some of the blood splashed on my face. She laughed. The blood felt surprisingly cool. Later I heard her father in the passage outside. I wanted to stay over, but Lucia sent me away. She said she didn’t want anyone to see me. I got home very late.

  The following afternoon I went by without phoning beforehand. Her father was friendly as always and told me just to go up. I’d spent the whole afternoon grading papers, and I was feeling drained. Lucia said she had to go right away, she was on shift at six. If I wanted to, I could go along with her. She would buy me a drink.

  In the bar there were a couple of guys from the village, and Lucia wanted us to sit with them until it was time for her to start. I didn’t feel like it myself, but she had pulled u
p a couple of chairs. She was on first-name terms with all of them, and sat next to one she called Elio whom I’d never seen before. Elio worked as a mountain guide in summer and a skiing instructor in winter. He talked about his climbing trips and some ski race that was taking place in January, and the foreign girls who all wanted to hop into bed with him. One came back every year, a German woman from Munich. She books private lessons, but let me tell you, we don’t do a lot of skiing. Her husband was some bigwig in a bank, and he might show up in the valley for a weekend. She parked the kids on a baby slope. Then he worked out how much he made from private lessons. He said he was in it purely for the money.

  I wanted to go, but Lucia told me to stay. She put her arm through Elio’s and told him to go on. By now he was on to mountaineering, relating heroic exploits about difficult ascents and dangerous rescue missions. Lucia wasn’t looking at me. She beamed at Elio. In the middle of one story I got up and left. At home I didn’t know what to do with myself. I turned on the TV. There was a talk show, in which, to the consternation of the audience, a man was talking about living with two women. The women were present in the studio, and they kept saying what a good relationship they had. I felt disgusted and turned the TV off.

  I vacuumed the whole house, washed the dishes, and took the empty bottles to the recycling center. I felt a bit better after that. On my way home I looked in on the bar again. Lucia was working now, and the whole place was full of noisy tourists. Elio was sitting at the end of the bar. When Lucia spotted me, she went over to him and took a puff from his cigarette. Then she leaned across the bar and kissed him on the mouth. She looked at me with an evil smile.

  THE NEXT DAY I ran into Lucia on the street. I had bought her something for Christmas. She took the parcel from me without looking at it, shrugged her shoulders, and walked off.