by Peter Stamm
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 walke
rs 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 individu
ally 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.
