Agnes

by Peter Stamm

  It was freezing up on the roof. The gale almost took our breath away, and we tried to shelter behind the little construction that housed the elevator machinery. This time we did see stars, masses of stars, it looked like the sky was made of nothing but stars. I saw the Milky Way, and Agnes pointed out Orion and Gemini.

  “I didn’t know you knew about stars,” I said.

  “What do you know about me anyway,” said Agnes, but it didn’t sound bitter.

  She leaned against me, and I kissed her hair. We stood on the roof for a long time, looking up at the sky, neither of us saying anything. Then we heard a siren going off down below, and, in spite of the wind, we went over to the guardrail and looked down. We saw an ambulance, soon followed by a police car.

  “Something’s happened,” said Agnes.

  “Sometimes I try and imagine what it would be like to be someone else, like the ambulance driver for example,” I said. “What would things look like to me then.”

  “Whenever something happens like on Christmas Eve, you can’t help thinking it’s particularly awful. As though the date mattered.”

  “We imagine we all share the same world. But each of us is in a mine or quarry of his own, just chipping away at his own life, doesn’t look left or right, and can’t even turn back because of the rubble he leaves behind him.”

  “Come on, let’s go inside. I’m cold.”

  When we were back in the apartment, we both felt chilled to the bone. I ran a bath. Agnes walked into the bathroom. She got undressed and got in the bath with me. She sat with her back to me, and I put my arms around her. I washed her back, then we changed places, and she washed mine. We stayed in the bath for a long time, and kept adding more hot water. Then we dried each other, and I rubbed and combed Agnes’s hair. Agnes turned the light out in the bedroom, and we made love.

  “That was a present,” she said afterward, as we lay side by side on the bed.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s Christmas.”

  “I don’t want you to sleep with me if you don’t want to.”

  “But it was a present.”

  “Thank you very much,” I said, and turned away.

  Agnes didn’t say anything.

  “Do you ever see Louise?” she asked after a while.

  “Sometimes in the library. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “Would you like to do something about it?”

  “There’s nothing between us anymore.”

  “And what used to be between you?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I told her you’d come back.”

  “You came back.”

  “She knows lots of stuff about Pullman, and she can introduce me to interesting people.”

  “How wonderful.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you sleep with her?” asked Agnes.

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about you and Herbert?”

  “No.”

  “Why would you have gone to him with the baby?”

  “Because he’s there for me. Because he loves me.”

  “So why did you come back to me?”

  “Well, if you don’t know that …” said Agnes. “Because I love you, and only you. Even if you won’t believe it.”

  30

  The next day, Agnes had a cold.

  “Being up on the roof is bad for you,” I said.

  She stayed in bed all day, and read, while I sat in the living room, watching television. I went out briefly in the afternoon, to buy bread. I’d been boycotting the store by the entrance for several weeks. It was snowing hard, and the wind blew it right in my face. When I got back to the apartment, Agnes was sitting in bed, cross-legged. The blanket had slipped off her knees. She was crying.

  “You should keep yourself covered,” I said. “What’s the matter?”

  The Norton Anthology lay open in her lap, and she pointed to a poem. “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London,” by Dylan Thomas.

  Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,

  Robed in the long friends,

  The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,

  Secret by the unmourning water

  Of the riding Thames.

  After the first death, there is no other.

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “If there’s no more death, there’s no more life either,” said Agnes.

  “It’s only a poem,” I said, “you shouldn’t take it so seriously. It’s just words.”

  “A child has died in me,” said Agnes, “in my belly, it was six centimeters already. I couldn’t save it. It grew inside me, and then it died inside me. Do you know what that means?”

  “Are you still thinking about that?” I said.

  Agnes turned away and cried into her pillow. The book fell to the ground. I picked it up and pulled up the blankets. She slept into the late afternoon, and I read. When she woke up, she was calmer. But she had a temperature, and her cold had gotten worse. I made her some tea, and sat with her until she was asleep again. Then I went for a walk by the lake.

  The snow had stopped. When I was really cold, I went to the café at the end of the park. The waitress switched on the light, and brought me a coffee. Then she disappeared again through the door behind the bar. I looked out over the lake. For the first time, I thought about our baby, not just about Agnes, and her pregnancy, and her loss. Not about Margaret either. I thought about the baby, which was six centimeters, which I had never known and never wanted, and which was now lost. It didn’t have a name and it didn’t have a face. I didn’t even know if it had been a boy or girl. I had never asked Agnes about that. I walked out of the café. It had gotten dark by now, and while I walked along the shore, my thoughts ordered themselves, and suddenly I knew how Agnes’s story would continue. It was as though a door had opened, and I could see it all clearly, and it was all within reach. Agnes was still asleep when I got back. I shut the bedroom door, and sat down at the computer. I felt quite numb, maybe because I’d come in from the cold, and because the apartment was so warm, too warm. I’d gotten almost as far as Christmas in the story, but I took up the story after the holidays. I sensed right away that Agnes was closer to me than usual. It was as though it wasn’t me writing—I was just describing a film that was showing inside my head. I saw Agnes standing on an empty train platform. It was nighttime. A train drew up, almost empty, and Agnes boarded it. I wrote.

  The journey to Willow Springs took the best part of an hour. By the time Agnes got out, it was well past midnight, but you could still hear the rockets going off, and sometimes the whole sky was bright with fireworks. Agnes was cold, in spite of her winter coat, but even being cold seemed to be at a remove from her, it was as though she knew she was cold, without feeling it. She walked down long streets, past rows of small wooden houses, some of them still echoing with music and the sound of people talking and laughing …

  It felt as though I was writing quickly, but it was actually quite late when I couldn’t do any more, when the pictures froze and lost their resolution. I read over what I’d written, and it felt as though I was reading it for the first time. I didn’t know where this was going, but I knew I couldn’t go on like that, it was impossible for Agnes and unbearable for me, I needed to find an ending, a good ending, for Agnes’s sake. But I felt too tired; I saved what I’d written, and switched off the computer.

  I got undressed and lay down next to Agnes. She was breathing deeply and evenly, and without waking, turned to me and put her arm around my waist. I fell asleep instantly.

  31

  “Did you write the ending?” Agnes asked me the next morning. She was feeling better, but her voice sounded hoarse, and it hurt when she swallowed.

  “I’m not finished yet,” I said.

  Agnes got up for breakfast, but had to go straight back to bed afterward. Her mother called. I picked up the receiver. I had never spoken to
Agnes’s parents, or even given them any thought. Apart from the odd phone call, Agnes seemed not to have much contact with them.

  I brought the telephone into the bedroom. Back in the living room, I could hear Agnes say: “A friend who’s just dropped by. I’ve got a bit of a cold.” After she hung up, I went in to see her.

  “Don’t your parents know about me, then?” I asked.

  “Were you listening to my conversation?”

  “I just heard you say something about a friend dropping by.”

  “I don’t tell them much about what I’m up to. I don’t think they’re all that interested. They’d only worry.”

  “Why, because of me?”

  “Because of everything. They barely know the first thing about me.”

  “Is that because they’re living down in Florida?”

  “My mother wanted to stay here with me, but my father … I told them I wouldn’t visit them. I’ve never been to see them down there.”

  “You’re tough.”

  “I thought it was tough for me when they left. Now I don’t need them anymore, and they don’t need me yet. I’m sure I’ll be hearing from them …”

  “How do they know my number?”

  “I had my calls rerouted.”

  There had never been a call for Agnes before. I went back to my study. I had decided to forget what I wrote yesterday, and write a new ending. But I didn’t delete the text, I saved it in a file I called “Ending 2.” I felt a sense of relief as soon as I started writing. I thought I could make up for what I’d done wrong yesterday. I wrote more consciously than usual, and faster; I knew what I wanted, and I chose the shortest way that would get me there.

  I described the holidays exactly as they had been, only without the feeling of distance between Agnes and me, without her tears and Louise’s present. I wrote about a wonderful week between Christmas and New Year’s, how we cooked together, and went for walks, all bundled up in our warmest clothes, through Grant Park in the snow, and to the Adler Planetarium, where Agnes explained the stars to me, and to the library, where we looked up old Christmas stories.

  Agnes was back with me. We knew now that we belonged together, and that knowledge helped her overcome the loss of the baby. Just as the baby had once sundered us, now its loss brought us together. Sorrow and pain bound us closer together than happiness ever had.

  We celebrated New Year’s at home. We didn’t go up on the roof, because Agnes still had a cold. We sat by the window, and watched the snow.

  I heard the cello playing in the bedroom. Normally, the slightest noise is enough to put me off when I’m writing, but now I welcomed the distraction. I wrote almost without thinking, though it wasn’t the same as the state of unconscious concentration I’d been in yesterday.

  We’d turned on the television to watch the live broadcast of the New Year’s festivities from Times Square in New York. Tens of thousands of people had gathered there, and were gazing up at the enormous artificial apple that was slowly being lowered toward them. At midnight on the dot, it touched the ground. The crowds cheered, people screamed and hugged each other. Somewhere singing began; the singing seemed to grow from the noise, which gradually faded, till there was nothing to be heard but the old song.

  Should auld acquaintance be forgot

  And never brought to mind?

  In Chicago it was only eleven o’clock, but Agnes and I stood up. We embraced and toasted our future, while in New York people continued to sing:

  But seas between us broad have roar’d,

  Sin’ auld lang syne.

  For auld lang syne, my jo,

  For auld lang syne,

  We’ll take a kiss o’ kindness yet

  For auld lang syne.

  Agnes had stopped playing, and had come into the study.

  “I don’t want you to finish the story,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not good. We don’t need it.”

  “But I have finished it.”

  “Really?” she said. She hesitated. “Does it end happily?”

  “Of course it does. In America, all stories end happily.”

  Agnes smiled. “Will you read it to me?” she asked.

  “You go to bed,” I said.

  32

  I’m not very good at reading aloud. But that wasn’t why Agnes was disappointed. She didn’t say anything, and nor did I as I sat on the bed next to her.

  “Are you happy with it?” I asked.

  “Are you happy with it?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. I wasn’t convinced by the ending. It hadn’t really come off, it wasn’t alive, it wasn’t real. I had written it the way I had wanted it to be. It was like a New Year’s resolution that doesn’t survive for more than a few hours before you disregard it, a well-intentioned but empty form of words.

  “Endings are always difficult,” I said. “Life doesn’t go in for endings, it goes on.”

  “It’s a present, then,” said Agnes. “A New Year’s present.”

  She tried to look me in the eye, and I put my arms around her so as not to look back at her, and I said: “I’ll put it in a folder along with the other pages, and then you’ll have your little book. A book called Agnes.”

  When Agnes came out of the bedroom a little later, I hadn’t yet begun on that. I was sitting in the wicker chair, staring out at the falling snow.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Thinking.”

  “About the story?”

  “Yes,” I said. The film in my head had started up again.

  Over the next few days, I was restless. Agnes seemed to have caught it from me, and she wasn’t well either, and her cold had gotten worse too. She said her throat hurt each time she swallowed, she suffered blinding headaches, and she stayed in the bedroom almost all the time.

  I had made up a little booklet of all my pages plus the ending. But as soon as Agnes was asleep, I went back to work on the story. I went over the whole thing, and replaced the ending with “Ending 2,” which, as I’d already sensed, had been coming all along. It was the only logical, and the only true ending for the story.

  When Agnes asked me what I was working on, I said I was back on the luxury trains. I was often absent-minded with her, I would rather have been writing the whole time. It was as though I was living the story now, as though everything else was insignificant and unreal, and as though eating and sleeping were just a waste of time.

  I was irked with Agnes for being ill. I still made her cups of tea and brought her her meals in bed, but she couldn’t help feeling my impatience and being hurt by it.

  “You don’t have to hang around here all day just to look after me,” she said. “Go to the library if you want. Maybe you’ll meet Louise.”

  “That’s not the point. I’m just sorry you’re spending your holidays like this. I hate sitting around at home all day.”

  “There’s no reason why you should. I’m not on my deathbed yet. I’m perfectly OK, as long as I can stay in bed.”

  I walked over to the lake again, and strolled through Grant Park. When it got to be too cold for me, I went to the library. Louise wasn’t there. I got myself a novel, and read it for an hour or so. Then I put it back, without bothering to find out what happened at the end.

  “You were gone a long time,” said Agnes on my return.

  “But you said you wanted to be on your own.”

  “I wasn’t complaining, don’t be so touchy. I said I didn’t mind if you went out for a bit. I never said I wanted to be on my own.”

  “Did you sleep?”

  “No, I watched television.”

  “I thought you had to stay in bed?”

  “I was covered up.”

  I cooked something, and we ate in the kitchen.

  “What shall we do for New Year’s Eve?” I asked.

  “I don’t think I’ll be better by then.”

  “How do you know? Don’t you want to go out somewhere with me
?”

  “No, I’d like to. But I’m not well. I don’t feel well. Did you go to the library?”

  “Yes, but not on account of Louise. I was getting to feel cold, and I wasn’t ready to come home. I didn’t want to bother you.”

  “You don’t bother me. I was just saying you don’t have to spend all day looking after me. It’s fine if you go out. It’s fine if you want to go to Louise’s party.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really.”

  “She knows lots of interesting people. It might even be useful for the book.”

  “We’re not married or anything.”

  “It might be useful for us too. If I’m to stay in this country, I need to meet some of the right people.”

  “I don’t want to argue with you,” said Agnes, “I’m tired and I don’t feel well.”

  33

  “Your hair’s getting thin,” said Agnes, “you’re getting old.”

  I’d gone into the bedroom to say goodbye.

  “Will you promise me to take a taxi back,” she said.

  “I might be very late. You’re not to worry about me.”

  “Will you call me at midnight?”

  “I can’t promise you. You know what it’s like at a New Year’s party at midnight. But I’ll try.”

  We embraced, and she kissed me passionately.

  “All the best,” she said.

  “Hey,” I said, laughing, “I’ll be back.”

  “I just meant if you don’t call … Happy New Year.”

  I called Agnes just after eleven o’clock.

  “You’re far too early,” she said.

  “I thought I might forget later. What are you up to?”

  “I’m having something to eat. I watched the celebrations in New York. The New Year’s already started there.”

  “I know.”

  “I miss you.”

  “Go to bed. When you wake up, I’ll be back.”

  Louise was standing next to me while I telephoned. She had an ironic smile on her face.

  “Are you missing your little girlfriend?” she asked, when I’d hung up.