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.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
PETER STAMM was born in 1963, in Weinfelden, Switzerland. He is the author of the novel Agnes, and numerous short stories and radio plays. His novels Unformed Landscape, On a Day Like This, and Seven Years, and the collection In Strange Gardens and Other Stories are available from Other Press. His prize-winning books have been translated into more than thirty languages. He lives outside of Zurich.
MICHAEL HOFMANN has translated the works of Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, and Peter Stephan Jungk. He is the author of several books of poems and a book of essays, Behind the Lines, and is the editor of the anthology Twentieth-Century German Poetry. In 2012, he was awarded the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Florida and London.