We're Flying (32 page)

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

T
EAR 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.

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.