On A Day Like This (3 page)

In the winter after Fabienne’s departure, Andreas’s mother died of breast cancer. She had known she was sick for some time, but she had first concealed it from
the family, and then played it down. Even when she had only a little time to live, she still pretended everything was OK. The atmosphere in the house was unbearable, and finally Andreas rented a room in the city, and came home only at weekends. He would usually arrive after lunch on Saturday, and go straight up to his room. He said he had to work. Then he would lie on his bed and read his old children’s books, and only come down for supper. After supper, he disappeared as quickly as possible into the village, to meet friends. He drank too much, and when he came home late at night, drunk, he would sometimes run into his mother, who was unable to sleep. She was standing in the kitchen, swallowing some homeopathic remedy that she tried to keep him from seeing. She would say good night, and pad down the dark corridor to her bedroom, but, once Andreas was in bed, he could hear her getting up again and restlessly pacing about the house.

In those months he started going out with Manuel’s younger sister, Beatrice, who worked as a teller at the Canton Bank, and had just broken up with her boyfriend. The relationship lasted just six months. Beatrice was still living with her parents, who were religious people and wouldn’t have allowed Andreas to spend the night with
their daughter. Sometimes, Beatrice visited him in the city, but she never wanted to stay over. Andreas said she was legal, but she shook her head and said, no, she couldn’t do that to her parents. She let him undress her to her underwear, then she said she wasn’t ready yet, she wanted to get to know him a bit better first. Even when she touched him, Andreas thought she didn’t really want to, and it was just to please him. Eventually he had enough. He called her at the bank and said he didn’t want to see her anymore. She said she was working, and wasn’t able to talk, and he said there was nothing to talk about, and hung up. After that he didn’t answer the phone for a week. He saw Beatrice at his mother’s funeral. She had come with Manuel. The two of them offered him their condolences, and they exchanged a few meaningless sentences. Years later, Andreas heard that Beatrice had got back together with her ex, and married him.

During his time with Beatrice, he started writing letters to Fabienne. He had thought about her a lot after her going away, and sometimes when he was lying on the bed with Beatrice, he shut his eyes and imagined it was Fabienne beside him. From that time, she had accompanied him through all his relationships. She was
always there, as a shadow, fading a little over time, but never quite disappearing.

Andreas went into the kitchen to make some tea. Then he lay down on the sofa, and started reading the little book from the beginning.

The love between Angélique and Jens was almost as chaste as that between him and Fabienne. Sex did not play any part in the basic vocabulary, and Jens appeared more interested in the beauty of Schleswig-Holstein than in Angélique’s. He drove her around the area in his old Beetle, showed her the Viking museum at Haithabu and the famous Bordesholm altar in Schleswig, and walked along the North Sea-Baltic Canal with her, one of the most important waterways of the world, as he explained to her. He kissed her for the first time on the Rendsburg ferry, and then they went on excursions even further afield. A visit to Lübeck gave Jens the opportunity to deliver himself of the stupidest sentence on Thomas Mann that Andreas had ever read. He turned over a few pages, and it was fall. The date of Angélique’s departure was moving nearer, casting its dark shadow on the young happiness. Just as Jens was on his way to the station to say good-bye to Angélique, and promise
to visit her in Paris, his car developed another problem, and by the time he finally got to the station, all he could see of her train were its two taillights. Foolishly, the two of them hadn’t even exchanged addresses, and for a couple of pages it looked as if they would never see each other again. But then Jens managed to get a place to study in Paris. In the spring, he set off after Angélique, and only a few days later, by a wildly improbable coincidence, he met her strolling down the Champs-Elysées. A happy ending in spring light, a jerky pen-and-ink sketch of bliss.

The story was implausible and badly written, but it had extraordinary parallels to Andreas’s own. He too had set off in pursuit of Fabienne, though only after two years. They had exchanged letters that whole time. Andreas had never referred explicitly to the kiss by the lake, but his letters had been full of hints. Fabienne must have sensed what he felt for her.

She was never the first to write, but she replied to all his letters. She wrote about her studies, her family, her friends. She did not mention that Manuel had come to visit her in Paris, just as she did not mention her trips to Switzerland. Not until Andreas had finished his degree and got an assistantship in a school on the outskirts of Paris did she tell him, in a postscript, that she would
be going to Switzerland in October. She and Manuel were an item, and all the to-ing and fro-ing had gotten a bit wearing, and a bit expensive as well.

Andreas was stunned. He asked himself why he had never thought to visit Fabienne. He thought of turning down the job, but then he went there anyway. He resolved to speak to Fabienne. For weeks he thought about what he would say to her. He couldn’t imagine what she saw in Manuel, who had just taken a job as a gym teacher in the village where he and Andreas had grown up.

No sooner had he got to Paris than he called Fabienne. She said she was very busy, she was sitting her exams. They ended up arranging to meet on one of the following days in the tearoom of the mosque.

In the two years they hadn’t seen each other, Fabienne had grown still more beautiful. She had lost some weight, and her features were clearer, more mature. She looked utterly self-possessed, walking across the crowded café to greet Andreas, ordering mint tea and pastries for them. Andreas talked about his job, his pupils, and his new colleagues. Fabienne talked about her exams, which had gone well, about her summer vacation, about the books she had read. She said she was going to Zürich to finish her degree. Her German was
still not good, she badly needed to spend time in a German-speaking environment. Andreas said she didn’t have the trace of an accent, and anyway Switzerland was the last place she should go to for that. Fabienne just laughed. He didn’t say what he had meant to say. After an hour, Fabienne got up and said she had to go, she was due to meet a girlfriend.

In the two months that Fabienne remained in Paris, they met four or five times. They drank tea or coffee, and once they went to the cinema to see a Fritz Lang film. Just before the end, the film tore, and after a long pause the house lights came on, and a woman walked to the front and said that for technical reasons they were unable to show the ending of the film. In a few sentences she told them how the story ended.

Andreas asked Fabienne to have a drink with him. She was tired, she said. He walked her back to her place. The whole evening they had spoken only banalities. As they walked along side by side, he wanted to say at last the things he had wanted to say, but he couldn’t get a syllable out, only a wheeze. Fabienne asked if he had said something. No, he said, it was just a frog in his throat.

Andreas never supposed that falling in love with an au pair was a particularly original thing to do. It had probably happened lots of times. But what was striking
were the many details of his story that chimed with the book. The nickname he had given Fabienne, her appearance, the fact that she had bought herself a cat in Paris, and liked seeing old German films. That she sang him French nursery rhymes, and that her father was a doctor.

The author of the little book was named Gregor Wolf. There was a little biographical sketch of him at the front of the book. Apparently, he was born in 1953, and after training to be a bookseller, he had done various jobs, among them waiter and night porter. He had lived abroad for a long time. As of 1985, he was a freelance writer, living in Flensburg and Majorca. The biography sounded like every other author biography. Andreas had never heard of him, but that didn’t mean much. At the back of the book was a list of other books by Gregor Wolf, and there followed a dozen or so catchpenny titles.

Andreas asked himself whether Fabienne had ever met the author, and told him her story. It seemed unlikely, but what was even more unlikely was that all the coincidences were accidental.

He put the book down and turned on the TV to catch the news. Afterward he switched it off. The programs that would have interested him were generally on too late. He went to bed early, and was soon asleep. When the alarm went off, he still felt tired. He went to
the bathroom, cleaned his teeth, and showered, first hot then cold. He didn’t eat any breakfast, just gulped down a cup of coffee, and set off.

On Wednesday, Andreas met Sylvie. They always arranged to meet on afternoons of no school, but other things often got in the way. Sylvie had three children, and when one of them was ill, or had a music lesson canceled, she would send him a text message to cancel their meeting. When they did meet, she would always make a joke about their relationship. Sometimes Andreas suspected she had other lovers besides him, but he never asked. He thought it was none of his business, and in fact he didn’t care either way.

Sylvie would arrive on her bicycle. She was out of breath when she walked past him into the apartment. He asked if she wanted a drink, but she said she didn’t have much time, put her arms around him, and dragged him into the bedroom.

Once they had slept together, Sylvie was a little calmer. She talked about her husband and her children, and the little catastrophes that always seemed to befall her. She had numerous relatives and close friends who always seemed to need her help, and Andreas listened
to her, and got the people she talked about all mixed up. She only ever used first names. That’s your brother, right? asked Andreas. No, said Sylvie, with a show of irritation, he’s my best friend’s husband, or my husband’s cousin, or Anne’s French teacher. Sometimes Sylvie asked him why he never talked. He said he had nothing to say. His life was too formless, and at the same time too much of a tangle to give rise to any stories. Sylvie didn’t listen. She stood by the window looking out. She was naked, but she behaved quite as if she were dressed.

“What a horrible yard,” she said. “What kind of people live here?”

“I’ve hardly met any of the neighbors.”

“How long have you lived in this building?”

Andreas figured it out.

“Almost ten years,” he said.

Sylvie laughed and returned to bed. She kissed him on the mouth. Andreas grabbed her around the waist, and pulled her down. Sylvie sat up.

“Now you can offer me a drink, if you like.”

Andreas put on his pants, and went into the kitchen to make coffee. Sylvie followed him. She said she didn’t understand how he could stand to live in such a tiny apartment.

“I can’t afford a bigger one.”

“I’ve got some friends in Belleville who want to sell their apartment. It’s three big rooms, and not expensive. I’m sure you’d get four hundred thousand for yours. The area’s become so fashionable.”

Andreas said the apartment wasn’t as small as all that. And he felt at home in it. He didn’t need any more space. Then he told Sylvie about Angélique and Jens, and his love for Fabienne.

“It’s the exact same story,” he said. “Isn’t that amazing.”

“But your version of it ended badly.”

“Yes, for me,” said Andreas. He handed Sylvie a cup, and sat down on the kitchen table. “Maybe she met the author. He lives on Majorca. Stranger things have happened.”

“Then why should she tell him the story with a happy ending?”

“I’ve no idea,” said Andreas.

“Perhaps she was in love with you. Perhaps she wanted it to end well.”

“I was an idiot,” said Andreas.

Sylvie asked what was special about Fabienne. Andreas said she was very beautiful when he first met her. But that couldn’t be the whole story. If he met Fabienne now, he would still find her attractive, maybe
he would approach her, have an affair with her. She wouldn’t be the great love of his life, not now, not anymore. Presumably it wasn’t even Fabienne herself that he longed for, so much as the love of those years, the unconditionality of the feeling that still floored him now, twenty years later.

“The bull that’s led to the cow probably thinks he’s in love too,” said Sylvie, and laughed. She said she’d better go, and went into the bedroom to get dressed.

“Write to her,” she said, as she said good-bye.

Andreas had decided to write to Fabienne, but he kept putting it off and putting it off, until he finally forgot all about it. There was some trouble at school, a couple of pupils started a fight during recess. One of them was in Andreas’s class, and there were meetings with the headmistress and the parents and a social worker. Then a letter came from Walter. Andreas was very surprised to hear from Walter. They talked on the phone every other month or so, and never had very much to say to each other. Sometimes Walter would send him a postcard from his vacation, which they would all sign, and at Christmas there was a round-robin letter containing all the news of the past year; apart from that, they never
wrote to each other. The letter was accompanied by a form.
Clearing of a grave
, Andreas read. Under that heading were the names of his parents, handwritten, and under the heading, Client, was Walter’s name and his own.

Walter had signed the form. Normal practice was for graves to be given up after twenty years, he wrote in his accompanying letter, but the grave counted as that of their mother only. When their father was cremated, they had signed a disclaimer of burial rights, perhaps Andreas remembered. He was sorry to bother him over something like this, but he hadn’t wanted to make the decision on his own. He had thought Andreas might want to visit the grave once more. It wouldn’t be cleared until fall at the earliest. If he did decide to come to Switzerland, he would of course be welcome to stay with them. They would be pleased to see him again. Walter had signed the letter as “Your Brother,” which struck Andreas as being in poor taste.