On A Day Like This by Peter Stamm Page A

bottles. He dropped the bottles in one of the green recycling containers. He said something to himself, and laughed out loud. His laugh sounded rather unpleasant. Then the boy was playing ball in the yard. Someone opened a window and told him to clear out. The boy walked through the yard. He tried not to step on the cracks between the paving slabs. He skipped from stone to stone. His mother called down to him to run and play with the others. The yard opened out, and a wide landscape appeared. Andreas was on his bicycle. The road was as straight as a die. He was heading into the wind, and seemed not to be moving at all, but when he turned around, the wind was still in his face. He got off, and pushed the bicycle across the flat plain. He felt he wasn’t moving. In the sky, dark clouds slid by, but he knew it wouldn’t rain, not yet. Then it did rain. Andreas was in his room in the attic.The rain was pelting on the skylight. It was cool in the room. Andreas lay down on the bed. He was reading a book, but the words blurred before his eyes. He was on a desert island with a couple of other children. He didn’t know how they had gotten there. They were on the beach. When it got dark, they went into the forest, which was a tropical forest. They came to a crumbling tenement house, a bombed-out ruin. The children stood in front of the house and debated what to do. Andreas seemed to know the other children. They were older than him.
    The telephone woke him. He looked at his watch, it was five. He hesitated for a moment, and then picked up. It was the realtor. He said things were looking good. The Cordeliers were very interested. The woman had tried to get him to lower the price, but he hadn’t budged. Her parents were coming up from Perpignan at the weekend, to look at the apartment. Would he be there? Andreas said he didn’t know.
    “I know these kind of people,” said the realtor. “If they like the place, they’ll move fast.”
    Andreas emptied out the cupboard in the landing. He was surprised he had so many things he had completely forgotten about. Whole boxes full of notes, letters, records. He leafed through them, stopped to read the occasional page, and then threw everything awaywithout hesitating. A couple of cassettes he had recorded years ago, carefully writing down the tracks, he kept for a long drive sometime.
    He found a box full of letters and postcards from friends, and from his mother. Letters she had written to him during his time doing national service, in which she talked about ordinary day-to-day things, illnesses, excursions, visits. The last traces of a life that was snuffed out. Traces that weren’t traces, just words without any weight. At the bottom of the box were some letters from Fabienne. He must have collected them together some time, wrapped them in packing paper, and sealed the parcel. He broke the seal and read a couple of the letters. Their banality astonished him.
    Fabienne wrote to say she had a paper to write about
The Magic Mountain
by Thomas Mann, and had he ever read it? She had been out to a restaurant with some friends where people ate with their bare hands, like the ancient Gauls. She had met three Americans who had wanted to take her picture. Why had she written him that? One October, she had gone to Normandy with friends and gone swimming, even though the water was cold. Another time, she had eaten oysters and gotten sick. Andreas was surprised at the many friends and girlfriends she mentioned. With one letter was aphotograph showing Fabienne in the middle of a group of young people. They were wearing colored paper hats and laughing drunkenly at the camera. On the back of the photograph she had written: “Best wishes for the New Year.” Best wishes for a new year that was long gone, and that Andreas couldn’t even recall. He wrapped up Fabienne’s letters in the packing paper, and put the parcel on the table. He threw away the other letters. In another carton he found a pile of