On A Day Like This by Peter Stamm Page B

his old appointment diaries, little books that left about a line of space for each day. He had never kept a diary as such, the thought of keeping a record of his life always seemed to him absurd. It was only these calendars he had kept, where the years were summed up in very few words, the names of people he had met, vacation places, dates of exams and doctors’ appointments. In his first years in the city he had written down the titles of all the films he had seen, the restaurants he had eaten in. With time, he had gotten more and more casual and remiss. He always went to the same restaurants anyway, and the films he went to see weren’t important. His meetings with Nadia and Sylvie were so regular that he didn’t need to write down dates and times. Over the last few years, there were more and more months where the calendar had remained blank, where it contained no traces.Slipped into one of them was a list of all the women he had slept with. He read the names. In some cases he couldn’t even put a face to the name, or only after long thought. The list was a couple of years old. He added a few more names, then crumpled up the sheet and threw it away.
    One list among many, he thought. His life was an endless sequence of lessons, of cigarettes, meals, cinema visits, meetings with women or friends who basically didn’t mean anything to him, incoherent lists of little events. Sometimes he had given up trying to get the whole thing to make sense, trying to look for sense on it. The less the events in his life had to do with one another, the more interchangeable they had become. Sometimes he appeared to himself like a tourist, racing from one sight to the next in a city he doesn’t even know the name of. Loads of beginnings that had nothing to do with the end, with his death, which in turn would mean nothing beyond the fact that he had run out of time.
    At the weekend, Mme Cordelier’s parents came and looked at the apartment. They liked it, and that same day drew up a purchase agreement. The Cordelierswanted to have the walls painted, and the floors sanded. They didn’t want to keep any of the furniture.
    The realtor said they wouldn’t sign the final contract for another six weeks at the earliest. Andreas said he would be moving out in a couple of days, and going abroad. The realtor said he could give someone power of attorney to represent him in front of the notary. The money would be transferred to his account after the sale.
    On Monday, the furniture dealer came and picked up the furniture. He was about to pick up the statue of the Huntress when Andreas said he’d prefer to keep it. The junk dealer said it was valueless. He offered Andreas a sum for the furniture that was far too low. Andreas argued with him for the sake of it, and managed to get a little more money out of him.
    Everything he owned now fitted into a suitcase, the same red artificial leather suitcase he had arrived with in the city eighteen years ago: a few clothes, toiletries, a sleeping bag, Fabienne’s letters, the cassettes, and the two books he had decided to hold on to. He wasn’t even taking his address book. He felt light, free of all his ballast. It was as though he had been asleep all those years, grown numb like a limb that hadn’t moved for ages. Now he felt that same pleasant pain that you feelwhen the blood shoots back into an arm or a leg. He was still alive, he could move.
    That night was Andreas’s last in the apartment. He spread the sleeping bag out on the floor as on the first nights he had spent there, and, just as then, the apartment felt strange to him and a little frightening. He slept badly. When he woke up, it was just getting light. His footfall echoed in the empty rooms, and his cough sounded quite threatening. Andreas went up to the window and threw it open. It had rained a little overnight, and the cement slabs in the yard all glistened darkly. He lit a cigarette and smoked it without enjoyment. He watched a blackbird