To the Back of Beyond Read online

  ALSO BY PETER STAMM

  NOVELS

  Agnes

  Unformed Landscape

  On a Day Like This

  Seven Years

  All Days Are Night

  STORY COLLECTIONS

  In Strange Gardens and Other Stories

  We’re Flying

  Copyright © 2016 Peter Stamm

  Originally published in German as Weit über das Land in 2016 by S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main

  Translation copyright © 2017 Other Press

  We wish to express our appreciation to the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia for their assistance in the preparation of this translation.

  Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  Text designer: Julie Fry

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016.

  Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Stamm, Peter, 1963– | Hofmann, Michael, 1957 August 25– translator.

  Title: To the back of beyond / Peter Stamm ; translated from the German by Michael Hofmann.

  Other titles: Weit über das Land. English.

  Description: New York : Other Press, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016054830 (print) | LCCN 2017000227 (ebook) |

  ISBN 9781590518281 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781590518298 (e-book)

  Classification: LCC PT2681.T3234 W4513 2016 (print) | LCC PT2681.T3234

  (ebook) | DDC 833/.92 — dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016054830

  Ebook ISBN 9781590518298

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  v4.1

  a

  For Jaume Vallcorba Plana

  “…split up, and we will remain true to ourselves…”

  — MARKUS WERNER, ZÜNDEL’S EXIT

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Peter Stamm

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Beginning

  About the Authors

  BY DAY you hardly noticed the hedge that separated the yard from that of the neighbors, it just seemed to merge into the general greenness, but once the sun went down and the shadows started to lengthen, it loomed there like an insuperable wall, until all light was gone from the garden and the lawn lay in shadow, an area of darkness from which there was no escape. Even now, in mid-August, it got cold quickly, and the damp chill seemed to pour out of the ground it had withdrawn into during the hours of sunshine, though even then it was never entirely gone.

  Thomas and Astrid had put the children to bed, settled themselves with a glass of wine on the wooden bench outside the house, and divvied up the Sunday paper. After a while, Konrad’s plaintive voice could be heard through the open window, and with a sigh Astrid had put down her section on the bench, emptied her glass, and gone inside without a word, not to reemerge. Thomas heard a soothing murmur and a little later saw the light come on in the living room. Then the window was snapped shut, a dry sound that signaled the end of the day, the weekend, the vacation. The light went out, and Thomas imagined Astrid crouching in the corridor, unpacking the big suitcase they had left there when they got back in the late afternoon. It must have been hot here too while they were gone, the house felt hot, the air was still and close, as though it stood under unusual pressure. Thomas went through the mail, which the neighbors had left out on the side table in the living room. Astrid was standing just behind him, even without seeing her he could feel her presence, her concentration. Nothing urgent, he said, and sat down at the table. Astrid threw open a few windows and said, as she went out, that she would get dinner ready. They had picked up a few items at a convenience store—bread, milk, cheese, a bag of lettuce. The kids had disappeared upstairs, Thomas could hear them bickering over something or other. When he and Astrid had taken them up to bed after dinner, Konrad had almost fallen asleep while brushing his teeth, and Ella hadn’t even asked if she could read for a few minutes.

  Thomas imagined Astrid making two separate piles of clean and dirty clothes. She carried the dirty things down to the utility room in the basement and put the clean ones away in the closet in the bedroom; the kids’ things she folded neatly and left in a pile on the stairs to carry up tomorrow. She stopped for a moment at the foot of the steps and listened to a few quiet sounds from upstairs, the children getting comfortable in their newly made beds, in thoughts or dreams they were still at the beach, or maybe already back at school.

  The light came on in Astrid and Thomas’s bedroom, through the shutters it cast a pattern of stripes on the lawn, which had already lost all color with the onset of darkness. Astrid went into the bathroom, then out to the corridor again, to fetch the sponge bag out of the suitcase. She looked herself in the mirror with that blank expression with which she sometimes looked at Thomas. He used to ask her what she was thinking about, but she would invariably reply, Oh, nothing, and over the years he had begun to believe her and stopped asking.

  Thomas folded up the newspaper and laid it on the garden seat. He picked up his glass, thinking he would finish it, then hesitated, rolled the wine around a few times, and set it down next to Astrid’s empty glass, without having touched a drop. It was less a thought than a vision: the empty bench at dawn, the newspaper on it, sodden with dew, and their two glasses, the half-full one containing a few drowned fruit flies. The morning sun was shining through the glasses, leaving a reddish stain on the pale gray wood. Then the children emerged from the house and joined the straggle of other children on their way to school or kindergarten. A little later, Thomas left for work. He said hello to the old woman whose name he had once known but had now forgotten. He saw her out with her dog almost every morning; in spite of her age she had a vigorous walk, and a loud, confident voice when she said hello back to him, as though everything was fine and always would be. By the time he got home at lunch-time, the newspapers and the wineglasses would have been whisked away.

  Thomas stood up and walked down the narrow gravel path that ran along the side of the house. When he got to the corner, he hesitated momentarily, then, with a bewildered smile that he was only half aware of, he turned away to the garden gate. He lifted the gate as he opened it, so that it didn’t squeak, as he had done from when he was a boy, coming home late from a party, so as not to wake his parents. Even though he was stone cold sober, he had a sense of moving like a drunk, slowly and self-consciously. He walked down the road, past the neighbors’ houses that got a little less familiar with each one he passed. There was light in some of the windows; it wasn’t yet ten o’clock, but there was no one in the gardens or on the street. Ahead of him grew his shadow as cast by the streetlamp behind, then it merged in the light of the one following, which cast a fresh shadow behind him, which in turn grew shorter, overtook him, and hurried ahead of him growing all the while, a sort of ghostly relay of specters accompanying him out of the neighborhood, across the circular road, and into the business district that sprawled away from the village out into the flat land.

  The doors of the big rec
ycling plant stood open, and he could hear a monotonous drone. Thomas ducked as he passed, as though that would make him any less visible. When he got to the old industrial canal, he turned for the first time to look back, but there was no one to be seen, only the slightly quieter drone of the machines was still audible.

  The road followed the canal for a while and then crossed a narrow bridge. Thomas accelerated, it was as though he had left the village’s gravitational field and was now moving unimpeded through space, out into the unexplored terrain of night. The meadows either side of the road belonged to a horse breeder and were surrounded by tall fences. Right at the back of one of the meadows there were a few horses standing so close together that their bodies seemed to merge into a single many-headed form in the dark. The stables had no lights on. Just before Thomas reached them, he stopped to listen. When the children were smaller, he and Astrid had often walked this way; he couldn’t remember now if the owners kept a dog or not. He hurried past the buildings. There was still no sound, but suddenly a halogen beam came on and lit up the yard and a portion of the road.

  It was a relief to Thomas when he reached the edge of the woods. There was no moon in sight, and inside the woods, the gravel path was just a pale suggestion. Night seemed to draw him onward with its emptiness. The path carried on along the embankment, and then over the flood-protection barrier and to the far side of the narrow strip of wood. Here it was a little brighter. From the distance he could hear cars, and suddenly a locomotive. Thomas looked at his watch and with difficulty made out the time. It was half past ten, the train was punctual. For a moment he thought about the way the short line of carriages entered the brightly lit station, and the handful of passengers who got out walked through the underpass and to the bicycle racks, unchained their bicycles, and cycled off in every direction.

  Now that Thomas was standing still, he noticed how quiet it was in the woods. Perhaps it was that that was giving him the sensation of not being on his own there. It was as though something was lurking in the darkness, neither man nor beast but a sort of unspecified life-form that took in the whole of the woods.

  He walked on down the path to its end. From that point it was just another hundred yards across the meadow to the place where the canal joined the river at an acute angle. Thomas wandered over there; he used to light campfires and hang out there sometimes with his friends when they were teenagers. The canal seemed to have more water in it than the river, whose bed seemed almost dry. In spite of that, it would have been difficult to cross over to the other side. Thomas sat down on one of the rough stone slabs. There was a smell of rising damp from the river. He took out his cigarettes and with his fingertip felt how many he had left. Eleven. He lit one and looked up at the sky, which was now completely dark. It was a clear night, but there weren’t many stars to be seen. He went through his pockets to see what he had with him: a key ring with a tiny torch, a penknife, dental floss, a lighter, and a cotton handkerchief. By the light of the torch, he counted his money; it came to more than three hundred francs. He shivered and briefly wondered about making a bonfire. Then he decided to go on, back to the little pedestrian footbridge, and then follow the canal west.

  The narrow planked bridge felt wet and slithery underfoot. Thomas held on to the rail so as not to slip. He struck a footpath that was so narrow it gave him the feeling he was being gripped and passed on in complete darkness by the shrubbery to either side, to a gravel road that led straight through the woods for a quarter of a mile and then as far again across open pasture. Ahead of him he saw two cars speed across the road bridge, brush the houses on the far side with their conical beams, and disappear behind the hill. As he reached the road, he heard another car in the distance. He hid in the tall roadside grass and waited. The car sped past him. When he heard nothing more coming, Thomas jumped up and jogged across the bridge. He left the main road before the village and took a side road that followed the river to a glider airfield and beyond. When he was little, they had sometimes bicycled out here to watch the gliders, but it had never really interested Thomas, he just stayed for the sake of his friends, who had dreams of one day becoming pilots.

  At the edge of the grass runway was a long hangar, and behind it, in the lee of a hedge, a dozen or so trailer homes, of which Thomas could only see the outlines. There weren’t any lights anywhere, or any sounds to be heard. He was feeling very tired. He walked up to the nearest trailer, groped for the door handle, and turned it cautiously. It was locked. The other trailers were locked as well, but one had an awning that was easily opened. When Thomas stepped inside, he could feel there were duckboards over the ground. The air smelled stale, a smell of grass and old plastic and something gone off. By the feeble light of his little torch he saw a camping table and chairs and an improvised kitchen with a two-ring gas burner and a sink. In a corner was a ground cloth of stiff layered material. Thomas rolled himself up inside it and lay down on the ground, but even so he felt cold. He couldn’t get to sleep on the hard floor, and he thought of home, wondering whether Astrid would have noticed his absence yet. She often went to bed ahead of him and didn’t wake up when he came to bed.

  When Astrid realized that Thomas wasn’t lying beside her, she would suppose he was already up, even though she almost invariably got up first. She would go upstairs half asleep and wake the children and go downstairs again. Ten minutes later, freshly showered and in her robe she would emerge from the bathroom and call the children, who were bound to be still in bed. Konrad! Ella! Get a move on! If you don’t get up now, you’ll be late. Always the same sentences, and always the same replies too. One more minute. I’m up already. I’m just coming. On the way into the kitchen, Astrid would dart a look into the living room and wonder that Thomas wasn’t there either. But these first forty-five minutes of the day always followed such a rigid plan that there wasn’t a moment for her to think about anything else except what had to be done next. Switch on the coffee machine, add water, set the table, put out bread, butter, jam and honey, milk and cocoa. She shouted to the children once more, louder this time and with a note of anger, and she poured herself a first cup of coffee, which she drank standing up. Then at last the children came clattering downstairs and sat down. Konrad rubbed the sleep from his eyes, Ella set an open book next to her place, and Astrid had to tell her twice before she shut it and sulkily spread jam on a piece of bread. Then, finally, with mouth full, Konrad asked, Where’s Papa? He had to leave extra-early today. Astrid had no idea what made her say that. It just seemed like the simplest thing, and even as she said it, it became a sort of fact. He had to go to the office early. The children didn’t ask any more questions, even though Thomas hardly ever left the house before breakfast. Astrid tried to think whether Thomas had said anything about some appointment or something, but by then the children were getting up, and she needed to see that they didn’t forget anything. Do you have swimming today? Put your sandals on. No, you’ll need a pullover, it’s quite cool outside. Leave the book here. Off you go! She kissed them on the cheek and pushed them out the door. For a split second she stood in the doorway, watched them go, saw them disappear around the corner, heard the familiar creak of the garden gate and the crash as it banged shut. There was fall in the air already.

  As Astrid went into the bathroom to blow-dry her hair, she wondered about maybe going to the pool today. She had to do the laundry, finish unpacking, shop. She drew up a plan. The next time she thought about Thomas was when she left the bathroom. She called his office. His secretary said he hadn’t arrived yet, and asked if they’d enjoyed the vacation. Oh, lovely, yes. Would you mind checking in his desk diary for me. No, said the secretary after a pause, there’s nothing here. The first thing he has down is this afternoon, a meeting with a client. Will you ask him to call me quickly when he gets in then, said Astrid.

  She bicycled off to the shops, hung the washing out to dry, and finished unpacking the suitcases. One of them contained a plastic bag full of shells that the kids had picked up on th
e beach. When Astrid tipped them onto the table, sand trickled out of the bag. She put the shells and snail shells in a flat basket, and carefully brushed the sand together, avoiding scratching the table. Then she stowed the suitcases in the attic. It was hot up there, the air had a consistency almost of cotton wool. Astrid thought a little ruefully of the past two weeks they had spent by the sea, the heat that she loved, the Spanish street markets, the wonderful fruit and vegetables, the astonishing array of fish and seafood you could get. Let’s just stay here, Thomas had said flippantly on one of their last days. She had laughed and then they had stopped and considered it, spending the whole year by the sea. It was only a game, but in Thomas’s eyes and the kids’ Astrid could see a gleam of enthusiasm. And what would we live off? We could make jewelry out of shells and sell it on the promenade. What about school? Papa can homeschool us. Finally Astrid had said, But home is nice too. The sea would stop being special if it was always just outside the front door. And I’m sure they have winter storms here and the house would get damp, and there’s not even any proper heating. She had always been the voice of reason in the relationship, and in the family. Sometimes she asked herself if Thomas would have chosen a different sort of life if they hadn’t been a couple.

  Thomas did not call. Perhaps he had tried while she was in the shops and hadn’t wanted to leave a message. Or he had just plain forgotten. He was bound to have a lot on his plate after the vacation, and would have a hundred and one things to think about. Astrid felt too embarrassed to call the secretary again. She decided she would go for a quick swim after all. While on vacation she had resolved to take more exercise, to swim while the weather held, and then to take up jogging again.

  On the radio they had predicted showers and falling temperatures for the afternoon, but there was little sign of that. Even so, the pool was practically empty. To Astrid it felt like a privilege to be able to go swimming in the middle of the day, even as she felt excluded by the more active world in which Thomas featured, and the children as well now, sitting at school racking their brains about math problems or writing an essay about what they had done on holiday. She had a guilty conscience, but that twinge of guilt had something pleasing too. The changing rooms were dirty, there was rubbish everywhere, and the pale blue concrete floor felt sticky underfoot. It must have been very busy here yesterday, the last day of summer, maybe the last warm day all year. After two weeks of swimming in salt water, she felt particularly heavy in the pool, as though something were dragging her down. She stopped after ten lengths and lay in the sun for a while, until her swimsuit felt a little dry. By half past eleven she was back home.