In Strange Gardens and Other Stories Read online

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  …………………………

  BLACK ICE

  Ice Lake

  Flotsam

  In the Outer Suburbs

  Everyone’s Right

  Passion

  The Most Beautiful Girl

  What We Can Do

  The True Pure Land

  Black Ice

  IN STRANGE GARDENS

  The Visit

  The Wall of Fire

  In Strange Gardens

  Through the Night

  Like a Child, Like an Angel

  Fado

  All That’s Missing

  The Stop

  Deep Furrows

  The Experiment

  The Kiss

  BLACK ICE

  But I can’t be talkin’ of love, dear

  I can’t be talkin’ of love.

  If there be one thing I can’t talk of

  That one thing do be love.

  —Esther Mathews

  ICE LAKE

  I had come home on the evening train from the French part of Switzerland. I was working in Neuchâtel at the time, but home was still my village in the Thurgau. I was just twenty.

  There had been an accident somewhere, a fire, I don’t remember what. At any rate, the train came from Geneva half an hour late, and it wasn’t the normal express but a short train with old cars. It kept stopping in the middle of nowhere, and the passengers got into conversation with each other, and opened the windows. It was summer, vacation time. Outside, it smelled of hay, and once, when the train had stopped somewhere for quite some time and the country around was very quiet, we heard the screaking of cicadas.

  It was almost midnight when I got to my village. The air was still warm, and I slung my jacket over my arm. My parents had already gone to bed. The house was dark, and I did nothing more than dump my carrier bag full of dirty clothes in the corridor. It didn’t feel like a night for sleeping.

  I found my friends standing outside the local, wondering what to do with themselves. The landlord had told them to go home, licensing hours were over. We talked out on the street for a while, till someone opened a window and shouted to us to shut up and go away. Then Urs’s girlfriend Stefanie said: “Why don’t we go up to Ice Lake and go for a swim? The water’s really warm.”

  The others headed off, and I said I would just fetch my bike and catch up with them. I packed my trunks and towel, and then I set off after them. Ice Lake was in a valley between two villages. I was halfway there, when I ran into Urs heading the other way.

  “Stefanie’s got a flat,” he called out to me. “I’m just going back for a puncture kit.”

  Shortly afterwards, I saw Stefanie sitting by the side of the road. I dismounted.

  “Urs might be a while,” I said. “I’ll go with you, if you like.”

  We pushed our bikes slowly up the hill behind which the pond lay. I had never been especially keen on Stefanie, perhaps because they said she would try it on with anybody, perhaps because I was jealous because Urs never went anywhere without her. But now, alone with her for the first time, I seemed to get on with her okay, and we talked pretty easily about all sorts of things.

  Stefanie had taken her final exams in the spring, and was working as a cashier in a supermarket until going on to college in the fall. She talked about shoplifters, and who in the village bought only sale items, and who bought condoms. We laughed all the way up the hill. When we got to the pond, we saw the others had all swum out already. We got undressed, and when I saw that Stefanie didn’t have her swimsuit with her, I didn’t put on my trunks either, and made as though that were quite natural. There wasn’t a moon but there were loads of stars, and dim starlight on the hills and the pond.

  Stefanie had jumped into the water, and was swimming in a different direction from our friends. I set off after her. The air was a bit cooler already and the grass was wet with dew, but the water was just as warm as it was by day. Only when I reached down with my feet and kicked hard did I stir up cooler water from underneath. When I had caught up to Stefanie, we swam side by side for a while, and she asked me if I had a girlfriend in Neuchâtel, and I said I didn’t.

  “Come on, we’ll swim to the boathouse,” she said.

  We reached the boathouse, and looked back. We saw that the others were back on the shore by now, and had got a campfire going. We couldn’t tell whether Urs had joined them yet or not. Stefanie climbed up onto the pier, and then onto the balcony, from where we had often dived into the water when we were kids. She lay on her back and told me to join her, she was feeling cold. I lay down next to her, but she said: “Come closer, that’s no good.”

  We stayed on the balcony for a while. In the meantime the moon had come up, and it was so bright that our bodies cast shadows on the gray weathered wood. From the forest behind us we could hear sounds, but we didn’t know what they were, and then someone was swimming toward the boathouse, and Urs’s voice called out: “Stefanie, are you there?”

  Stefanie put her finger to her lips, and pulled me back into the shadow of the tall rail. We heard Urs panting as he climbed out of the water, and pulled himself up on the rails. He had to be standing directly over us. I didn’t dare look up, or stir.

  “What are you doing there?” Urs was crouched on the balcony rail, looking down at us. His voice was quiet, surprised, not angry, and he was talking to me.

  “We heard you coming,” I said. “We were talking, and then we hid, to surprise you.”

  Now Urs looked over at the middle of the balcony, and I looked that way too, and the damp patch that my body and Stefanie’s had made was as clear as if we were still there.

  “What did you do that for?” asked Urs. Once again, he was addressing me, he seemed not to notice his girlfriend, who was crouching motionless in the shadow. Then he got up, and high above us on the rail he took a couple of steps, and with a sort of cry, a whoop, he leapt into the dark water. Even before the splash, I could hear a dull impact, and I jumped up and looked down.

  Leaping off the balcony was dangerous. There were some poles stuck in the water that reached up to the surface; when we were kids we knew where they were. Urs was floating on the water. His body had an odd white shimmer in the moonlight, and Stefanie, who was standing beside me now, said right away: “He’s dead.”

  I carefully climbed down from the balcony onto the pier, grabbed Urs by an ankle, and pulled him toward me. Stefanie had jumped down from the balcony, and swum back to the others as fast as she could. I pulled Urs out of the water, and heaved him onto the little pier in front of the boathouse. He had a horrible wound on his head.

  I think I mainly just sat next to him. Some time, a lot later, a policeman turned up and gave me a blanket, I hadn’t realized how cold I was. The policeman took Stefanie and me back to the station, and we told them what had happened, but not what we had done on the balcony. They were very friendly, and when it was morning they even gave us a ride home. My parents were worried about me.

  I saw Stefanie at Urs’s funeral. The others were there too, but we didn’t talk, not till later in the bar, and then not about what had happened that night. We drank beer, and someone, I can’t remember who it was, said he wasn’t sorry Stefanie had stopped coming. Ever since she’d started turning up, we hadn’t had any proper conversations any more.

  A few months later, I heard that Stefanie was pregnant. From then on, I started spending most of my weekends in Neuchâtel, and I even started doing my own laundry.

  FLOTSAM

  May God forgive the hands that fed

  The false lights over the rocky head!

  —John Greenleaf Whittier

  I wasn�
�t sure whether I’d called the right number or not. There was a snatch of classical music on the answering machine, and then the beep, and then the expectant silence of the recording. I called a second time. Once again, there was just music, and this time I left a message. Half an hour later, Lotta called me back. When we had gotten to know each other better, she told me about Joseph. He was the reason why she couldn’t leave her voice on the tape. He musn’t learn that she was back in the city.

  Lotta was Finnish, and she lived in the West Village in Manhattan. I was looking for an apartment. An agency had given me Lotta’s number.

  “I sometimes have to rent the apartment,” said Lotta, “when I don’t have any work.”

  “And where do you live then?”

  “Usually with friends,” she said, “but this time I couldn’t find anyone. Do you know of anywhere I can go?”

  The apartment was big enough for two, so I offered to let her stay in it. She agreed right away.

  “You must never pick up the phone,” she said. “Always wait till you know who’s calling. If you want to talk to me, call my name, and I’ll switch off the answering machine.”

  “Were you there the first time I called?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Lotta lived on the fourth floor of an old building on 11th Street. Everything in the apartment was black, the furniture, the sheets, the rugs. A few withered cactuses stood on the little wrought iron balcony that opened out onto the yard. On the table by Lotta’s bed, and the glass-topped table that had the answering machine on it, there were dusty shells and twigs of coral. The few lamps had red and green bulbs in them, which made the rooms look odd at night, as if they were under water.

  When I came to inspect the apartment, Lotta had answered the door in pajamas, even though it was midday. After showing me round the place, she went straight back to bed. I asked her if she was ill, but she shook her head and said, no, she just liked sleeping.

  After I moved in, I never knew her to get up before midday, and usually she went to bed before me as well. She read a lot, and she drank coffee, but I rarely saw her eat anything. She seemed to live off coffee and chocolate. “You should have a healthier diet,” I said, “then you wouldn’t be so tired.”

  “But I like sleeping,” she said, and smiled.

  There was a black kitten living with us too. Lotta had been given it, and she called it Romeo. Later, she learned that Romeo was a girl, but the name stuck anyway.

  It was October. I was meeting a couple of old friends, Werner and Graham, who were working for a bank. I suggested we go to the shore for a long weekend. Graham said we could take his car, and I asked Lotta to come along. We set off on a Friday morning. We wanted to go to Block Island, which is a little island about a hundred miles east of Manhattan.

  We made our first stop in Queens. We were late setting out, and already hungry. We bought hotdogs from a stand on the road. Lotta just drank coffee. At a crossroads a little way ahead of us was a black man, who was standing beside a cardboard box full of vacuum-packed meat. Whenever the lights turned red, he would go from car to car and try to interest the people in the meat. When he caught sight of us he came running up, with one of the packages in his hand. We stopped and talked to him for a while. He spoke better French than English, and we asked him what he was doing in Queens. He didn’t mind our kidding around with him; probably he was hoping we would buy something from him. Even as we drove off, he was still smiling, waving his packages at us, and calling out something after us that we couldn’t understand.

  We got onto the island on the last ferry of the day. We had left the car in an almost deserted carpark on the mainland. The crossing took two hours, and even though it was cold, Werner spent the whole time outside, leaning on the railing. The rest of us sat in the cafeteria. The ship was almost empty.

  Right next to the port on the island there was a big, crumbling turn-of-the-century hotel. Not far away was a simple B and B in a shiny, white-painted clapboard house. Lotta and I shared a room—it seemed the natural thing to do.

  There was a near gale blowing in off the sea. All the same, we thought we’d take a walk before supper. There was a gray wooden boardwalk going along the shore. Once outside the village, it suddenly stopped, and we had to trudge on through sand.

  Werner and I were walking together. He was very quiet. Graham and Lotta had taken off their shoes, and were looking for shells nearer the tide line. Before long, they had dropped back. Only occasionally we heard a shout or Lotta’s high-pitched laugh through the roar of the surf.

  After we’d walked along a while, Werner and I sat down on the sand to wait for the others. We could see their silhouettes black against the glinting water.

  “What are those two doing down there?” I asked.

  “Picking up shells,” said Werner placidly. “We’ve gone a long way.”

  I clambered up onto a dune to look back. Sand leaked into my shoes, and I took them off. The village was a long way away. Some of the houses already had lights on. When I came back down, Werner had got up and walked down to the water. Lotta and Graham were sitting in the shelter of a dune. They had put their shoes back on. I sat down beside them and we looked silently out to sea, and watched Werner throwing rocks or shells into the water. The wind blew up little tornadoes of sand along the beach.

  “I’m cold,” said Lotta.

  On the way back, I walked with Lotta and helped her carry some of the shells she’d picked up. I had knotted together my shoelaces, and my shoes were dangling over my shoulder. The sand felt chilly underfoot. Graham was walking on ahead, Werner was following us at a distance.

  “I like Graham,” said Lotta.

  “They work in a bank,” I said, “him and Werner. But they’re okay.”

  “How old is he?”

  “We’re all the same age as each other. We went to school together.”

  Lotta talked about Finland. She had grown up on a farm, north of Helsinki. Her father had bred bulls. Lotta had left home early, and gone first to Berlin, then London, then Florence. Finally, four or five years ago, she had turned up in New York.

  “Last Christmas I visited my parents. For the first time in years. My father’s not well. At first, my plan was to stay with them, but I came back in May.” She hesitated. “I suppose I only went away on account of Joseph.”

  “What happened with Joseph? Were you an item?”

  Lotta shrugged her shoulders. “It’s a long story. I’ll save it for some other time.”

  As we were approaching the village, we turned around to look for Werner. He was a long way back, and was walking slowly down by the water’s edge. When he saw us waiting for him, he waved and speeded up a bit.

  We had supper in a little fish restaurant. Lotta said she was a vegetarian, but Graham reckoned she was allowed to eat fish anyway. We paid for her, and she ate whatever the rest of us ate, but she didn’t drink any wine.

  After Lotta had been silent a while, Graham and I sometimes lapsed into our native tongue. Werner didn’t speak, and it didn’t seem to bother Lotta either way. She ate slowly and with concentration, as if she had to think about every move and every bite. She noticed me watching her and smiled, and only went on eating when I’d stopped looking at her.

  At night, Lotta wore pink pajamas with appliquéd teddy bears. She had short blond hair. She was certainly over thirty, but she seemed like a little kid. She lay on her back, and had pulled the covers up to her chin. I rested my head on my hands, and looked at her.

  “Do you think you’re going to stay in New York?” I asked.

  “No,” said Lotta, “I don’t like the climate.”

  “Is Finland any better?” I asked.

  “At home I was always cold. I want to go to Trinidad. I’ve got a lot of friends there.”

  “You’ve got a lot of friends, period.”

  “Yes,” said Lotta.

  “Well, you’ve got some friends in Switzerland now.”

  “I’d lik
e to have a little shop in Trinidad,” she said. “Cosmetics, films, aspirin … things imported from here. You can’t get that kind of thing over there. Or else it’s very expensive.”

  “Do they speak English on Trinidad?” I asked.

  “I think so. My friends speak English … well, and it’s always warm.”

  On the road below, a car drove past. Its headlights sliced through the blinds, swung across the room, up onto the ceiling, and suddenly went out, just over our bed.

  “You have a lot of freedom,” I said. But Lotta was already asleep.

  We met Werner and Graham at breakfast.

  “Did you sleep well?” asked Graham with a grin.

  “I like to be able to hear the ocean from bed,” I said.

  “I was very tired,” said Lotta.

  Werner ate in silence.

  It started raining in the morning, and we went to the local museum. It was housed in a little white barn. There’s not much to report on the history of Block Island. Some time it was discovered by a Dutchman by the name of Block. Some settlers crossed from the mainland. Not too much happened after that.

  The old fellow who ran the museum told us about the many ships that had run aground on the reefs in front of the island. The locals had lived from flotsam and jetsam more than they had ever done from fishing.

  “People say they lured the ships ashore with false lights,” said the man, and laughed. Nowadays the island was living off tourism. In summer, every ferry was full of summerfolk, and a lot of wealthy New York people kept summerhouses there. For a while it had been quite the thing to have a house on Block Island. But today a lot of those people flew to the Caribbean.