The Sweet Indifference of the World Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  THE SWEET INDIFFERENCE OF THE WORLD

  “Acclaimed Swiss writer Peter Stamm tells the mysterious, complex story of a time-traveling love affair that tests the boundaries of reality and raises as many questions as it answers.” —Vogue

  “Excellent…this amorphous tale folds in on itself, becoming a meditation on how memory can distort reality…Fans of Julian Barnes will love this.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Adroitly translated by the award-winning Hofmann, [Stamm] explores the timeless doppelgänger phenomenon through dual couples whose fleeting interactions engender intriguing questions about singularity and agency and confirm the impossibility of absolutely sure answers.” —Booklist

  ALSO BY PETER STAMM

  NOVELS

  Agnes

  Unformed Landscape

  On a Day Like This

  Seven Years

  All Days Are Night

  To the Back of Beyond

  STORY COLLECTIONS

  In Strange Gardens and Other Stories

  We’re Flying

  Copyright © 2018 Peter Stamm

  Originally published in German as Die sanfte Gleichgültigkeit der Welt in 2018 by S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main

  Translation copyright © 2020 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: Jennifer Daddio / Bookmark Design & Media Inc.

  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- author. | Hofmann, Michael, 1957 August 25-translator.

  Title: The sweet indifference of the world / Peter Stamm; translated from the German by Michael Hofmann.

  Other titles: Sanfte Gleichgültigkeit der Welt. English

  Description: New York : Other Press, [2020] | “Originally published in German as Die sanfte Gleichgültigkeit der Welt in 2018 by S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main.”

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019005601 (print) | LCCN 2019011396 (ebook) | ISBN 9781590519806 (ebook) | ISBN 9781590519790 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Young women—Fiction. | Older men—Fiction. | Fate and fatalism—Fiction. | Memory—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PT2681.T3234 (ebook) | LCC PT2681.T3234 S2613 2020 (print) | DDC 833/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019005601

  Ebook ISBN 9781590519806

  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.

  v5.4

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  “We lay there without moving.

  But under us all moved, and moved us,

  gently, up and down, and from side to side.”

  —SAMUEL BECKETT, Krapp’s Last Tape

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Peter Stamm

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  About the Authors

  ONE

  She visits me often, usually at night. She stands by my bed, looking down at me, and says, You’ve aged. She doesn’t say it in a nasty way, though, her voice sounds affectionate, almost merry. She sits down on the side of the bed. But then your hair, she says, tousling it with her hand, it’s as thick as it ever was. Only it’s gone white. You’re not getting any older though, I say to her. I’m not sure if that’s a happy thought for me or not. We never talk much, after all, what is there to say. The time goes by. We look at each other and smile.

  She comes almost every night, sometimes so late that it’s starting to get light. She was never one for punctuality, but I don’t mind about that, the less time I have left, the more time I allow myself. I don’t do anything but wait anyway, and the later she comes, the more time I have to look forward to her.

  This morning I woke up early and got up right away. For once I didn’t want to be in bed when she came. I put on my good pair of pants, my jacket, and the black shoes, and sat down at the table in front of the window. I want to be ready.

  It’s been cold for days, there’s been snow lying on the roofs and fields, and thin lines of smoke twisting up out of the village chimneys. I take the little passe-partout frame with Magdalena’s photo out of my desk drawer, it’s the picture I clipped from the newspaper ages ago, and you can hardly make her out on it. The paper is yellowed, but it’s the only picture of her I have, and barely a day passes that I don’t at least glance at it. I run my fingers along the narrow frame and it gives me the feeling I’m touching her, her skin, her hair, her body.

  When I look up again, out of the window, I can see her standing outside. Her breath is steaming, and she’s smiling and waving. Her lips are moving, and I’m guessing she’s calling me. Come on! she repeats, so exaggeratedly that I can lip-read it. Let’s go for a walk. I’m coming, I call back, wait for me! My wheezing alarms me, it’s an old man’s voice, a voice that’s just as alien to me as the frail body that imprisons me. I pull on my coat and scarf as quickly as I can. I hurry downstairs, stumbling on the hollowed-out stone steps. By the time I’m walking out of the home, I see Magdalena has already set out. I set off after her, in the direction of the river, toward the footbridge that leads across to the village I grew up in, passing the little pond where we used to feed the ducks when we were little, the place I had a bad fall on my bike, and that other place we used to meet at when we were teenagers at night, and light bonfires. It feels to me as though I’ve become part of the scenery here, which has hardly
changed over all the years.

  Magdalena has almost reached the bridge. Her step is so light, it’s as though she’s levitating over the snowy footpath. In my haste I’ve forgotten my cane, and I’m torn between my fear of slipping on the ice and falling and my other fear of losing Magdalena from view. Wait! I repeat, I’m not so fast anymore.

  Images surface of her vanishing into the mountains before me, how we wandered around the city together, how we traipsed through Stockholm arm in arm, that night I told her my story, and hers, the night she kissed me. She turns to face me and smiles. Come on! she cries. Come and get me.

  TWO

  Magdalena must have been perplexed by my message. I hadn’t left any number or address, only a time and a place and my first name: Please come to Skogskyrkogården tomorrow at two. I have a story I want to tell you.

  I waited for her at the exit to the Underground station. Quarter past two, and she still wasn’t there; briefly I thought she might have taken a cab. But her lateness wasn’t significant, she was always unpunctual, not in the aggressive way of showing the person waiting that their time is worth less than hers, more from a kind of vagueness with which she approached everything in her life. I was certain that she would come, that her curiosity was greater than her suspicion.

  Five minutes later, the next train rolled in, and I was already thinking she wasn’t in this one either when she came down the steps with her twinkling feet. I had meant to indicate my presence immediately, but in the instant I saw her, I couldn’t breathe, no more than I had been able to the night before when I had stood outside her hotel waiting, and hadn’t managed to speak to her then. She must be almost thirty, fully twenty years younger than me, but her manner was that of a girl, and anyone seeing us together would surely suppose we were father and daughter. I let her walk past without addressing her, and then I followed her in the direction of the cemetery.

  She didn’t make the impression of someone with an appointment to keep, walking down the street with rapid steps, as though she’d been that way a hundred times. I had expected her to stop at the entrance to the cemetery, but she walked straight in, and without the least hesitation climbed the hill that was surmounted by a ring of old trees. At the foot of the hill was an enormous stone cross, and yet the whole site had a heathen aspect, landscape and nature seemed stronger than the consecrated buildings and their Christian symbolism.

  Magdalena had sat down at the foot of one of the bare trees up on the hill, and was looking in my direction, as though we were having a race and she’d won. Out of breath, I came level with her, and although she had never seen me before, she seemed to understand straightaway that it was I who had summoned her. Lena, she said, holding out her hand. Christoph, I said, and shook it, in some perplexity. Not Magdalena, then? No one calls me that, she said with a smile. A slightly unusual place for a meeting. I just wanted us to be able to talk undisturbed, I said.

  I sat down next to her, and we gazed down at the yellow stone buildings that were probably from the Thirties. Next to a few slabbed structures was a monumental roof supported by square pillars, with a large, frozen pond in front of it. The gently contoured lawn was flecked with snow. From the entrance to the cemetery came people in dark coats, some alone, others in pairs or small groups. They stopped in front of one of the buildings, a scattered group that didn’t seem to cohere properly.

  I like cemeteries, said Lena. I know, I replied. It’s cold, she said, shall we walk a bit?

  We walked down the hill. The mourners by now had vanished under the jutting roof of the chapel, and the plaza was once more unoccupied. Next to the building stood a candelabra with a clock. Curious, said Lena, doesn’t it look like something on a railway platform? She stood under the clock, looked up at it, checked her watch like a traveler impatient for a train to leave. Final destination, I said. She laughed at me, but carried on playing her role, till I clapped gently, whereupon she gave a clumsy bow.

  We walked on into the cemetery, past geometrical rows of graves towards a thin copse of firs. We were walking side by side, so close that sometimes our shoulders brushed. Lena was silent now, but it wasn’t an impatient silence, and we could have gone on like that for a long way without talking, just preoccupied with our own thoughts. Finally, just as we stepped between the first trees, I stopped and said, I’d like to tell you my story. She didn’t reply but turned towards me and gave me a look that wasn’t so much curious as utterly open.

  I am a writer, I said, or rather I used to be a writer. I published a book fifteen years ago. My boyfriend’s a writer, she said, or hopes to be. I know, I said, that’s why I want to tell you my story.

  We walked slowly along the gravel path that led in a straight line through the wood, and I told Lena of the strange encounter fourteen years before which had led to my abandoning writing.

  THREE

  It was when I was at university that I had first started working on fiction, ambitious projects full of deep wisdom and literary allusions, that no one wanted to read, much less publish. It was these years of trying and failing that finally brought me success. The hero of the novel with which I eventually found a publisher was, just as I was, a disillusioned author. The book was a love story, it was supposed to be a portrait of my girlfriend, but while I was writing it, we broke up, and so it turned into an account of our breakup and the impossibility of love. For the first time in my writing, I had the feeling I was creating a living world. At the same time, I could feel reality slipping through my fingers, daily life was getting boring and shallow to me. Yes, my girlfriend left me, but if I am to be honest I had left her months before in my imagination, I had slipped into fiction and my artificial world. When she told me she couldn’t go on this way, and that she was missing me even when I was right there next to her, all I felt was a sense of irritation and exasperation.

  My novel, though, was a hit with booksellers and readers; even the reviewers seemed to sit up. This debut promised all sorts of things for the future, wrote one woman. And in fact I did believe in some sort of future, for the first time in a while. After living from hand to mouth for several years, the success of my book secured not a lavish but a respectable income; but above all I had something to show for myself that justified all my endeavors. The years of failed writing already felt like a long-distant time, in which I was caught up in labyrinthine plots, and driven by exaggerated ambitions.

  I never admitted how much my story was about me. When I was asked about that after readings, I dismissed the idea, and insisted on the separation between author and narrator.

  My publisher had lined up a series of readings for me, and I enjoyed being able to escape my empty apartment and travel around the country, looking at new places, and just being busy for an hour or two in the evenings. When I got an invitation from the little bookshop in my native village, I only briefly hesitated. The old bookseller had written me such a gracious and flattering letter that I agreed. Only as the date moved ever nearer, I felt a little uneasy about reading in front of people who had known me as a boy, and who couldn’t fail to make the connection between the characters in my novel and me in my present life.

  It was the end of November. I had set off, deliberately early, just after lunchtime. I hadn’t been back to the village for years, and I wanted to see if the reality still corresponded with my memory.

  The train emptied as it went along, as though approaching a forbidden zone, I was the only person left in my carriage, and it was a long time since the conductor had last put in an appearance. When I set out, the sun was shining, but the farther east we went, the foggier it got, and by now everything outside was gray, forest, bare trees, fallow fields, a herd of sheep, and just the occasional farm or clump of houses. Shortly before the destination, the otherwise straight rail tracks curved hard to cross to the opposite side of the river. Just before the curve, the train slowed down and came to a complete halt. The tilt of the carriage, which had been barely d
iscernible as we were moving, now that we were stopped made me feel giddy, it was as though I was off kilter myself. The train remained standing for a long time, then it gave a jerk and trundled across the river, without anything having happened that would explain the delay. But my sense of unease persisted until I was in the village.

  In winter, the region was often fogbound for weeks on end, and those were the climatic conditions I associated with my childhood, a cold, gray, blotting-paper world, but simultaneously cloistered, in which things that weren’t directly in front of you seemed not to exist. Only when I took my final school exams and left the village for the city did I learn how large and uncertain the world truly was. Perhaps that was what had prompted me to start writing, to reclaim the landscape and the security of my childhood, from which I had exiled myself.

  Although I could perfectly well have gone home when my reading was over, I had asked the bookseller to reserve a room for me in the hotel on the marketplace, which housed a restaurant and a small studio theater as well. Before I went away to college, I had spent a couple of months there, working as a night porter. At that time, the little arts center was still pretty new, and it all seemed very big and terribly modern to me; now it looked modest, old, and run-down.

  I had meant to go for a little stroll through the village, but even on the way from the station to the hotel I had been piqued and upset by the mixture of new and familiar. Even those buildings that still looked the way I remembered them seemed strange to me, as though they were in a museum, detached from their context and function.

  The air in the hotel room was dry and scented with air freshener. I lay down on the bed and thought about the village the way it used to be. When I shut my eyes, everything was still as it was, the buildings, the streets, the people who lived in them. I remembered the bustle of market days, the processions and celebrations with brass bands and fireworks, but also dim days of spring, the yawning void of summer, the cozy feeling of rainy days in autumn. Each season had had its particular smell, rain on asphalt, hot tar, moldering leaves. Even the snow had had a smell, a kind of dimmed freshness that I could almost taste.