In Strange Gardens and Other Stories Page 4

  I thought I wouldn’t mind lying naked with Monika in the grass, and I said so.

  “Like an animal,” said Monika. “I couldn’t do that. I’d be scared.”

  “There’s no one around.”

  “That would be why. There has to be some distinction.”

  “I mean just because we’ve known each other for so long,” I said. “I wouldn’t feel ashamed in front of you.”

  “I always wanted to be different from my parents. Even though I like my parents. But I don’t want to be just a copy of them. It would be awful if everything just carried on being exactly the same.” She hesitated. Then she said with a laugh: “And why would you feel ashamed anyway?”

  When I looked back after a while, I saw Sandra and Michael sitting in their canoe, and coming after us. They were paddling as fast as they could, and shortly after, when they passed us without a word, I could hear their panting. They were dressed now, in swimsuits and T-shirts. Automatically, I started paddling faster, but Monika said, “Oh, don’t. I don’t feel like racing.”

  “But I don’t want to have anybody in front of me,” I said. “Do you think they knew it was you, at the campsite?”

  “I don’t care,” said Monika. “Fuck them too.”

  The next afternoon we went swimming again. The water was cold, and we soon returned to the shore.

  “They were here too,” said Monika, picking up a chocolate wrapper that was lying on the sand. “Pigs.”

  “It could have been anyone.”

  “I expect he did it to her here too.”

  “You’re a little bit obsessed. Leave them alone. If they enjoy it.”

  “It spoils everything,” said Monika. She balled up the wrapper and threw it in the bushes. “How do you do it? You’re not a monk. How long have you been on your own?”

  “Half a year … eight months. How do I do what?”

  “It’s so strange. It’s nice, it doesn’t cost anything, and you can do it anywhere. And yet …”

  “I don’t know … Really—everywhere …”

  “In principle,” said Monika. “Where was the craziest place that you slept with a woman?”

  We had hung our towels up to dry on a tree, and were lying on the grassy bank. Monika turned toward me, looked at me, and smiled.

  “It was just I didn’t have any respect for you then,” she said. “I liked you all right. But if I don’t have any respect for a man …”

  “What about now?” I asked.

  Some clouds had drawn up, and when they passed in front of the sun, the temperature cooled quickly. We packed our things together, and moved off. The wind was gusting, but the water was almost still and very dark, and made little sucking sounds against the thin aluminum sides of our canoe. In some places it curled up, as over some shallows. Then we saw a flash of lightning, and we counted the seconds till the thunder, and we knew there was a storm at hand. I remembered my childhood, when the lifeguard had got us all out of the water when there was a storm coming. Then on the shore, just ahead of us, we spotted one of the little shelters they set up for canoeists here and there along the river. When we moored our boat, the waves were already high, and then all at once it started to rain. We pulled the boat onto the shore, covered it over with a tarpaulin, and ran for shelter.

  “Where do you reckon the others are now?” I asked.

  “No idea,” said Monika. “Struck by lightning, for all I care.”

  The rain fell. We sat in the shelter for hours. Monika leaned against me, and I put my arm around her. Some time, we both fell asleep. Later on, we got the camping stove out of the boat, and made coffee and smoked the last of my cigarettes.

  “What will we do if it doesn’t stop raining?” I asked.

  “Oh, it always stops eventually,” said Monika.

  It had gotten cold, and we could barely see the opposite bank through the teeming rain. It was like sitting in a room with walls of water. Gradually, it lessened, and we caught a glimpse of a low-angled sun. We paddled on. The river narrowed, and the current increased. We passed under a solitary bridge that water was still dripping off. In some places, trees had toppled into the river, and we had to squeeze by them. That night, we had trouble finding a campsite. By the time we finally did, mist was already rising off the water. We tried, unsuccessfully, to light a fire.

  The next morning the sun was shining, but round about noon it began to rain again. A fisherman we met as we carried the boat around a little lock warned us that the weather would stay like this now. And it really did rain all that day, into the evening, when we put up our tent. Everything was wet, and this time we didn’t try and cook, we just ate crispbread and ham with sweet mustard.

  I couldn’t sleep for a long time that night, but it didn’t bother me. I listened to the rain falling on the taut canvas and thought of the time I was in love with Monika, and all that had passed since then. It rained all that night, and it was raining the next morning, and through most of that day as well. When it finally stopped, we had long since stopped bothering about it.

  The river levels were high now, and the water was murky with particles of earth. The river was narrow at this point, and the current was so strong that the water seemed to roar, and we stopped using our paddles except to keep from running into anything. When we came around a corner, we saw a canoe on the bank, with bags, mats, and a couple of sleeping bags next to it. There was a big dent on it.

  “I think they must have capsized,” said Monika. “Our two fuckers. Shall we go see?”

  “Do you want to?” I asked.

  “They might need help,” she said. “It’s our duty as citizens.”

  We allowed ourselves to drift past the spot, turned, and made our way back to the bank against the current. “Hallo!” called Monika. “Michael, Sandra, are you there?” We heard nothing. Monika said she was going to have a little look around, and would I make some coffee. Then she found Michael, and called me.

  “Sandra’s gone to get help,” said Michael, “she headed into the forest.”

  We helped him to get up. The three of us couldn’t squeeze through the trees, but it turned out Michael wasn’t in such a bad way as we’d initially supposed. He was able to walk unaided, but he had a limp, and favored his bare foot. By the time we were beside the river, the water for coffee was boiling. We only had two cups. Monika and I shared one, and gave the other one to Michael. After a few swallows, he began to talk.

  “There was a fallen tree lying across the river. Up ahead. We took the corner too fast, and were unable to avoid it.”

  They had rammed the tree, and the canoe had turned sideways, tipped up, and immediately filled with water. They had jumped out of the boat, Michael said, the water wasn’t deep at that place, but all their things had fallen into the river. Their food was gone, and the camping stove and the paddles as well. All they’d been able to save had been a few things that had bobbed on the surface for a while.

  Monika asked if he wanted something to eat. He said he wasn’t hungry. When we broke out our things, he ate with us after all. Then we decided to paddle on to find a place where there was more room for our tent. But Michael refused to get into a boat again.

  “But how are you going to get away from this place, if not by boat?” asked Monika. I looked up the map. The nearest road was about three miles away. From there, it was at least another six to the nearest settlement.

  “When did Sandra go?” I asked.

  “Yesterday,” said Michael. “No, it was this morning, in the early hours.”

  “We would get lost in the forest,” said Monika, “at least on the river there’s only one way to go.”

  Things got a little tight in the tent. Michael lay upside down next to Monika and me. I lent him a pair of socks. His sleeping bag was damp, and it smelled moldy in the tent. Michael fell asleep immediately, and started breathing heavily and rhythmically.

  “I think he must have a fungus or something. Normal people’s feet don’t smell so bad,” Mon
ika whispered into my ear.

  “It’s his sleeping bag, I think,” I whispered.

  Then Monika started laughing quietly, and saying: “Oh, give it to me, oh, oh.”

  “Ssh, he’ll hear.”

  She unzipped my sleeping bag, and groped for me.

  “Just to warm my hands,” she said.

  “They’re ice cold.”

  “That’s the disadvantage of being alone.”

  I slept badly that night. When I woke up the next morning, Michael wasn’t in the tent. I could hear him walking about outside. My sleeping bag was damp, and I felt cold.

  “Are you awake?” Monika asked beside me.

  “Yes,” I said. “What’s he doing?”

  “What are you doing?” Monika called out.

  “I’m looking for my shoe,” Michael called back.

  We crawled out of the tent. The weather was slightly better. It was still cloudy, but at least it had stopped raining. There was a thin mist between the trees and over the river. The air smelled of moldering wood. I put on some water to heat.

  “This is the end of our coffee,” I said. “We’ve just got powdered milk left.”

  “And mushrooms and roots,” said Monika. “This is where the universal law kicks in.”

  Michael didn’t say anything.

  “We should start off before it begins raining again,” said Monika.

  “I’m not getting in a boat again,” said Michael.

  “Don’t be childish,” said Monika.

  He stood up and disappeared into the forest. When we called after him to come back, he called out that he had to find his shoe first. He knew exactly where he had lost it. We packed our things, and also those of Sandra and Michael. We roped their canoe to ours. When we were done, we called Michael again. He made no reply, but we heard him in the underbrush nearby.

  “If we don’t set out now, we won’t get there today,” said Monika. “Come on, let’s get him.”

  We followed Michael into the forest. As we got closer to him, he moved away, and when we went faster, he went faster as well.

  “That’s enough now,” called Monika. “Stop right where you are.”

  “We have to wait for Sandra,” he called back. At least he had stopped walking. When we had caught him up, he said it again: “We have to wait for Sandra.”

  “Why didn’t the two of you just wait for us,” I said. “You knew we weren’t far behind.”

  “Sandra said you wouldn’t stop,” said Michael, “just because we overtook you. She thought you’d be mad at us. And because she hadn’t tied the baggage on. She said you’d laugh at us.”

  “Are you crazy?” said Monika. “This isn’t some kind of competition. Cow.”

  Michael bent down.

  “My shoe must be very nearby,” he said with a pathetic voice.

  “Fuck your shoe,” said Monika. I’d never seen her so angry. I could hear that it had begun raining again, but the drops couldn’t get through the thick canopy of leaves. “We’re going on now. And you’re coming with us. We can leave a note for her.”

  “What about my shoe?”

  “Leave it,” screamed Monika. “We couldn’t sleep all night because of your stinking feet. You must have got a fungal infection or something. And now we’re going.”

  Michael was cowed and silent, and followed along behind us. Monika scribbled a note on a piece of paper, put it in a polythene bag, and attached that to a tree at eye level. She seemed to have calmed down.

  “This isn’t a game,” she said to Michael. “This is a big, wild forest. You can die here, you know, just like an animal.”

  Our canoe was now low in the water. For a while the river snaked through the forest in tight curves, and then it widened out again, and it was easier to make headway. Toward noon, the sun briefly broke through the clouds. The trees were still dripping with moisture, and in the boat it smelled of our wet things. Once, we saw a hat caught in the boughs of a fallen tree in the water, and Michael said: “That’s my hat.”

  Monika and I didn’t say anything, and, though it would have been easy to fish it out, we carried on. The current grew weaker. We were now passing through tall rushes, and finally we got out onto a big lake. In the haze we couldn’t make out the opposite shore. Monika looked at the map.

  “The campsite is on the eastern shore, about six miles from here,” she said. “If we keep going, we should get there tonight.”

  The wind was against us, and the canoe we were towing slowed us down as well. Monika and I paddled. Michael sat silently in the middle of the boat. Once I told him he should spell Monika. But he was so clumsy with the paddle that she soon took it out of his hands again. The wind grew fresher, and the waves lapped almost over the edge of the boat. We made barely any progress.

  “At least when it was raining, there wasn’t any wind,” I said.

  “Come on, don’t give up,” said Monika.

  After that, we didn’t speak any more. The shore was all overgrown with reeds, and it all looked the same. Once, we steered the boat into the reeds, and stopped to eat some ham and crispbread. Then we paddled on. It was past seven before we finally reached the campsite. There was a man on the shore, who helped us get the boats onto land.

  Michael vanished as soon as we had landed. Monika and I scrubbed our canoe clean. When we carried it overhead to the boathouse, we saw Michael and Sandra walking across the campsite in a tight embrace. They didn’t look in our direction. We put up our tent close to the shore, in the middle of people’s caravans.

  I was showering when I saw Michael once more. He was wearing some plastic sandals, and shaving. He gave me a barely audible greeting.

  “I expected Sandra to come at the head of a rescue party,” I said.

  “She was going to come back for me,” he said.

  When I got back to the tent, Monika was gone. The socks I had lent Michael were airing on the line. I threw them in the nearest garbage can. Monika came, bringing a bottle of Portuguese wine, which she dug up somewhere.

  “I ran into Sandra while I was showering,” she said. “She was missing a tooth, at the front, in the middle. She didn’t say a word to me.”

  We boiled some rice, opened a can of tuna, and drank the wine. Then, when it was almost completely dark, we walked down to the lake. We sat down on the pier.

  “Do you think she would just have left him out there?” Monika asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe because of the shoe.”

  “And what about the tooth?”

  Music drifted softly from the garden restaurant, and there was the sound of TV from one of the caravans. Otherwise, it was quiet.

  “Strange,” I said, “do you remember there being any mosquitoes?”

  Monika drew up her legs, and rested her face on her knees. She looked over the lake water for a long time. Then she turned her head, looked at me, and said: “Things always happen when you least expect them to.”

  “I didn’t think anything like this would happen to us,” I said.

  “Who knows,” said Monika, and she smiled. “Actually, I quite fancy sleeping with you. But only if you promise not to fall in love with me again.”

  PASSION

  Whenever I think of Maria, I think of the evening she cooked for us. The rest of us were already sitting down at the table in the garden, and Maria stood in the doorway, with a flat dish in her hands. Her face was flushed from the heat in the kitchen, and she was beaming with pride in her work. Just at that moment, I felt incredibly sorry for her, and for the whole world, and for myself too, and I loved her more than I had ever loved her before. But I didn’t say anything, and she set the food down on the table, and we ate it.

  We had gone to Italy as a group, Stefan and Anita, Maria and me. It had been Maria’s idea to visit the village of her grandfather. Her grandfather had emigrated to Switzerland many years ago as a young man, and even Maria’s father had only known their former home as a vacation place.

  We stay
ed in a small, slightly run down rental cottage, in the middle of a pine-wood near the sea. There were other cottages dotted about the wood, most of them bigger and handsomer than ours. Not far away was a coastal promenade,with restaurants, hotels, and shops. The old part of the village was back from the coast, at the foot of some hills. We spent most of our time in the new part, in our cottage, because we didn’t have a car. Only once, after a late breakfast, did we call a taxi and visit the old village.

  There was no one on the streets. From time to time a car drove by. We heard kitchen noises through an open window, and once we saw two black-clad women. Maria wanted to ask them about her grandfather, but before we could get near them they had vanished into one of the houses. We found a little bar that was open. We sat down at a table, and had something to drink. Maria asked the bar owner whether a family bearing her name lived in the village. He shrugged his shoulders and said he was from the north, and only knew the customers at the bar. And even with them, he mostly just knew their nicknames and Christian names.

  Then we went to the graveyard, but there was no memento there of Maria’s family either. We didn’t find her name on any of the tombstones or any of the burial urns.

  “Are you sure we’re in the right village?” asked Stefan. “I always thought most Italians came from Sicily.”

  Maria didn’t reply.

  “Everything’s so sleepy,” said Stefan. “Your relatives could at least have gotten up if you’ve come all this way to visit them.”

  “Are you disappointed?” I asked.

  “No,” said Maria. “It’s a beautiful village.”

  “Did you feel anything?” asked Anita. “I don’t know, roots. Maybe there are some … I don’t know, cousins of cousins still living here?”

  At first we thought we would stay there a bit longer, but there was nothing for us to do, and we didn’t see any restaurant where we could have gotten something to eat. We walked back, trekked along endless paths across a hot plain without any shelter from the sun. Once, a man rode past us on a motor scooter. He waved and shouted something I didn’t understand. We waved back, and he disappeared in a white cloud of dust.