To the Back of Beyond
Peter Stamm
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 Even now, in mid-August, it got cold quickly, and the damp chill seemed to pour out of the ground it had withdrawn into during the hours of sunshine, though even then it was never entirely gone.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 recycling 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.