Seven Years by Peter Stamm Page A

on the Kalahari Desert, and was sitting there dreamily. I saw great expanses of veldt full of animals, herds of animals moving over the plain, quickly and aimlessly. They trotted, galloped, and grazed. They ran across the expanse, following some invisible routes, always the same routes since the year one. They reached a water hole, a pasture, they disappeared into the distance, the wind blew away their traces.
    Once there was a trivial quarrel with Antje. I had left a couple of dirty cups in the sink, and she accused us of using her apartment like a hotel. She wasn’t some chambermaid, with nothing better to do than tidy up after us. Sonia felt bad, though it wasn’t her fault. We quickly patched things up with Antje, but the atmosphere wasn’t the same. Two days later we left.

A ntje didn’t get up until we had had breakfast. I made her some coffee. Sonia said she was going shopping in town. Antje asked Sonia to take her along, she had to check in on the gallery and run a couple of errands besides. I asked her if she wasn’t tired. No, she said roughly, and drank her coffee standing up.
    Sophie wanted to watch a movie. Just this once, said Sonia, although it was really a very common occurrence. Sonia had distinct notions of how to raise a child, and even though she kept having to make compromises, she wasn’t prepared to abandon her ideal line. That way, Sophie’s upbringing presented itself as a sequence of exceptions. Sophie had learned how to live with that. Each of her appeals ended in “just this once.” And since Sonia and I were generally overworked and felt guilty for not spending enough time with Sophie, we rarely denied her. But only once you’ve fed Mathilda and changed her litter, said Sonia. Why is it always me who has to do that, groaned Sophie. You wanted a cat, said Sonia, now you have to look after her.
    The two women set off. I put in a DVD for Sophie and went out to the garden. The fog had lifted a little and the sun was peeping through, but the air was still chilly. We had a few vegetable beds where we grew lettuces and vegetables in summer, but this year had been so rainy that we hardly harvested anything, and had neglected the garden out of annoyance. The tomato plants had rotted away, their fruits had gone black and fell off at the slightest touch and splattered on the ground. A few tiny cabbage heads lost themselves in the rampant grass, the cucumber that I’d once trained up a wooden stake had been attacked by mildew and was dried out. I ripped everything up and tossed it in the compost bin. I wanted to hoe the beds, but the ground was frozen. Instead I started to rake up the leaves that had dropped from our neighbor’s great sugar maple onto our tiny patch of lawn and onto the front yard. Once Sophie came out of the house and watched me, then she disappeared inside again. Shortly before noon, Antje and Sonia returned with bulging shopping bags. Half an hour later Sonia called me in to lunch.
    After our meal we pulled on our coats and sat down outside to drink our coffee. Sonia talked to Antje about her time as in intern. Antje said Marseilles had changed, even since Sonia’s latest visit. The city was much cleaner than before, but it had gotten a bit boring too. Which is fine by me, she said, I’m not twenty anymore. Sonia said she had found it hard to settle in there, if Antje hadn’t introduced her to a few people, she would probably have spent the entire six months alone. You had so many visitors, said Antje. That’s not true, said Sonia, I did nothing but work all the time. Even so, it was perhaps the time of her life. Albert had trusted her, and she had learned an incredible amount. Do you remember the silly fellow who visited you?, asked Antje. The one who went on and on about udders? Jakob?, I asked. He didn’t visit me, Sonia said, he just turned up one day. Anyway, he came and stayed with us, said Antje. You thought he was so frightful, didn’t you?, I said. He just wrote