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Peter Stamm

In Strange Gardens and Other Stories

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.

“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.