We're Flying by Peter Stamm Read Free Book Online Page A

that Heidi met Rainer. He was just going home with a few friends when he saw her sitting down by the river. He was worried she might do something silly, he said later, when she asked him why he had approached her. A woman by the river in the middle of the night, of course you thought of things like that. No, Heidi said, nothing like that had ever crossed her mind. Rainer’s friends stayed behind, shouted to him a couple of times, and then went off without him.
    Rainer had sat down on the bench next to Heidi, and she told him her story, but not what Susa and Renate had said about her sketches. He didn’t seem at all interested in pictures. He took her home with him; after all, they couldn’t sit out on the bench all night. He was very sweet, and then suddenly he put his arms around her and started touching her. She didn’t fight him off for long, she had no strength and was tired and empty. Perhaps she even wanted it, the pain and the humiliation were aptpunishment for her cowardice, they set the seal on her defeat. Heidi had to think about Renate, how different she was, more confident but still cautious and sensitive.
    Rainer stood by the window, and Heidi stared at his hairy back and felt disgusted by him and by what he’d done with her. He turned to her and asked how old she was, and when she replied, Nineteen, he said, You’re not shitting me, are you? He was ten years older.
    Heidi stayed at Rainer’s for three days. He worked in a sportswear shop, and left home every morning before nine o’clock, and only returned after business hours. Most of the time she spent in the flat, incapable of formulating a clear thought. Once, she pulled out her drawing things, and she sat for an hour in front of the empty sheet of paper without sketching a line. She sat in the dusk, waiting for Rainer, dreading him but unable to leave. She felt like a prisoner, even though he’d given her a key to the apartment. Sometimes she stood behind the front door without managing to open it. Once Rainer was back, he didn’t feel like going out. He had done the shopping, had bought bread and cheese and ham and wine, and they ate and drank, and then Rainer stripped her naked, and she let him. He was fit and strong and about a head taller than her, and he turned and twisted her and put her in positions that he liked, and demanded that shedo things that were difficult for her and shaming, but still she never had the feeling that it was personal, and that he was thinking of her. He seemed very detached and entirely wrapped up in himself and his pleasure, and that was some consolation to her. He used her, but perhaps she used him even more, because she felt nothing, not even pleasure. She viewed herself as from a distance, and was surprised at herself.
    HEIDI HAD NO CLEAR RECOLLECTION of time after her return home. She withdrew to her room and didn’t speak to anyone. She heard her father standing at the foot of her bed, and announcing in a loud voice, You can go back to the office now. He went away, he came back, stood there in silence and looked down at her. Her mother brought her meals, sat down on the side of the bed, talked to her or stroked her hair. Sometimes she cried. You can’t lie here always, she said, you have to eat something, say something. At night Heidi stood in front of the window for hours, gazing out at the moonlit mountains, the stony sisters, that simultaneously drew her and frightened her. She got sick. The doctor was clueless, he performed all sorts of tests on her, and Heidi let it happen. She sat on the treatment table in her underwear. The doctor wrotesomething in her file, and then swiveled around on his much too low chair. Everything’s fine, he said, making a face as though nothing was, except you’re pregnant.
    She asked him not to tell her parents, but after a while it was impossible to conceal the fact. Her mother was first to notice, and told her father. Her parents reacted with astonishing calm. They asked