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

Heidi who the father was, and whether he knew. Oddly, it had never occurred to Heidi to let Rainer know. What did the child have to do with him? But on her parents’ insistence, she called him. He came that weekend, and Heidi met him at the station. He was wearing good clothes, and she sensed that he had thought about everything and had a plan. They drank coffee in a place near the station, and Rainer cautiously tried to establish Heidi’s view of everything, and whether she could imagine a life with him. By the time they moved on, to lunch at home with her parents, everything was decided.
    Rainer got on well with Heidi’s parents. He had a way of submitting to others immediately, and Heidi’s father liked that. He helped Rainer get a job, and found them a little three-room apartment. From the balcony, Heidi could see the Three Sisters, and when the wind was in the right angle she could hear the trains, and even the platform announcements. On Sundays, Rainer and Heidiwent to her parents’, and they all acted as though the baby was already born and belonged to them. Heidi didn’t say much, she sensed that it would pass, and that something different was in store for her, something she couldn’t begin to predict. At the wedding, Heidi’s father made a speech, poking fun at his daughter who had left home to become an artist, and had come back with a bun in the oven. Rainer looked sheepish, but Heidi smiled and raised the baby aloft, like a prize.
    HEIDI WENT TO INNSBRUCK many times in the intervening years, but never once to Vienna. Rainer didn’t care for Vienna, much less the Viennese. Anyway, he didn’t want Heidi to get any stupid ideas, he said, otherwise she might start applying to the Academy again.
    A train came in, and Heidi quickly stood up. She didn’t want people to see her sitting there as though she had nothing better to do. She went to the supermarket, and then home. She stopped by the neighbor’s. Cyril wasn’t ready to go home yet, he wanted to go on playing with Leah. He can have supper with us, that’s fine, said the neighbor. Not today, said Heidi. Cyril, she called out shrilly, and she stuck her head in at the door, past the neighbor. Cyril!
    While she was making supper, she saw the teenagers hanging around the recycling containers. She knew one of the girls, who was a trainee at the bakery. At work she wore a shapeless apron, but on the street you only ever saw her in a miniskirt, with exposed navel and a pushup bra that made her breasts look even bigger than they were. She’s just a kid, Rainer had said once, in a tone that made Heidi suspicious. He often made remarks like that about other women, he seemed to think of little else. In their years together Heidi had lost all respect for him. She refused to participate in his games, and kept to herself whenever she could. He suggested a course of therapy for her, came home with pamphlets for couples workshops. Never, said Heidi, I’ll never do that, and I’ll never talk about those things in front of other people either. She wouldn’t even touch the pamphlets, that was how disgusted she was.
    After some time Heidi had begun to draw again, in the mornings, when Rainer was out of the house and Cyril was in his kindergarten. Every evening she watched the trainee baker from her kitchen window, saw her parading back and forth in front of the boys, with her chest out and her bottom wiggling. Heidi wanted to ask her to model for her, but she didn’t dare go down and talk to the girl. Instead, she drew her from memory, she imagined her inall sorts of poses, naked and clothed, from the back, from the front, squatting or kneeling, standing, face averted, with a hand in her hair.
    Heidi stood naked in front of the mirror, and then drew the girl, based on her own body, a childlike figure resembling both parents without it being clear which features came from which parent. She hid the drawings in a cardboard box at the top of the closet in the bedroom.