Seven Years - By Peter Stamm Page 0,46
days on end. I slept badly, and often I was half dead with exhaustion. Sonia’s parents offered to support us, but we didn’t want that. Then we won a contest to build a school in Chemnitz. Our project got some attention, and soon we got more contracts. We were able to start employing people, and move into bigger premises. Sonia was the creative brains of the enterprise. She did most of the designs, while I took on the organizational and managerial tasks. I hardly gave Ivona a thought. I assumed she was back in Poland, when one day I got a letter from her.
The letter came at the worst possible moment. I had a thousand things on my mind, a building that was supposed to be finished and was going wrong in every way, a builder who kept calling me about some guarantee or other, a contest jury that I needed to prepare myself for. Sonia had been home all that week, she had a migraine and was bedridden, and only got up for a short time in the evenings when I came home, and we had something to eat together, and then she went back to bed.
The mail had been on my desk since lunchtime, but I only got around to looking at it in the evening. The envelope was made out by hand in a clumsy writing that I couldn’t recognize; there was no return address. I pulled out two pieces of paper, saw the signature, Ivona, and immediately had a bad feeling. The secretary had already left for the day, so I went to the kitchen to get a coffee. Then I sat down at my desk and began to read.
Dear Alexander, perhaps you still remember me. After everything that had happened between us, I thought it was absurd, Ivona addressing me formally. Of course I remembered her. I sometimes used to wonder what had become of her, but never made any effort to find out. She wrote to say she thought about me every day, and the lovely time we had together. She had often meant to write to me, to ask to see me again, but then she had learned that I was married now, and she didn’t want to interfere. She was sure I had lots to do, she sometimes saw my name in the papers, and was proud of knowing me.
For a brief moment I had the absurd thought that Ivona wanted to blackmail me, but she had nothing on me. Sonia knew about our affair, and after that night when I told her about it, I hadn’t seen Ivona again, I just stopped going, and she’d never tried to get in touch. Sure, I’d behaved badly toward her, but that wasn’t a crime.
The reason she was writing, I read on, was that she was in dire straits. She was still illegally in Germany, getting by on badly paid jobs off the books, cleaning and child minding and occasional little bits of translation work for a Christian publisher in Poland. The money had always been enough, Ivona wrote, she had even been able to support her parents on it, who had had a hard time after the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, but a few months ago, she had gotten sick, some abdominal condition. She never had health insurance, she had just been lucky enough to stay well. Now she was facing expenses that dwarfed her income. She had turned to God for advice, and one night in her dreams she had seen me as her rescuer. Even then she had hesitated for a long time before asking me for help. If I wasn’t able to give her anything, she wouldn’t bother me anymore. I owed her nothing, she would see any help as a charitable act, and try to pay me back as soon as possible.
The letter was cumbersomely expressed. I was pretty sure someone must have helped Ivona write it. Even so, the formulations were full of that blend of submissiveness and impertinence that had struck me about her from the start. I could picture her face before me, the expression of humility that made me wild with lust and rage. Ivona had signed with first and last names. Below her signature was an address in Perlach and a phone number. I pocketed the letter, shut down the computer, and went home.
The lakeside house of Sonia’s dreams turned out to be beyond our means. Instead we lived in a row