Seven Years - By Peter Stamm Page 0,6

Her voice sounded dark and soft.

When I woke up, I was muzzy and hardly knew where I was. It was brightening outside, the room was in twilight. My head hurt, and I needed to pee. I was shirtless, Ivona had all her clothes on, only the top buttons on her blouse were undone.

While I pissed into the sink, I opened the mirror cabinet, which was stuffed with shampoo samples and unfamiliar medicines. I turned and saw that Ivona was awake and watching me. I said, I’m going now. Then she got up and came over to me and whispered into my ear, I love you. It didn’t sound like a declaration of love, more like the statement of an immutable fact. I reached for my shirt and T-shirt. Ivona watched me dress with something like entitlement, her eyes were full of pride. I walked out without another word.

I stopped outside the dormitory to get my bearings. I couldn’t remember which way we’d gone the night before. The birds in the trees were fantastically loud, and for a moment I had the ridiculous idea that they might attack me. I asked myself what I was doing here, and how things had ever gotten so far. The whole business was embarrassing to me, and I hoped no one had seen me leave with Ivona. At the same time, though, I felt strangely exhilarated. Everything I’d previously experienced with women struck me as a sort of game in comparison to the night I’d just been through. I had felt grown up with Ivona, and responsible, and perfectly free.

I lived in one of the bungalows in the Olympic Village. It was a tiny place, but my friends in shared apartments or student dorms were all jealous of me. There were hundreds of these bungalows along narrow lanes surrounded by towering apartment buildings, and they really were like a sort of village. They had been built for competitors at the Olympics. After the games, the area was handed over to students. I paid three hundred marks a month for a little house that was roughly 250 square feet. Downstairs there was a walk-in closet, a kitchenette, and the legendary “Nice” shower, a plastic bath unit where you felt you were in a spacecraft. Upstairs was the bedroom and study. One wall of the study was glass, and there was a little veranda outside. To save space, a bunk bed was installed at the top of the stairs. The village was full of stories of couples falling out in the course of wild nights, but presumably that was just student talk.

The bungalows had been run up quickly and weren’t in good condition. The windows were poorly insulated, and even so you had to air out the space all the time, because otherwise you got mold in the walls. The student union had provided us with paint for the facades. Some people had made proper works of art, others had scrawled political slogans on the walls. Some of the paintings looked like children’s drawings.

There were always parties in the village, and spontaneous barbecues. It was noisy, especially in summer, which made it hard to concentrate on your work. You could hear everything from the bungalows on either side. I had a German lit student next to me. I barely knew his name, but I knew all about his sex life, and I heard every quarrel and every reconciliation with his girlfriend. Sonia, who was taking the same courses as me, sometimes came to visit. She was interested in the architecture of the village, and later on she would come and study with me. One hot summer afternoon, when we were both cramming architecture history, we could hear shouting from next door. I was about to knock on the door to complain when it got quiet. Shortly after that, there were the loud shrieks of pleasure of a woman. Sonia didn’t understand at first, and said shouldn’t we check up on what was happening. I don’t think they need help, I said laughing. Only then did the shoe drop. I said I should have studied German, where you didn’t have to work so much, and had time for other things. Sonia blushed, and said she was going to the bathroom. When she returned, the noise still hadn’t stopped, and after a few more minutes, she said she had to leave, she had a date. From then on we did all our cramming in the library.

It was before seven