The Archive of Feelings by Peter Stamm

Author:Peter Stamm [Stamm, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

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After two months without rain, the weather has finally turned, it’s cooler, there’s a wind blowing, and it’s started raining, first cautiously, then gradually more heavily. As though it had taken the wind to get me moving, I finally called my colleague. He’s home. He tells me some tales of office life, a sacking, a love affair, some bickering. It doesn’t interest me one bit, but I have to listen, after all I want something from him, and am dependent on his goodwill. When he finally stops and I’m able to get in my request, he gets all pompous. He had earned the confidence of the stars by not abusing their trust. But Franziska and I went to school together, I say, we’re old friends. That’s neither here nor there, he says, sometimes old friends are exactly the people they don’t want to hear from.

He could be right about that. I don’t even like myself in the role of someone who pops up out of the past simply because he’s got it into his head that he wants to settle certain matters that should have been settled long ago. What’s the point of these old stories? Have we really got any more to say to each other than it said on one of Franziska’s old postcards: I’m doing well, how are you? The sun’s out, and I’m busy. Though of course I’m far from busy.

In the end, my colleague gives me Franziska’s email address, and makes me swear not to say it was him who gave it to me. And if you get wind of anything interesting, give me a call, he says, we’ve not heard anything from her in donkey’s years. I promise and get off the line.

My colleague failed to ask me a single question, not even how I was feeling, or what I was up to. Presumably the memory of me has already started to fade in the agency, but then I never wanted anything else anyway. As far as my colleagues were concerned, I was never anything but one of the gray mice who did the research, dependable helpers whose job one day was superseded.

I leafed through Franziska’s file some more, this time looking at the pictures, but even with them in front of me, I’d have a hard job describing Franziska’s appearance. I can see the color of her eyes and hair, I see the style, the mouth, nose, brow, but all that doesn’t make her, that’s not what I loved about her. I look in the box of old photographs again and find a couple from when we were young. Franziska’s always in the middle, they are group snaps or shots from school trips or parties. In one of the pictures, she’s holding a guitar and maybe singing. I’m there in the picture too, eyes down, bashful and spotty, with a worried-looking smile. I don’t look at all comfortable in my skin, as the saying goes; presumably I couldn’t begin to imagine what Franziska found attractive in me.

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