Eternal Summer

1

The woman and child arrived on a Tuesday. It was weeks since I’d last had guests booked in. The trade fairs had been canceled or rescheduled because of the continuous state of alert, and there no longer seemed to be any other reasons to visit our region.
Although it was October, the past days’ heat had stirred up the fires again. From the garden you could hear the helicopters circling the forest, and at two-hourly intervals, the announcements of the police as they patrolled the surrounding area: Stay home, wear face masks, keep doors and windows shut. Stay home, wear face masks, keep doors and windows shut. Stay home. They swelled and faded, came and went.

I’d been sunbathing and stood in the cool lobby in my dressing gown.
“Do you have a room available?”
It took some time for my eyes to adjust to the darkness and see them: a woman and a little girl. I put the girl at about three or four. The woman was around my age—mid, maybe late, thirties. She was wearing a light-colored dress with a purse over her shoulder and stood next to a small rolling suitcase, holding the child by the hand. I noticed that neither of them had a mask on, but maybe they’d been waiting for a while and had already put them away. Their legs and shoes were gray with dust; they’d brought the smell of the forest in with them, the smell of burned leaves and smoke.

I went ahead across the dining room, through the terrace doors, and into the garden. A low, wooden walkway in the style of a Japanese veranda led from the terrace to the bedrooms, past a fishpond and a small ornamental maple with brilliant red leaves. A young gray cat slinking through the stiff reeds stopped and stared at us.
Most guests were surprised by the garden. It wasn’t in keeping with the rest of the hotel—the gloomy lobby, the old-fashioned dining room with its wooden furniture and dark-green curtains, the uninspired name, which was simply that of the town: Hotel Bad Heim. My grandfather had laid it out one summer while I was here with my mother, who loved all things Japanese. It was the summer before I started second grade. Now, all these years on, the garden was very much in step with the times; apart from the pond, it hardly needed water.
The sky was closing in from the forest. As we went along the walkway, I noticed that the woman had stopped behind me. I followed her gaze to the brown clouds piled up over the fire on the other side of the river, where the forest was almost entirely coniferous. Maybe, I thought, she hadn’t been aware of the fires. Maybe she and the child had wound up here by chance. It must be an alarming sight to anyone not used to it, not expecting it, so I did my best to reassure her. “Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s only the undergrowth burning. And there’s a river in between. The flames can’t cross that.”
I unlocked the last door we came to, number five. The afternoon sun filtered through the closed shutters over the carpet and the bed.
The child had stayed in the garden and was watching the cat. The woman looked around and put her suitcase down next to the door. I asked if she’d like me to open the shutters. The room was the only one with a second window; it looked out over the field behind the house and up to the forest. The woman smiled at me.
I left the key on a small table. “You can eat here in the hotel,” I said. “The restaurants in town are closed.” I realized I’d forgotten to take her details. “Oh, and I’ll need your names—and your IDs, please.”
She nodded, smiling again. “Can I bring them to you later? I’m not sure where they are just now. We are Dorota and Ilya Ansel.”
She spelled out the names for me, and I told her mine and said she should let me know if she needed anything. Then I left her to unpack. When I turned at the door, I saw that she had sat down on the bed and slipped off her shoes. The polite smile was gone. Instead, her face had a strained look, as though she’d begun to think of other things and hadn’t expected me to look back.

I didn’t see them again that day. I smoked, sunbathed, listened to music. In the evening I made myself a supper of canned tomatoes and sardines. I wondered whether to prepare something for the woman and child, but decided to wait. If they needed anything, I had enough for a simple meal: frozen fish, potatoes, bread, cheese, eggs—and plenty of cans.
I watched the news in the dining room. The unusual heat showed no sign of abating. No rain in sight. I’d opened the front door and the sliding door to the garden, and a warm breeze was wafting through the house. The never-ending summer brought with it a strange restlessness, a sense of powerlessness that most of the time I tried to ignore. It had to cool down sometime. Clouds would form; it would rain. The fall would come. A stubborn faith in an old normal, despite daily weather reports to the contrary. We stared helplessly at the temperature graph, at the red and blue lines representing day and night that remained unwaveringly high, unwaveringly close together. Each day brought the hope that the blue line, at least, would take a dive. The hope of cooler nights, of air masses colliding over the forest. The hope of clouds, of rain. Each day the still, the not yet. Each day the sometime it’ ll break, it has to. The waiting.
The endless summer not only fueled my fear of fires, it increased my sense of helplessness. I was used to fires in July and August, but we’d been waiting since mid-September for the air to clear and the earth to grow moist again.
I went on my usual round through the garden, fed the fish, chased off the cats, picked up the first fallen leaves from the pond. I could barely smell the burning anymore; the wind had turned and was coming from town. The fires would stop soon. It was a matter of days now.
I sat on one of the loungers, looking into the bright-pink sky, waiting until it was black on the horizon—until only the glow of the forest remained, far away on the other side of the river. I lit a cigarette and walked slowly over the gravel to the fence, beyond which the brown grass of the field stretched to the edge of the wood. I glanced at the room occupied by the woman and child. They hadn’t come out since their arrival, and now it was dark in there behind the shutters—dark and silent. The television wasn’t on, and no one was speaking. I realized I hadn’t asked the woman how long they were intending to stay. One night, was my guess.
She must have a reason for staying here with her little girl at a time when there were so many restrictions and the air quality was so appalling. They were probably on their way somewhere; maybe they’d had to change trains, had gotten stranded. I imagined train tracks unable to cope with the heat, malfunctioning air conditioners, intolerably stuffy compartments.
I returned to my lounger, took my keys, and left the hotel by the main entrance. In the vestibule was a folded stroller that I hadn’t noticed before.
The streets were empty. I walked slowly through town, past the windows taped with tinfoil, past the playground that had been closed since the summer to discourage outside play. A group of teenagers were sitting at the top of a jungle gym, smoking in a huddle, their faces reflecting the light from their phones—bright islands in the darkness. I heard them laugh. One of them grabbed a bar of the jungle gym and slowly pulled himself up. His gray back, his gray shoulders, rising and falling. He made it look easy, almost effortless.
I stopped at the crossroads for a moment, listening to the voices, the laughter, the bass, the weave of real sounds and cell phone noise. The traffic lights changed for no one; a train went through the empty station. Signs on the lampposts warned of the fires and the poor air quality, with illustrations to demonstrate correct procedure. Line drawings of heads in smoke masks, children and old people next to a thermometer, emergency numbers, a map showing muster stations in case of evacuation.
The warnings against outside activity had been in place since mid-April. The situation changed daily, depending on wind direction, the success of firefighting operations, the weather. Often the wind blew the smoke into town. Old people and children stayed home behind closed windows, watching maps of the area on their screens. Everyone kept an eye on the fluctuating zones of red, orange, and yellow that showed the levels of sulfur compounds in the air.
Bad Heim. Low-slung houses, paved front gardens, empty streets. Signposts to places that no longer existed: the spa, the casino, the vineyards. Billboards—and behind the billboards, public housing, a swath of white on the horizon like a range of mountains, balconies stacked over balconies, each private life separated from the next by a milk-glass partition. Scratching posts, birdhouses, plastic furniture with tablecloths clipped into place, clotheshorses, exercise bikes. The deserted bunker of the Grand Hotel, with its gappy sign jutting into the sky, its old curtains. A lot of the houses still bore traces of their former identity as bed-and-breakfasts—green signs with eternal promises of vacant rooms, relaxation, and fresh air.
I walked past the station, over the tracks, along the asphalt path. To the right of this path, after the last lamppost, was the field. From here you could see my hotel on the edge of town—the only hotel left in Bad Heim. The window of number five was a black oblong in the back of the building. The woman must have opened the shutters after all.
My little world lay in the bright circle of the outside lamp. Three loungers and a low table—and on the table, my speaker, my ashtray.
I crossed the field and slipped into the garden through a gap in the fence. When I was almost at the building I noticed a small, pale shape behind the window. It wasn’t until it moved that I realized what I was looking at. The sole of a foot was being pressed against the glass by someone sitting there in the dark. A shudder ran through me. I’d assumed that the woman and child were asleep, but actually, it seemed, the woman was sitting at the window in the dark, looking out at the forest. She must be able to see me. I hurried past as if my thoughts were elsewhere, careful not to look her way. But the image of that foot lingered in my mind, strangely unpleasant—the pale toes, the ball, the heel, pressing against the glass as if to expand the room.