The Family Clause

by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

  Your dad loved it, she says. What do you mean? Being on paternity leave. He stayed home with both you and your sister. He was absolutely incredible at it. He made his own purées from parsnips and carrots and was extremely particular about your sleep schedules. I had no idea, the son says. Did I never tell you? the mother says. He was a fantastic father when you were small. It was once you got older that he became a bit more unpredictable. I don’t understand what you saw in him, says the son. You’re so different. The mother puts down her cutlery. She thinks for a moment. His bravery was infectious, she says. And his contempt for unnecessary rules. She smiles and looks out at the square. But he should have chosen a different career. A man with charisma like that shouldn’t be going around selling bidets. He should have been on stage. Or in front of a camera. Did he ever try that? asks the son. No. He had zero interest in it. All he wanted to do was write. Before we had kids, anyway.

  * * *

  A grandfather who feels like a grandfather’s grandfather’s father steps into the waiting room in the centre of town, ready to see his doctor. Is this the right address? the nurse asks as he reports to the reception desk. She pushes the glass to one side and shows him a grey computer screen. The grandfather puts on his reading glasses and squints. The nurse recoils when she smells his breath. The grandfather puts his other reading glasses on top of the first pair and cranes his neck. Yes, he says. That’s right. You know you can see a doctor closer to home, don’t you? the nurse says. Thank you, I know, says the grandfather. But there’s no trusting the doctors there. The nurse doesn’t argue, which must mean she agrees. The grandfather is shown into the next waiting room, where he sits down on a bench, gathers his strength and tries not to fall asleep. Isn’t it strange that drinking so much can make your mouth so dry.

  He remembers when this body was his friend. It was invincible. He could fill it with whatever he wanted, it would survive anything. Now it has turned against him. Mutinied. It’s like his old Passat, which worked perfectly well until it stopped working and then everything went wrong at once; the wing mirrors fell off, the window controls stopped working, the petrol cap came loose, even the doors became difficult to close unless you lifted them upwards at the same time.

  The nurse shouts his name. He readies himself and gets up. Where would you like to start? the doctor asks before they are even sitting down. His feet hurt, his knees ache, he has pains in his thighs, he has a headache, his stomach sometimes hurts, he often feels a pressure on his chest, especially when he tries to sleep, he wakes up in a cold sweat, he has to change his t-shirt several times a night because it gets so damp. Do you have nightmares? the doctor asks. No, no nightmares, says the father. Strange dreams, though. The other night, I spent several hours walking around Marseille. But it wasn’t like Marseille is now. It was Marseille like it used to be. All the cars were old, the cigarette adverts, too, even the music drifting out of a café was from the mid-seventies. He walked north along Rue de Lodi, then took a right onto Rue Fontange and a left onto Rue des 3 Rois, followed, oddly enough, by a right onto Rue Sibié, even though everyone knows that it’s quicker to get to the railway station if you continue straight down Rue des Trois Mages and turn right onto Boulevard Garibaldi, which becomes Boulevard Dugommier which becomes Boulevard d’Athènes. But in his dream he wasn’t in a particular hurry, he didn’t have any bags, his feet weren’t aching, he just floated along through the warm spring air in that weightless way he did when he was in his twenties and had been out partying and then woke at dawn in a strange flat and stepped out into brilliant sunlight and had no idea where he was and just started walking in one direction until he saw something he recognised, a fountain, a bar, a cinema showing a new film by Alain Tanner. But in the dream he knew exactly where he was and where he was going, he walked along Rue Sibié, he continued all the way to Place Jean Jaurès, where he turned left, made his way back onto Rue Curiol, turned left onto La Canebière and right onto the next boulevard, and it was only once he had made his way up the steps of the fortress-like station building that he realised he was all alone. The station was empty. The trains were abandoned. The ticket desks were open, but unmanned. He realised that he had walked all the way from Rue de Lodi to the railway station without seeing another soul. And in his dream he hadn’t been afraid, he had felt more relieved than anything.

  Okay, the doctor says, looking thoughtful. And do you want to know the strangest thing? the father asks. I never knew anyone who lived on Rue de Lodi. My ex-wife lived on Rue Marengo, which was two blocks away. But that wasn’t where I started my walk. The doctor nods and jots something down.

  You haven’t stopped taking your medication, have you? the doctor asks. Not stopped, says the grandfather. I take my medicine. But sometimes I have short breaks. I don’t want to get addicted. Didn’t we have this exact same conversation last time? the doctor asks, scrolling through the grandfather’s notes on the computer screen. Didn’t we agree that you would keep taking your medication, no matter what? The grandfather sits quietly. You need to understand that depression is a serious illness, says the doctor. If you stop taking your medication, there will be consequences. The grandfather nods. Particularly if you stop suddenly. Is that what happened, or was it gradual? I don’t want to get addicted, says the grandfather. You won’t become addicted, says the doctor. But how long do I have to keep taking it? asks the grandfather. For as long as you need it, says the doctor. I don’t want to need it, says the grandfather. I understand that, says the doctor. But if you want to feel well, you need to take your medicine. If you want to feel bad, you can stop. I want an MRI scan, says the grandfather. There is absolutely no reason for any magnetic resonance imaging, says the doctor. The grandfather sits quietly. I can help you with your feet, a prescription for antidepressants and some new needles and insulin. Anything else? My vision, the grandfather mumbles. There’s something wrong with my eyes.

  * * *

  A mother who is a grandmother who is solely responsible for the fixtures and fittings is driving at ninety in a forty zone. She is making her way back to the north of town, to the building site that is already four months behind schedule. The construction company is being difficult, there are problems with the union, two employees were injured in an accident a few months earlier and now a legal dispute is looming. As the icing on the cake, the spotlights she ordered eight months ago still haven’t arrived. Despite the company guaranteeing delivery by the end of September at the latest. This is the last time she works with amateurs. She is so tired of being surrounded by second-raters. All her life, she has been waiting for the day when she can work alongside people who perform on her level. When she was sent to the childminder as a girl, she was surrounded by drooling babies and thought, even then, that things would be different once she started school. She could show the teachers that she already knew how to read. She would be able to spend her playtimes discussing school subjects with her classmates. But school was a disappointment. The boys could barely string a sentence together. The girls used their words to gossip or discuss whether Paul or John was the most handsome. She started dreaming that things would be different once she got to high school, but it was the same story there, just worse. So many idiots everywhere. Talentless teachers. Spotty boys. Girls who obsessed over their looks. No one thought big thoughts. Everyone was shackled to their everyday lives. They went to parties, fell in love, broke up, went on holiday. They acted like they didn’t realise that life would soon be over. Her parents were worried when she chose not to hang out with any of the others. They told her she should study less and sleep more. But she hated sleeping. Even then, she knew that sleep was a waste of time. She slept a maximum of five hours a night, and it didn’t seem to affect her. Yes, she was tired at times, but rather a tired person than someone who slept over half her life away. When she turned eighteen, her parents wanted her to talk to a priest who was also a family friend. She reluctantly agreed. She sat on an uncomfortable stool in the priest’s kit
chen as the priest fried sausages and made mashed turnips. Her mother said that the daughter didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, she just read and read and read. That sounds wonderful, the priest said, smiling at her. She claims that everyone on earth is an idiot, said the father. Everyone but her. What kind of thing do you read? the priest asked. She mentioned a few names. Not bad, said the priest. I’m convinced you have no need to worry, the priest said to her parents. This is a phase. It’s been going on since she was little, said the father. Since she taught herself to read, said the mother. She’ll soon realise that there is more to life than books, said the priest. But what if she doesn’t? the mother whispered. She will, said the priest. Trust me. The parents trusted the priest, and six months later she went to visit her aunt, who was taking a course in Marseille. They went to a jazz concert, and when the lights came up she realised that she was sitting at the same table as a young man with dimples and dark curls. What did she see in him? She doesn’t quite know. All she knows is that the world grew bigger when he came to visit. Everything shrunk when he went back to his daughter. He felt the same way. He moved over. Before long, she was pregnant. They got married. He promised to shut down his business and get a real job. He just needed to sell the things in the wardrobe. He just needed to make a quick working trip to Italy and back. At the time, she didn’t know exactly what he did there, but he always had cash. Import export, he said, until he was given a test position as a salesman with the Danish wholesale company that produced bathroom items.

  She still dreamed of one day finding a context that suited her. When their son began playschool, she tried literary studies. For six months, she sat through endless seminars in which downy-chinned, pipe-smoking communists in tatty waistcoats discussed whether Kafka was subversive enough to be good. The next spring, she took political science instead. For six months, she was forced to do group work with people who were so stupid that they wouldn’t recognise their own shadows. She dropped out. She applied for a job in a natural medicine shop. She worked there until her husband convinced her to apply to study architecture. He had seen her sketches. He claimed she was meant for something more than standing around in a shop that stunk of incense. An architect? She had never even considered it. But she got in. She completed the five-year degree in four and a half years. For the first time in her life, she had slightly more patience with the idiots surrounding her, because these idiots did, at least, have ambitions: they dreamed of building something that would outlive them. She found a job immediately after graduating, she worked for a company for two years and then she and two classmates started their own practice. It was just after the crash and everyone said it would never work, that it was too risky, but they managed it, they survived that crash and the next one and now they had seven employees and four trainees and she was able to take time off to go to the other side of town and have lunch with her son in a shabby local restaurant.

  But the son who is a father is as uninterested in her world as her ex-husband was. He never asks about the building work. He doesn’t want to talk about the architecture in the area, about Rem Koolhaas’ lighting solutions at the Fondazione Prada or Mona Hatoum’s exhibition at Tate Modern in London. Instead, he just wants to tot up all the things he did before lunch: woke up, loaded the dishwasher, put a wash on, prepared something he calls pre-breakfast for the children, dropped the four-year-old off at playschool, hung up the washing, emptied the recycling, took the cardboard down to the bins, cleared the rubbish from the back seat in the car, changed the carry cot for a new child seat. The one-year-old was with him the whole time, dribbling in his sling. The only mishap was when the father went to close the back door of the car while carrying two bags of instruction manuals and forgotten toys, and somehow managed to shut it on his own little finger, which has now swollen up and turned bluish-black. I’ve got some aloe vera, the grandmother says, producing a tube from her bag. Bites, inflammation, itching, everything feels better with a bit of aloe vera. Father–son relationships? he asks. No doubt, she says, handing him the tube.

  I’ve ended the father clause, the son who is a father says as he rubs cream into the damaged nail. Ay, she says. I can’t do it any more, he says. It’s been going on for far too long. Someone else will have to take over. But you had an agreement, didn’t you? she says. Yeah, but surely that can’t apply for all eternity? he says. Especially not considering the state he leaves the office in. The son describes the torn-down cupboard doors in the kitchen. The piles of rubbish. The missing instant coffee. The stolen change. The list is never-ending. Well, it’s up to you, she interrupts. What’s that supposed to mean? It’s your choice if you want to have any contact with him or not. So if I don’t look after him, he’ll break it off with me? I don’t know, she says. He’s done it before. With his first daughter? the son asks. The mother keeps eating. What really happened with her? You know what happened, says the mother. But why do we never talk about it? What is there to talk about? Is it true she was a prostitute? the son asks. Ask him, says the mother. He doesn’t want to talk about it, says the son. I don’t know the details, she says. All I know is that he was a fantastic man who changed. And I suppose he can’t stay with you? says the son. She answers with a glance. I’ve helped him enough, she says. Me, too, says the son. But I didn’t choose him, you did. He didn’t choose you either, she says.

  They finish their food. I have to get going, she says. Otherwise those cowboys will probably install the strip lighting in the parquet. The son doesn’t smile. He is annoyed. He is an expert in making a spark into a forest fire and an elk out of a feather. It makes no difference that she offers to babysit the kids sometime soon. He doesn’t seem to understand that she has spent her entire life helping men. First she took care of her father, then her husband, then her son. She is done with that now. Her patience with men has run out, she thinks once they have said goodbye without the grandson waking up, and she is back in her car on the way to the building site.

  Her phone rings. She glances at the display. It’s her ex-husband. She rejects the call. He calls again. She lets it ring. He calls again. This time, she answers. He says that he has just been to the doctor. They examined his eyes. He needs an operation. At first, they wanted to give him an appointment a few weeks from now, but when he said he lived abroad the kind secretary managed to find a cancellation tomorrow morning. It’s free because I’ve exceeded the annual treatment charge, he says. That’s good, she says. I don’t want to go alone, he says. Ask your children, the mother says. We argued, he says. They never have any time for me. They just work and look after themselves. Call your son, says the mother. He’s on paternity leave.

  They hang up without him asking a single question. She drives on. Where did he go? The man she fell in love with. The man who could even coax a smile out of her utterly humourless mother. The man with the glittering eyes, the loud clicking fingers, the thick neck that couldn’t hear a bassline without starting to bob in time. The man who was notoriously unfaithful with anything that had a pulse. When she spoke up, he passed the blame. When she warned him, he smiled. When she gave him one last chance, he did the same thing over and over and over again. But it wasn’t the cheating that made her grow weary. She could handle the cheating. And he wasn’t alone in having a bit of adventure on the side. No, the thing she never got used to was his unpredictability. The fact that he would vanish when he was needed most. Eventually, she had had enough. She filed for divorce. He accepted and disappeared. He didn’t speak to his children for several years. Then he returned, a shadow of his former self, and announced that his daughter was dead. He wanted them to try again. She told him she had long since moved on. He asked whether there was someone else and she could only laugh at the idiocy of him even thinking she had time for that when she had spent the past few years being mother, father, business owner, careers adviser, mediator, boundary setter, child-benefit saver, teller-offer, encourager, tear dryer, hair-gel applicator, shaving instructor, football coach, football specta
tor and, once (genuinely only once), when the referee meant to be refereeing the daughter’s football match had an acute migraine: football referee (her last question before she took the whistle and ran out onto the pitch: offside? What’s the offside rule again?). There was just one thing she hadn’t managed, when her son bought his first tie to wear to a spring ball; he needed help with the knot, she called her brother, he tried to give instructions over the phone, she tried it once, twice, the tie became increasingly crumpled, the son increasingly desperate, he needed to leave soon, he was going to be late, the tie was too short, too long, the knot too thin, it looked more like a reef knot. Eventually, the mother suggested that he ask their neighbour. The painter, who lived on the next floor, took the tie and produced a perfect knot, then he raised his arms and hung it like a medal around the already tall son’s neck. The neighbour tightened it and said: you look like a prince. The son ran off to the ball and the mother stayed behind in the kitchen, she turned off the light and watched as he jogged away, his long legs, his slightly slippery smart shoes, his silvery tie fluttering over his shoulder, glowing in the summer sunset. She turned off the light to see him better. She turned off the light so the neighbours wouldn’t see her eyes. The ex-husband disappeared, but she was left behind. She continued to make packed lunches and remove splinters, she managed the family budget and arranged girls’ dinners, she changed shoelaces and fixed zips, she designed a hospital entrance, a car park, she redeveloped a goods entrance, planned a loft conversion for a private customer, she bought large packs of frozen pierogi and bandaged sprained basketball fingers, she mediated in sibling conflicts and gave encouragement ahead of school tests, she bought wine for student parties and fixed gaming remotes with adhesive putty and silver tape, she bought designer clothes for the children but never for herself. Whenever her friends tried to set her up with some bearded, divorced town planner, she said she didn’t have time for love. Not right now, anyway, she said when her friends refused to give in. Right now I need to be here for my kids, she said, putting her life on hold until her daughter graduated from high school. As she came running down the school steps, the mother cheered so loudly that she lost her voice. At the party, she continued to talk with an increasingly hoarse tone. She managed to croak her way through the speech. By the next day, she couldn’t even whisper. For several weeks, she carried a notepad around with her, writing down everything she wanted to say. The doctor told her it was bad to laugh, bad to whisper; if she ever wanted to get her voice back, she should stay perfectly silent for ten days. Otherwise there was a serious risk of permanent damage to her vocal cords. You’ll never do it, her children said. How are you, of all people, going to stay silent for ten days? Impossible. But she managed it. The same way she had managed everything else when the odds were against her. Her voice came back, but her ex-husband was still missing. No one knew exactly where he was or what he was doing, and so many years had now passed since the divorce that people had long stopped asking how he was.