by Herman Koch
That was how I sometimes lay on the couch in our living room in the evening and thought about things. Something in me whispered that I needed to stop thinking, that I should above all not go too far with thinking. But that never worked; I always thought things through to the end, to their most extreme consequence. At this exact moment, I thought, there are people everywhere, lying on couches in living rooms like this one. Later on they will go to bed, they’ll toss and turn a bit, or say something nice to each other, or remain stubbornly silent because they’ve just had an argument and neither of them wants to be the first to admit he was wrong. Then the light goes out. I thought about time, the passing of time, to be precise, how vast, how endless, how long and dark and empty one hour can be. Anyone who thinks like that has no need to think about the infinity of space. I thought about the sheer quantity of people, their numbers, not even in terms of overpopulation, or pollution, or whether in the future there would be enough for everyone to eat, but strictly about the quantity itself. About whether three million or six billion served any given purpose.
Once I had arrived at this point, the first feelings of discomfort would appear. It isn’t that there are too many people, not per se, I would think to myself, but there are an awful lot of them. I thought about the students in my classroom. They all had to do something: they had to make a start in life, they had to go through life. Even though a single hour can be so long. They had to find jobs and form couples. Children would come, and those children too would sit through history classes at school, although no longer taught by me. From a certain vantage point you could see only the presence of people, not the people themselves any more. That was when I would start to panic. From the outside, you wouldn’t have noticed much of anything, except that the newspaper was still lying unread on my lap.
‘Do you want a beer?’ Claire would ask, coming into the room just then with a glass of red wine in her hand.
Now I had to say ‘okay’, without the tone of my voice giving cause for concern. I was afraid my voice would sound like that of someone who has just woken up, who has just got out of bed and hasn’t spoken yet. Or simply a strange voice, not completely recognizable as my own, a scary voice.
Claire would raise her eyebrows and ask, ‘Is something wrong?’
And of course I would deny it, I would shake my head, but much too vehemently, which would give me away, as I, in a strange, scary, squeaky voice that didn’t sound at all like my own, would say: ‘No, everything’s fine. What could be wrong?’
And then? Then Claire would sit down beside me on the couch, she would take my hand, she might also lay a hand on my forehead, the way you do with a child when you’re checking for a temperature. And here it comes. I knew that the door to normal was wide open now: Claire would ask again whether there was really nothing wrong, and I would shake my head again (less vehemently this time); she would go on looking worried at first, but would soon put aside her concern: I was reacting normally, after all, my voice had stopped squeaking and I was answering her questions calmly. No, I had only been sort of lost in thought.
About what?
I don’t even remember any more.
Come on, do you know how long you’ve been sitting here with that newspaper on your lap? An hour and a half, maybe two!
I was thinking about the garden, that maybe we should build a little shed back there.
Paul …
Hmm?
No one thinks about the garden for an hour and a half.
No, of course not, I mean, I was thinking about the garden for the last fifteen minutes or so.
But what about before that?
On that Sunday afternoon, though, a week after my appointment with the school psychologist, I looked at the garden for the first time in a long time without thinking about anything. I heard Claire in the kitchen. She was singing quietly along to something on the radio, a song I didn’t know but in which the words ‘roses by day’ kept coming back.
‘What are you laughing about?’ she said when she came into the room a little later with two mugs of coffee.
‘Oh, just laughing,’ I said.
‘What do you mean, just laughing? You should see yourself. You look like one of those born-again Christians. One big lump of happiness.’
I looked at her, I felt warm, but in a pleasant way, the warmth of a down quilt. ‘I was just thinking …’ I said, but stopped quickly. I’d been planning to start in about a second child. We hadn’t touched on the subject for the last few months. I thought about the difference in age, which in the best case would be almost five years. It was now or never. Still, there was a voice telling me that this was not the time, in a few days perhaps, but not on this Sunday afternoon when the medication had started doing its work.
‘I was thinking that maybe we should build a little shed in the back garden,’ I said.
33
Looking back on it, that Sunday was the high point as well. The novelty of living a life without guarded thoughts quickly wore off. Life became more constant, more muted, like a party where you can see everyone talking and gesturing, but can’t hear what anyone in particular is saying. No more peaks and troughs. Something was missing. You sometimes hear about people who have lost their sense of smell and taste: for those people, a plate of the most delicious food means nothing at all. That was how I looked at life sometimes, as a warm meal that was growing cold. I knew I had to eat, otherwise I would die, but I had lost my appetite.
A few weeks later I made a final attempt to regain the euphoria of that first Sunday afternoon. Michel had just gone to bed. Claire and I were lying together on the couch, watching a programme about convicts on Death Row in the United States. We have a wide couch, with a little manoeuvring we could both fit on it. Because we were lying next to each other, I didn’t have to look her in the eye.
‘I was just thinking,’ I said. ‘If we were to have another child now, Michel would be five by the time it’s born.’
‘I was thinking the same thing, just recently,’ Claire said. ‘It really isn’t a good idea. We should just be happy with what we have.’
I felt my wife’s warmth, my arm around her shoulders may have pulled her closer for a moment. I thought about my talk with the school psychologist.
Did you ever actually have an amniotic fluid test?
I could ask that, as casually as possible. One disadvantage was that I couldn’t see her eyes at the moment I asked. A disadvantage, and an advantage.
Then I thought about our happiness. About our happy family. Our happy family that should be happy with what it had.
‘Shall we go somewhere next weekend?’ I said. ‘Hire a bungalow or something? You know, just the three of us?’
34
And then? Then Claire became ill. Claire, who was never ill, at least never had more than a runny nose, who in any case never spent the day in bed with flu, ended up in the hospital. From one day to the next: there was nothing that could have prepared us for her hospitalization, there had been no time to, as they say, make arrangements. In the morning she had felt a little ‘wobbly’, but she had gone out anyway, she had kissed me goodbye, on the lips, then climbed onto her bike. That afternoon I saw her again, but now with a whole series of drips in her arm and a monitor beeping at the head of her bed. She tried to smile, but it was clearly an effort. A surgeon standing in the corridor gestured to me to come over. He needed to talk to me alone.
I’m not going to say what was wrong with Claire, not here, I consider that a private matter. It’s nobody’s business what kind of illnesses you’ve had, in any case it’s up to her if she wants to talk about it, and not up to me. Let’s just say it wasn’t a life-threatening illness, at least not at that stage. That’s a word that was used a few times by friends and family and acquaintances and colleagues when they called. ‘Is it life-threatening?’ they asked. They said it slightly sotto voce, but you could hear the thirst for sensation right through it – when people get a chance to come close to death without
having it touch them personally, they never miss the opportunity.
What I also remember well is the urge I felt to answer that question in the affirmative. ‘Yes, it’s life-threatening.’ I wanted to hear the silence that would drop at the other end after an answer like that.
So without going into detail about Claire’s illness, I just want to report here what the surgeon said to me in the corridor, after he told me about the coming operation. ‘No, it’s not peanuts,’ he said, having allowed a little pause for me to deal with the news. ‘Your whole life changes from one day to the next. But we do everything we can.’ The last phrase was said in an almost cheerful tone, a tone that clashed with the expression on his face.
And after that? After that, everything went wrong. Or rather, everything that could go wrong did go wrong. A second operation followed the first, then a third. More and more monitors were clustered around her bed, tubes emerged from her body and went back into it at other places. Tubes and monitors that were supposed to keep her alive, but after that first day the surgeon dropped his cheerful tone. He still kept saying that they were doing everything they could, but by then Claire had lost almost twenty kilos, she could no longer even raise herself up to lean against the pillows.
I was glad that Michel didn’t see her like that. At first I had acted chipper and suggested that we go together to see her at visiting hours, but he acted as though he hadn’t heard me. On the day itself, the day his mother had gone out the door but not come back in the evening, I had emphasized the festive aspect, the uniqueness of the situation, like sleeping over at a friend’s house or a field trip. We went out to eat together at the café-restaurant for regular people, spare-ribs with fries was his favourite meal back then, and I did my best to explain to him what had happened. I explained it to him and talked around it at the same time. I omitted things, mostly my own fears. After dinner we rented a movie at the video shop; he was allowed to stay up longer than normal, even though he had to go to school the next day (he was no longer at the daycare centre by then, he was in first grade at elementary school).
‘Is Mama coming later?’ he asked when I kissed him goodnight.
‘I’ll leave the door open a crack,’ I answered. ‘I’m going to watch TV, that way you can hear me.’
I didn’t call anyone that first evening. Claire had made me promise not to. ‘No reason to make a fuss,’ she’d said. ‘Maybe it will all turn out to be nothing and I can come home in a couple of days.’ I had already talked to the surgeon in the corridor by that time.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘No reason for a fuss.’
The next afternoon, after school, Michel didn’t ask about his mother. He asked me to take the training wheels off his bike. I had done that once a few months earlier, but then, after a few lurching attempts, he had ended up cycling into the low fence around the park. ‘Are you sure?’ I asked. It was a lovely day in May and he went riding off, without wobbling even once, all the way to the corner and then back. When he passed me, he let go of the handlebars and raised his hands in the air.
‘They want to operate tomorrow,’ Claire told me that evening. ‘But what are they going to do, exactly? Did they tell you anything?’
‘Did I tell you that Michel had me take the training wheels off his bike today?’ I said.
Claire closed her eyes for a moment; her head was resting deep among the pillows, as though it were heavier than usual. ‘How’s he doing?’ she asked quietly. ‘Does he miss me terribly?’
‘He’s so anxious to come and see you,’ I lied. ‘But I think it would be better to wait a little bit.’
I’m not going to mention the name of the hospital where Claire was. It was fairly close to our home, I could get there by bike, or by car if the weather was bad, but either way it never took me more than ten minutes. During visiting hours Michel stayed with the woman next door, who had children as well; sometimes our babysitter came over, a fifteen-year-old girl who lived around the corner. I don’t feel like going into detail about everything that went wrong at the hospital, I would only like to urgently advise those who attach any value to life – their own, or that of their family and loved ones – to never let themselves be admitted there. That, by the same token, is my dilemma: it’s nobody’s business which hospital Claire was in, but at the same time I want to warn everyone to stay as far away from it as possible.
‘How are you coping?’ Claire asked one afternoon, I think it was after the second or third operation. Her voice was so weak that I had to put my ear almost to her lips. ‘Don’t you need any help?’
At the word ‘help’, a muscle or a nerve under my left eye began to twitch. No, I didn’t want any help, I could manage quite well by myself, or perhaps I should say: I amazed myself, above all, with how well I was able to manage. Michel got to school on time, his teeth brushed and his clothes clean. More or less clean: I was less critical of a few spots on his trousers than Claire would have been, but then I was his father. I’ve never tried to be ‘both father and mother’ to him, the way some half-assed, home-made-sweater-wearing head of a single-parent household put it once in some bullshit programme I saw on afternoon TV. I was busy, but busy in a good way. The last thing I needed was for people, with or without the best of intentions, to take work off my hands so that I would have more time for other things; I was grateful to have every moment accounted for.
Sometimes I would sit in the kitchen with a beer in the evening, after having kissed Michel goodnight, the dishwasher was zooming and bubbling, the newspaper lay unread on the table before me, and then suddenly I would feel uplifted, I don’t know how else to put it: it was a feeling of lightness, above all, extreme lightness; had someone pursed their lips and blown at me right then I would undoubtedly have gone floating off, up to the ceiling, like a down feather from a pillow. Yes, that was it: weightlessness, I’m deliberately not using words like happiness, or even satisfaction. I sometimes heard the parents of Michel’s playmates sigh about how, after a busy day, they really needed ‘a moment to themselves’. The children were in bed at last, and then came the magic moment, and not a minute earlier.
I’ve always thought that was strange, because for me that moment began much earlier. When Michel came home from school, for example, and everything was as it should be. My own voice, above all, asking him what he wanted in his sandwich, also sounded as it should have. The larder was full, I had done all the shopping that morning. I took care of myself as well, I looked in the mirror before leaving the house: I made sure my clothes were clean, that I had shaved, that my hair didn’t look like the hair of someone who never looks in the mirror – the people in the supermarket would have noticed nothing unusual, I was no divorced father reeking of alcohol, no father who couldn’t handle things. I clearly remember the goal I set for myself: I wanted to keep up the appearance of normality. As far as possible, everything had to remain the same for Michel as long as his mother wasn’t around. A hot meal every day, for a start. But also in other aspects of our temporary single-parent family, there shouldn’t be too many visible changes. Normally, it wasn’t my habit to shave every day; I didn’t mind walking around with stubble. Claire had never made a big deal out of that either, but during those weeks I shaved every morning. I felt that my son had a right to sit at the table with a clean-smelling, freshly shaven father. A freshly shaven and clean-smelling father would not prompt him to think the wrong things, would in any case not cause him to doubt the temporary character of our single-parent family.
No, on the outside there was nothing for anyone to notice about me. I remained one pillar of a trinity, another pillar was lying only temporarily (temporarily! temporarily! temporarily!) in the hospital, I was the pilot of a three-engine aircraft, one of whose engines had stalled: there is no reason to panic, this is not a crash landing, the pilot has thousands of flight hours behind him, he will land the plane safely on the ground.
35
One evening, Serge and Babette showed up. Claire was going to be operated on
again the next day. I remember it well, that evening I had made macaroni, macaroni alla carbonara, to be honest the only dish I have ever mastered down to the smallest detail. Along with the spare-ribs from the café-restaurant for regular people, it was Michel’s favourite dish, which was why I made it every day during the weeks that Claire was in hospital.
I was just about to put the food on the table when the bell rang. Serge and Babette didn’t ask to come in; before I knew it they were already in the living room. I saw how Babette in particular looked around the room, then the whole house. During those weeks we didn’t eat in the kitchen, the way we usually did; I had set up trays in the living room, in front of the TV. Babette looked at the trays and cutlery and then at the television that was already on, because the weekly sports news was going to start in a few minutes. Then she looked at me, with a special look, I don’t know how else to describe it.
That special look, as I can still recall, made me feel as though I had something to explain. I mumbled something about the festive aspect of the meals we took together; there were, after all, occasions on which I did depart from the normal run of things, the household didn’t have to be a carbon copy of the way Claire ran it, as long as there were no visible traces of decline. I believe that in explaining this to Babette I used the phrase ‘male household’, and even ‘holiday feel’.
That was pretty stupid; looking back on it now I could kick myself. I didn’t owe anyone an explanation. But by then Babette had climbed the stairs and was standing in the doorway to Michel’s room. Michel was sitting on the floor amid his toys, he was in the process of lining up hundreds of dominoes, in imitation of World Domino Day, but when he saw his aunt he jumped up and leaped into her outstretched arms.
A little too enthusiastically, if you ask me. He was very fond of his aunt, it’s true, but the way he wrapped both arms around her thighs, making it look like he would never let go, still created the impression that he missed having a woman around the house. A mother. Babette cuddled him and ran her fingers through his hair. Meanwhile she looked around the room, and I looked with her.
