‘You can’t make me have an abortion,’ she says.
He wonders, Is she a Catholic? A proper Catholic? She is Polish, after all. They have never talked about it.
‘I don’t want to make you do anything,’ he says.
‘Yes, you do. You want me to have an abortion.’
This he does not deny. It is not, after all, the same thing.
He says again, ‘What do you want?’
And then when she says nothing, ‘It’s true. I don’t think you should keep…Fuck, stop!’
She has tried to pull away from him, to leave the shelter of the umbrella. He is holding her arm now, tightly, and saying to her, ‘Think about it! Think about what it would mean. It might fuck up your whole life…’
She shouts into his face, ‘You already have fucked up my whole life.’
‘What?’
‘You have fucked up my whole life,’ she says.
‘How?’ He asks again, ‘How?’
‘By saying that.’
‘What?’
‘What you said.’
‘What did I say?’
‘ “That’s shit,” ’ she says.
His face is a mad mask of incomprehension.
‘You said that!’
Yes, he did say that.
She is sobbing again, violently, next to the towering snout of a truck. Droplets hang on the truck’s snout. He sees them, hanging there, white. They shake, and some of them fall, as a moment of fierce wind hits everything. Some of them fall. Some of them don’t. They hold on, shaking. He says, loosening his hold on her shaking arm, just wanting to end this awful episode among the trucks, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry I said that.’
—
It seems so smooth, the way it moves on the endless tarmac. Whispering wheels. It is quiet. No one seems to have anything to say. Not even the weather now. For some kilometres a light mist comes off the motorway, and then it is just blandly dry.
Pearl-grey afternoon.
At Mainz, they cross the Rhine.
He knows Mainz as the city where Gutenberg invented printing, and thus ended the Middle Ages; that was what they decided, anyway, at a seminar he attended at Bologna University some years ago, The Middle Ages: Approaching the Question of a Terminal Date. He was asked, afterwards, to write an introduction to their transcripted proceedings.
He finds himself thinking about that, about the terminal date of the Middle Ages, as they pass across the Weisenauer Rheinbrücke, the water on either side a sluggish khaki.
Modernity was what happened next.
Modernity, which has never much interested him. Modernity, what’s happening now.
It started here in Mainz.
And the Roman Empire ended here — from here the legions tried to outstare the tribes on the other side of the demarcating waterway, where now there is the Opel factory at Rüsselsheim, and a little further on Frankfurt airport, the actual airport, an enormity flanking the motorway for five whole minutes.
And the weather darkens again as they leave the airport behind.
What has been said in the last hour?
Nothing.
Nothing has been said.
Pine forests on hillsides start to envelop them on the east side of the Main. And fog.
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
Ché la diritta via era smarrita
Well, here it is. Dark pine forests, hemming the motorway. Shapes of fog throw themselves at the windscreen.
Finally someone speaks. He says, ‘When did you find out?’
‘A few days ago,’ she says. ‘I didn’t want to tell you on the phone.’
‘No.’
A few more minutes, and then he says, ‘And is it mine? Are you sure it’s mine? I have to ask.’
She says nothing.
‘Well, I just don’t know, do I?’ he says.
—
Sex happens, surprisingly, at the Gasthaus Sonne in Trennfeld. It’s what they always do — hurry to the hired space to undress. It’s what they always do, and they do it now out of habit, not knowing what else to do when they are alone in the hotel room. This time, however, he makes no effort to please her. He wants her to dislike him. If she decides she dislikes him, he thinks, she may decide that she does not want this pregnancy. He is hurried, forceful, almost violent. And when she is in tears afterwards, he feels awful and sits on the toilet with his head in his hands.
It took them an hour to find Trennfeld in the fog — a village of tall half-timbered houses on a steep bluff above the Main. Every second house with a sign saying Zimmer Frei. A few more formal inns — with parking space in front and paths down to the river at the back — in one of which they have a room.
He had told her, as they picked their way through the fog, that she should not assume, should she decide to keep this child, that it would mean they would stay together. It would not necessarily mean that. Not at all. It was only fair, he said, that he should tell her that.
She said nothing.
She had said little or nothing for the last two hours.
Then she said, ‘You don’t understand.’
Sliding across a mysterious foggy junction, he said, ‘What don’t I understand?’
‘That I love you,’ she said drily.
Well, she would say that, he thought, wouldn’t she. Still, his hands took a firmer hold on the wheel.
A sign at the roadside told them, then, that they had arrived at Trennfeld.
And there it was, the picturesque street of half-timbered houses. The Gasthaus Sonne. The low-beamed reception area. The narrow stairs with the Internet router flickering on the wall, up which the smiling Frau led them to their room.
She had a shower and found him lying on the bed, on the grape-coloured counterpane, waiting for her.
—
Later, when he emerges from the bathroom’s rose-tiled box, she is still crying, naked except for the coverlet that she has pulled partially over herself. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, sitting down on the edge of the bed. It does not sound very sincere so he says it again. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s just,’ he says, ‘this is such a shock. To me.’
‘You don’t think it’s a shock to me?’ There is a pillow over her head. Her voice is muffled, tear-clogged, defiant.
He looks from her pale shoulders to the insipid watercolour on the orange wall.
‘Of course it is,’ he says. ‘That’s why we need to think about this. We need to think about it seriously. I mean…’ He wonders how to put this. ‘You need to think about your life.’
He knows she is ambitious. She is a TV journalist — pops up on the local Kraków news interviewing farmers about the drought, or the mayor of some nearby town about his new leisure centre and how he managed to snare matching funds from the European Union. She is only twenty-five, and she is sort of famous, in the Kraków area. (She probably makes more money than he does, now he thinks about it.) People say hello to her in the street sometimes, point to her on the shopping-centre escalator. He was there when that happened. ‘What was that about?’ he said. ‘You’re famous?’
‘No,’ she laughed. ‘Not really.’
She is though, and she wants more. He knows that.
‘Do you see what I’m saying?’ he asks.
—
They spend a few hours in the dim, curtained room as the afternoon wears on. Nothing outside the room, on the other side of the crimson curtains, which glow dully with the daylight pressing on them from without, seems to have any significance. The room itself seems pregnant, swollen with futures in the blood-dim light.