Kenneth had been to the house more than once. He would be waiting there when Benjamin had been delivered to his day care. Always in a short-sleeved shirt and tight summer trousers, despite the vagaries of March. An eight-month tour of duty in Iraq, then ten months in Afghanistan had hardened him. The cold winter tamed a serviceman’s hankerings for comfort, he explained.
It was quite irresistible. And quite terrifying.
Over the mobile, she had heard her husband ask after Benjamin and sensed his doubt that he could have fully recovered from his cold so quickly. She had also heard him say that he loved her and was looking forward to coming home. That he might be back sooner than expected. And she didn’t believe the half of it. That was the difference now. Compared to when his words had dazzled her. Now she realized she had been blind.
She was frightened, too. Frightened of his rage, and of what he might do. If he threw her out, she would have nothing. He had made sure of that. There might be a little, but still nothing to speak of. Perhaps not even Benjamin.
There were so many words in him. Clever words. Who would ever believe her when she claimed Benjamin would be better off with her? Was she not the one leaving? Had her husband not devoted himself entirely to the family, made the sacrifice of long periods away from home in order to ensure their livelihood? She could hear them already. The local authority, the regional state administration to whom divorce applications were sent. The arbiters who would take note only of his responsible nature and her own misdeed.
She just knew.
She would call her mother later, she told herself. She would swallow all her pride, and the shame of it, and she would tell her everything. She’s my mother, she said to herself. She will help me. I’m certain she will.
And then the hours passed, and her thoughts weighed down upon her. Why did she feel like this? Was it because in the space of only a few days she had come closer to a stranger than to the man to whom she was married? For this was a fact. The things she knew about her husband were the things they shared in the few hours they were together in the house. What more did she know than that? His work, his past, the packing cases upstairs, all of it remained closed to her.
But losing her feelings for him was one thing; justifying it was quite another. Had her husband not been good to her? Was her own fleeting infatuation preventing her from seeing things rationally?
These were the thoughts that preyed on her mind. And they were the reason she once again found herself drawn to the first floor of the house, to the door behind which his packing cases were stacked. She stood, considering it. Was this the time to seek out knowledge? Was this the time to transcend the boundary? Was this the point of no return?
Yes. It was.
She dragged out the packing cases one by one and arranged them in reverse order in the corridor. When she put them back, they had to be exactly as before, properly closed and with the pile of coats on top. It was the only way she could feel in control of the project.
That was her hope.
The first dozen boxes, from the rearmost row beneath the roof window, confirmed what her husband had told her. They contained old family items handed down. The same kind of clutter her own grandmother had left behind: a jumble of documents, porcelain, cigar cutters, lace tablecloths, watches and clocks, a twelve-piece set of cutlery, woolen blankets, bric-a-brac.
The picture of a family life long gone and consigned to memory. Just as he had described to her.
The next dozen added detail that seemed only to lay a confusing veil over this picture. Here were the gilded photo frames. Scrapbooks of cuttings. Albums prompting memories of events and occurrences. All of it from his childhood, and all with the strong undertone that lies and deceit are the silent attendants of reminiscence.
Because contrary to what he had always insisted, her husband was not an only child. There was absolutely no doubt that he had a sister.
One photo showed her husband in a sailor suit, his arms folded against his chest as he stared into the camera with eyes that were sad. No more than six or seven years old. His skin soft, the thick shock of hair parted at the side. Next to him was a little girl with long plaits and an innocent smile. It might have been the first time in her life she had been photographed.
It was a fine little portrait of two vastly different children.
She turned it over and considered the three printed letters. EVA. There had been more, but they had been crossed out with a pen.
She sifted through the other photographs, turning each one over. More words obliterated.
No names, no places.
Everything scribbled out.
Why would anyone do this? It was like willing people to disappear.
How often she had sat with her mother and peered blankly at old photos of people without names?
“That’s your great-grandmother. Dagmar, she was called,” she heard her mother say, though the name was nowhere to be seen. What would happen when her mother died? Where would all the names be then? Who would know who had given life to whom, and when?
But this little girl had a name. Eva.
She was definitely her husband’s sister. The same eyes, the same mouth. In two of the photos in which they were pictured on their own together, she was gazing at her brother with admiration in her eyes. It was touching.
Eva looked like any other little girl. Fair and pure, and, with the exception of the very first photo, facing the world with a look that contained more trepidation than courage.
When brother and sister were pictured with their parents, they stood close together, as if to shield themselves from the world around them. Never touching, just standing close. Always the same tableau: children at the front, arms hanging limply at their sides; mother behind, her hands resting on the shoulders of the girl, and the father’s hands on those of the boy.
It was as if those two pairs of hands were pressing down on the children, keeping them on the ground.
She tried to understand this boy with the weary eyes who would later become her husband. It was no easy task. There was a gulf of time between them, and she sensed this now more clearly than ever before.
Eventually, she returned the photos to their boxes and opened the scrapbooks, now with the certain conviction that everything would have been better if she and her husband had never met. That in fact she had been put into this world to share her destiny with a man such as the one she had now chanced upon and who lived only five streets away. Not the man she saw in these photos.
His father had been a pastor. He had never told her, but it was plain from the photographs.
He was an unsmiling man with eyes that exuded self-importance and authority.
The eyes of his wife were different. They were empty.
In these scrapbooks, she could see why. The father dictated everything. In the parish newsletters, he thundered against ungodliness, preached inequality, and renounced those who did not conform. There were pamphlets about holding the word of God in one’s hand, releasing it only to hurl it into the face of the infidels. And all these outpourings made it clear to her that her husband’s upbringing had been very different from her own.
Too different by far.
Throughout, this hateful torrent was infused with a nasty undercurrent of nationalist sentiment, malevolent opinion, intolerance, deep-rooted conservatism, and chauvinism. Though she acknowledged that this was the work of her husband’s father and not of her husband himself, she nevertheless sensed, both now and, on reflection, in their daily life together, how the blight of the past had left within him a darkness that was assuaged only when he made love to her.
This was not what she wanted.
Something had been terribly wrong in that childhood. Whenever a name other than Eva’s occurred, it was obliterated. And always it seemed with the same pen.