His hands disappeared, but his breathing was still shallow. Then he cleared his throat, as if he had something on his mind. “How… How did things go today?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve forgotten what day it is.”
“No. I haven’t forgotten.”
I didn’t say that I’d hoped he had forgotten so I wouldn’t have to have this conversation.
He stroked my hair, tenderly now, not seductively. “Have you been OK?”
“Every year it gets a little easier,” I said, because that was certainly what he wanted to hear.
“Good.”
He stroked my hair one more time, then his hand disappeared back under his own blanket.
The mattress undulated slightly when he turned over, perhaps onto his stomach, that’s how he liked to sleep. Then he mumbled good night again. Judging from how it sounded, he had turned over with his back to me. Soon he was sleeping deeply. But I lay awake in bed.
Five years.
Five years had passed since my mother left.
No. Not left. Was sent away.
My father died when I was nineteen. He was just a little over fifty, but his body was much older. Shoulders, back, joints, all of him was worn out from all of the years in the trees. He moved more heavily with each passing day. Perhaps his blood circulated more poorly as well, because one day when he got a splinter in his palm, the cut wouldn’t heal.
He put off seeking help for too long, being the man that he was. And when the doctor had finally received approval to give him antibiotics, even though my father was actually too old to be given priority for this type of expensive treatment, it was already too late.
My mother recovered surprisingly quickly after his death. Said all the right things, was optimistic. She was still young, she said, and smiled bravely, had a long life ahead of her. Perhaps she would even meet another man one day.
But they were just words. Because she fluttered away, the way petals blow away when the blossoming season is over. There was wind in her gaze, impossible to capture.
Soon she failed to show up for work in the fields. She just stayed home. She had been thin before, and now she ate almost nothing. Began sniffling, coughing, grew more and more lethargic, and soon she developed pneumonia.
One day when I came to look in on her she didn’t open the door. I rang the bell several times, but nothing happened. I had an extra key that I took out and unlocked the door with.
The flat was neat and clean, all that remained were the old furnishings that belonged to the household. All of her things were gone; the pillow she used to lean her back against on the couch, the bonsai tree she tended with such diligence, the embroidered blanket she liked to fold up and spread across her thighs, as if she felt a particular chill right there.
The same afternoon I found out that she’d been sent north. She was fine, the district’s health supervisor assured me, and gave me the name of the nursing home. I was shown a choppy presentation film from there. Bright and beautiful, large rooms, high ceilings, smiling personnel. But when I asked about leave so I could go and visit her, I was told that I would have to wait until the blossoming season was over.
A few weeks later word came that she had departed.
Departed. That was the word they used, as if she had in fact gotten out of bed and left. I tried not to think about how her final days had been. A rasping cough, feverish, frightened and alone. To think she had to die like that.
But there was nothing I could have done. Kuan said so as well. There was nothing I could have done. He said it again and again, and I continued saying it to myself.
Until I almost believed it.
Chapter 8
WILLIAM
“Edmund?”
“Good afternoon, Father.”
He stood alone beside my bed. I had no idea how long he’d been in the room. He had become somebody else, taller, and his nose… The last time I saw him, it was far too big. Noses often grow at their own pace in young people, leaping ahead of the rest of the body, but now it suited his face, his features had grown into place around it. He had become handsome, a beauty that had always lain latent in him, elegant, but dressed a bit rakishly, a bottle-green scarf hung loosely around his neck, his fringe just a bit too long, it was becoming, but made it difficult to see his eyes. On top of it all he was pale. Wasn’t he getting enough sleep?
Edmund, my only son. Thilda’s only son. It hadn’t been long before I understood that he was hers, wholly and completely. From the day we met, she let it be known that her greatest wish was to have a boy and when he arrived the following year, her vocation was fulfilled. Dorothea and Charlotte, and later the five other little girls, became mere shadows of him. In a sense I understood her. The seven girls gave me a constant headache. Their fierce and unceasing howling, shouting, whining, crying, giggling, running, coughing, sniffling, not to mention chattering—the way such young girls could chatter, they were relentless chatterboxes—all of these sounds surrounded me from the minute I got up until I went to bed, and not just that—they continued all through the night as well. There was always a child who cried over a dream, always one who came tiptoeing in wearing only a nightgown and had kicked off her stockings in her sleep, so that bare feet slapped lightly against the cold floorboards, and then crept up into the bed making some sound or other, some woebegone whimpers, or an almost aggressive demand to be allowed to squeeze in between us in our bed.
It seemed impossible for them to be quiet and it was therefore impossible for me to work, impossible to write. I had really tried, I had not given up right away, as Rahm believed. But it was no use. Even though I closed the door to my room after having clearly informed the entire family that Father had to work, they had to show consideration, even though I tied a scarf around my head to shut out the noise, or stuffed my ears full of wool, even then I could hear them. It was no use. Over the years there was increasingly less time for my own work, and soon I was no more than a simple merchant who struggled to feed the eternally voracious little-girl stomachs. They were bottomless. The promising naturalist had to step aside for a weary, middle-aged seed merchant, with tired feet from hours spent behind the counter, rusty vocal cords from the eternal small talk with the customers, and the fingers, endlessly counting the money that there was never quite enough of. All of it due to the noise made by the young girls.
Edmund stood completely still, frozen. Before his body had been like the sea by a peninsula, winds and waves met and collided with one another, chaotic, unruly. The restlessness was not only in his body, it was also in his soul. One minute he would show his good-natured side, and fetch a bucket of water just to be nice, the next minute he emptied the bucket across the floor in order, as he explained it himself, to create a lake. Reprimands had no impact on him. If we raised our voices, he just laughed and ran away. Always running, that was how I remembered him, the small feet, never at rest, always running away from some catastrophe or other that he had instigated, from the capsized bucket, a broken porcelain cup, knitting unraveled. When that happened, and it happened often, I had no choice but to catch him, and hold him tightly while I pulled the belt out of the loops on my trousers. I had come to despise the hissing sound of the leather against fabric and the jangling of the buckle as it struck the floorboards. The anguish over what was to come was almost worse than the actual blows. The sensation of the leather against my hand and the belt buckle, I clung to it—I never hit with that end, not like my father, who always slung the buckle through the air so it hit the back hard. I clutched it tightly, so it dug into my palm and left behind welts. The leather against the bare back, the red marks that blossomed out of the white skin, like twisting vines. In other children, these red welts helped to settle them down, and the memory of the punishment remained in the child’s consciousness, so the next time they would avoid making the same mistake. But it didn’t have that effect on Edmund. It was as if he didn’t understand that all of his impetuous actions led him back to the belt, that there was a connection between the lake on the kitchen floor and the subsequent blows. But it was nonetheless my responsibility to continue and I hoped that deep down he also noticed my love, understood that I had no choice. I disciplined him, therefore I was a father. I hit him as the tears swelled in my chest, while the sweat ran and my hands shook, I wanted to beat the restlessness out of him, but it never helped.