“I love you, too,” Xavier said, folding back a dog-eared corner of a page, “but as a stepson loves his stepfather. That’s how I love you.” He realized that he had never told Awromele that he loved him.
“I don’t care how you love me,” Marc said, letting go of the boy’s arm. “You can love me however you like. Any way you love me is okay. It’s not about the form, it’s the content.”
At that moment, they heard the key turn in the lock.
Marc moved to the other side of the table, where he prepared himself in silence for an important talk with the mother. He saw his whole life in front of him, from his boyhood in the Jura to the moment when he had decided to move in with Mrs. Radek and her son. He was nothing, he was like sand, but the sand knew whom it loved.
Relief
THE FIRST THING the mother did was go into the kitchen and wash her hands. She always did that when she came in. Then she hung up her coat, came into the living room, and said hello to her family.
“They’re still talking about Xavier at the bridge club,” she said to no one in particular. “But I told them that we’re all back to normal in this house.”
The mother went into the kitchen to make some chamomile tea, which she brought back into the living room a few minutes later in a thermos jug of Italian design that she and the architect had bought one time in Bologna.
They drank their chamomile tea in silence. Xavier had a vision in which Awromele was taking the weenies of strange boys in his mouth. He had never imagined Awromele doing such things, but it worried him.
When Marc realized that he couldn’t put it off any longer, that he had to say it now, that otherwise it would never happen, he rubbed his hands together and said, “Sweetheart.” Marc coughed. His hands were moist, but that could just as easily have been from the hot tea. “Sweetheart,” he said again, and he looked at the mother. She was ignoring him. “Darling.” Marc couldn’t come up with any pet names; he couldn’t even remember whether he had ever thought up pet names for her. “As far as I can see, you don’t have a narcissistic disorder,” he said at last.
The mother poured herself another cup of tea. She had never thought about herself in connection with disorders, but now that her boyfriend was stating so emphatically that she had no narcissistic disorder, she began to have her doubts. Did she seem less than normal to the outside world?
“Right,” Marc said. “Not that. And, well, I’m glad. Because a lot of people really do suffer from that.”
The mother said nothing. She didn’t know what there was to be glad about; disorders she didn’t have didn’t do much to cheer her up.
“I love you very much,” Marc said. He tried to look at her lovingly, with the fire that he had really only felt for her on one evening, a fire that had gone out as inconspicuously as it had been lit.
The mother took a little sip, the tea was still a bit too hot. She thought about the stories she had heard from her girlfriends at the bridge club, stories she couldn’t join in with, stories about feelings she knew about only from magazines.
Xavier bent deeper over his book. He tried not to think about Awromele, and at the same time not to listen to this conversation. He was afraid of knocking over his cup. He noticed he was trembling, as though he were hypoglycemic.
“What I mean is, I love you,” Marc said, because the mother had still not said a thing. “And in the last couple of weeks I have really come to appreciate you, as a person, as a woman. Well, as everything.”
The mother looked at her boyfriend, who had broken her nose one evening when she had spread herself open for him. She had tried to forgive him, but she still couldn’t. Forgiveness was a tricky business. In fact, she had never been able to forgive anyone, and she had the feeling that no one had been able to forgive her, either. Even though she had no idea what she’d done wrong.
“That’s nice,” she said.
“People without a narcissistic disorder can cope well with the truth, because they live in harmony with themselves and with their surroundings,” Marc continued. He had good hope that she would understand everything, that it would all turn out fine, that she would be able to live with it as long as he didn’t beat around the bush, as long as he was honest. “I want you to know that I love you very much, but there is one other person I love just a little more.”
The mother looked at him. She had heard the words without understanding them. She’d had that problem before, not being able to understand what men were saying to her. Her late husband had often said things to her that she hadn’t understood. Men — well, not that there had been so many of them. Two. Others had intruded into her life briefly, but they had stuck to being silent, and the rest.
“Don’t you want to know who I love so much?” Marc asked, and he picked up his spoon and pretended to play with it absentmindedly. “Don’t you want to know who I love so terribly much that it drives me crazy?”
Xavier became increasingly absorbed in his homework. He seemed to be in a trance. He saw the letters dancing on the page, and he was reminded of the Jewish mystics Awromele had told him about one afternoon in the tram. Jewish mystics had seen letters dancing as well.
“Yes,” the mother said, after she’d thought about it a bit. “Yes, actually, I’d like to know.”
Marc smiled; he tried to look as sweet as he had the evening he’d met her. That evening, he had looked sweet and innocent, too, so terribly sweet, and at the same time lovesick and brutish. Hungry. Why, he didn’t know anymore himself — loneliness perhaps, the need to forget a whole series of women who had left him. You could grow tired of having people stick to you, but people who ran away were tiresome as well.
“Well,” the mother said, “I’m all ears.” Now it was Marc’s turn to be silent.
The mother remembered exactly why she had let him seduce her: it was because she hadn’t felt a man for decades. She had been penetrated, mostly from behind, but she hadn’t felt a man, not that; as far as that went, she had only feeble memories that had grown so vague that she could no longer tell the difference between what was real and what was fantasy. She had also forgotten what it was like to drive a man wild. She did remember what it felt like when a man didn’t want you anymore, when the father of your child was disgusted by what had crawled out of you, by the belly in which the embryo had grown so slowly. She had wanted to experience it one last time, before it was too late; she had wanted to know what it felt like to drive a man wild. That’s why she had laughed that evening even when there was nothing to laugh about, giggled without good reason, rolled her eyes like a bad actress, tilted her head to one side, and encouraged Marc to go on, above all to go on, not to give up, never to give up. She wanted to know what it was like to have a man long for her. “Read my palm,” she had said to Marc, who would someday break her nose. “Read my palm,” and he had taken her hand and never let go.
“Your son,” Marc said. “Your sweet son. That glorious creature.”
The mother looked at her child, whom she had hated since the day he had entered the world with a shriek. Whom she had to hate, because he had made her what she didn’t want to be, but what she had to become in order to be respectable in this city: a mother. She had thought it was a part of being happy, a child.
She looked at Marc and then at her tea. She took a sip. She was amazed to discover that she felt nothing, not even surprise, as though she had been expecting this for years, even back when she was taken to the hospital with contractions and all she’d been able to think was: Something terrible is going to happen, there’s no way out. Something terrible is going to happen.