Once that was something we did often, having our friends over for dinner. It’s been a long time. I have a vague sense of why we don’t do it anymore; I step over to Frederik and embrace him from behind. I hug him longer and harder than I normally would, resting my head against his back and shoulders.
Niklas looks up at us happily, and it’s obvious that Frederik really enjoys the attention too. He sounds a little shy when he asks, “Now what have I done to deserve this?”
But I don’t know yet. I only feel the warmth, the joy of the three of us together.
Frederik’s tipsy and quite silly now, the way he can get after a party. He says, “Did either of you notice I have an extra willy?”
I lean around him and see a large, oddly shaped bulge in his trousers.
He says, “I got it when I was out peeing.”
Then he takes out of his trousers an empty beer bottle that he must have stuffed down there. He laughs happily; he finds this funny.
We continue taking things out of the dishwasher and putting them away. In the living room, we wipe the tables and set the chairs back in their usual places.
And in the meantime I begin to weep, for I’m slowly analyzing this dream as I dream it. I’m dreaming that I understand why our dinners and parties are now a thing of the past. Why we can never be together again as a family.
I dream that I’m drying off glasses the dishwasher didn’t get completely dry, that I don’t utter a word, that the tears just run down my cheeks. At some point Niklas sees me. He asks what the matter is, and I say, “He’s dead, of course! This isn’t real at all! We’re having such a lovely time, but of course he’s dead. In reality he’s no longer here. Tonight he’s just visiting.”
• • •
The teachers’ break room at my school was furnished in the ’70s. The walls are still covered in burlap, the cot’s still a captain’s bed, and the poster next to the door even depicts a pyramid. Who in the last twenty-five years would even think of buying a pyramid poster? It’s as if the room was simply forgotten by the administration. But it certainly hasn’t been forgotten by amorous colleagues when the annual Christmas party takes place upstairs, or by the odd teacher who seeks refuge here after a bad class. There are so many downward-spiraling fates bound up with this room, so many teachers who failed to get a grip in the months before they were fired or quit, or who did their best to reconcile themselves to a disability pension on psychological grounds.
Since Bernard and I are here every day, now that summer vacation’s begun, I brought in a vase yesterday and a bouquet of flowers I picked by the ditches beside the bike paths. Last week I took thumbtacks and hung up some unused postcards of fine photographs. And in the closet I’ve hidden a locked suitcase with linen and a quilt of our own, so we don’t have to lie directly on the old spread.
Here we lie, naked and still a bit sweaty, Bernard resting his brow against my cheek. And he tells me once again about Lærke.
I doubted before whether he really understood how serious her brain damage was. But he knows. He’s fully aware how little of her remains.
During these past months, he’s described the real Lærke as a remarkably charming and generous woman. Every single weekend, she’d take the family on some new adventure. Treasure hunts in the woods that took as their theme the last cartoon the boys had seen; long songs with lyrics of her own invention; forts they built together of old cardboard boxes for the boys’ toy monsters. I have a hard time believing that anyone could be so relentlessly full of fun and passion for family; it must be an idealized memory. Yet what can I say? Perhaps I do the same thing myself in the way I conceive of the Frederik I once knew.
“I still enjoy being with her,” he says. “It’s difficult to explain exactly why. But she’s still my Lærke.”
“I understand that,” I say, though it’s not true.
He lifts his brow from my cheek and rolls over beside me on the narrow foam mattress, staring up at the ceiling.
“It’s odd how one can find people who make really clever remarks so terribly boring. And yet love to spend time with people who speak only in banalities. So what is boredom anyway?”
We discuss this. We have the strangest long conversations while lying half on top of each other and eating the pastry and fruit we bought on our way here. And then we look again into each other’s eyes, not talking, or we explore each other’s bodies.
It’s hard to say which classroom lies directly above the break room, as there are no windows here, and you can only get here through the maze of shelving in the textbook storeroom. But as far as I can tell, we’re lying entangled and sweating right beneath one of the eighth-grade homerooms.
Ten days after Bernard and Lærke’s accident, Lærke still hadn’t come out of her coma. Bernard sat by her side. The nurse he confided in most told him he should lavish all that attention on their eight-year-old boys instead. They needed every hour he could give them, while for the time being, Lærke wouldn’t notice the difference.
He knew that the nurse was right, yet he couldn’t keep himself from staring all day long at Lærke’s unmoving face behind the oxygen mask. He held her hand, he stroked her forearm where there weren’t any tubes or tape. And also where there were tubes and tape. He spoke to her, trying to say calming, cheery words.
Jonathan and Benjamin weren’t with us in the car, he’d say, since she probably wouldn’t be able to remember what happened right before the accident.
They’re doing well, he’d tell her. Your mother’s taking care of them. You’re in the hospital, sweetheart. We’ve been in a car wreck. We weren’t the ones at fault. He suddenly changed lanes. There was nothing we could do. I’m well — and you will be too. It’ll all work out. We’ll be fine.
And when she still showed no signs of life, he’d say, Yes, that’s good. You shouldn’t let me wake you. That makes the most sense. Just rest. That’s the best thing you can do.
But in fact it hadn’t been going well for their eight-year-old twins. The fourth time they visited their mother in the hospital, Jonathan screamed so convincingly about stomach pains that the nurses called a doctor in. Jonathan was positive he was going to die, and when the doctor’s examination didn’t calm him or get rid of the pain, Bernard had to take him down to the emergency room, while his father-in-law drove Benjamin home and Winnie stayed with Lærke.
The consultation in the emergency room didn’t turn anything up either, and when Jonathan continued to yell about his stomach, the older female physician asked Bernard if she could give Jonathan a sedative on top of the painkillers.
At that, Bernard’s brain seized up. He couldn’t say yes or no or I don’t know; he couldn’t utter a single word. And he wasn’t able to give his son any of the support he needed either. The emergency room staff had to ring up to the neurointensive ward and ask to speak with Winnie. She immediately told them to give Jonathan the sedative, then rushed down to the emergency room, got Bernard and Jonathan into a taxi, and rode home with them.
There were so many decisions to make about the boys during those long days: Should they return to visit their unconscious mother again? Where should they stay when they weren’t at the hospital? What was the best way to protect them from the desperation that everyone around them was feeling? All decisions that depended on whether Lærke was going to die in the next few hours. Or whether she might wake in the next few hours. And every one of them, a decision that made Bernard miss terribly being able to consider it with Lærke.