‘Let’s go shopping!’
‘Okay,’ says Alphonse.
Five months, he thinks, but now he has to speak. They’re still grinding their teeth with those forced grins. ‘I’ve just finished the bedrooms. Hope you like the result.’
‘Oh, sure to! Absolutely! Thanks!’
‘Our place too! Very professional!’
‘Well then, let’s just carry on shopping,’ says Alphonse.
‘Yes!’ they shout in chorus.
Once they’ve percolated far enough between shelves insulated by bags of crisps, Cat plants a finger on his forehead. ‘Magnet.’
‘They’re neighbours. A few days ago they were still arguing like crazy,’ he explains, as quietly as he can.
‘And now they’re groping each other.’
‘You noticed?’
‘The only thing missing was a sandwich board saying “Affair”. They’re taking a risk, aren’t they? In a supermarket like this.’
‘They live even further away from here than we do.’
‘All the same! They were! Here! By chance!’
‘Shh. We’ll talk about it in the car.’
They spend the evening on a bed of harmonious gossip, casual affection, and shared vegetable-slicing. Cat is in the bath waiting for him when the telephone intrudes, the landline.
‘Let it ring,’ she says.
He picks up nevertheless and sits at the top of the stairs with the receiver to his ear.
‘It’s his,’ is the first thing Sieglinde says.
‘Dieter’s?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who knows that?’
‘You. Me.’
Why him? ‘I thought you hated each other till the other day.’
‘We did. But I always had more of a problem with Els. Dieter and I usually can’t stand each other either, but there is an attraction.’
‘Complicated.’
‘Horrendous.’
He can hear Cat getting out of the bath.
‘And Lana? Is she … ’
‘God, no! No, no no. It hasn’t been going on that long.’ She hesitates for a moment. ‘Haven’t you ever been in love with someone you could barely stand?’
‘No.’ He’s fairly confident of that answer.
‘Sometimes I think nature makes me fall in love with people to prevent me from murdering them. If I hadn’t been in love with them, I’d have murdered them, I mean.’
‘Does Ronny suspect anything?’
‘He’s at the doctor’s at the moment. With an insect in his ear.’
‘It was bothering him this morning. He asked if I could see it.’
A sigh. ‘There’s no insect in his ear. It’s psychosomatic. It always is with him.’
Cat walks past without touching or looking at him. She goes downstairs. He tries to grab the loose cord of her bathrobe but misses. Downstairs she turns on the television.
‘He could hear it buzzing, he said.’
‘Yes, yes,’ says Sieglinde. ‘He’s got a flat opposite that Delhaize supermarket. Dieter, I mean. Of course it’s not very clever to go shopping together. Business with pleasure, we thought. Since you caught us we’ve agreed that at the very least we’ll always take two trolleys in future.’
That dream of hers, he thinks. He has to wrap this up.
‘But about the baby, you’re no longer so frightened?’
‘I don’t know.’
The television is on in the living room.
‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘Nothing. I just wanted to explain.’
‘Okay.’
‘The rooms look splendid, by the way.’
‘Thanks.’
They say their goodbyes. To explain. He fails to imagine anything specific about the attraction between Dieter and Sieglinde.
Cat has already fallen asleep on the sofa, nodded off in her bathrobe, her open laptop in her lap. On the coffee table is a bottle of white wine with only a centimetre left. She started it in the bath. He turns off the television and cautiously wakes her, aware that there’s little she dislikes more than being woken in the first phase of sleep. This evening is no exception. After sitting upright with closed eyes for a while, she goes upstairs without saying anything. When he puts his arm around her under the down cover, she shakes him off.
‘Your patients,’ she mumbles. That’s what she calls his clients sometimes.
-
25
The first thing he sees is a boat-shaped cloud. It sails between him and the sun, then onward, allowing more and more sunbeams to warm the window and stretch out toward the quilt, toward his arms, hands, and face. He lies there until the sun is fully visible, astonished by the emotion its embrace evokes in him. He’s in the habit of sleeping with the curtains open because the light helps him to wake, and the endlessness of the sky is what he likes to see first. But this morning it shines at him more magnificently than usual, and at the same time more sweetly. As if this year the summer is refusing to yield.
He looks at Cat, who’s still sleeping. Soon she’ll be getting good news, he thinks. He carefully lowers the blinds; she sometimes complains about too much light too early. In the bathroom it’s the smells that take him by surprise, those of his bowel movement as well as the shower gel, every particle intensely present, almost tangible. ‘What’s happening to me?’ he wonders, but the smells are already fading into the background.
Dressed in his underpants and a T-shirt, he fills the kettle and rummages in the garage in search of a lighter pair of overalls. While lifting the straps onto his shoulders, he walks barefoot along the hall and picks up the newspaper from the floor.
It’s the photo of a dead Palestinian child on the front page that recalls his dream of the night just past, if only a few horrible details of it: heart-rending close-ups, no story. There was a man with his brains dripping down out of his long hair, a woman’s bleeding nipples, a child with ripped stumps for fingers, and none of them were dead, they screamed, stared at their wounds in panic, fully conscious, stumbling about aimlessly.
And then there was the sun and that cloud boat, warm light, a reaffirmation of the supreme happiness with which he woke. He wonders how he could possibly wake so happy after a dream like that. He searches his memory for similar experiences but finds none. Was it the realization of having been spared extreme suffering that struck him on waking? He used to take the assertion that things ‘could be worse’ as a threat, as if you were about to discover that your suffering could be far greater than it already was. Now it’s different, now he sees the extraordinary magnificence of every day on which no fateful turn of events befalls him.
He hears Cat coming downstairs and takes a second cup out of the cupboard.
‘I didn’t get much sleep,’ she says.
She’s wearing his bathrobe, which would leave anyone else guessing as to her figure. She’s far less pale than she has been.
When he puts the cup down for her she turns her face toward him and he kisses her on the lips. She pulls the paper closer by one corner,