—I was so afraid that I would be rejected, that she would push me away from her, and when she didn’t do that I became even more scared.
He finishes his cup while I explain to him what it’s like to stand with one foot on a wobbling skiff and the other on a pier and to feel the pull of each foot going in opposite directions. I feel the need to fill him in on the background story and explain to him how a moment’s carelessness with a kind of a friend of a friend can accidentally lead to a child, how this little person who is now holding a semi-soggy biscuit in her hand came by pure chance and now lives a life of her own.
—Stuff happens, I say, feeding some biscuit crumbs to two doves prowling around the table.
—Coincidences have a meaning, he says, ordering another espresso.
Once more I watch him take three sugar cubes out of the bowl and put them into his cup.
—You did things in a slightly different order than usual, he continues, you first had a child and then got to know each other, he says, sipping his coffee.
—How long can a love relationship last? And a sexual relationship? And a mixture of the two? Can that last a whole lifetime, forever?
—Yes, yes, it most certainly can, says Father Thomas. There are so many facets to a relationship between a man and a woman and it isn’t for outsiders to understand what’s going on between them.
I feel I can hear Mom’s voice; that’s exactly how she might have put it.
—It’s so difficult to know where you have another person, to know what her feelings are, I say.
—Yes, that can happen, says Father Thomas, ordering another tumbler of Amaretto. As far as I can make out, you’ve already done all the things I would have advised you to give more thought to until you were sure.
My daughter has finished her biscuit and her face is totally smudged. I search my pockets and the stroller for something to wipe her with. My companion is quicker than I am and hands me a handkerchief.
—It’s clean, he says, I keep it especially for the parish children, in case the need arises, he adds, smiling at the child. I can see that he’s trying to work out what film to recommend. My daughter has developed an interest in the doves.
—I’m thinking of a movie, he then says, an old movie with, if I remember correctly, Yves Montana and Romy Schneider that I saw not so long ago and that might be instructive for you to watch. As you were saying, he continues, summarizing what I never said in just a few words, it isn’t the first night that’s the dangerous one, but the second night when the magic of the unknown has disappeared but not the magic of the unexpected. I think it was Romy who said it. You’re welcome to pop over tonight and watch it, if you have a babysitter.
I put the hood on the child, shake his hand, thank him for the coffee, and tell him that it’s unlikely that I’ll be free in the evening. The big question that looms over me all day is whether we’ll be getting into the same bed again tonight or whether that was just an isolated incident, an exception that had occurred under special circumstances last night, and the mother of my child might even have been trying to save me from an embarrassing situation. Up until now I’ve never slept with the same woman for two nights in a row because that would have meant that it had turned into a serious relationship and that commitments had been made. Although, mathematically speaking, last night was our second night together, it’s a matter of opinion when one should start counting, whether it really was the second time or whether tonight should be counted as the second time.
Seventy
When Anna comes home from the library she’s holding two bags. I notice her quickly checking and adjusting herself in the mirror in the hall before she puts the bags up on the kitchen table.
—I bought some food, she says, as I help her unpack the bags and arrange the shopping on the table. I want to slip my arms around her but feel this isn’t the right moment. I see that she’s bought some kind of fowl, probably duck, and different types of trimmings that I haven’t a clue of how to cook. She says she’s going to do the cooking herself.
—For a change, she says. I decided to pull up my socks and celebrate the fact that Flóra Sól and I have been with you for three weeks.
—Can you cook? I ask. I’m stunned. I thought that this girl—my child’s mother—couldn’t cook. I thought you were a geneticist, I say.
She laughs.
—Sorry, she says, for not cooking for you before, sorry for always letting you do it.
I hold my daughter in my arms and we watch her mother handling the bird like a person who knows what she’s doing, confidently chopping dates, apples, nuts, and celery and diligently shoving the stuffing into the animal, all in the space of a few minutes, as if she had a long history of working in a restaurant kitchen behind her. I can’t quite say whether I’m happy or disappointed to discover this new side to Anna. I was starting to enjoy cooking, even though I am still quite slow at it.
—I was brought up by a father who enjoyed nothing more than cooking and spent long hours in the kitchen trying to create new recipes, she explains. If he wasn’t fishing trout, he was out hunting for ptarmigan; if he wasn’t shooting ptarmigan, he was shooting geese or reindeer. One day he came home with common snipe and another with a whooper swan, which he said he’d shot by accident. I remember he spent all day cooking the swan with the kitchen door closed, and the swan filled the whole oven. But personally I soon lost interest in cooking. Besides, there wasn’t any room for me in the kitchen. But once you’ve seen how it’s done, it’s no big deal, she says, stitching up the stuffed duck on the draining board so that the filling doesn’t leak out. As I watch her make carrot mousse and sweet brown potatoes on the pan, I realize how I literally know nothing about the mother of my child, not even about the hunting interests of my child’s grandfather.
—What? she asks and smiles at me.
—Nothing.
—Yeah, what? she says again. Why are you looking at me?
—I’m trying to work out what kind of a person the daughter of a ptarmigan hunter is.
—Deep inside? she asks, looking at me with her aquamarine eyes.
While the duck is in the oven I walk all the way down to the car to get the box with the remainder of the wine bottles. On the way up I meet Father Thomas and grab the opportunity to hand him two bottles.
—To be compared with your own production, I say. He tells me that they’re all happy to have me back in the garden after my brief absence and that the monks are showing more interest in the garden than they did before.
—They’re spending more time outside, he says, and they’re realizing that it’s good for them to get some fresh air. Brother Paul tried to water a few flower beds and got his feet wet for the first time in twenty years, but was grateful to be back in touch with Mother Nature again. They’re also all very happy about the way you’ve marked the roses. Now one can walk down the rose garden’s old paths again and practice one’s Latin by reading the names of the plants on the labels.
When I get back to the apartment, Anna has placed the side dishes on the table and is taking the duck out of the oven. Flóra Sól sits ready in her chair with her bib on and a spoon in her hand. It’s got to be said, the food is delicious, but neither of us has much appetite. I admit I don’t want to sleep on the sofa bed anymore, not when there are two places in the bed in the next room. When I’m about to stand up to bathe Flóra Sól and put her to bed, Anna halts me and says:
—I’ll do it.
Looking out into the darkness through the kitchen window, I make out some lights in several windows of the monastery up on the hill. Tomorrow I’ll mow the lawns and take the garden benches out of the storage room and give them a coat of oil. Then I’ll sow various types of salad in the new beds and continue to work on the patches of spices.
I finish clearing up inside and walk straight into the bedroom, get into bed, and gently pull the quilt off Anna.
By the time Flóra Sól wakes up in the morning and stands up on the cot, we hav
en’t slept much. I won’t deny that I’ve started to think of the world like this: there’s the two of us, then the others. Sometimes I feel the child is in our group, and the two of us and the child are one, and sometimes I feel the child belongs to the group with the others.
Seventy-one
Although we haven’t said a single word about our relationship, I’m nevertheless acquiring my first experience of being a couple with a child. Living with another person is no hassle at all, as long as you can make love to them. Even though my position isn’t exactly clear, I’m still happy and excited, although I wouldn’t exactly say that to anyone in those words out loud.
Anna is still immersed in her books and still lost in her thoughts, as if she were both present and distant at the same time. Except in bed, she’s not distant there. Sometimes it’s as if she doesn’t notice me until we’re both in bed. Then everything changes. Another life takes over once we’re under the sheets; outside it, during the day, we’re more like brother and sister. We’ve even been asked on the street if we were siblings. We don’t hold hands on the street; we don’t kiss during the day. We’re like siblings when we take a stroll with the child or sit opposite each other with her, eating the dinners that we cook in turn. I’ve become more audacious than I was in my cooking, and because I really want to surprise Anna, I give in to my butcher and buy something he recommends: deer fillets.
Still, the night has started to contaminate the day, and the effects of what we get up to after hours stretch into the day. We’re more hesitant and shy and talk less together during the day than we did before, because we’re thinking about what’s in store for the night. Sometimes I start thinking of the night straight after lunch and actually spend the whole day looking forward to going to bed.
In fact, we only really talk about things that are related to the child, although Anna still praises my cooking when I do it. I don’t have much appetite in the evenings myself, but Anna always eats well. Neither of us makes any reference to what we are about to do, and we’re both equally fast at bathing the child and tidying up.
Our daughter does us the favor of falling asleep as soon as her head hits the pillow. She sucks her pacifier with her rabbit beside her on the cushion and, a few moments later, dozes off. The child is perfect in every area, all day long. When I come back in, once Flóra Sól is asleep, Anna slams her book closed and stands up. We pay no heed to the fact that it’s only eight o’clock and drop everything we have, books and clothes, and move to the bed without saying a word. There’s nothing to disturb us; we’ve no television, no news of wars and men slaughtering each other, and we get no visits either, so we can speed up our daughter’s dinnertime and putting her to bed; she doesn’t mind. Sometimes we’re in more of a hurry and we just leave the dishes on the table until the next day. The bed is a world of its own, where external laws don’t apply. We’re increasingly sparse in our use of words; you don’t have to be able to express everything in words either. I can hear the priest’s voice, and white subtitles appear on the ceiling, twenty feet above the bed, across the wings of the dove:
The longing in this case relates a great deal to the flesh.
Seventy-two
My daughter is having her afternoon nap and I’m standing in front of my lover who is reading at the table. She immediately puts her book down.
My intention was to tell her that I’m going up to the garden, but I surprise myself by saying something completely different:
—I was wondering if we could have a talk. About us.
—What do you mean about us?
—If we could discuss the status of our relationship.
She seems surprised.
—What status?
She says this in a low voice, averting her gaze. She’s still holding the pen. That means that she hasn’t stopped doing what she was doing before I interrupted her; she’s just going to pause briefly to answer one or two questions. In the evenings she puts her pen down as soon as I’ve put the child to sleep. But not now. She’s not ready to discuss our relationship, it’s not the time, I was too quick, I didn’t choose the right moment. Actually, I’ve very little to say about the matter myself.
—We sleep together.
There’s a vast chasm between what I’m saying and what I’m thinking.
—Yes?
I shut up.
—You mustn’t fall in love with me, she says finally, I don’t know if I could live up to it.
I don’t tell her that it’s too late for that.
—You can’t rely on feelings lasting forever, she says.
I’m trying to figure out what she means by feelings not lasting forever. To be honest, I have, in fact, started to wonder whether it might be possible to live like this for the rest of my life, and look forward to climbing into bed with the same woman every night. In fifty-five years’ time I’ll be as old as Dad is now, seventy-seven. Another fifty years would mean approximately another eighteen thousand two hundred fifty evenings and nights with the same woman. That’s provided there’s no car accident in a beautiful lava field. That means eighteen thousand two hundred fifty nights to rejoice over and look forward to. I glance at the clock and see a way of turning this situation around for me, around for us.
—Anyway I was just wondering if we should go to bed, I say, as if to wrap up a matter that can’t be settled in any other way. It’s two p.m. and our daughter has about another hour to go in her siesta.
This is where most of our attempts at conversation end, in bed precisely, although you can’t really say that we’ve settled anything. But somehow there’s never any need to discuss the matter any further after that. Physical contact manages to lay all outstanding issues to rest, and the problem evaporates like that red-blue mist over the hills after the first mass of the day.
Anna later calls me from the doorway to the bedroom so I look up. I don’t notice the camera until she’s pressed the click and the flash goes off in my face, as I’m half buried under my quilt. She winds the camera.
Up until now she hasn’t taken many pictures of Flóra Sól outdoors.
—I wanted to have a picture of you, as a memento.
—Are you leaving? I feel like she might as well be pointing a gun at me and not a camera. I briskly look death in the eye, right before the shot is fired. I could easily have said: Go ahead, shoot me then.
—No, she says. Finished.
I try to hide my mental turmoil by getting out of bed and slipping into my trousers. But I’m careful not to turn my back on Anna, my lover.
Seventy-three
I’d be willing to share my experiences with someone, and yet I’m not the type of guy to divulge what’s going on between a woman and me to someone else. When someone is frank with you and tells you something a bit personal, you can’t go around telling anyone about it. What happens between Anna and me is between her and me. But I don’t feel I’m betraying her trust by popping in to consult the expert on divine love in room seven of the guesthouse. I’m helped by the fact that I’ve acquired more experience in various areas since I last discussed issues related to this with him some ten days ago.
I sit with my daughter, wriggling on my knees in her striped stockings, while we talk together; and because I’m visiting Father Thomas on a formal matter, my daughter and I sit on one side of the desk and the priest on the other. He offers me a shot, but I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to be drinking when I’m with the child. I notice a porcelain doll in a blue knitted dress has been placed on the middle of the desk. I get straight to the point.
—How does a man know if a woman loves him?
—It’s difficult to be certain about anything when it comes to love, says the priest, pushing the doll toward my daughter.
—What if the woman says she’s scared you won’t come back when you go out to the shop?
—Then it could be that she is the one who actually wants to leave, alone.
I notice him observing the child playing as he’s talking to
me.
—And when a woman is miles away in her thoughts, does that mean she’s not keen?
—It can both mean that and mean that she is keen.
—But if a woman tells a man that he can’t fall in love with her?
—That can mean that she loves him. It reminds me of an old Italian film that you might like to watch, which deals with similar problems. The director shows little faith in dialogue as a means of settling feelings.
—But if she says she’s not ready for a relationship?
My daughter hands me the doll; she wants me to take its knitted dress off.
—That could mean that she is ready but doesn’t know if you’re ready and is afraid you might reject her.
—But if she says she wants to go away and be alone?
—That could mean that she wants you to come with her.
The priest has stood up and is looking through his shelves.
—There’s such a thing as wise love, as verse reminds us, he says from the other side of the room with his back turned to me, but there’s no such thing as wise passion. But if life were solely to be based on wisdom, you’d miss out on the passion, as they say in here somewhere, he says, and I know he’s not quoting from the Bible.
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