Читать книгу Thirty Days - Annelies Verbeke - Страница 13

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Sieglinde is about to step into her car when he slams shut the door to his van. Lana is already in the passenger seat and she waves to him over her shoulder, her face friendly in the rear-view mirror. After a furtive glance at her daughter and the windows of her house, Sieglinde makes a quick telephoning gesture with her thumb and little finger. He assumes she’ll call him. Five months, he thinks. Does her daughter know?

‘Door’s open,’ she calls.

Inside he finds Ronny, over a bowl of swollen Honey Loops. He’s reading a stapled wad of papers, which he slides into a leather briefcase when Alphonse walks into the room. His head jerks to one side a few times, a tic Alphonse hasn’t noticed before.

‘What’s he eating now, you’re thinking.’ Ronny jabs his spoon at his breakfast. The question had not occurred to Alphonse. ‘My daughter left them. I just hope it’s not anorexia. And I can’t throw anything away.’ Again those little jerks of the head. Now he’s put his hand over his ear like a shell and is moaning plaintively.

Don’t ask, thinks Alphonse. It’ll probably come of its own accord.

Which it does. ‘Yesterday I was working in the garden and I think something flew into my ear. Or crawled.’ He’s started using his hand as a sink plunger. ‘I’ve got to get it out.’

Insects in bodily orifices: a wasp sting in a classmate’s mouth, thirty years ago, rushed to hospital; a fly in Cat’s nose in a restaurant, making one eye fill with tears and he thinking it was emotion; a beetle in his own ear, on his last trip to Senegal.

‘It’s buzzing. Would you have a look?’

He consents, having expected to be asked.

Ronny goes over to stand by the window. ‘In the light.’

Alphonse cautiously steps into the man’s personal space, the territory of pores, hair roots, and vulnerability that deters him initially in anyone other than Cat, even though it somehow fascinates him at the same time. He concentrates on the surprisingly small, pink ear, pulling gently at the earlobe to get a slightly better view of the auditory canal.

‘Can you see it?’ asks Ronny, one alarmed eye up close, the iris in the corner.

The inside of the ear remains dark.

‘I can’t see anything, Mr … ’

‘Oh, just call me Ronny. I’ve got a torch. Wait.’

Ronny leaves him behind at the window, rummages in one of the kitchen drawers and comes back with a tube-shaped lamp.

‘I really can’t see anything. It might be a hair or something.’

‘But it’s buzzing! And it’s rubbing its legs together, listen!’

On Ronny’s instructions, Alphonse lays an ear against his. ‘Only the sea,’ he says.

‘You can’t hear it?!’ Ronny is surprised by the anger in his own voice.

‘Perhaps you ought to see a doctor.’

‘Yes. I don’t know how I’m supposed to find the time, but I think I’ll have to, it’s driving me crazy.’

‘Good luck.’

‘Thanks. And sorry. Nice work, by the way. That colour is … ’ He thinks about it as he knots his tie. ‘Calming. Thanks for that too. And once again, my apologies. I urgently have to leave now.’ In his haste he bangs his hip on the corner of the marble tabletop. He manages to stifle the pain until he’s out of the room.

By the time Sieglinde rings, work has absorbed Alphonse for several hours. He takes the call.

‘Ronny’s left, hasn’t he?’ is the first thing she asks.

He reassures her.

‘I had a strange dream. I was about to give birth—something that in spite of everything I’ve never dreamed about before—and it wasn’t too bad, all told, even though I had to do it inside some kind of crude timber structure; my husband decided to lodge a complaint against the doctor. I got my child, a son. It was different from last time. I felt confused, but there was no extra gravity, no crushing. I held him in my arms and the next moment Dieter was at my side.’

‘The neighbour?’

‘Yes. We slowly walked down a wide staircase to the main foyer of the hospital. Halfway down, the sunlight fell through a skylight onto the child’s face. It was intense and unreal. I watched dust dancing in the sunbeam. “Look,” Dieter said. “He’s got a moustache.” I could see it now too: golden-brown hairs on the baby’s upper lip, smooth and full, like the curved little eyelashes of a doll, a vertical block of them. We laughed about it. “We’ll call him Führer,” said Dieter, “our little Führer.” We looked again, and this time the child undeniably had the face of Adolf Hitler, elderly-looking the way newborns can sometimes be, and it had a moustache with that telltale shape.’ Sieglinde pauses. ‘What could a dream like that mean?’

‘What were you feeling?’

‘Dieter and I slowed down and shared our worries. Yes, my son did look very much like Adolf Hitler. Then I felt a sadness coming, a kind of despair, but I was resolutely determined to bring the child up as well as I could, to love it unconditionally.’

He erupts with laughter, finding it impossible to suppress. ‘That’s a funny dream, isn’t it?’

‘I had to laugh about it myself, at first. Although it moved me, too. It moves me enormously, to be honest.’

‘Well if you feel you’re prepared to be a loving mother to Hitler, then it’s bound to work out this time.’

‘Yes, that’s what I mean,’ she says, happy.

He’s finished before they get home. Not wanting to leave without saying goodbye, he writes ‘Done! Have a good evening’ on a Post-it, with his name underneath.

At the wheel he rings Cat, who is back earlier than planned. She asks him to pick her up, so that they can do some shopping together in what she calls ‘the real supermarket’. She’s explained to him more than once why she’s willing to drive so far to get to this particular shop but he keeps forgetting.

Cat jerks the door open just as he’s about to put the key in the lock. She’s not too thin, she’s beautifully slim, and she looks healthy. Everything’s going to be all right.

‘Pussywuss,’ he says.

‘Don’t call me that.’ She presses a smile to his lips and they embrace.

He quickly showers and puts on different clothes, a hat on his head.

On the way out, Cat’s arms struggle with her leather jacket, the one he likes, as she’s well aware. ‘Can we go in mine?’

They walk over to her car and he opens the passenger door for her.

‘How was yoga week?’ He starts the engine.

‘Oh yes. Yoga.’

‘Too much of a good thing?’

‘No, no. It’s just that most yogi aren’t terribly Zen. Every time I start to think: this is where I belong, it turns out that it’s not after all. My fault, probably. I’m not a group person.’

‘Fortunately I’m not a group.’ He puts on his sweetest face and strokes her right breast like a toddler caressing a small mammal.

She glances down. ‘You’ve finished early?’

‘Yes, and I’ve kept tomorrow morning free. I’ll go with you.’

‘No, I’m going on my own.’

‘But why?’

Her eyes remain fixed on the road. ‘It’s my check-up.’ His strange woman.

It could have crushed them, getting those first test results. Ovarian cancer—cunt cancer; he didn’t like her calling it that. Since the diagnosis she’s been as brave as she was angry. The radiation and the surgery had the intended effect and recovery was gruelling but steady, although later tests showed that another, relatively minor operation was needed. Secondaries are almost out of the question, children not. Her hair grew back in valiant waves. A routine check-up, tomorrow. With good news. Good news. Good news.

They continue their journey wordlessly and park in silence.

He’s always found commercials for the supermarket on supermarket radio perplexing: enticing people to where they already are. In this case it’s a conversation between two highly charged ladies, Marlies and Suzanne. Marlies is giving a cheese and wine evening but has forgotten to buy the cheese and Suzanne plans to surprise her husband Bert with mussels and chips but she’s forgotten the chips. When they’ve finished laughing, good fortune is all that remains: the supermarket is still open.

Cat puts it down to the drink. He chuckles.

She’s in the act of feeling a mango when ‘Águas de Março’ drowns out the voices of Marlies and Suzanne. Elis Regina and Tom Jobim take over from them, their sticks, their stones, the end of the road—she loves this song too, he knows she does, and now she’s feeling the mango rhythmically, picking up another one in her other hand, shaking them discreetly back and forth, her feet following. It’s glass, it’s sun, it’s night and it’s death, a snare and a hook, a small piece of bread. He stands behind her. She puts the mangos down. ‘Matita-pereira … mistério profundo.’ He doesn’t speak Portuguese but he’s often listened. Her hand seeks his, her back in his arm, steps across the floor that they share with a furtive audience. It’s the wind and it’s blowing, it’s pride at a fall, it’s the rain and it’s raining, it’s riverbank talk. He sings the final lines of the refrain, his mouth to her ear. ‘ … É a promessa de vida no teu coração.’ Good news, tomorrow. A thorn, a fish, the house’s design, a body in bed, a little alone. She’s becoming conscious of her surroundings, wants to turn to see who’s looking. ‘Just another moment,’ he begs, which softens her. Continual fever, a light and a scratch, it’s a bird in the sky, and one in the hedge. When Elis and Tom’s whistling turns into a zazaziza of laughter he slowly lets her go.

An elderly lady, staring at them, enthralled, makes her escape as quickly as possible on being spotted. An athletic man and a small, chubby woman are striding behind a supermarket trolley to the racks of onions. The man places a bag amid the other shopping in their trolley. Then his hand, briefly, for less than half a second, touches the woman’s bottom.

‘What is it?’ Cat asks.

‘I know those people.’

Dieter sees him first. Noticing him stiffen, Sieglinde follows his gaze. There’s no escaping. ‘Alphonse!’ Her voice trembles.

Dieter hesitates, wondering whether or not to bring the trolley, then leaves it behind. ‘Hey, Fonzy,’ he says, apparently unaware that he’s moving his body back and forth as if at a wailing wall. ‘Nice hat.’

‘This is Cat,’ Alphonse says. ‘My partner.’

They shake hands. Dieter and Sieglinde laugh as if at a dirty joke.

‘We thought … ’ she starts. But she seems to have no idea what they thought.

‘We were … ’ says Dieter.

‘By chance … ’

‘Both suddenly all out of something!’

‘And we ran into each other here! Ha ha ha!’

‘Cheese!’ shouts Dieter.

‘He was all out! Ha ha ha!’

‘So I said … ’ Dieter gestures with his elbow in the direction of his neighbour. ‘Come on!’

‘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.