Читать книгу Self-Control - Stig Saeterbakken - Страница 6

Chapter Two

More agitated than usual … yes … I put the key into old man Schiong’s pride and joy, a shining wrought-iron gate from before the First World War, given a new coat of paint every five years up until Didriksen came and took over … dried flakes peeling back like bits of black paper in a wreath around the big keyhole, I can hardly bear to think of it. But the familiar dusty and dry atmosphere inside soon calmed me down … helped me slowly but surely regain my composure. That, and the distinctive tightness of the hairnet around my head, which was like the beginning of a vague headache. There was something so blissfully imperturbable about this big room with all its machines, which I was the first to enter as usual while bit by bit it flickered and fell into place under the light of the fluorescent tubes in the ceiling. Everything was just as it had always been. And in this calm, this majestic steadfastness, I walked around and flipped the switches, like an ancient, millennial ritual, and the deep rumbling of the machines filled me with that sensation of pleasure and peace which every morning makes me feel I belong to a world over which I am in complete control, similar to what it must be like to finally get indoors … I imagine that’s what it must be like, anyway … after being out in a fierce storm for hours.

One minor problem. A machine, number four, stopped at lunchtime, after having given us a brief warning in the form of a sweet, black puff of smoke from its valve … like a reminder of the times they ran on paraffin … only to fall silent soon after, as if someone had turned it off. The boss soon appeared. From force of habit he turned to me to find out what was going on, although strictly speaking number four wasn’t my responsibility. Two of my colleagues had already unfastened the cover and stood shining flashlights inside it. I explained to the boss, as far as I could surmise, where the fault in all likelihood was to be found, what could possibly have caused it, and in what way and how fast, if need be, we could repair it. He listened to what I had to say with a few sullen grunts, and then looked briefly around the inside of the machine as if to verify what I’d said, even though I knew only too well, as did my colleagues, that he hadn’t the faintest idea about the workings of the machines he owned, and that for him to stand studying the motor on a Hold-Martinsen 34 was akin to someone from the Middle Ages being presented with a Picasso. Then he stared at me again, with an angry look, as if he wanted to tone down his helplessness by demonstrating that he wasn’t quite sure if he trusted my professional opinion. He, who is completely at the mercy of these assessments. His lips had sunk back into his mouth and didn’t come out again, even when he spoke. Then he put a paternal hand on my shoulder and nodded approvingly before he shuffled off and crept up once more into that rat’s nest of an office he has, half a story over the workshop floor, with its tinted window … the embrasure as we call it … where he can see us, but we can’t see him.

Jens-Olav, who’d had his head stuck down inside the machine for almost a quarter of an hour, turned and peered at me with those little slitty eyes of his, as if he wanted to draw my attention to some oversight. I don’t know if it was to get away from that accusatory look … and I’ve asked myself several times if it feels accusatory because it’s justified? … but anyway I did something that I usually only do when the situation is so serious that it’s demanded of me: I walked over to the boss’s office and knocked on the door. I regretted it immediately, because going in there was, as always, awkward. The exterior door to the office was down on our level, so that after you’d gotten your “come in” and had opened it, you still had the stairs left to climb: the first thing you saw was the boss’s head, high above, like that of a sweaty little god, hovering on a cloud of solid wood, which in reality is an ordinary desk, but which seems enormous when seen from underneath. And as you ascend the three or four steps … aren’t they unusually high as well? It feels like that, anyway … he, the boss, has ample time to study the person approaching him.

I took off my hairnet the way you’d doff your hat to the lord of the manor. The company’s only computer was on the desk in front of him, in the one place where it was probably of least use. There was a bowl of honey on top of it, which he used to lure flies. The window overlooking the street was kept open all summer long and ensured a constant supply of the species … they were everywhere … and it didn’t make any difference if the window was closed because the flies still kept on pouring out of their snug hiding places in cracks and ventilators and everywhere in the gaps in the moulding, they obviously settle in there, legions of them, in the walls and floors and behind the wallpaper, and continue to breed as long as the warmth keeps them alive. Enticed by the heavy sweetness from the honey bowl, or by the lure of the skirting boards, candy red against the white of the walls, they head out and lose their way in the open … a short, intense flight … until the swatter catches up with them and mashes their quivering happiness into a shapeless yellow pulp. He always gets them. He never misses. He says he can feel it. He knows when the time is right and he can strike with everything he’s got.

The boss pointed something out to me once, the fact that it’s impossible to kill a fly with a single blow, no matter how hard you hit or how accurate you are. Maybe it’s because of the mesh in the swatter, which is there to reduce drag … another thing I’d never considered until he mentioned it … and which always leaves a small part of the insect unscathed? All you’re doing is knocking them unconscious. Even when they’re badly messed up, even when the white vestiges of life are oozing out of them as a more than demonstrable sign of their defeat, it’s still, according to the boss, just a matter of time until they come back to life. He’s told me how he’s seen some of them dragging themselves across the desk, just barely intact, the tiniest remainder, but alive just the same … like a buzzing mote moving across the table top, as he so vividly described it. You have to go further if you want to get rid of them for good. He’s explained it all to me and shown me how he does it. On the small display table, with the coffee and the kettle on top, he keeps a plastic bag: with his hand inside it, so he avoids touching them, he picks up the unconscious fly and crushes it between his fingers, and then, as a last precaution, he drops the remains into a glass preserve jar, where there are already thousands of earlier victims, and screws the top on tight over the mass grave. I’ve never seen him empty it, not once in all these years has the stock diminished … maybe his goal isn’t to rid the office of them but to fill up his jar?

Now that I’d disturbed him … while he was in the middle of something utterly unimportant, no doubt, and without any particular goal in mind, I just stood there … my mouth slightly open perhaps … in front of the desk, probably looking confused and indecisive … as indeed I was. Besides that, the smell of the honey was making me dizzy. Maybe that’s why he keeps the bowl there, I thought, not to attract the flies but to anaesthetise his visitors, all of whom without exception he regards as his enemies, to knock them off balance before they have a chance to cross the starting line. What was I going to say? What impulse had brought me up here? And then it was as though I had only now realized how unreasonable this situation was, the entirely random and extreme absurdity of the fact that he, this little rodent, should be sitting there as my superior, and I, Andreas Felt, should be standing there with my cap in my hand bowing and scraping for what little he might spare me. Was this pathetic figure sitting there, five to ten years my junior, really the person to whom, according to the rules, I was obliged to defer? To be at his beck and call, to cater to his every whim, whatever it might be at any given time, every single day from early morning until the working day was done? It made me furious now that I thought about it. This anaemic huckster, this pallid character who had brownnosed his way to the top and hadn’t lifted a finger since, just sat idly for hours on end in an overheated office in front of a computer he barely knew how to turn on and off … What real power did he have over me, when it came down to it? On the contrary, wasn’t it closer to the truth that the power relationship between us was so fragile, so completely removed from reality, constructed upon formalities and nothing else, absolutely nothing else, that we only needed to leave the premises and go to another place up the street, to Mehrum’s Bakery, in order to see how ludicrous it was, how implausible it was, how downright embarrassing it was, and how it would dissolve irretrievably and turn to dust as soon as a different and slightly fresher air was let in?

“Get up, you little shit,” I said to him, which was as good a thing to say as any after such a long pause, which looked like it was about to drive him over the edge in any case, unaccustomed as he was, no doubt, to being faced with silence when someone had taken the trouble to come see him. It was hard to say whether he was relieved or appalled that the silence was now being broken. He sat there stooped and sullen in any case, motionless, with his little gimlet eyes that he couldn’t manage to keep still. I saw that he was missing a button on his shirt, that it was his tie which was keeping his collar in place, and this inspired me to go that much further.

“Get up and listen to what I’ve got to say!” I said, overconfidence making me pompous and bombastic. Because he really was a pathetic sight, sitting there pale as if he’d just been to the doctor and received a death sentence by way of a merciless x-ray. There was nothing else for it but to let rip, something I felt duty bound to commit to anyway, now that I’d started.

“You little shit!” I roared at him, “hiding away so that people can’t see just how ridiculous and incompetent you actually are! Sitting rotting in an office all day long. Your name might be on that brass plate outside the door but you’re not the boss. You probably couldn’t put two words together if someone came up and asked you what it is we actually do here! Why? Because all you know how to do is cheat! All you’ve learned to do in life is to sneak, and swindle, and suck up! All you’re good for is lying and deceiving! There’s nothing more pathetic than the sort of people who cheat because they can’t succeed any other way! Shrewd and spineless, what a wonderful combination! But every fraud in the world has more dignity than you! You asshole! You’re the sort who cheats his parents from the time he’s born, who dupes and deceives his friends, who’d have cheated on his girlfriends if he had any, and whose crowning glory, after years of swindling, was his wedding day! All you’ve ever earned money on was deceit! Everything you’ve built up and all the times you’ve succeeded, all of it was a swindle from start to finish, you miserable bastard!”

Fired up by my own words, and with an intense pressure in my chest from the excitement, I leaned over his desk and roared, more at the shiny forehead than at the man slumped under it: “I’ve seen your notes on the desk drawer, so I know how you think! I know how you work! If you can call it working, earning money the same way you wring out a cloth! I know how you’ve got a hold over the old man! I know all about your methods, how you began to ingratiate yourself when the time was ripe, how you stayed in the background and let everyone else have their say, and then afterward you took Schiong aside and told him what you thought! How you found out about the unpaid bills, and about the health insurance, which were only mere formalities, problems that could be fixed in a wink, and how you blew them up out of all proportion to Schiong, who was long past understanding anything like that, and how you talked him into letting you take care of it, quietly, and how in reality you didn’t need to do anything at all apart from make a few calls and reallocate some insignificant funds! How you patted him on the shoulder afterward and told him he could relax now, that everything had been taken care of, that everything was in safe hands! Safe Hands! The greediest, filthiest, most unscrupulous sticky-fingered pair of crook’s hands known to man!”

All the yelling had begun to take it out of me. I took a breath and leaned back but not so far that I didn’t keep a good grip with both hands on the edge of the desk. Before I continued, I lowered my voice, a murderous whisper accompanied by an almost inaudible whistling: “A good few of your workers are starting to get on in years, you realize that? Some of them might retire as early as next year. What are you going to do then? Where do you plan on finding the new blood to replace the old guys down there? How do you plan on replacing your workforce, something that has to happen, and still manage to come close to maintaining current levels of production? Do you think kids today have the least bit of interest or respect for a business as unprofitable as this? They want to step out into the light, not down into the darkness and noise of this place. Do you think that on the day we all leave you there’ll be nine fresh-faced kids standing down there, in our workshop coats, one machine each, blessed with the knowledge and patience we have, to guarantee that this lousy little business of yours, in spite of old and out-dated equipment, doesn’t suffer in the least as far as efficiency and delivery schedule? And what about the technological revolution that’s set to explode all through trade and industry, have you considered that? Have you any idea at all of what demands are going to be made? Have you, and I just thought of this now, have you any concept at all of what quality means? Or maybe you just think it’s a matter of getting hold of some people who work fast enough? You should consider yourself lucky, you crook, that the business you got your hands on almost runs itself. You should thank the devil that it was all in place, the whole thing, the day you made a fool of old Schiong. Because you, Konrad Didriksen, are one of the worst imaginable types of creep that crawls on the surface of the earth, living off of all the misery you manage to sniff out, and if something isn’t already rotten the day you get your claws into it, then you make sure it perishes, you soil it and contaminate it so that it’s ready to be taken over and the death blow can be dealt without your risking anything at all.”

I remained standing when I had finished, and he stayed seated, and there wasn’t a sound from him or from me, neither of us moved a muscle. I didn’t quite know how I should feel after finally speaking my mind in that way … I noticed that I was sad more than anything, sad on both our behalfs, standing there in the unbearable heat from his electric radiators in the mistaken belief that it served any purpose. I got it into my head that it was up to me to break the spell. But I couldn’t manage to say anything, so instead I cleared my throat: Didriksen gave a start, and then he stood up, as if he’d been asked to give a speech. With a contemptuous sneer, he made clear what he thought about what I’d said, as a pretext to come and disturb him while he was working, what an impudent little idiot, what a spineless bunch of bastards we all were … without meeting my eyes a single time, instead looking around continuously, as if trying to locate something in the room that could confirm his preposterous accusations. Fortunately he was standing with the fly-swatter in his hand and now he shook it, weakly, as if fanning himself in the stifling heat, while he told me what a wretched person he thought I was for disturbing him in the middle of his work for nothing … he wondered if I’d spared a thought about everything that was piling up down there in the meantime … if I had even considered the responsibility that rested with him at the end of the day … he repeated that last part a couple of times: rested with him, rested with him … and then he motioned angrily with his hand, with the result that he give himself a whack on the mouth with the swatter: at which point, finally, he looked up at me, as if he instinctively blamed me for this. I averted my eyes and caught sight of the white entrails of a fly hanging off the side of his computer … it looked like an abscess had been squeezed out of its grey skin … he’d obviously landed a direct hit right before I’d made my entrance. There was no way I could imagine that there was any chance at all of that thin lump regaining consciousness and yet it occurred to me that Didriksen was impatient to be left alone so that he could go over to get his bag and finish the job before it was too late.

But I was hardly halfway down the stairs when he started to speak again, and now in a voice that was barely recognisable.

“My wife is very ill” he said, as if he was talking to himself, but hoping that I’d overhear.

I remained standing with one foot poised over a step, unable to decide which reaction would be most natural. But soon I’d hesitated for so long that there was no going back. I turned and said: “Excuse me?” as if I hadn’t heard what he’d said.

He stood looking at me gratefully, as far as I could make out over the edge of the desk.

“My wife is very ill,” he repeated, looking down as if he was ashamed of it.

“What’s wrong with her?” I asked politely.

“A rare form of cancer” he replied, my question seemed to have made it easier for him because he was looking down at me again. “One there’s no treatment for. They’ve tried everything, but nothing works.”

“Can’t they operate?” I asked, and thought that I could make out the beginning of an endless series of questions I could ask if necessary, in order to keep the conversation going.

He shook his head.

“No one will say anything,” he said, his voice sounding like it might crack. “No one will tell me anything. I ask and ask, every single day I’m there, but they just answer in general terms that it’s impossible to know for sure, that it could be months, that it could be years. And the worst part of it is that I’m certain that they do know. That every one of them dealing with her there, that they know exactly how long she’s got left. They’ve just agreed between themselves that me and Kristine are better off not knowing.”

It gave me a start when he mentioned her name, I couldn’t quite make myself believe that he had a woman by his side, this hairless flycatcher who paid me my wages every fortnight without fail.

“What do you think?” he continued. “What would you have done if you were me? Would you take them at their word when they say that they don’t know? Or would you have pushed them until you squeezed the truth out of them?”

And when I didn’t answer: “Which is better, do you think? To know the details, to know to the hour how long you have left, or not to know anything, as it would be otherwise, if there was no illness?”

I didn’t know what to answer, and I wasn’t really sure if he really wanted advice or if it was more important for him to present his problem to an outsider, someone he wasn’t well acquainted with. I said it was something that it was difficult to have an opinion about before you found yourself in the same situation.

Didriksen nodded ponderously, as if he hadn’t expected me to offer any particular opinion either. Then he looked at the clock.

“Well. They’re probably waiting for you down there. But thank you. Thank you.”

Slightly perplexed I went back to work, uncertain as to whether I’d now bolstered my position with the boss or emphatically destroyed what little standing I had managed to build up over the course of the last few years’ unblemished record at such a small and easily surveyed workplace. The others glanced at me in passing, and these seemed more expressions of suspicion than any actual curiosity regarding my reasons for having a chat with the boss in his office and not even during break time. Kare and Jens-Olav had managed to repair the damage while I’d been gone … the noise was back to full level … a polyphonic hum, a persistent booming drone as stolid as the surrounding walls, as solid and as durable as them in their delimitation of the room. Everyone had gotten back to what they were doing, an even ratio of men to machines, spread out over the large floor with approximately the same distance between them, like sculptures in a museum, and I thought, while I stood there … because that’s one of the advantages of this type of work, that you don’t need to think about it while you’re doing it … that if it hadn’t been for the racket we were making, if, on the contrary, all nine of us worked away in silence, busy with our own projects, then possibly the only sound we would have heard would have been the hollow blows against the wall from Mr Didriksen’s office. I suppose that’s the lot of insignificant people in life, they occupy themselves with insignificant things. That some of them still end up in important positions, in a roundabout way, is just the way it goes.

I glanced up at the large clock above the embrasure. Just a little after this time tomorrow Hans-Jacob and Elise would be paying their monthly visit. I don’t know why I did it exactly … maybe in order to steel myself for what was coming … but I let the evening play out in my head just as I knew it would unfold … exactly as it would unfold … getting changed around six o’ clock … Helene’s imperious meal preparations … Her appeals for assistance, always with a hint of resentment, if there’s something to be peeled or washed or chopped … The strange feeling I get walking around with shoes on indoors, as if I’m a stranger in my own home … The sound of the doorbell frightening me out of my wits because I’ve been walking around for the last hour waiting for it to ring … the slightly strained tone at the start, which we can never completely dispense with, no matter how well we all know each other … The conversation around the table that for a little while is intended to involve all four participants, but which soon divides into two, one between the men and one between the ladies …

Hans-Jacob always talks more than I do. He’s the one who talks and I’m the one who responds. He’s the one who brings things up and I’m the one who chimes in. And sooner or later, come Saturday, Hans-Jacob will turn the conversation around to his favourite subject, about a six-month course we both took a few years after leaving school … at a time when we both had a lot of common interests and took for granted that we were going to work together … and more specifically about a teacher we had in the course, who had indeed been exceptionally talented. Moreover, he’d penned several books within his particular field, which were the ones we’d used when studying for the final exam, and which were also out of the ordinary … so perhaps it’s not so strange that Hans-Jacob is always bringing the subject up, even though, like me, he probably hasn’t looked at the books since and so is relying on the memory of his past enthusiasm. “That Vogt-Johannessen,” he’ll say, and draw circles in the air with the end of his pipe, just as if we were sitting in a cafe way back in the day, each with his beer, after our class was over. And once more he’ll talk about Vogt-Johannessen as if I didn’t know who he was, had never read him, and had no grasp at all of the technical content of his work. But that’s Hans-Jacob’s way of talking … as if the person listening doesn’t have the faintest idea what he’s talking about. “That Vogt-Johannessen, Andreas … Vogt-Johannessen …” He could continue like that the entire evening. In which case his voice will gradually acquire more of a singsong tone as he warms up to the subject. He’ll gesticulate wildly and caress his pipe as if it was a rare geological find … eventually it’ll sound like he’s actually singing from his seat … casting resonant musical waves that kind of wash or throw his conversational points over the listener and make it impossible for me to question anything at all. He never seems to go anywhere … not even to the traditional Saturday dinner at our house, pleasant and relaxed as it’s intended to be … without having thought out a list of topics beforehand that he can bring up and which he knows will arouse interest. On no occasion does he turn up unprepared. The worst thing about it is that he’s usually studied the subjects so well that it’s impossible to contradict him: all the facts are on his side.

I’ve never liked talking to him. And that’s in spite of the fact that our conversations through the years probably amount to several thousand hours altogether. I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s because he’s always so quick to respond, his answers so pertinent to what I ask him, even when he can’t have guessed what I was going to bring up beforehand. It’s annoying in the extreme. It’s like he never lets me finish what I’m saying, as if there’s some prestige for him in guessing the end of my sentence, preferably before I’ve gotten halfway. Still, it’s nothing compared to what it was like when we were young, when we were seen as being joined at the hip, he was like a man possessed every time we bumped into someone: back then he used to speak just as often as he was able, even snatch the words out of my mouth if necessary. And on the rare occasions I managed to get a word in, he stared at me, terror-stricken while I spoke … sometimes he stood there stiff as a plank with his eyes wide, terrified in case I might say something interesting, something that would be worthy of note and remembered as a particularly astute or original remark. I’d imagine that’s probably why Hans-Jacob has developed his own particular form of sarcasm over the years, in order to ensure that anything that I might come out with won’t overshadow what he has said or is going to say. And on the rare occasions I did hit the nail on the head with my, in Hans-Jacob’s opinion, long-winded and humourless observations, then he was in there right away, almost before I had time to draw breath, throwing in a thought uncannily like my own, but formulated in his own characteristic way, as if raising up my ordinary and slightly boring utterance, making it into something brilliant, converting it into a deadly-accurate flick of the whip with all the stinging irony he was so notorious for in our younger days, as if to say to the rest of the group, please, excuse my friend here, he doesn’t know any better, but this is what he was actually trying to say.

Back then I accepted it and viewed it as confirmation that he was the more intelligent and enthusiastic of us two, always a head in front of me, which I have to admit was true, many a time. But could there have been other reasons behind it? Wasn’t it likely … or more likely, even … that it was insecurity that lay at the bottom of it, that he was fairly insecure by nature and that this was why he’d gotten into the habit of answering every question he was confronted with so quickly and so pertinently … simply in order to cover up the fact that he was an extremely nervous person? That it was something he started doing because he was so terrified of not having an answer at hand, terrified of being at a loss for words, terrified of being caught out not knowing something? The thought delighted me. Maybe, I thought, all these years I’ve been confusing anxiety with wit, an anxiety Hans-Jacob has spent his whole life trying to hide? Helene’s always seemed pretty clear-sighted where it came to Elise and Hans-Jacob, over the years. But she’s never made the slightest suggestion that Hans-Jacob is in reality quite a different character than he pretends to be. She’s normally so good at being able to see through other people, read them like an open book … and suddenly it struck me … that Hans-Jacob’s role as the dominant party in our relationship had possibly … or most likely … come about as much of a result of importunity and obstinacy on his part, more than any actual intelligence or sophistication. Yes, perhaps even to compensate for the lack of these qualities, I thought, which if he’d had them would have afforded him the natural, as opposed to the hard-earned, role of leader in our almost lifelong friendship. Maybe, in reality … and the thought gave me goose bumps as I went around from machine to machine with the greasing log, jotting down the tiny digits from the counters on each, decimals and all … that it is I who am superior to him, since I find it so easy to allow him take the lead … since I’m so willing to let him triumph … since it doesn’t bother me much letting him outdo me, overwhelm me countless times in the course of a single evening when the four of us are together. And I couldn’t get this thought out of my head … and couldn’t help but ask myself … if this wasn’t true superiority? … this calm certainty … this untapped potential … as opposed to Hans-Jacob’s bluster and cheap triumphs? …

But these were things I didn’t want to dwell on for too long, for fear of what I’d arrive at if I delved too deeply. I looked over the entries in the log … with feigned concentration … and compared them with last week’s figures … but couldn’t prevent my thoughts from following the trail they’d sighted. Could this be the reason I’ve always joked with Elise? I thought … always being slightly bold and rather inconsiderate toward her … maybe even bordering on offensive at times, for all I know? … with her it doesn’t take much anyway … in order to keep my real feelings about her, and Hans-Jacob too in fact, in check? Come to think of it, I’ve hardly exchanged a serious, let alone a sensible word with her. But there are certain people you have to joke with in order to endure being in their company. Elise is that kind of person. And by way of this jocularity I keep … in all likelihood perhaps have probably always kept … at arm’s length … the fact that I really can’t stand her.

Of course, Helene for her part misunderstands the whole thing. She’s always perceived my little act with Elise … unavoidably perhaps … as flirting … albeit well within the bounds of decency … She still gets offended when she thinks I go too far. Then you just joke around with Hans-Jacob as much as I joke around with Elise, I was stupid enough to suggest in bed one night after they’d been to visit and we lay talking about the evening. Helene only needed to stick out her jaw and scratch her head like mad in order to get me to shut up and understand that I needn’t repeat my suggestion. It was this parody that first drew my attention to the fact that Hans-Jacob has a slightly protruding jaw, something I’d never previously noticed.

Helene loves to criticize them after they’ve been to visit. She’s always noticing something about them, or else interpreting something in a particular way, taking this as a sign that things aren’t quite as they should be between them. I have to confess that her observations have been extremely keen, yes, almost eerily so at times, the awful implications she’s managed to draw from one thing or another. For a while she was sure that it was only a matter of time before Elise would leave Hans-Jacob … or Hans-Jacob leave Elise … every time we all met … and it was as though her sympathies switched every other time, as though she alternated between seeing Elise’s peevishness and inexhaustible self-pity with Hans-Jacob’s eyes, and subsequently all of Hans-Jacob’s bad sides with Elise’s eyes in turn, his tiresome patronizing, his puerile whims, his indolence, his vindictive streak, his bad-tempered reprimands of Elise that would often ruin an entire game of bridge, if he was in a bad mood to start off with. And every single evening the four of us spent together, Helene found something new to get caught up in, a new piece to fit into the big picture that was constantly telling her that the two of them really didn’t suit each other, that both of them were, in all likelihood, still just waiting for the right moment to leave the other one. When Kristoffer died it was almost as if she saw it as confirmation, nearly turning to me in triumph, the night Hans-Jacob rang, because now the opportunity had finally arisen to make the point, with the simple words she used to report the terrible news, that what was it she had said, she knew something would happen to that boy someday, the way they’d treated him since he was a baby!

But I’m not completely blameless either. Over the years I’ve been greatly entertained by Helene’s interpretations and explanations, and I’ve also, to a certain degree, made my own contributions … maybe not so much to her actual criticism, but by way of certain insignificant remarks … the necessary affirmations she’s needed in order to fully justify her reasoning. Indeed, of course … you’re right, it did seem like that … that’s probably true … a kind of confirmation of what she saw and the way she perceived it. I’ve certainly never had anything against Helene’s interpretations, in the wake of Hans-Jacob and Elise’s visits, of how things actually were between them, how they felt about themselves and one another. Even though these descriptions, or accounts, have with few exceptions been extremely negative, and thus haven’t given Elise and Hans-Jacob much of a chance. When I think about it, I suppose I’ve pitched in with a few small observations of my own, in much the same vein as Helene’s, over the years. It’d probably be accurate to say that at some point it became a pastime for the both of us, with Helene in the driver’s seat mind you, this evaluation of Elise’s and Hans-Jacob’s marriage, examining and analysing it thoroughly based upon any new information that came to light. It simply became a habit that’s lingered, even though it’s lessened considerably, and which now as a rule limits itself to short statements, without further elaboration. Without the great pleasure either, in fact, that it once gave us.