11-27-05, 2:00 pm
Salbenblatt had had something to drink and didn’t want to make a noise. He bolted the door of the flat and checked the gas tap, as he did every evening; he heard the siren of a car down in the street, and then, behind the opened door, his wife who had woken with a fright. He could see her on the broad, foam rubber couch in the neon glimmer which came through the curtains, the dark patch of her hair on the pillow. “Only an ambulance, or the police,” he said. “Perhaps a drunken motorcyclist, looking for his brains somewhere. Go to sleep.” They both listened to the wailing double tone, getting fainter and then finally fading away.
“Please, don’t turn on the light,” she said and stirred. “How late is it?”
“Just after twelve.” She remarked that the last time she had been awake it had been about one, but he didn’t answer; he undressed cautiously. He thought he ought to take his bedclothes to the next room. Probably the sour smell of alcohol was unpleasant to abstemious women. He seldom drank, so it must be especially disagreeable to her.
She turned abruptly to the wall. “Where did you go then?”
“All over the place.” He didn’t feel a bit drunk now as he stood in his pyjamas by the table and smoked, though he knew she couldn’t bear the smell. He thought, you wouldn’t believe it anyway. All at once he shivered and looked at the couch on which a thin ray of light fell.
Impossible to say now that he had walked half the night through the town, through the narrow old alleys, under the crooked, celebrated red brick gables, beneath the moon which shone through the filigree stonework of the town hall facade; and how he had felt as he heard the clocks in the towers strike the hours, while he had sent love-like messages back home, to the one now lying face to the wall; and how he had thought that it was actually quite easy, if you only looked at it in the right way. What sentimentality, he thought now, as he stood here like the perennial miscreant.
Salbenblatt stubbed his cigarette out and carried the ashtray into the kitchen. He ran some water over his forehead and neck and drank a few gulps, which tasted nauseously of chlorine. After drying himself he returned and lay down next to his wife under the blanket, breathing as lightly as possible and stretching out his hand towards her, but he felt, despite her drowsy warmth, the coldness, the tension, which for weeks he had melodramatically called the sword between them.
He lay there for some while, staring upwards, where occasionally reflections from the cars moved along the walls, illuminating sharply the colors which they themselves had painted, ultramarine and chrome yellow, reputed to be restful; and from her breathing he knew that she was wide awake. He said into the half dark, “Has anything moved?”
She gave no answer, jerked her head irritably pushing his hand away from her rather bony shoulder blade.
“I asked you something,” he said, sniffing at her hair. “Been to the hairdresser’s?
“Well, what of it, isn’t it allowed?”
“My God, I only remarked that you had been to the hairdresser.” He lay now with eyes closed and felt the alcohol rise to his head, just enough to make him feel enlightened. All right, you hold your hand out time and again, so that it can be slapped. He was indeed his own martyr. Patting the blanket he said, “Stinks nicely of this spray. “Yes, really nice,” she said against the wall.
He was silent for a while. He rubbed his toes against each other, then said: “Bergson’s things arrived today, extra with the Swedish motor transport. Five tons of art.”
“Then your museum will collapse. Was that this chap with the numbers from last year?”
“That’s right. Warning One to Four. Anatomy Twentysix and so on, the whole show composed out of tin and old cog wheels. We are solemnly going to exhibit it all, let the people have a guess and Father Realism will turn a blind eye, all for the sake of peaceful neighbourliness.”
“I know, I know,” she said, “if you were to be minister, you’d do a mighty clearance to the lampposts or the mines!” She turned over irritably. “You and your homemade revolution, your tough talk, as though you were the strong man I had been waiting for. Doesn’t fit you at all.”
“There you are!” thought Salbenblatt. He was almost satisfied. You go on probing until you’ve found the sensitive spot. No violence, no poison; you simply do it with words. The effect is dead sure. You only have to watch out that you don’t forget the argument with which it all started. Well, what was it?
“What was it?” he said out loud.
“In case you’re interested,” she said, “tomorrow I’ve got my examination on the sine theorem. Don’t you ever want to go to sleep?”
“No, want to talk to you. Always exams, always this idiotic math. We want to talk to each other now. Nobody told me that one night I would find a calculating machine in my bed. I can’t remember it.”
“Just move out.” She pulled the blanket over, so that he lay half uncovered and she tensed her muscles as he, sighing, moved over towards her, his chin on her neck, where it scratched her, while his hand did something that she had never found unpleasant before. She tried not to think of before. He removed his hand quickly and moved away. “Funny bed,” he said, “funny room. Completely new frigidaire feeling.”
“You’re off your head,” she cried.
“Only drunk, darling.” He stared at the reflections of a car passing by. “Are you quite sure that nothing has moved? No mistake in your reckoning, some sort of crack in your calendar, like before?” She did not say anything.
“Sorry, of course, then everything was different. Even the air we breathed. Go on, sing the song of that time or start howling straightaway.” He nudged her roughly with his elbow. “Do you remember how we couldn’t wait for it. The everlasting unsureness, the separations, the farewells, our cold feet outside the front door, because upstairs your landlady spied on us, until we bribed her with coffee and two pounds of chocolates, and the wretched creaking of the floor boards in the long mouldy smelling hall, when I crept along in my stockinged feet, and even in the holidays they wouldn’t give us a double room, because they were all so moral there, except of course when we wandered around out of doors. Then it would have been a disaster perhaps, if we had waited for the right date in vain. But do you know what?” he said, “I don’t give tuppence for those times.”
“Now stop it,” she said sleepily. “And please stop fussing as though it were really worrying you. Who’s going to have it, you or I?”
“Aha, father not required, we are so extremely modern. Have it your own way.” He jumped up and stalked furiously through the room, snatched his things tidily folded from the back of the armchair, then knocked his knee against a sharp object, which fell over noisily. He cursed and stamped cross the carpet in his faded pyjamas and gradually felt ridiculous. Been waiting for the storm too long; now when refreshing rain should fall, the loveydovey-do with which their quarrels had usually been resolved was no longer there. Not even real anger. The best thing would be to retreat to the museum, perhaps the tin skeletons of this progressive Swede, goggling expectantly out of their packing cases would suggest something to him. After that he could sleep on the desk in the office, white coat as cover, at least it would look as though he had worked through the night.
He was already at the door, when suddenly came that soft sniffing and calling which he hadn’t heard for ages and which used to remind him of some woebegone little animal, and he turned back hastily. “It’s all right,” he said, “my poor darling, I’m not running away. There now, be quiet.” She lay still and let him stroke her car and neck and the loose tangle of her hair, while he balanced on the edge of the couch, noticing that his movements functioned automatically. He said, “It’s only the adjustment your body has to get used to. Soon you’ll feel fine, you’ll see.”
“Yes,” she said, “my belly as the elixir of life. You know it by heart, like a book on marriage. And of course, now you’ll be considerate, as expected. Absolutely intolerable.”
“And you’ll stop being fed up and change your touch-me-not attitude, as though I had ever wanted to push you against the wall.” He had forgotten to go on stroking her and lay down sideways making a hollow, but his wife stayed stretched out stiffly, and he thought that she was thinking about the thing they couldn’t imagine, but which was already beginning to establish itself. He said, “Perfect case of neurosis for two, if we go on letting ourselves slip like this, really.”
“All right,” she said, “let’s not talk about it any more.” As she reached over him grunting for the light cord, her breasts brushed against him, and all at once they seemed to him to be heavy; she put the light on and looked at the clock. It grew darker and they heard the noise of the cord as it knocked against the stem of the lamp.
He turned onto his back and said, “Couldn’t we behave as though we had always wanted it? Perhaps one day really.”
“Please don’t let’s talk about it any more.”
“Yes, “ he said, “the more we talk, the worse it gets, even for careers. Especially at night. Are you asleep?”
She murmured something that he didn’t understand, and down below another car went by.
He watched the trail of lights hurriedly sliding past and he said, “Only others, they have it quite normally. Apparently without fuss.”
“Please,” she said. “Please, once and for all, be quiet.”
Salbenblatt lay there quietly, he was tired, at the same time sober, and he thought about his things strewn over the carpet, then about Bergson’s Anatomy, and later on about the crooked streets in the moonlight. “The absurd thing about it is, I love you, you see.” But that she couldn’t hear, because she had just fallen asleep.
Onderka, the carpenter, was frightened for the first time in his life as he stood waiting for the wailing of the emergency siren twenty kilometres away and which still didn’t turn up in the woods near the old tollhouse on the main road where he lived. An hour ago Anna had woken him, grey with distress, because she had suddenly started to bleed, and for a while they had hoped that it would pass, but then he remembered what the doctor had said, and he rushed off on his bike to the village and roused the mayor out of his sleep in order to telephone. It was only afterwards that the anger rose in him and he grew more and more apprehensive.
For the tenth time he went outside the house and stared at the lake through the bare trees; on the other side the road came out of the hills and crossed the railway line, where nothing was to be seen but the lights of the level crossing house and their reflections in the water; he recalled how he had once got caught in the safety net at a hundred yards, just a few inches from hell; trifling to what was happening to his wife behind the door. All at once he heard her, and gritting his teeth he ran back.
“It’s nothing,” she said as he came in. “It’s already gone. Only it was like a knife.” She lay on the bed half-dressed, between towels and cotton wool and attempted to get up; with his broad hand he gently pressed her back on the pillow. “I wanted something to drink,” she said. “I’m so thirsty.”
“I could have got you something long ago,” said Onderka. He fetched a lemon and water from the kitchen. He halved the lemon and squeezed one half over the glass and she watched as it dropped in. “No sugar.” “But pips in it,” he said handing it to her. He supported her head while she drank, then she pushed the glass away.
She groaned and drew in her breath quickly; he held her shoulders tightly, casting a furtive look at the clock.
“This time they’ve turned it round inside,” she said in a flat voice, and he watched her face, that looked gaunt and transparent against the white bedclothes. He thought that he would smash something if it should come again before the ambulance arrived. Now he felt very alarmed and listened: it was the Transit express, the rumbling of the two-hundreddiesel engine across the water, going north. “Of course, the level crossing, otherwise it would have been here already.” He gave her some more to drink and stroked the back of her neck; her skin felt cold and wet with perspiration. “Bit better? You must lie quietly.”
She tried to smile but only managed a grimace. “I’m so ashamed. Again I can’t manage it.”
“Stay quiet,” Onderka said, while skillfully changing things for her. Too damned much, he thought, and wished that the ambulance would come. He must stop it. He must stop it at once.
“Don’t look,” said Anna, “please don’t.”
“Don’t say another word,” he said furiously.
“They’ll manage to stop it, they’ll fatten you up all right, you half portion.”
“Onderka, they are proper contractions, you know it yourself.”
“They’ve got incubators there,” he said, “whole floors of them. They can cope with anything.” He went and washed his hands, returning quickly. “If you cry, it will get worse,” and he comforted her again but he knew just as well as she did that it was simply too early and that it couldn’t live. So that was why he had always worked like a horse, that was why he had planted towers and chimney stacks all over the country, higher and higher, fool that he was. “It’s so hot,” she said, “and I’m freezing at the same time, I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right!” he said and put the window ajar while he listened intensely and started hating his house – he had raised the beams and the door frames himself, enlarged the windowpanes, but he thought he would have to go into the shed, do something, smash the cradle which he had secretly nailed together. He stood there waiting and cursing the stillness. Then he thought of the beer barrel he would have rolled onto the building site, where they were to have sung together with him. He ought to telegraph now, you couldn’t go onto the scaffolding with nerves like his, not even speak through intercom to the men on the crane, where he would have hoisted a little flag. As it was, he would return in the morning to a grey homecoming, clear up a bit, and on the pillow there would be nothing but an impression.
He heard Anna gasp. “Perhaps you dragged something heavy in your shop,” he said, “perhaps you fell.”
“No,” she said and straightened her back because just then she felt it just enough to know that it was still there. “You should have married someone else,” she said exhausted.
“Oh, of course” he said, “right away, tomorrow mornng early. Only wait for the ambulance. Please think of the ambulance, think of the doctor who will help you. No nonsense now.”
“We were quite beside ourselves for joy,” she said, making a wry face.
Not at this price, though, he thought and full of anxiety watched the white on white that was his wife.
“You mustn’t talk. You mustn’t get excited. They sent it off immediately, they understood at once.”
He didn’t tell her about the tussle he had had on the telephone, but at the same time he wished he could do it again. He squeezed the other half of the lemon and mixed it, thinking of the snappy voice that he couldn’t throttle. “First the pleasure, then call for help,” till he roared, “Listen, you snottynosed, you half-baked idiot of a midwife, it’s happened to us for the third time in 10 years, much worse than before. Blood group apparently, something to do with monkeys, and they’ve got more sense than you have,” until the mayor, in his dressing gown, put his hand on his shoulder, shocked – and how he had telephoned again and apologised and the voice had said, “All right, you sod, they’re on their way.” That was thirty-five minutes ago.
Too long for a man who loved his wife. Others filled up with drink, or ran around groaning, as though they were having it themselves. Bollbock, the mechanic for lifting the sliding casings, an old fox who worked to the millimeter and with whom he bunks during the week in the caravan, had told him how he had had to be put to bed when his wife had her first-born 18 years before. At least they had it. He fished the pits out of the glass and said, “You only have to nod, if you want to drink!”
Anna made no reply, she kept her eyes shut and he readied for felt her wrist for the place where her pulse should have been but he didn’t feel anything, then he felt his own, and thought hazily of first-aid help. He couldn’t remember a single name, since relationships had been broken off during the war. She looked at him suddenly and he heard her whisper, “Everything is so far away. . .”
“Don’t worry,” he said loudly, “I’m looking after you.” He started to count the seconds, thought of bends, level crossings, trees, bad roads, skidding tires. “They won’t forget us, that I can swear.”
Thought it all out in vain, that at least he would have been as well-off as they were. Perhaps they would have named him Robert, he would have built him a catapult for the magpies. A girl, maybe, only more difficult with a name. Would have run around in the woods, unrestricted, lots of fresh air; perhaps they would have bought a motorbike, or even a car if Anna didn’t feel well in a sidecar; they would have driven all over the place, he would have shown them the chimney stacks, masts and television towers, everything that was high, and it was a bare twenty minutes to school along the little path. Well, it was not to be. Unimportant, while here his wife was slipping away through his fingers.
He sat on the edge of the bed and looked after her. “We can have one all the same, if you like. We’ll fetch one from the Home.” He hadn’t thought of that before at all, and suddenly it seemed quite simple.
But then it began again, and she tried to sit up and it was tearing her apart and Onderka, who was now lying half over her with his weight and didn’t notice how she dug her fingernails into his arm, kept saying, “Scream, just scream, if it helps.” When it finally left off, he heard the siren outside and the ambulance.
“Bit out of the way, for such excursions,” said one of the two men as they came in, with something like clinical confidence all over their white coats, and lifted Anna onto the stretcher. Onderka leaned against the wall and looked at his hands - he had never seen them tremble before. “Yes,” he said, “maybe you’re right.”
Just at that moment Donath noticed that he wasn’t the only one awake, eleven storeys above the street that led to the hospital, just at that moment the emergency siren stopped, and he heard clearly the ticking of the alarm clock on the shelf above his head, and he waited and hoped that his wife would fall asleep again.
She made no movement, although he could hear her breathing, and for a moment he thought it would be premature, but then she would have alarmed him long ago. He recalled tenderly how she had looked at herself in the mirror in the evening and had said that she seemed to be growing gradually into a walking elephant, and later, whatever happened, she wanted to go to Paris or Arles, but especially to Arles, perhaps to see if Van Gogh’s bridge was still there, hanging as it does today in every respectable flat, and then she had embraced him, because he got a bit vexed.
He turned cautiously to the window, through which a part of Orion was visible, bordered by the cornice of the hyperbola roof, a glass honeycomb, where one floated lightly between the stars, with city heating and pleasantly housed, and he was reminded of Jesus de Santiago, with whom he had discussed deviations a whole night long, and who would probably think this the beginnings of the counterrevolution. Possibly somewhere he was right but now his thoughts slid downwards, like a lift, somewhere southerly, where among the slag, the birches and the dwarf pines the caravan trailer which he had hired, was standing; where it smelled of heather and soft coal, at the edge of the flooded open-cast mine with its sails and fishermen; where one evening he had gone outside the door, while she undressed inside and climbed into his pyjamas, and he had then lain next to her for hours, not daring to pull his arm away from under her, while he listened to the night-clear noises of the briquette factory on the other side of the water, half intoxicated by her sweet self lying there, and where he had told her about it the next morning.
At that moment Donath started. He was properly awake now and knew that his wife had lain there the whole time, sleepless and, rigid, and as always when he was agitated, he suddenly felt his stomach. He thought fleetingly of cancer and resolved from tomorrow onwards at the latest, he would cut down on coffee and tobacco, at the same time he had a yearning for a cigarette, yet didn’t get up.
He moved his hand tentatively sideways, along her shoulder, her throat, wet with perspiration, felt her body stiff and cramped under the blanket of discomfort or fear. “What’s the matter?” he asked, while he sat up and peered into her face, shining palely in the darkness. “Is anything wrong? Would you like half a sleeping pill?'
She gave no answer, but kept her eyes open and stared upwards, where for him there was nothing but ceiling, nothing but the calm grey of the new housing block wallpaper over the otherwise reliable plains of sleep. He shook her slightly. “Does anything hurt? Can you hear me?”
Finally she turned onto her side and gripped his arm, so that he moved nearer to her. “It mustn’t come again,” she said. “I’m frightened of falling asleep. It is terrible it’s still there, it’s everywhere. Can’t you see it?”
“You’ve been dreaming,” he said. “Everybody dreams sometimes, but now you are awake, and I’m with you. Shall I put the light on?” His voice seemed to him much too jovial, and he wondered what psychology there was for the seventh month but could not think of anything. He left the light off.
“It was probably an ambulance you heard, it’s just gone past. Try not to think of it any more, if it was bad. Just think of Phoebe.”
She clung to him when he mentioned the name; she didn’t tell him what she was thinking now.
“At least six and a half pounds,” said Donath. “That was what we agreed, and of course your eyes, I hope she has your eyes, if you can ‘arrange it - the hundreds of blues and greens of the ground swell over the sandbanks in the rising sun. No wonder I was first smitten by them.”
“Yes,” she said bewildered. “But the sun which I saw was receding over the horizon, a red-hot ball of clay, and the stars were tumbling about in the middle of the day, in the rumbling gloaming and I was standing there in the blistering wind with something shrieking in my arms, that was long since dead, and that fell to nothing before my eyes.”
Hiroshima, thought Donath and slipped his hand under her head, under the strands of hair matted with fear which he would have liked to caress away. Called it lightning from the sun, more than twenty years ago. He said, “Don’t go on, if it distresses you,” and he wondered what she had last read, heard or seen, as though dreams were just mere photos of the world, although not a lot was said about megatons and megadead in our country. It didn’t lead anywhere. Where from then?
“I’m frightened,” she said still clinging to him.
“But it’s past,” he said. “You’ll see – a few hours, then the sun will rise, the right one, the only one for us, then you will have forgotten it, or at the most, laugh about it. Just hold on tight. And no more nightmares!”
“You don’t understand,” she said, quite differently from the woman he had known up till now and had loved. “One day I will really wake up, because somebody has pressed the red button, some smart general or some senile madman, and I’ll futilely hope to stuff my child back where it came from, until I’ve vanished into smoke myself.”
“That’s enough now,” cried Donath, as he shook her again, “wake up, now, wake up!” He thought, it’s the same old story, the old bogyman, the paper tiger, which doesn’t even stop at your own wife. Simultaneously he thought, there you are, it will presumably be just as everyone had been instructed, and all you had to do was to watch out that you were lying properly with your feet in the direction of zero behind an indefinite number of undulations. He pressed her hand to his cheek. He caressed her and said, “At least try to feel that I am there.”
“Perhaps it has already happened,” she said. “Perhaps we are the only ones left over and don’t know it.” She scratched his temple weakly with her fingernails and stared out the window like him: no comfort of glass honeycomb, of sleepiness any longer, only the turgid undercurrent, on which one was carried away into emptiness, more thorough than any radiation.
I dreamt of the caravan,” Donath said. He tried some breathing exercises to quiet his stomach, and to think out arguments, theories of hope and of reason, as a revolutionary should do, but what did one do really? God knows it was easier to discuss deviations with Jesus de Santiago or with painters and poets who misinterpret a Plenary Session of the Party.
“The trailer stood in the old place,” he said. “Do you remember? The trouble it was to tow it there, near the bank. Only the roof had suddenly turned yellow. A lemon yellow roof under the pines.”
“Yes,” she said. And as he was about to describe the inside of the trailer, the hard upholstery which you could pull out until everywhere was bed, she suddenly gripped his hand and pushed it under the bulging blanket. He could feel it kicking and he felt quite glad when she started to cry.
