A Beautiful Young Wife (12 page)

Gerson held out his hand, and Edward automatically reached out to him, but Gerson said: ‘The other one, please.' He took him by the left wrist and put his face down close to his forearm. He slid his glasses up onto his forehead. ‘Sorry,' he said, ‘it's the general practitioner in me.' He looked up. ‘You've got ringworm, did you know that? Be careful around the baby — it's highly contagious.'

He waited till lunchtime before crossing the hall to the elevator. He walked to the parking lot with his bag and his bundle of bedclothes, and didn't look back.

At an intersection not far from the institute he parked the car and put his seat back. He slept for an hour and waited for three more, during which time he tried to oversee the scope of the catastrophe. All he could grasp were individual sentences, intonations …
Please, Ed, convince me …

At five o'clock, he saw Marjolein's SEAT Ibiza turn into the street. He followed her at a discreet distance. She drove hard, jerkily, never using her turn signals. She turned onto the highway. It was funny, he thought, that when you started acting like a psychopath, you immediately felt like one, too. Marjolein took the same route that his own GPS dictated, and parked close to her house. He pulled up onto the curb a little ways behind her. Just as she was getting ready to climb out, he opened the passenger door and plopped down on the seat beside her.

‘Fucking hell, Ed … I almost died …' Her hand on her heart.

She closed the door again and looked at him. She was holding her purse clutched to her stomach. He saw a vein pounding on the side of her neck. ‘Why didn't you return my calls?' he said.

You also started sounding like a psychopath.

‘Why are you here?' she said. ‘What's going on?'

He looked through the windshield. The heat lay on the street, panting like a dog. The shoddy shops, the kerchiefs, the disgust on the boys' faces — like a street in Tangiers. He had been there once. The hard, impenetrable lives of Moroccans; everything there depressed him. ‘Jaap knows,' he said. ‘About us. He knows about it.'

‘Fuck.'

He turned to her. ‘Did you tell anyone?'

‘What do you think?'

He flinched; his face looked as though he'd crumpled it. ‘He'll be coming to you, too.'

She searched for something in her bag, and then saw the key in the ignition and took it out. ‘What do you want me to do? What am I supposed to say?'

‘I can't decide that for you … It probably won't go so badly for you.' He scratched his arm and said: ‘I'm the one who's responsible.'

‘You think so?' she said without looking at him.

‘There's no need to worry.' He paused for a moment, and then said: ‘How did he find out, Marjolein?'

Her hands, white and bony, gripped the wheel. Occasionally, someone glanced at them as they passed by. What did they see? A father and a daughter? A man and his mistress? Only people with problems sat in a car like this.

He looked at her. She shook her head. He would never touch her again, not like that; it was over. They had awakened from the dream; everything that was going on lay before them in the old, exhausted afternoon light.

He climbed out and walked to his car. As he drove past, she gestured to him. He stopped, and the window on the passenger side slid open. And there, on the hot asphalt, with the car door between them, she gave him her farewell present. She said: ‘My phone was on the table. He picked it up. He saw it was you. Then he knew.' Her hand was on the doorsill, her eyes looking away through the windshield. ‘That's how it went.'

He felt the vertigo of the duped. ‘And “he” being?'

‘Arrival at destination,' said the electronic voice.

‘Jaap,' she said. She pulled her purse strap up higher onto her bare, brown shoulder. ‘I'm sorry.'

• • •

He crossed the campground like a prisoner returning from war. Blue shadows flowed from between the tents; the start of the deluge.

‘There's Uncle Ed!' Hunter shouted.

Edward put down his bag. With a smile that broke his face to pieces, he said: ‘I've come to visit for a couple of days. Is that okay?'

‘
Mi casa es tu casa
,' Friso said.

Edward cleared off the unused upper bunk and slid his bag under the bed.

‘What's up?' Friso said from the doorway. ‘Hassles at home?'

Edward nodded, his stiffened jaws prevented him from speaking.

A little later, as Friso was filling two cups with red wine from a carton, he said: ‘
Il faut être toujours ivre
. Upsy-daisy!'

Edward sat on the porch and drank tangy wine. Mosquitoes bounced off his ears. You could hear the hum of the highway; it was getting dark quickly now. Hunter came back from the lavatories, which were lit up in the distance like a service station. There was a stripe of toothpaste on his lower lip. ‘Good night, Uncle Ed.'

‘Sleep tight, buddy.'

‘Will you still be here early in the morning?'

‘Yeah, I'm going to sleep there, in the bed next to yours.' He pointed.

‘And Morris and Aunt Ruth, too?'

‘No. They're going to sleep nice and warm in their own beds.'

The boy nodded contentedly.

When Edward had emptied his cup, he said: ‘Guess I'll turn in, too.' The sky glowed with the bundled light of the city, flaring orange like fire. He remained seated. Friso refilled their cups.

‘I've made a complete mess of things,' Edward mumbled, the first sentence of a letter never finished. Friso said nothing, and Edward felt a trace of sympathy for him, for his discretion, because he knew what it was like to lose everything.

The night was filled with mosquitoes and demons. He yearned for morning. At three-thirty he climbed down the ladder and poked his brother-in-law, who was snoring. It was almost light outside by the time he fell asleep.

He drank instant coffee in the sharp-cut, early light of day. He had forgotten how fresh and pleasant it could be outside in the early morning. The little spider webs between the blades of grass were glistening and heavy with dew.

Later he shuffled off to the lavatories like a real camper, a roll of toilet paper in his hand. The day lay directionless before him. He had one lecture in the afternoon, that was all, the last one before the summer break. It would take an effort far beyond his own strength, but appearances were there to be kept up, like a hobo brushing his teeth beside a fountain.

That afternoon, he rented a bike at the reception desk and cycled to De Uithof. The complex of roads twisted and turned above the bike tunnels; he couldn't remember the last time he had ridden a bicycle. To his left, a park exhaled its coolness, and as he passed a vast graveyard among the greenery, he remembered the hen he had cared for when he was sixteen. He had taken it home as a tousled, yellow chick from a poultry farm outside the village. The farmer had let him do it, indifferently, knowing how it would end. Edward wanted to give it a good life amid the brood of bantams in the yard. The chick grew to become a big, passive chicken, barely inclined to move, and despite its size soon fell victim to the keen little hens that chased it around the garden and picked out its white feathers. He couldn't protect it from the covey's aggression, and had the feeling that he was witnessing two defeats. That of the chicken, which was ostensibly failing to
make good
, and his own: he had wanted to do something benevolent, and it had resulted in an indisputable fiasco. The hen was designed for a lifespan of about six weeks, and in fact seemed resigned to that. He felt a bit of hatred for the submissive, malformed creature, and was ashamed of that hatred.

Somewhere in his early days at college, the chicken must have died. He had no idea what his parents had done with the dead bird, his chicken, which he had forgotten about completely until this day on which his memories unfurled before him, clear and colourful. He couldn't imagine why he had failed to come up with that chicken during his discussions with Ruth, when she accused him of being unfeeling — the distinct volumes of his biography somehow refused to merge into a whole, a single life possessed of meaning and coherence.

The auditorium was barely half-full. It was the day before summer break. The windows were open. When the stumping around was over and the voices stilled, he said: ‘Once I had a white chicken. She was born in a hatchery somewhere and grew up in a warm shed with thousands, tens of thousands, of others like herself. When we talk about growing up here, of course, we're talking about something quite different from the gradual process of cell division that you refer to as your youth, and which you took twenty years to complete. No, she was bursting at the seams after about six weeks on a diet of concentrate and antibiotics, from a few grams to around one-and-a-half kilos in six weeks, an Olympian achievement … Imagine if you would that you were to grow up among your own contemporaries, without parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts … Everywhere you look, only people of your own age, rather like those festivals you people attend …'

He heard laughter, shouts of affirmation.

‘It was in that shed that I found her,' he said, ‘my fattened chick, almost six weeks old and ripe for the slaughter, atop a thick paddy of excrement —'

‘Lowlands!' a boy at the back shouted. Laughter rolled from the rows of seats.

‘I picked her up just like that,' he went on, ‘and I don't know why, but I decided that I was going to rescue this one chicken.' He looked into the auditorium from over the tops of his reading glasses. ‘Had I possessed the language to explain to her what “mother” meant, she still would not have understood me. In her world, there was nothing to be found that pointed in that direction. When I took her out of the shed and gave her a life amid the other chickens in our backyard, there was no way I could have known that it would be impossible for her to live with the others, who were all socialised.' He raised his hands. ‘And so I bestowed upon my chicken a life even less happy than the one she already had, out of
idealism
. And so I also extended that life beyond the limits of the bearable …'

He stopped for a moment to wipe the sweat from his forehead. ‘The important thing,' he went on, ‘is that you have heard me use the words “less happy”. My chicken, I have said, was unhappy. She did not know how to live among members of her own species, other birds who did know how to do that, how to be chickens. In our circles, it is not common to talk about the feelings of animals. We don't deny that animals might have feelings, but we also don't acknowledge that they might have them. We stick to the comfortable mean, which my wife claims is an indication of a defective moral sense.'

Some of the students were still busy taking notes, he saw. Such touching industry. His thoughts began to wander; he had no idea how he could proceed from the story of his chicken to the subject of this lecture, which was vectors, and the conditions under which H5N1 could become airborne.

‘This afternoon,' he said with his eyes closed, ‘while cycling here, I thought for the first time in … thirty, thirty-five years about that chicken, and was surprised to find that I had truly
loved
her, for a while. Or in any case … that I possessed something like
compassion
… When I go into a hatchery these days, all I want is to get out again as quickly as possible. The ammonia fumes make your eyes burn, you almost can't catch your breath. In fact, I rarely think these days about the animals that are born, grow up, and die under such conditions. All I think is: how soon can I get out of here? In that way, and I believe that is what I am trying to say this afternoon, I differ from that boy with his chicken. That is, I am … a different person.'

He grasped the edges of the lectern.

‘Something has happened in the meantime … something irreversible. That's the way it goes, unfortunately, as we grow older … we lose a certain sort of sensitivity. Our receptors become numbed. That is why old age is unbearable, because you sometimes suddenly remember what it was like … to have a
heart
, a heart that made you capable of great, rash deeds, to be caught up and feel a part of life on earth …'

He looked up. The last of the pens had stopped writing.

‘Am I getting side-tracked?' He took off his glasses and wiped them on the shirttail hanging from his trousers. ‘To have a heart,' he said, wiping in concentration, ‘that could make you happy or unhappy, and that even linked you to something like a
chicken
… A chicken, for God's sake. A white chicken.' He held his hands apart, to indicate the size.

‘In neurology, there is a term for what I'm talking about,' he said after a few seconds. ‘
Anesthesia dolorosa
… painful numbness.'

He looked into the auditorium. It was a blur.

‘Thus far, my introduction … I believe …' He folded his glasses and placed them on the papers in front of him. He heard shuffling, whispering, like in a church. He wiped his forearm across his eyes, but they kept running over. He tried not to make a sound, but couldn't stop himself from sniffing loudly. Vague forms began moving towards the exit.