The Greenhouse (21 page)

There’s no such thing as a normal day, and everything, literally everything, that is connected to my role as a father is new to me. In the evening, for the first time, I experiment with giving the child a bath. Since hot water is in short supply and the water pressure is so low that it takes an eternity to run a bath, I try placing my daughter in a reasonably large sink and bathe her there.

She’s into running water in a big way and is having fun in the sink with a small plastic cup, which she fills and immediately empties. Before long I’m drenched and the floor is flooded. The easiest thing to do would be to take the child with me when I’m having a bath myself, and make better use of the water that way. The only snag, though, is that once I’ve shampooed her hair and rinsed her two golden curls, someone has to take the child out of my bathwater. When I’ve finished bathing her in the sink, I wrap a towel around her small, soft body and then comb her hair with a soft brush. I realize I could place a ribbon in her hair to match the yellow dress. I look up the word in the dictionary and write it down.

—Tomorrow we’ll buy a ribbon and put it in your hair, I say to my daughter.

—Do, do, she says loud and clear.

I put her in her pajamas, fastening its only two buttons, one over her belly button and the other below her throat. Then I display the smiling, wet-combed child to my friend, who is still stooped over a book at the kitchen table. I give her mom a chance to admire the fruit of her creation, the fruit of our creation. She acknowledges the child, gives her a brief smile, and plants a kiss on one of her dimples.

—Is she in new pajamas? she asks.

—Yeah, we bought them together today, when we went into the village, I say, lifting my daughter onto the table so that her mom can see the pink two-piece flannel pajamas with green rabbits.

—Nice, she says, nodding at me to add weight to her words, very nice; but instead of looking at her child she looks at me with her aquamarine eyes. Flóra Sól stretches out her arms toward her mother for a hug; then she immediately rests her head on my shoulder, she wants to go to bed.

—Sleep, the model child repeats in her clear voice.

I tuck my child into the cot that the monks brought me. I’m still puzzled by how Father Thomas managed to track down the bed. Even though I’ve drawn the curtains closed, it’s as if there’s always a strange light around the child. Several people have commented on the light around my daughter, even on a cloudy day like today, including the lady on the top floor when I returned the iron to her.

It doesn’t take long to put Flóra Sól to sleep, and by the time I’m finished, Anna is completely immersed in her scientific studies at the kitchen table. I see that she’s washed up and picked up the child’s toys. I think of asking her if she wants to go out for the evening and have a look around. I could draw a map of the village for her with the main street and our street running through it; that would be two lines, the sign of a cross in fact, then I could mark two or three places that she could perhaps have a closer look at, the church, town hall, post office, and the café beside it, it wouldn’t take long. Will it seem like I am trying to get rid of her, that I’m afraid of being left alone with her when Flóra Sól is asleep? What if she gets lost or someone accosts her? Instead I sit facing her at the table, and all of a sudden I feel the need to tell her something personal about my life that she doesn’t know yet.

I fetch a photograph of Jósef and myself and show her. We’re standing side by side in the garden, but unusually I’m not holding his hand.

—This isn’t a relative? she asks.

The question doesn’t surprise me, Jósef is a head smaller than I am and looks totally unlike me. It’s a natural first reaction. It isn’t his looks, though, that make Jósef unlike other people. At first sight, he looks like a very handsome young man with his dark hair, brown eyes, and tanned skin, like he’s just stepped off a beach. Lots of women are charmed by him, even after they realize that he doesn’t talk. Because I was so often reminded of how handsome my brother was, I assumed that I was somehow the opposite.

—We’re actually twins.

She looks me straight in the eye. Her eyes are very unusual, more turquoise than aquamarine.

—What do you mean by actually twins?

—Yeah, we weren’t in fact born on the same day, but we’re still twins, we were together in the womb. It’s true, I was born first, my brother two hours later, just after midnight the next day. So technically speaking we’re twins and celebrate our birthdays on the same day, my birthday, the ninth of November.

—You’ve never mentioned a brother. I thought you were an only child.

—Yeah, but I do have a brother. He moved into a community home when Mom died. They don’t know what’s wrong with him; there have been conflicting diagnoses, probably some kind of faulty connection in the brain and autism. He doesn’t talk, he’s the quiet one in the family. People who don’t know about it often don’t notice anything; they’re so happy to have found a good listener, I say with a smile.

Anna nods; she seems to have an understanding and a genuine interest in what I have to say about Jósef. She asks for more details about the diagnosis, and I sense that we’re entering her home ground now, the field of genetics. She closes the thick book and doesn’t leave her pencil in it. I get the feeling that’s not just temporary, that she’s stopped studying for the night.

—He behaves quite normally somehow and can cope quite well. He greets people with a handshake and is always well turned out and tidy, although he sometimes wears some pretty wild colors.

In the photograph I’m showing to Anna he’s in a violet shirt with butterfly patterns—the last shirt Mom bought for him—and a mint-green tie.

—Dad and I put the ties on him; he can’t do the knots himself. When he stays over on weekends he always carefully folds his clothes and puts them in his old wardrobe, even when he’s only staying for one night. Three minutes after he’s up his bed is made, all smooth and without a crease, like a hotel room that’s been tidied by three maids.

Anna wants to know more about the system my twin brother has developed for himself.

—His whole life is based on fixed routines, I say. When my brother visits on weekdays, he always wants to do the same things, to make popcorn, and then he wants to dance with me.

On the first weekend he stayed with us after Mom died, he seemed a bit standoffish and insecure. He was used to Mom taking care of him and fussing around him, and he went out to the greenhouse to look for her several times. By the next time, though, he knew the system had changed and seemed to adapt to the new circumstances. He’d created a new system.

—He actually has a great capacity to adapt, I say.

Anna nods; she knows what I’m getting at. I grab the bottle of wine and pour two glasses.

—The main thing that distinguishes my twin brother from other people is that he never changes mood; in fact he’s practically always happy, I say, it’s genuine happiness, like a colored light bulb over a hall door, and he’s fascinated by the beauty of the world. He’s a very good person, I say finally, he’s incapable of lying.

I smile. She smiles, too.

—What about you? Do you lie sometimes? she asks, looking straight at me.

She throws me off guard; I can feel my heart beating under my sweater.

—No, but maybe I don’t always say what I’m thinking, I answer.

Later that night I make the sofa bed again. Once I’m under the covers, I try not to be bothered by the fact that my female friend is sleeping in a bed that’s far too big for her, at a mere arm’s length from me. Instead I try to focus on tomorrow’s meals. I’m wondering if I could pull off a dessert and whether Mom’s recipe for cocoa soup might be a good idea.

It’s been three days since the girls fell unexpectedly into my life, so to speak, and this is the first time we’re going out together with the child in the carriage. We have a specific mission: I’m going to show the mother of my child where the library is. Anna has changed the carriage into a stroller and we alternate pushing it. Our daughter is in her flowery yellow dress and has a ribbon in her hair. People are staring at us so I feel like announcing to everyone that we’re not a couple and that just because we’re taking our child for a stroll doesn’t mean that we sleep together, that this is just a temporary setup.

The library is beside the café, but before Anna dives back into her science, we sit down at one of the three tables on the sidewalk, facing each other with the stroller between us. I put on the brake while Anna adjusts our daughter, ties the laces that have come loose around her hat, and hands the child a strawberry, which she immediately shoves into her mouth. An older couple is sitting at the next table, and I hear the man say he’ll have the same thing his wife is having. Is that the sign of a successful relationship? Ordering the same thing? Should I also say I’ll have the same thing that Anna, the mother of my child, is having? I practice several potential answers in the local dialect in my mind; the onus is on me to speak for both of us, since I’m the one who’s been living in the village for two months.

—One coffee, says Anna, smiling at the owner.

—Same for me, I say.

My daughter claps her hands in excitement and parrots my last syllable.

If the owner of the café asks me straight out if she’s my girlfriend, I’ll deny it.

—Is that your girlfriend?

But he doesn’t.

Before the owner goes in for the coffees, he stoops over the child, doting over her, and then gently pinches her cheek and pats her on the head. People seem to be very child-friendly here; practically no one leaves the child alone. And the men have been eyeing up Anna, too, I can’t help noticing. I also realize that the child attracts less attention when her mother is with her. I have mixed feelings about this, even though, just a few minutes ago, I was worried that people might think we were a couple.

The man who is squatting on the steps of the library is staring at Anna so intensively that it’s almost rude, I feel like telling him to stop it. Instead I lift my daughter out of the stroller and sit her on my knee by the table. She’s all fidgety, but doesn’t touch the coffee cups. I stick the pacifier in her but she spits it right out. She tries to stand on my knees, and I lift her up so that she can see all around her. She waves at the man on the steps and he waves back. Then I try putting her on the empty chair beside me, let her sit on her own chair between us parents, with her head just about reaching over the edge of the table. We both look at her proudly, the parents; inside my head I’m turning into the father of a little child. Her mother smiles at me. I hope the guy on the library steps also noticed the smile. This is how my new life comes into being, this is how the reality of it is created.

It’s nine a.m., Anna has just gone to the library, and my daughter and I have been up for an hour and a half. I haven’t mentioned the garden to Anna, but I will soon need to go back up there to water the plants. I don’t trust Brother Matthew with these things anymore; he’s in his nineties.

Taking care of a child is a lot of work; you can never keep any particular train of thought going for long. When the child’s awake I need to give her my full attention. I’m probably a little bit clumsy with my daughter, and I can’t do things the way her mother can, but she takes it all in her stride. But I try to manage my role as a father as best I can, by doing what’s necessary and being consistent with myself. Then I try to be good to the child while I wait for Anna to come back from the library.

Although the child is almost always happy, that doesn’t mean she can’t be temperamental. But her temperament isn’t determined by my moods or any other factors in her surroundings. Was I a cheerful child, I wonder? Dad spent more time with Jósef than with me, and Mom and I were more of a pair, too.

Then there’s another side to my daughter when she wants to be left to her own devices, in peace and without being disturbed. She can acquire a serious air in those moments and even frown. She sometimes even crawls into the bedroom and tries to close the door behind her, or she finds a spot where she thinks no one will see her. I keep one eye on her from a distance but otherwise leave her be.

—My little hermit, I say when she crawls back out of her cell ready to embrace the world again.

There are many fun and interesting things about this little being. The way she whistles, for example. I noticed this morning that she was trying to purse her lips, checking them in the mirror several times from where she was sitting on the floor in the bedroom. Once that target has been achieved, my nine-month-old daughter pumps her lungs with air and blows through the spout. As soon as she produces a pure tone, she becomes startled, but when I smile at her, she wants to show me more and forms a new spout and blows again.

—Clever girl. Incredibly clever girl.

—Should Daddy sing and Flóra Sól whistle with him?

She’s ecstatic, I’m an ecstatic father, and I’m dying to share my fatherly pride with Anna when she gets back from the library. I also wish Mom could see her granddaughter; I wish she could see me in my role as a father. How would Mom haven taken to Anna?

I pick the child up off the floor and put her in her floral dress with her blue cardigan over it. Then I put a sun hat on her and let her look at herself in the mirror again before I put her into the carriage. She thinks it’s fun to dress up.

—Shall we go out in the carriage and see Daddy’s roses? Would Flóra Sól like to go to the garden with Daddy and meet the monks and look at the
Rosa candida
?

I plug the pacifier into her when we get out with the carriage, spread a blanket over her, and she quickly falls asleep.

When I get to the steps leading up to the rose garden, I take her out of the carriage, with the blanket and pillow and climb the hill with the child in my arms. Once we reach the garden, I put her down on the blanket on the grass right beside me while I work in the flower beds. My daughter sleeps another hour. I move her twice with me around the garden as I switch patches and always keep her within reach.

Then she’s suddenly awake and is sitting up, visibly puzzled by her surroundings. She looks all around her, sees me, and breaks into a big smile. Then she sets off, abandoning the blanket for the divine green nature.

—Don’t you want me to change Daddy’s girl’s diaper? I ask, taking off my gardening gloves. Once I’ve changed her, I sit with her on the garden bench and give her pear juice to drink from a spout cup.

—Do you want to smell the scent?

The shorter, full-blown roses are the same height as her, and she shows a lot of interest in the flowers. Right beside her there is a red-pink rosebud, which she first gently skims with her index before bending her neck to sniff the flower with a theatrical gesture and to finally gasp in wonderment. I burst out laughing. Then I realize that Brother Jacob and Brother Matthew have made their way out of the library into the garden. I don’t know how long they’ve been standing there for, watching us, but they both have beaming smiles. They then rally up more brothers, and by the end, there are eleven of them; the only one missing is Brother Zacharias. They want Flóra Sól to give a repeat performance of sniffing the rose. The child enjoys being in the limelight and continues her act without further ado. The monks laugh for a good while. I’m a little bit stressed about having the child in the garden; it’s considered to be within the walls of the monastery, and I never intended to stop there for long.

Brother Michael vanishes and swiftly returns with a ball in his hands; it’s the size of a football, except that it’s pink and has the picture of a dolphin on it, as far as I can make out. They confer on how best to organize the game so that the child can be in the middle and come to the conclusion that it’s best to place it on the lawn and very slowly roll the ball toward the child. My daughter titters and laughs and claps her hands. She’s quick to grasp the rules of the game. I see her stroking Brother Paul’s bald head. Before going home I clip a bunch of roses to take with me. It occurs to me as I’m giving the child a piggyback down the steps that I must remember to ask Brother Gabriel for his vegetable soup recipe.

As soon as the bouquet of roses is in water in the middle of the kitchen table, I feel it was a bit rash of me to come home with all those roses. I must at least make it clear that the roses are from the child to the mother.

I discuss the garden with Anna in the evening, once I’ve put the child to bed. I tell her I’m trying to save a centuries-old rose garden, with some unique species, from neglect and abandonment.

—Your dad didn’t mention any work in the garden, she says.

—Many species are in danger of extinction, I say, and that’ll reduce the flora, I add, a point of view the genetics expert should well understand.

—Yeah, she says, it’s no problem to split the day so that I’ll be with Flóra Sól in the afternoons while you go to the garden. Instead I’ll do a bit of studying in the evenings, when she’s asleep, if that’s OK by you.