The Dinner (21 page)

But Claire had also gone to the hospital alone a few times. There was no sense in me missing half a day’s work for a routine visit to her gynaecologist at the hospital, she had said.

I was about to ask Van Dieren whether all pregnant woman were given an amniotic fluid test, or only a particular high-risk group, but gulped back the question right away.

‘Were there amniotic fluid tests thirty or forty years ago?’ I asked instead.

The school psychologist thought about it for a moment. ‘I don’t believe so. No, now that you mention it. In fact, I’m a hundred per cent sure. That was definitely not something they did back then, no.’

We looked at each other; at that moment, I was also a hundred per cent sure that Van Dieren and I were thinking the same thing.

But he didn’t say it. He probably didn’t dare to say it, so I said it for him.

‘In other words, the inadequate state of medical science forty years ago is the only reason I’m sitting here across from you today?’ I said. ‘That I’m here at all,’ I added; it was a superfluous thing to add, but I felt like hearing it from my own mouth.

Van Dieren nodded slowly, a smile of amusement appeared on his face.

‘If you put it that way,’ he said. ‘Had this test been available back then, it’s not entirely unimaginable that your parents would have decided to be safe rather than sorry.’

I took the pills. For the first few days nothing happened. But I’d been told that beforehand: that nothing would happen, that the effects would become noticeable only after a couple of weeks. Still, it struck me that Claire had started looking at me differently from the very beginning.

‘How are you feeling?’ she asked, several times a day.

‘Fine,’ was my stock answer.

And it was actually true. I felt quite fine, I relished the change, above all I relished the fact that I didn’t have to get up in front of the classroom every day: all those faces looking at me, for a full hour, and then other faces that came in for the next hour, and on and on, one hour after the next; if you’ve never stood in front of a class, you don’t know what it’s like.

After a little less than a week, earlier than predicted, the medication began to take effect. I hadn’t expected it to be like that. I had been dreading it; I especially dreaded the thought that it would kick in without my noticing. Personality change, that was my biggest fear: that my personality would be affected, that I would become, though more bearable to those around me, lost to myself. I had read the information leaflets, and they included absolutely alarming contraindications. ‘Nausea’, ‘dry skin’ and a ‘decreased appetite’ were things you could live with, but they also talked about ‘feelings of fear’, ‘hyperventilation’ and ‘memory loss’.

‘This is really potent stuff,’ I told Claire. ‘I’m going to take it, I don’t have any choice, but I want you to promise that you’ll warn me if it goes wrong. If I start forgetting things or acting weird, you have to tell me. Then I’ll stop.’

But my fears proved unfounded. It was on a Sunday afternoon, about five days after I had gulped down the first pills, I was lying on the couch in the living room with the big, fat Saturday newspaper on my lap. Through the sliding glass doors I looked out at the garden, where it had just started to rain. It was one of those days of fluffy white clouds and patches of blue in between, the wind was blowing hard.

I should mention right away that in the months that went before all of this, my own house, my own living room, and along with it, above all, my own presence in that house and in that living room had often frightened me. The fear was directly connected to the existence of so many other people in similar houses and living rooms. Especially in the evening, after dark, when most people were ‘at home’, this fear would quickly take over. From where I lay on the couch I could see, through the bushes and trees, the light from windows across the street. I rarely saw actual people, but those lit windows betrayed their presence – just as my own lit window betrayed my presence. I don’t want to give the wrong impression, I wasn’t afraid of people themselves, of people as a species. I don’t suffer from panic attacks in big crowds, and I’m also not the antisocial guest at parties, the loner no one wants to talk to, whose body language itself announces nothing more loudly than his desire to be left alone. No, it’s something else. It had to do with the provisional status of all those people in their living rooms, in their houses, their housing blocks, their neatly laid-out neighbourhoods of streets, each of which directly leads to another, each square connected by streets to the next square.

That was how I sometimes lay on the couch in our living room in the evening and thought about things. Something in me whispered that I needed to stop thinking, that I should above all not go too far with thinking. But that never worked; I always thought things through to the end, to their most extreme consequence. At this exact moment, I thought, there are people everywhere, lying on couches in living rooms like this one. Later on they will go to bed, they’ll toss and turn a bit, or say something nice to each other, or remain stubbornly silent because they’ve just had an argument and neither of them wants to be the first to admit he was wrong. Then the light goes out. I thought about time, the passing of time, to be precise, how vast, how endless, how long and dark and empty one hour can be. Anyone who thinks like that has no need to think about the infinity of space. I thought about the sheer quantity of people, their numbers, not even in terms of overpopulation, or pollution, or whether in the future there would be enough for everyone to eat, but strictly about the quantity itself. About whether three million or six billion served any given purpose.

Once I had arrived at this point, the first feelings of discomfort would appear. It isn’t that there are too many people, not per se, I would think to myself, but there are an awful lot of them. I thought about the students in my classroom. They all had to do something: they had to make a start in life, they had to go through life. Even though a single hour can be so long. They had to find jobs and form couples. Children would come, and those children too would sit through history classes at school, although no longer taught by me. From a certain vantage point you could see only the presence of people, not the people themselves any more. That was when I would start to panic. From the outside, you wouldn’t have noticed much of anything, except that the newspaper was still lying unread on my lap.

‘Do you want a beer?’ Claire would ask, coming into the room just then with a glass of red wine in her hand.

Now I had to say ‘okay’, without the tone of my voice giving cause for concern. I was afraid my voice would sound like that of someone who has just woken up, who has just got out of bed and hasn’t spoken yet. Or simply a strange voice, not completely recognizable as my own, a scary voice.

Claire would raise her eyebrows and ask, ‘Is something wrong?’

And of course I would deny it, I would shake my head, but much too vehemently, which would give me away, as I, in a strange, scary, squeaky voice that didn’t sound at all like my own, would say: ‘No, everything’s fine. What could be wrong?’

And then? Then Claire would sit down beside me on the couch, she would take my hand, she might also lay a hand on my forehead, the way you do with a child when you’re checking for a temperature. And here it comes. I knew that the door to normal was wide open now: Claire would ask again whether there was really nothing wrong, and I would shake my head again (less vehemently this time); she would go on looking worried at first, but would soon put aside her concern: I was reacting normally, after all, my voice had stopped squeaking and I was answering her questions calmly. No, I had only been sort of lost in thought.

About what?

I don’t even remember any more.

Come on, do you know how long you’ve been sitting here with that newspaper on your lap? An hour and a half, maybe two!

I was thinking about the garden, that maybe we should build a little shed back there.

Paul …

Hmm?

No one thinks about the garden for an hour and a half.

No, of course not, I mean, I was thinking about the garden for the last fifteen minutes or so.

But what about before that?

On that Sunday afternoon, though, a week after my appointment with the school psychologist, I looked at the garden for the first time in a long time without thinking about anything. I heard Claire in the kitchen. She was singing quietly along to something on the radio, a song I didn’t know but in which the words ‘roses by day’ kept coming back.

‘What are you laughing about?’ she said when she came into the room a little later with two mugs of coffee.

‘Oh, just laughing,’ I said.

‘What do you mean, just laughing? You should see yourself. You look like one of those born-again Christians. One big lump of happiness.’

I looked at her, I felt warm, but in a pleasant way, the warmth of a down quilt. ‘I was just thinking …’ I said, but stopped quickly. I’d been planning to start in about a second child. We hadn’t touched on the subject for the last few months. I thought about the difference in age, which in the best case would be almost five years. It was now or never. Still, there was a voice telling me that this was not the time, in a few days perhaps, but not on this Sunday afternoon when the medication had started doing its work.

‘I was thinking that maybe we should build a little shed in the back garden,’ I said.

Looking back on it, that Sunday was the high point as well. The novelty of living a life without guarded thoughts quickly wore off. Life became more constant, more muted, like a party where you can see everyone talking and gesturing, but can’t hear what anyone in particular is saying. No more peaks and troughs. Something was missing. You sometimes hear about people who have lost their sense of smell and taste: for those people, a plate of the most delicious food means nothing at all. That was how I looked at life sometimes, as a warm meal that was growing cold. I knew I had to eat, otherwise I would die, but I had lost my appetite.

A few weeks later I made a final attempt to regain the euphoria of that first Sunday afternoon. Michel had just gone to bed. Claire and I were lying together on the couch, watching a programme about convicts on Death Row in the United States. We have a wide couch, with a little manoeuvring we could both fit on it. Because we were lying next to each other, I didn’t have to look her in the eye.

‘I was just thinking,’ I said. ‘If we were to have another child now, Michel would be five by the time it’s born.’

‘I was thinking the same thing, just recently,’ Claire said. ‘It really isn’t a good idea. We should just be happy with what we have.’

I felt my wife’s warmth, my arm around her shoulders may have pulled her closer for a moment. I thought about my talk with the school psychologist.

Did you ever actually have an amniotic fluid test?

I could ask that, as casually as possible. One disadvantage was that I couldn’t see her eyes at the moment I asked. A disadvantage, and an advantage.

Then I thought about our happiness. About our happy family. Our happy family that should be happy with what it had.

‘Shall we go somewhere next weekend?’ I said. ‘Hire a bungalow or something? You know, just the three of us?’

And then? Then Claire became ill. Claire, who was never ill, at least never had more than a runny nose, who in any case never spent the day in bed with flu, ended up in the hospital. From one day to the next: there was nothing that could have prepared us for her hospitalization, there had been no time to, as they say, make arrangements. In the morning she had felt a little ‘wobbly’, but she had gone out anyway, she had kissed me goodbye, on the lips, then climbed onto her bike. That afternoon I saw her again, but now with a whole series of drips in her arm and a monitor beeping at the head of her bed. She tried to smile, but it was clearly an effort. A surgeon standing in the corridor gestured to me to come over. He needed to talk to me alone.

I’m not going to say what was wrong with Claire, not here, I consider that a private matter. It’s nobody’s business what kind of illnesses you’ve had, in any case it’s up to her if she wants to talk about it, and not up to me. Let’s just say it wasn’t a life-threatening illness, at least not at that stage. That’s a word that was used a few times by friends and family and acquaintances and colleagues when they called. ‘Is it life-threatening?’ they asked. They said it slightly
sotto voce
, but you could hear the thirst for sensation right through it – when people get a chance to come close to death without having it touch them personally, they never miss the opportunity.

What I also remember well is the urge I felt to answer that question in the affirmative. ‘Yes, it’s life-threatening.’ I wanted to hear the silence that would drop at the other end after an answer like that.

So without going into detail about Claire’s illness, I just want to report here what the surgeon said to me in the corridor, after he told me about the coming operation. ‘No, it’s not peanuts,’ he said, having allowed a little pause for me to deal with the news. ‘Your whole life changes from one day to the next. But we do everything we can.’ The last phrase was said in an almost cheerful tone, a tone that clashed with the expression on his face.