On A Day Like This (6 page)

The hospital was right behind the Gare du Nord. Andreas walked right past it every day on his way to work, and had never noticed it was there. Delphine drew up outside the main entrance, and kissed him on the mouth.

“Good luck,” she said. She said she wouldn’t be far away. He was to call her when he was finished.

“I’ve no idea how long it’ll be,” said Andreas.

“Doesn’t matter. I’ve got something to read.”

The operation itself didn’t take long, but afterward Andreas had to go and lie down for a couple of hours, even though he’d only been given a local anesthetic. When they told him he could go, he called Delphine. She said she’d be there in fifteen minutes. He was to wait for her at the entrance. He went out into the big hospital forecourt, ringed by three-story buildings of light-colored sandstone. The complex put him in mind of a barracks or prison. In the middle of the yard was a piece of lawn surrounded by a low hedge, at the far end of it was a tower with a clock. It was half past four. The yard was deserted, except for the occasional doctor or nurse crossing it with quick steps. It was astonishingly quiet, with no sense of the bustling city beyond.

Andreas tried to imagine what it would be like to have to spend weeks or months here, to have a bed behind one of the windows, and lie there weakened after an operation or a course of therapy. He would barely be able to take the few steps to the window, or out into the corridor. He was too weak to wish to be anywhere other than in bed, back in the semi-stupor in which he spent his nights and days. Then, in the middle of the night once, he found himself wide awake. He listened. It was raining outside, and the noise of the rain mingled with the sounds of his neighbor breathing. He got up and left the ward. He walked through darkened corridors and down wide staircases to the exit. He snuck past the porter, walked through the city, barefoot and in pajamas. Catch cold, he was thinking, catch my death of cold. Those strange sentences. A patrol car followed him for a while, but he slipped away through a pedestrian street.

Andreas emerged onto the street. A couple of tourists were hurriedly lugging big plastic suitcases across the road to the station. For a moment he thought of catching the next train, never mind where to, anywhere they wouldn’t be able to find him. He failed to spot Delphine, who was parked only a few yards away. She had to wind down the window and call his name.
Delphine moved freely about the apartment, as if she had been there many times before. She made tea for Andreas. She found everything right away, the teabags, the teapot, the matches to light the gas.

Andreas, wearing pajamas, was lying down on the sofa. He felt freezing, though it wasn’t cold. Delphine brought him a blanket from the bedroom, and sat down in a chair opposite him. He smiled, and she furrowed her brow.

“What are you, my lover or my nurse?”

“I’m used to it,” she said. “My mother was often sick.”

Andreas was surprised his situation didn’t feel more awkward to him. When he’d been ill before, he would crawl into a corner, and refuse any offers of help or visits. Now, though, he was glad Delphine was with him, looking after him and talking to him.

“Was it very bad?”

“It didn’t hurt, and it doesn’t hurt now. But the idea of them cutting you open and shoving something inside you, that’s terrible.”

He said he didn’t want to talk about it now. He wanted to rest. Delphine asked him whether he would like her to read aloud to him. She went over to the bookshelf, and browsed through the titles.

“Jack London,” she said, “wasn’t he that gold miner? What are you in the mood for? Understanding Germany? Switzerland from the Air, The Judge and His Hangman? A Short Grammar of the German Language, Bertolt Brecht?”

She groaned.

“Can you read German?”

Delphine said she had taken it at school, but forgotten most of it. Andreas pointed her to the little book on the coffee table. That was fairly simple, he said, school level. Delphine worked out the title.

“Love Without Frontiers,” she said. “And you give that kind of thing to your kids?”

“No,” said Andreas, and shut his eyes. Delphine cleared her throat and began to read.

Delphine read softly and slowly. Sometimes she got her stresses so wrong that Andreas had to concentrate hard
to follow the text. After a while he gave up the effort, and just followed the sound of her voice.

He tried to picture Fabienne walking in the village, but he couldn’t do it. He could barely remember her face. He saw Sylvie and Nadia and the teacher with the big breasts, and, when he briefly opened his eyes, Delphine, leaning over the book and slowly and with difficulty forming German sentences that she could probably not understand more than half of. He remembered the first lessons in the German book, the language tapes, the friendly detached voice speaking nonsensical sentences:
The grass is green. The sky is blue. The pine is tall
. And then the expectant silence that made the sentences into questions. Was the grass really green? Was the sky blue? And then the voice a second time, repeating the sentence. The grass was green, and the world was the way it had always been.

Andreas remembered meeting Fabienne for the first time. It was at a twentieth birthday party for Manuel’s sister Beatrice, with whom he went out later. At the time he barely knew Beatrice. He had met her a couple of times while doing homework with Manuel. Presumably she had invited him because of her brother, who didn’t have many friends. At the time, Fabienne was newly arrived in the village. He couldn’t remember where Beatrice knew her from.

The party was in a cottage in the woods. The woods were bordered on one side by industrial terrain and a gravel pit, but the hut was on the other, by the river. When Andreas arrived, there was a big fire already going. Young men and women stood around talking. He propped his bike against a tree, and watched as they went around getting things ready. Most of the guests he knew vaguely by sight. A couple of young men came out of the forest with huge bundles of wood, which they dropped on the ground beside the fire. Beatrice was peeling clingwrap off bowls of salad, and Manuel was pricking sausages. Fabienne caught Andreas’s eye right away. She never left Beatrice’s side.

After they had eaten, Beatrice unpacked the presents, and asked who each one was from, and thanked the people without looking at them properly. Andreas’s present was a book by Albert Camus that he had only recently read himself. The two young men who had brought the wood were now burning cardboard plates and napkins on the fire. Andreas watched as the laminated finish on the plates bubbled up before the plates suddenly caught fire and were consumed with a greenish flame in a matter of seconds.

A birthday cake was produced, and Beatrice and Fabienne pumped coffee from a giant thermos flask.

One of the young men had brought a guitar, and Christian songs were sung that Andreas didn’t know.

Fabienne looked ravishing in the firelight. When their eyes met, she smiled. She seemed not to know the songs either.

Someone began telling jokes. Then Beatrice suggested playing hide and seek. Everyone paired off, and because most of the guests knew each other from the Christian youth group, and a few of them were couples already, at the end only Fabienne and Andreas were left over. Beatrice explained the rules, and told people not to go too far. She and her friend stayed by the fire, and started counting down.

The wood was bright, the moon was almost full, but it was hard keeping your bearings. The noise and the laughter of the others could be heard from all sides, as they stumbled over the uneven forest floor. Andreas followed a narrow path. Fabienne followed him at a distance. They had yet to exchange a word. After
about fifty yards they left the path and came to a little hollow.

“What about here,” whispered Andreas. He crouched down and looked back in the direction of the hut, where the light of the fire, now almost burned down, shone weakly. Then he heard Beatrice call: “Ready or not, here we come!”

Fabienne was leaning against a tree, as though she didn’t care whether she was found or not. They waited. Shouts and laughter were heard in the forest. The first couple were found, and joined in the search. They seemed to be walking along the edge of the forest, their voices getting louder and then quieter. The fire had flared up once more, and then collapsed into itself. Now you couldn’t make it out anymore.

“They’ll never find us in the dark,” said Fabienne. It was the first sentence that Andreas heard from her mouth. She spoke French. He asked her where she was from. Paris, she said, her parents lived on the outskirts of Paris.

After some time, Andreas got up, and they crept back to the hut. Only Manuel was there, poking the embers with a branch. The others had gone to the gravel pit, he said. Fabienne and Andreas sat down, and Manuel
started asking Fabienne questions. And in the end, they arranged to go swimming on Sunday.

When Andreas awoke, it was still dark. Delphine was still sitting in her chair, her legs stretched out on the coffee table, asleep. The book was in her lap.

Andreas wondered what she was doing here. He was almost twice her age, and had no idea what there was for her in making tea for a sick man and reading him children’s stories. They barely knew each other.

He undid the top buttons of his pajama jacket, and prodded the bandage over the wound. It didn’t hurt, but the thought of the incision beneath the bandage made him feel nauseous. He got up to go to the bathroom. When he returned, Delphine was up. He asked her if she didn’t have to go. She said she had nothing planned.

“If you like, I’ll stay the night with you.”

“I’m not up to much, I’m afraid.”

Delphine told him not to be stupid, sex wasn’t everything. She asked him if he was hungry. He shook his head.

“You must eat.”

She went into the kitchen. Andreas heard her open and shut the fridge. She called over to say she would go
out and buy a couple of things, was there a store nearby that was still open. Andreas said there was a greengrocer on the corner who stayed open till midnight. She said she’d be back right away. He wanted to give her some money, but by the time he was in the hall, she was already gone. Andreas had never lived together with a woman. It was a strange feeling, having someone moving around in his apartment, and going shopping and cooking for him.

He went back to the sitting room, and stopped in front of the mantel. His eye fell on a little framed photograph there. His father had taken it before Andreas had gone to Paris. It was one of the few things Andreas had wanted to keep when his father died. He picked up the picture and looked at it, and then at himself in the mirror over the mantel. He was startled by how little he had changed. His features had gotten a little harder, but the basic expression was still the same, an expression of friendly indifference.

Andreas studied the inscrutable expression, just as strange to him now as it was at the time it was taken. When pictures were put up in the staff room from a party or a graduation, he often couldn’t recognize himself in them, and when he looked at them he couldn’t remember how he had felt when they were taken. He
remembered his father taking that picture. They had gone out into the garden together. His father had got Andreas to stand in the shade under the sumac, and then sheepishly clicked the release a couple of times. It was the hopeless wish to capture his son. Presumably that had occurred to Andreas too, because he had a smile on his lips, half sympathetic, half-mocking. Only much later did it dawn on him how brave and affectionate it had been on the part of his father.

Not many days later, Andreas had left. He still remembered the silent leave-taking from his father. It was a Saturday, and the local train was packed with people going to the next village, or to the city, to go to the cinema or the theater. Andreas felt he stood out, with his big suitcase and his far-off destination. When the train pulled away, his father waved. His lips moved, perhaps to say something. Andreas briefly raised his hand. He was embarrassed. Only later had he understood that he would never be able to go back to the village. A few months later, when he went home for a visit during the vacation, everything felt different. After that, his visits were rarer and rarer, and finally they stopped altogether.

Andreas put the photograph back on the mantelpiece. He had never had many pictures of his family.
The few that he had been given lay in a drawer somewhere. He wondered what had possessed him to put this one out—a picture of himself.

It was ten o’clock. Delphine was in the kitchen, chopping vegetables. Andreas watched her. She said he could go and lie down, it would be at least another quarter of an hour till the soup was ready.

“Why are you doing this?”

“Doing what?”

“You could be going to the cinema or meeting friends or what do I know.”

“It’s second nature. If a friend is ill … Anyway, I went to the cinema yesterday.”

“I can make soup for myself,” said Andreas. “Anyway, we’re not friends. We hardly know each other.”

Delphine put down the knife and looked at him in astonishment. She said if he was bothered by her being there, he just had to tell her. Andreas apologized. He said he hadn’t meant it in a bad way.

After supper, he said he would go to bed, the operation had taken more out of him than he had first thought. Delphine carried the dirty dishes out. He heard her washing up, and putting the plates away.

She had her toiletry bag with her, but no nightie. She said she hadn’t been sure what she intended to happen, and so she had struck a sort of deal with herself. Andreas lent her a T-shirt, and she went to the bathroom. He heard her showering, then she came out and lay down next to him on the bed. She leaned across him, kissed him on the mouth and said good night.