The Drowned Boy

7

Tenth of August. Evening.

Carmen watched him from the window. She stood there for a while, wringing her hands. Nicolai had walked across the yard and onto the jetty. Now he was sitting on the edge and looked terrible. She went down after him, slowly, hesitantly, uncertain what to say. The words she was so frantically trying to catch seemed to grow like toads in her mouth, and suddenly she felt thirsty.

“Nicolai,” she said gently, “he’s never coming back. And we have to deal with it somehow. The future, I mean, and how we cope. Come inside, Nicolai. We have to eat; it’s getting late.” She stood on the jetty and begged and pleaded. But Nicolai was ashen with grief, his thin brown hair bedraggled. She had never seen him like this before, never seen him so helpless and forsaken.

“How can you think about food,” he said, “when Tommy’s gone forever? I just don’t get how you can think about food.”

She sat down beside him and took him by the arm. Her nails against his skin felt like sharp claws.

“If we don’t eat, then we’ll die too. And Tommy wouldn’t have wanted that,” she said seriously.

Nicolai flared up, unable to help himself.

“You know nothing about what Tommy would want,” he said, his voice bitter. “You should have shut the door. You know what he’s like, that he gets everywhere. People say those children are slow, but not our Tommy. He was quick as lightning.”

“Yes, but it was so hot,” she complained. “And you were in the cellar as usual. It’s nice and cool down there, so it’s easy for you to talk. You don’t need to put the blame on me,” she added. “That’s not fair. It’s bad enough as it is, without you making it worse. We’re going to have to talk sometime. We have to sort out the funeral and a whole lot of other things. Pappa Zita will be here soon; he’ll help us get started.”

Nicolai picked at a loose splinter in the dark wood with nails that were bitten to the quick.

“What did they ask you about?” she said after a pause. “They asked me all kinds of things. They even wanted to know if I breastfed him. I don’t see why they have to go into such detail. It just seems nosy to me.”

“You don’t understand anything, do you? You don’t get how serious this is. Tommy’s dead and gone. He drowned, and it’s our fault because we didn’t keep an eye on him. He wanted to know what you were doing when Tommy left the house. What were you doing?”

She thought about it. “I was just puttering around, tidying up, you know. And I wanted to clean the fish for supper. I went into the bathroom to rinse out some washing. Everything happened so fast. And I looked for him in all the rooms before I even thought about the pond. Come on now, we have to go in,” she nagged. “Mom and Dad will be here soon, and they’ll help us with supper.”

“You and your supper,” he snapped. “Just go and stuff your face, why don’t you. I’m not going anywhere. If your dad wants anything, he can come down here to the jetty, because this is where I’m going to be all night.”

She stood up, exasperated and desperate. She looked out at the water and the single water lily. Strange that there was only one, so beautiful and white and delicate. And then she spoke without thinking, the words falling from her mouth before she had a chance to stop them.

“We can have another one. We’re so young.”

Nicolai let out a small gasp, as if the thought was monstrous.

“I want to move,” he said quickly. “I don’t want to live by the water, not with children. And I don’t want another one; can you just stop?”

She didn’t reply. Instead she started to walk back to the house, and he followed her slender body with his eyes. There was something strange about her behavior, the way she was walking in her cropped top. In spite of everything, her steps were quick and light, as if she was unaffected by it all. Then a terrible thought struck him, and a shiver ran down his spine despite the warmth in the air. The fact that she seemed so indifferent, that she wanted to engage in life again right away, even though they were in mourning. A deep, bottomless pit of grief. He couldn’t even contemplate food or sleep or work, or the days ahead that would roll on regardless.

“Are you coming?” she turned around and called.

“Didn’t I just say no?” he yelled.

Suddenly he couldn’t contain himself any longer.

“Go, just go. Go and get on with your life!”

She stood there looking at him, astounded by this outburst. She didn’t recognize him, didn’t know this fury. She had never seen it before.

“Do you want a divorce?” she asked out of the blue. Now she was angry as well, because he was being so horrible and difficult.

“Yes,” he said. “Maybe I do. Then you can grieve in your own weird way.”