The Greenhouse

Twenty-four

— Didn’t you want to get to know the future mother of your child a bit better?

— Yeah, maybe, but it just didn’t happen, we somehow went our separate ways.

— Didn’t you see her again until the baby was born?

— Yeah, once, I say.

I bumped into her again at the end of April as she was lining up to buy a hot dog. I ran across the street and joined her in the queue; there was one man between us. Because I saw her first I had a moment to check her out before I said hi. She was in her blue parka with her thick, dark hair tied in a ponytail and a big scarf wrapped twice around her throat because it was a cold spring. She was visibly pregnant now; the baby had become a fact. I could feel my heart pounding and couldn’t help thinking that there were now two hearts beating inside my half-night stand, but when I tried to revive the memory of our visit to the greenhouse, there were few images other than those of the leaves projected against her stomach.

I heard her order a hot dog with everything except raw onion and a little remoulade, and I remember thinking that then the baby was also having a hot dog with everything except raw onion and that it was being nourished by her, even though its eyes might turn out to be like mine.

I gave the man a chance to serve her before I greeted her by stepping in front of her and just saying hi.

— Hi. She smiled at me with her hot dog in one hand and seemed surprised to see me, shy even. My child’s mother and I were two individuals who now greeted each other on street corners. I asked how she was, but she had just bitten into her hot dog so I waited while she chewed and swallowed. It was clumsy of me to throw a question at her just when her mouth was full, and she tried to chew as fast as she could, while I stared straight at her. Then she wiped some invisible mustard off the corner of her mouth. She had a beautiful mouth. She told me that being pregnant was like being seasick for months on end. I understood her completely and felt partly responsible. I was between sea trips myself, as it happened. She added that the worst of it was now over and that she was starting her exams.

She occasionally glanced at her half-eaten hot dog, as we stood facing each other and I had a direct view of a trickle of mustard beginning to solidify. While she adjusted the violet scarf around her neck, she handed me her hot dog and I held it in my left hand and my own in my right hand. I was minding something for her, the way friends do. She didn’t look like an expectant mother; there was nothing particularly motherly about her, she looked just like a girl who was starting to take her exams and was deeply immersed in essays.

I handed her back her hot dog, and she was looking at me so I involuntarily ran my hand through my thick mop of hair; I wanted to create a good impression. I didn’t know if she ever thought of me; she was probably just trying to work out what the child would look like. It wasn’t easy being a red-haired boy.

— Do you know the sex yet? I asked.

— No, she answered, but I have a feeling that it’s a boy.

For a split second, I thought I had a brief flash of myself walking a boy in a blue playsuit and a blue balaclava. I was either picking him up at his mother’s or returning him; I couldn’t fill in the time gap between those two things. We might have been feeding bread to the ducks — the pond was frozen, and we stood by a hole in the ice where the ducks were squabbling. In the vision I was holding the boy’s hand, I wasn’t going to lose a child I had been entrusted with for half a day down some hole in the ice or anything like that. Nevertheless, I found it difficult to construct a scene out of something that hadn’t become a reality yet. Although I wouldn’t be bringing up my child with its mother — I tested out the sound of those words in my mind, mother of my child—I wasn’t a shit and I felt like telling her that she could count on me, and telling her I could take the boy to his gym classes and we could be friends.

— All the best with your exams, I said as we were saying good-bye. All I could do now was wait for Anna to call me one night to ask me to come and see the baby.

— The only thing I could do was wait for the baby to be born, I say to my traveling companion, and just leave it at that.