The Greenhouse

Sixty-four

Anna is late and hasn’t returned home from the library yet. It suddenly occurs to me that she might have met someone in the village and gone to the café with him, that the guy on the library steps might be delaying her. I can easily imagine her being accosted by a man, one of those guys who has been ogling her on the streets, inventing some excuse, and because she’s so good and kind or spaced-out even, she might sit with him at the café. She’ll only stop for a bit, she’ll say, because she’s rushing home, but because he’s such a smooth talker he might make her forget her genetics and also make her laugh and forget what time it is.

So when she appears in the doorway five minutes later, slightly drenched from the rain, and with a box of cakes from the bakery in her arms, I’m unable to hide how delighted I am. I’m totally astounded by how absurdly thrilled I am, as if I were discovering her for the first time. She hands me the cakes and I find myself saying that she’s in a nice sweater, although, of course, it’s the same green sweater that she was in at the breakfast table. Then I suddenly grow insecure and burst into a blush and, even worse, she blushes, too. I feel uneasy and, to switch topics, offer to go downstairs to the laundry room and wash some of her clothes in the machine for her since I need to wash my working clothes.

— Since I have to do a wash for Flóra Sól anyway, I add as nonchalantly as possible, regretting it as soon as I’ve said it.

She looks somewhere between surprised and relieved.

— OK, she says. Can it be both whites and colors?

— Yeah, both. I can do two loads.

I haven’t a clue of what I’m getting myself into. I could have washed the kid’s tiny things in the sink.

— Can it be underwear as well or just jeans and T-shirts? she asks from the room.

— Underwear is fine, too. Do you mind if I wash your clothes with mine?

There’s no turning back after this.

I first put the girls’ laundry into one machine, and then I throw my working clothes into the second load. It takes me a hell of a long time to read the instructions and figure out how the machine works. When I’ve finished washing, I carry the wet laundry upstairs, clutching it in my arms, and hang it on the washing lines stretched over the balcony. Here I stand in a white T-shirt with clothes pegs between my teeth, just a few yards away from the old pensioner on the other side of the street, who hangs around home in his vest all day. I first hang up my daughter’s leggings and then her mother’s panties, so that, bit by bit, I’m putting my private life on the line, like the bloodstained sheets that used to be hung on balconies on wedding nights in the olden days. The old man watches me in eager anticipation, as I expose my temporary family life to the eyes of the world. No one should jump to any rash conclusions, though, just because I’m trying to make my child’s mother’s life easier by cooking for her while she researches her thesis in my rented apartment.