The Return

27

She wakes up yet again.

She can feel the darkness and his heavy presence like pressure on her chest. She cautiously heaves herself up on an elbow and tries to make out the faint phosphorescent glow of the alarm clock’s hands.

Half past three. Very nearly. As far as she can see. The air in the bedroom is compact and stuffy, despite the window standing ajar. She raises herself into a sitting position and gropes around with her feet on the uneven floor until she finds her slippers.

She stands up and tiptoes cautiously out of the room, picking up her thin and worn terry-cloth robe on the way. She closes the door and puts her ear against the cool wood. She can hear his heavy, occasionally rattling breathing even at this distance.

She shivers and puts on her robe, then slowly makes her way down the stairs.

Down. That’s the worst. The pain in her hips sends red-hot needles up and down through her body. Along her spine and up into the back of her head, down to the arch of her foot and into her toes. It’s remarkable how mobile this pain can be.

It gets worse with every step she takes.

With every day. More and more acute. It becomes more and more difficult not to turn her feet inward and hunch her back.

It becomes harder and harder to walk.

She slumps down at the kitchen table, rests her head in her hands and feels the throbbing pain slowly receding. Waits until it has faded away completely before turning her thoughts to that other business.

That other matter.

Three times tonight she has been jettisoned by that dream. Three times.

The same ghastly idea. The same unbearable image.

Whenever he’s come upstairs and plummeted down beside her, she’s pretended to be asleep. He hasn’t touched her. Not even placed a hand on her hip or shoulder. She’s got him as far as that. He never touches her now, and she knows this is a victory she has achieved, despite everything. She has come this far thanks to her own efforts.

Beyond reach. Her body is beyond reach. Now and forevermore.

She need never be taken advantage of again.

The unspoken agreement is a sort of murky bond between them, but it is only now that she has begun to appreciate the price. The counterbalance. The incomprehensible horror on the other side of the scales.

Everything has its price, but she has not had any choice. There can be no question of guilt regarding her decision and her action—she knows all too well what would be the outcome of giving herself again to this man, even though he is her husband and the father of her child. There is medical advice as well; it’s not just her. It would have a detrimental effect on her physical and mental health, and what ability to move around she still retains. If she were to become pregnant, that is. She must not give birth again. Must never give herself to him again. The hub of her life is in her pelvis. Ever since that terrible night when she gave birth, it has to be protected and made as inaccessible as a hallowed room.

A hallowed room?

This really is the way her thoughts are tending. Can anybody understand why?

God or her mother or any other woman?

No, nobody. She is on her own in this matter. A barren woman with a husband and a child. At long last she has learned how to accept the inevitable. He must never again be allowed inside her, and now his hands and the whole of his body have given up their vain attempts to plead and grope around. At long last he has resigned himself to the inevitable.

But the price?

Perhaps she did realize early on that there would be a price to pay. But now? Did she realize this would be the price?

The thought is horrific. Not even a thought; no more than the fragment of a dream. An image that has raced through her consciousness at such a dizzy speed and with such incomprehensible clarity that she has been unable to understand it.

Perceive, yes. Comprehend, no.

She has seen it, but not taken it in.

She stands up and makes her way to the stove. Switches on the light over the sink and fills a pan with water.

As it comes to a boil and she stands watching the bubbles break loose and rise to the surface, she thinks about Andrea.

Andrea, who is lying in bed on the other side of the wall behind the stove, sleeping the sleep of the innocent. Two years old—two years and two months, to be precise, and she wants to be precise tonight—and lying there underneath Grandma’s crocheted quilt, sucking away at two fingers. She doesn’t need to see in order to know. The image of her daughter is everywhere; she can summon it up in her mind’s eye whenever she needs to, without any effort at all.

Andrea. The only child she will ever have. It is a miracle that she is alive, and all other considerations are as nothing, compared with that.

All others? she asks herself: But she already knows the answer.

Yes, all others. She takes the pan off the stove.

She sips her tea and opens the cotton curtains slightly. All she can see is the reflection of her own face and a strip of the interior of the kitchen. She closes them again.

I dare not think, she admits to herself. I dare not think clearly. I must keep it at a distance. When the images crop up inside my head, I must learn to close the eyes of my soul.

Must.

They’ve found her now. That’s what she said in the shop, Mrs. Malinska, and there was both controlled and hysterical triumph in her deep voice.

They’ve found her over at Goldemaars swamp.

Dead.

Strangled.

Naked.

And suddenly, in this lonely kitchen, at this lonely hour, she shudders so violently that she spills her cup of tea over the table. The hot tea runs over the checked oilcloth cover and drips onto her right thigh, but several seconds pass before she is able to stop the flow.

It was that Saturday. Eighteen days ago, or however long it was. There’s been no sign of her since then, the slut; that’s when it must have happened.

That Saturday, in the afternoon. She can see so clearly in her mind’s eye as well. I’ll go and clear some brushwood, he’d said, and there was something in his voice and his obstinate look that she recognized and might well have been able to understand, if only she’d tried hard enough.

But why should she? Andrea was the important thing, and it’s Andrea that’s important now. Why should she have to understand what she doesn’t want to understand?

It was late when he came back home, and she knew something had happened. Not what, but something.

She could see it in his big hands as he wrung them, not knowing what to do with himself. In the blood throbbing guiltily through the veins in his temples. In his eyes, crying for help and a reduction in the pain.

In the horror that filled his body.

She had seen it, but not grasped what.

But now she is sitting here, and she knows. Dries her thigh with her hand and feels the pain come creeping back. She knows the girl must not be allowed to know.

Nobody must know. Least of all her. The image of Andrea floats back into her mind and covers all the burning and black knowledge she possesses with a protective balm.

The comforting angel.

The child of oblivion.

Nothing has happened. She has no suspicions.

Only that one.

She stands up once more and pads over to the cupboard; she shakes out two pills from the brown glass jar. Washes them down with a mouthful of water direct from her cupped hand.

For the pain.

For the sleeplessness.

For the dreams and suspicions and knowledge.

Why? she asks herself as she makes her way slowly back up the stairs.

I am so young. My life is close to its beginning, but already I’m bound hand and foot.

To this husband.

To this daughter.

To this aching body.

To this resolve to be forever silent?