“What did you say?”
“I said I was.”
She laughs at that. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” he says.
He sits on the plastic-wicker sofa.
She’s standing in front of him.
He looks up at her, having to squint despite the fact that it’s overcast. He even shields his eyes with his hand for a moment. It’s not warm out there and her nipples have appeared through the fabric of the T-shirt.
“So there’s not a lot to do?” he says.
“No,” she says.
“So what have you been doing?”
“Not much.”
There’s a silence and then she says, “Want to see the bathroom? It’s quite amazing.”
“Sure,” he says.
They have sex in the bathroom, just sort of anyhow, still half-dressed on the warm marble. It’s over in about two minutes and then they lie in the enormous oval tub with their heads at opposite ends. The tub is in the middle of the floor, its exterior finished in the same smoke-veined white marble as everything else there. They spend nearly an hour in it, their legs intertwined under the greenish water, or lying heavily on each other’s slippery torsos.
Her small pink foot is next to his face.
If he shuts one eye it seems to be next to her head, at the far end of the tub.
He half-sits to let in more hot.
“Are you hungry?” she asks.
“Starting to be.”
“Should we order something?”
“Okay.”
“I don’t want to go out,” she says.
“No,” he agrees.
They order some food up to the suite and watch the stupidly huge TV. After hopping around for a while, they end up with what seems to be the German version of Strictly. It’s easy to follow, and amazing how quickly allegiances form. Within twenty minutes it feels as if they’ve always been emotionally involved in the lives of these people, as if they’ve always wanted some of them to succeed and some of them to fail.
They laugh at them too, of course. Just the fact that they’re speaking German seems funny when everything else is so familiar from the English version. There seems to be a contradiction, she says, between the German language as they experience it and light entertainment formats. Certainly the fact that everyone is speaking German makes the sequined costumes seem even more camp.
The doorbell of the suite sounds.
István, in one of the hotel dressing gowns—it’s made of a heavy quilted material the color of bronze—opens the door and the man pushes the cart into the room.
When he starts to unload it onto the table, István says, “No, it’s okay, just leave it.”
He signs for it and hands the man the ten-euro note that Helen took from her purse for the tip.
The man thanks him.
“No worries,” István says.
The man withdraws, and István wheels the cart over to the sofa facing the TV and lifts the metal covers from the plates.
“Thanks,” she says.
It’s dark outside by then.
After eating he smokes a cigarette on the terrace.
When he steps back inside she asks him if he wants to stay the night.
“Is that okay?” he asks.
“Yes, it’s okay,” she says.
It’s the first time that he’s ever slept in her bed.
The next morning they have breakfast at Café Luitpold, which is about a ten-minute walk away, on the other side of the Hofgarten.
She says she discovered it during the weeks she was there on her own.
While they wait for their food, he asks how her husband is. It’s the first time that either of them has mentioned him.
“He’s okay,” she says.
And then she says, “No, actually he’s not okay.”
“No?”
“No.”
“The operation?” István asks.
“It was last week.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“Was it successful?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “It’s too early to say. It’s not just that though.”
“What is it?” he asks.
For a while she doesn’t say anything.
She has a sip of her coffee.
“He’s just very depressed,” she says. “That’s what’s hardest to deal with in a way, the way the physical difficulties lead to emotional difficulties, and there just seems to be no way out of it.”
“Yeah,” István says.
“The whole situation is just awful.”
He nods.
She visits her husband most days. The hospital isn’t actually in Munich. It’s in another town, about eighty kilometers away.
István drives her there, in an Audi that they hire. First they take the highway east out of Munich, and then switch to another one, going south with the mountains straight ahead of them now. Sometimes the mountains dissolve in shafts of sunlight. Sometimes they stand dark and solid against the sky. They drive toward them and ten minutes later they’re nearly there. Soon after the exit there are signs for Onkologisches Kompetenzzentrum Bad Trissl.
István parks, and they walk across the asphalt to the entrance.
While she’s upstairs he sits on one of the leather sofas in the lobby looking at things on his phone.
She usually spends about an hour up there.
They usually drive back to Munich in silence and usually arrive at around dusk.
At first he leaves his things in his own room in the hotel. Slowly, though, they start to migrate and within a week most of his clothes are in her cupboards and his washbag and shaving kit, his toothbrush and his skincare products, are on the smoke-veined white marble next to one of the sinks in her bathroom.
The doctor tells her that they plan to start the chemotherapy as soon as her husband has recovered from the surgery, which has left him extremely weak. He says there’s no way that the surgery alone will stop the cancer.
“Okay,” she says. As a response to what the doctor has just said, it feels insufficient. She doesn’t know what else to say though.
The doctor says, “I’m not sure how to put this.”
She looks at him, waiting.
“I’m a bit worried about your husband’s attitude.”
“What do you mean?” she asks.
“The will to fight is very important,” the doctor says.
“Yes,” she says.
“You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe if you could talk to him,” the doctor says.
“Okay,” she says.
“You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you,” the doctor says.
She tells István what the doctor said to her. They’re driving back to Munich. The snow that fell a few days ago still looks faintly luminous up on the mountains even though it’s already dark on the highway.
“Are you going to talk to him?” he asks her.
“And say what?”
“I don’t know.”
“He seemed really pessimistic,” she says.
“The doctor?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say exactly?”
“It wasn’t what he said so much. It was his whole demeanor or whatever. I think he thinks Karl’s going to die.”
“He’d tell you if he thought that.”
“No, he wouldn’t,” she says.
He wonders whether to ask her about the money, what happens to it if her husband dies.
He doesn’t.
She’s in tears.
“You okay?”
She shakes her head. He feels her do it. It’s too dark to see.
He holds her for a while, feeling the wetness of her tears on his shoulder.
“What is it?” he says.
“He’s going to die,” she says.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“We don’t know.”
“I know.”
“Shh.”
His head hurts. He has no idea what time it is. His eyes are open, though the darkness is so solid around them that it makes no difference.
“It’s my fault,” she says.
“No it isn’t.”
“Yes it is.”
“Why do you say that?”
While he waits for her to answer he nearly falls asleep again.
He’s not sure if she has answered or not.
She might have answered. He might have been asleep when she did. He might have fallen asleep and woken up again without even noticing.