A train glided through the twilight in an arc. He looked at his mother. Neither of them had said anything for a while. They had never talked to each other a lot, not even when he lived at home. They mostly spoke of practical things and in the evenings both sat reading. Now and then she would laugh and read a snatch aloud to him, which he listened to with only half an ear. Not until he grew up did he realise that she had never really known how to get in touch with him, exhausted and remote from the world as she was. He had misunderstood her awkwardness and taken it as coldness.
The row of lit carriage windows passed across her thick, curved lenses and hid her eyes. She put a hand on the parapet and stroked the painted cement with her palm. It’s still warm, she said, smiling. From the sun… He touched it for himself. She was right, the cement was still quite warm. It left a fine layer of grey dust in his palm. He wiped it off on his trousers. She would have called him one of these days if he hadn’t come. Perhaps it didn’t mean so much to him to hear it, but his father was dead, she had seen the announcement in the newspaper. Again that phrase, your father, as if she herself had had nothing to do with him.
She had never mentioned him in any other way. She had hardly ever mentioned him at all, the gentlemen’s hairdresser in a distant provincial town he had once been on the point of visiting. He didn’t know what to say. He tried to realise it but could not feel anything. She tried to read his silence. She did not feel upset about it, she said, it was all so long ago. Her tone was unusually hard, almost blunt. The death announcement had been signed by the children. So he had had more than one since he left them. The funeral had taken place. She smiled briefly and looked at him as if to catch him feeling moved. Still, it was strange, he finally got out.
The strange thing was that she had ever married the man. But of course, she went on, if I hadn’t, you wouldn’t have been born. He lowered his eyes and lit a cigarette. Now he mustn’t think she had gone around snivelling over his father all these years. It had been a misunderstanding that they had ever got together, and it had only been an instance of the irony of fate that he was the one to take his leave… She stopped and drank the rest of her coffee. For a moment her face was nothing but spectacles and cup. She probably hadn’t ever told him about it. Her voice was different now, softer.
She had been the cloakroom attendant at a restaurant where there was dancing. A musician who played the bass worked there. She’d been secretly in love with him for months, and finally he caught sight of her. One early morning when the restaurant closed he went home with her to her room. The landlady was always asleep when she got home from work, but all the same she asked him to take his shoes off on the stairs. He still had his orchestra dinner jacket on, a sparkly one, and patent shoes. When he took off the shoes she saw he had a hole in one sock. His big toe stuck out. She smiled at the thought and pushed at the handle of her coffee cup so the cup turned half round.
When she saw his pale big toe poking out of the sock and his expression when he realised she had seen it she knew she loved him. She smiled again and looked into the empty cup. If he hadn’t had that hole in his sock she probably wouldn’t have let him. Everything else about him had been perfect. He had been so well groomed it made her frightened, but that morning she was no longer frightened. She had always hated being so tall and broad-shouldered, she had felt like a lighthouse, but he was just as tall and he made her feel they matched each other. He had had such a nice voice, and he had said some nice things to her. No one had spoken to her like that before.
She stopped and looked up. He should have been your father, she said. They had been together for a couple of months, she and the handsome bass player. She had been in seventh heaven until summer arrived and he met someone else. She looked out over the parapet towards the brick mass of the heating station that still kept a faint reddish glow in the midst of all the blue. Then she had come across the gentlemen’s hairdresser. Robert gave her a long look. She felt it and met his eyes. But he was not to sit there feeling sorry for her, it was long ago. She had been so young. Things didn’t always come up to expectations, he knew that himself, it was nothing to snivel over. She rose and piled up the cups to carry them out. Hadn’t he better call those people?
He rang and again heard the well-modulated woman’s voice. Still no contact with the mobile. He had already come to a decision. Carefully he picked Lauritz up and put his pine cones in his pocket. The boy raised his head, half asleep, and then laid it back against Robert’s shoulder. His mother stroked him kindly on the back when they said goodbye in the doorway. She didn’t usually do that, she had never been very demonstrative. On the way downstairs the light went out. He went slowly down the stairs towards the little glowing orange point where the switch was, afraid of stumbling with the sleeping child in his arms.
He laid him on the back seat, covered him with his jacket and drove through the town and southwards along the motorway. As the blue road signs approached and rushed past, he thought of the unknown bass player with the nice voice, who should have been his father. Who would he have been then? Had his mother occasionally put the same question to herself when she sat on her balcony or lay on the sofa and looked up from her book for a moment? Had he been a reminder that just grew and grew all through his childhood, that nothing turned out according to plan? It wasn’t anything to snivel over, she had said, and instead of snivelling she had stuck to her job and sacrificed herself for her son. She had sought flight in novels and, compared with their more dramatic and tragic fates, she had doubtless thought her own was too trivial and average ever to be called a fate. It had just turned out as it had. Nothing to write home about.
There were a lot of lorries on the motorway, German, Italian, Spanish lorries, and Dutch ones. He stayed in the inside lane although that made him slower. He felt like listening to music but did not switch on for fear of waking Lauritz. It was really a kind of kidnapping, but what could he do? It was a real mess. He had stumbled straight into the chaos and confusion of perfect strangers as if they were his concern. He recalled an expression he had often heard his mother use when she commented on something she had witnessed or heard about. As if it was anything special. That was her judgement when someone complained of their troubles or protested at life’s injustice. Only war, natural catastrophes and mortal illness could produce a sympathetic remark. Was it her own privations that had made her so scornful towards others’ woes? He did not believe that, for she had never seemed bitter, only extremely remote. It was more likely that her contempt for her own pain had made her unfeeling about others’, until she stopped distinguishing.
When she sighed it was not because she was sorry for herself. Her nose and throat had just developed into a kind of ventilator from which disappointment, regret and sorrow were ejected now and then, quietly and without fuss. That was all she allowed herself, a minor character, as in her own opinion she was, in the great novel of the world, whose chief action in any case took place somewhere else, far out of range. Her frugality was not only dictated by her scant means, she practised it on principle and maybe it was a way of compensating for her unusual height, which had embarrassed her so when she was young. She apparently thought she took up more space than was right, and so ought to restrict her existence in every way possible. She had never thought of herself and as a whole had spent everything she earned on her son. Once she had bought a bicycle for his birthday, a shining, brand-new blue cycle with white tyres. He had wished for one for a whole year without ever really believing he would get it, but when he woke in the morning and saw it standing beside his bed, his rejoicing was dulled by the thought of what it had cost.