Fabienne and Manuel came along right at the end. By the time it was their turn, the first mourners had already left the cemetery. Manuel shook Andreas’s hand with an encouraging-looking smile.
“Glad we could see each other again,” he said, rather too loudly.
Fabienne stood next to him. Andreas looked at her. She smiled, and once again he longed to touch her.
“Your father was a nice man,” she said. She spoke correct German, her accent was barely detectable.
Andreas kissed her on both cheeks, and asked whether she and Manuel would stay to eat with them. He turned to Walter, and asked where the wake was being held. Manuel said unfortunately they wouldn’t be able to stay. His mother was babysitting the boy. They had to be back for lunch. He laughed for no reason. Fabienne asked whether Andreas was staying for any length of time. Why didn’t he come and visit them. She looked at him expectantly. When Andreas said he was going back today, he thought he saw disappointment flash across her face. But he wasn’t sure. Fabienne had composed herself again. She said he hadn’t changed at all.
“Come and see us the next time you’re in the country,” she said. “We’d like that.” But it didn’t sound like an invitation.
“Definitely,” said Andreas. He was annoyed with Fabienne for talking of we and us, and not I.
After the funeral meal, he went back briefly to Walter and Bettina’s place. The wine and the heat had made him tired. It was cool in the apartment. They sat in the sitting room, talking about their father. Walter showed Andreas a stack of old school notebooks. The square paper was divided into vertical columns of dates and numbers.
“You know he kept a record of the temperature each day, highs and lows, plus the humidity and pressure. Always at the same time of day. An endless list. He did it for forty years.”
Andreas said the notebooks seemed familiar. He had never quite understood what his father did it for.
“He stopped a couple of weeks before he died,” said Walter, suddenly bursting into sobs. Andreas couldn’t recall ever having seen him cry before, and felt embarrassed.
Walter had taken care of everything, the cremation, the thanking people, the execution of the will. Andreas had been sent the papers, and signed without reading them. Then Walter and his family moved into their parents’ house, and paid Andreas his share. That was the money he had bought the Paris apartment with. He had been to Switzerland a couple of times since, but never the village.
The thought that the grave was being cleared bothered him. For a moment he thought of going. Then he signed the form and put it in an envelope. He looked for an appropriate postcard. Finally he selected a Gauguin of a Breton village in warm colors. He wrote to say that unfortunately he didn’t have any time to visit Switzerland. He sent his love and best wishes to the family. He mailed the letter right away. He wanted to be free of the matter.
Andreas met Nadia and Sylvie, he did the shopping, he cleaned the apartment, he went to the cinema. The kids at school were difficult, and for the first time in many years, Andreas derived no satisfaction from his job. When the class complained to him about a test, he lectured them. Did they really think he did all that just to give them a hard time? He was doing it for them. He had a syllabus and goals. He hadn’t chosen his profession by chance; he was a teacher by vocation. He said he believed that education made people better. And that as long as they were in school, they had a chance to learn something, while other people had to spend their whole lives doing some stupid job. Knowledge of German would open doors for them, intellectually speaking, especially philosophy, which one couldn’t hope to understand without learning German. German was the language of philosophy, it had a clarity and purity that no other language could claim to have, and at the same time …
The longer he went on, the more hollow his words sounded to him. He looked at the kids slumped across their desks and whispering and giggling and trying to avoid his eye. He broke off in mid-sentence and sat down.
From that day forward, he saw the students with different eyes. He no longer deluded himself that he had any influence on them. Even the good boys and the eager girls who tried hard, who did their homework diligently and participated in the classes, annoyed him. They reminded him of himself, and of what had become of him.
He no longer enjoyed going to school. He suffered from the monotony of his days and felt tired and burned out. In the staff room there were endless discussions about the banning of head-scarves, even though there were no Muslim girls in the school, and head-scarves had never been an issue. The teachers formed two opposing camps. Andreas wanted to belong to neither one. It seemed to him they were both merely trying to settle old accounts. In Switzerland, he once heard himself saying, they dealt with these problems more calmly. After that, he was attacked by both sides, one called him racist, the other misogynist. Even Jean-Marc had come across all political, and defended the values of the republic that he seemed barely to have acknowledged before. Andreas spent his spring break in Normandy. Once again, he had intended to read Proust, but he ended up sitting around in the hotel, watching TV or reading the newspapers and magazines he bought at the station newsstand every morning. He spent a night with an unmarried woman teacher he had met on one of his long walks along the beach. He had been fascinated by her large breasts, and invited her to supper. It took a lot of effort to talk her into going up to his room, and then they talked for a lot longer while they emptied the minibar. While they made love, the woman kept moaning his name out loud, which got on his nerves. He was glad to be alone when he woke up late the following morning. She had left him a note, which he glanced at briefly before balling it up and throwing it away.
In May, it got really cold again, and Andreas came down with a cold that turned into a persistent cough. After three weeks, he still had it, so Andreas went to the doctor. The doctor listened to his breathing, and said to be on the safe side he wanted him to have a computed tomography scan. Andreas called the hospital and got an appointment for Wednesday afternoon. When Sylvie called, he made up an excuse. She laughed and accused him of having found some new hobby.
The tomography didn’t take long, and it wasn’t as bad as Andreas had expected. He shut his eyes, and tried to imagine he was lying on the beach in the sun, but the clattering of the machine kept bringing him back to reality.
The weather improved, and with it Andreas’s mood. The doctor had prescribed some medicine, and his cough got a little better. He had almost forgotten about it by the time of his follow-up appointment. Even before he had sat down, the doctor said the results were a little worrisome. He held the picture of Andreas’s lung up against the window and with his silver pen circled an area between the two wings of the lung.
“There’s a chance that it’s just tubercular scarring,” he said.
He sat down, and twiddled with his pen. To be on the safe side, he wanted to have a biopsy done, a very minor operation sampling the tissue, which could be done on an outpatient basis.
“They make a little incision above the sternum, and insert a probe. You won’t feel a thing.”
“What else could it be?” asked Andreas.
The doctor told him not to worry. Andreas asked what the chances were. The doctor said it was meaningless to talk about chances.
“It’s either-or. You have it or you don’t.”