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SARAH 2013

What if she were to buy flowers for Amos, Sarah says to herself as she swipes her MetroCard through the reader at the Union Square station entrance gate. The flow of people suddenly comes to a halt. In front of her is a female tourist whose large Eastpack backpack has become jammed between the metal posts. The tourist waves her arms in the air wildly and wrenches herself loose. Immediately the flow picks up again. In all her thirty-two years of life Sarah has never bought flowers. Where in New York can you find a decent bouquet of freshly cut flowers that won’t cost you an arm and a leg? For that matter, why should she buy flowers for Amos with his own money? Isn’t that a bit low? One way or another, she wants to do something to introduce the great, unexpected news.

It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday morning. The real workaholics of Wall Street who never stop working have been sitting at their computers with cups of Starbucks for more than an hour. The subway cars are filled with befuddled tourists, shoppers, locals. A student is doing pull-ups on a strap while two of his friends cheer him on. Sarah looks straight ahead, gliding through the tunnels under the city. At Washington Square she gets out, along with a young couple lifting a baby carriage. The escalators heave them into the sunny spring day at Washington Square, where the sellers at the organic market glance condescendingly at the passing crowds, rearrange their goat cheeses, and stack up crates of spotted apples. Every time she wanders past the Barnes & Noble bookstore, which is tottering on the brink of ruin, Sarah is led by means of a whole chain of associations to The Lady Di’s. A couple of years ago, when she came here to buy a load of books, Tori Amos happened to be present for a book signing. Sarah links the red-headed singer to the party at the castle, and from there it’s just one small jump to The Lady Di’s. After all those years the group finally built up a fairly successful career in the European alternative club circuit.

Each month Sarah receives a tidy sum of money: a transfer for the royalties from The Lady Di’s’ debut CD. A few of the numbers, in other renditions, have become the kinds of hits everyone knows. Sarah wrote practically all the songs on the debut album, but she didn’t play any of them. After the death of her father she fled to New York in a state of total shock. The first ray of light in her life was called Amos. Her wild infatuation with him jelled into something totally unique on this planet that only the two of them share: true love that they can’t compare to anything else.

Her shoulder bag is too heavy. Or is she already showing symptoms? Shortness of breath and a vague nausea, now that she thinks about it. As usual, all her belongings are hanging from her shoulder. Even the colour rinse and the baking soda for scones. She might bake the scones in the middle of the night, when the ravenous hunger strikes. Would that be a good way of letting Amos know: deep in the night, with a plateful of fresh scones?

Although Amos and Sarah have been married for quite some time, she’s still holding onto her former apartment, with a room she had converted into a music studio. That’s where she works on her music commissions, or where she just goes to spend a few days by herself when she feels the need. Amos has already given up trying to convince her to move in with him for good. Every now and then he mentions it. If they’re eating an omelette, he’ll save the egg box—in order, he claims, to make her a sound proof room in his spacious penthouse. Then she’d be able to make recordings at his place, too, and maybe give up that other apartment. The fact that they don’t live together has become a feature of their marriage. At first Amos threatened to end their relationship, but when he realized that Sarah needed it or she’d lose her bearings, he turned it into something they alone understand. Few can afford to live apart like that. In a city like New York, where there are people who live in shoe boxes, having two residences is pure luxury. You have to have plenty of capital to manage it. And Amos does.

Love under one roof is doomed to failure, according to Sarah. Amputating yourself from real life, imitating your parents, who didn’t know any better than to live like good, law-abiding citizens—she can’t see the point. Nor can she see how people today can keep reconstituting their families, over and over, against their better judgement, until no one can make any sense out of the tangle of offspring or their feelings for the other. Love under one roof condemns perfectly self-reliant people to having a household, a family insurance policy, and garden hoses, and to researching the relative quality of automobile luggage racks. For her, the other variant, in which you’re not constantly getting in each other’s hair but are still married, is the only viable option, and the only way to stay in the United States following her studies that is acceptable to the American authorities.

‘Respectability,’ she suddenly hears in her head, a word trademarked by her mother. ‘A boy with respectability’ was her mother’s reaction after that first dinner with Amos. ‘You’re not going to believe this, but he makes me think of your father in his younger years.’ After which Sarah walked outside to smoke a cigarette. Her mother could do that, casually slip her father into the conversation as if nothing was wrong, as if he had just gone to the bathroom but would soon be back. In her eyes, Amos and her father have very little in common. The two of them might have talked about the steam mechanism in espresso machines, but she cannot imagine them going any deeper.

There was so much that Sarah didn’t understand during her first years in the cosmopolitan city of New York, including the complicated American dating culture with its own rules and ways of paying for things. The more whimsical New York variant was something she never even tried to grasp. At first she implored Amos not to have any expectations of her. ‘No expectations,’ she kept pounding into him. She was terrified, at times even furious, that he would get her agitated again and make her want him so much that she’d wish she had never met him. She was suspicious whenever he spoke to her about the connection he felt with her. Who in God’s name had invented the modern, sensitive, needlessly extroverted man, anyway? At the same time, a sneaky little voice inside her kept trying to prove that his intentions were far from honourable. What did he want from her? To use her as a European slut, perhaps? Why did he ask her so many questions about her guitar? What was that all about? What did this rich Jewish money-grubber really have in common with her, a tinkerer who lived from advances on an inheritance? Wasn’t she too far beneath him, with his hidebound, arrogant Jewish opinions and his pathological friendliness? No other New Yorker was so considerate. There was something disparaging about it, the voice kept hissing. And when she was close to exhaustion, and he took both her hands in his own for the hundredth time and, with an intense look in his eyes, declared that he just wanted her in his life for who she was and how she was, and she shook her head in disbelief, put a big kettle of tea on the stove, and began reading yesterday’s newspaper, she almost believed he meant it. Yet to be on the safe side she dragged out the names of former girlfriends, photos that happened to fall out of unread books, trips he had taken with other people, so as not to become too attached to him, to create an escape route for when he was finished with her. She was an independent woman.

For the past two days, Sarah has come this close to taking her roommate Stacey into her confidence. She and Stacey have taken a bit of distance from each other recently. There’s been no occasion for it, no fight or forgotten birthday, because they don’t celebrate birthdays anyway. You can’t tell your friends everything, Stacey said yesterday out of the blue, although they can usually tell with their umpteenth extra sense if you’re keeping anything back. It’s as if she had been poking around in Sarah’s garbage, like any old stalker, and had dug up the positive Predictor sticks. No, Stacey wouldn’t be able to keep her mouth shut. Stacey is crazy about children. That’s why Sarah hasn’t said anything yet. She wouldn’t get any support or sympathy, only ear-shattering congratulations with her pregnancy. She’d have had to muzzle her in her enthusiasm, to keep her from blasting the news through a megaphone from the Statue of Liberty.

Sarah walks further and breathes deeply. She’s on her way to the smallest of Amos’s coffee shops, the one on Bleecker Street. The smell of something fresh is wafting through the streets of New York. Winter toppling into spring is in the air. The little trees on Washington Square are nonchalantly dropping their blossoms onto the damp asphalt, which was scrubbed hours ago by garbage men. Sarah switches off the music but keeps the earbuds in. She’s walking here, the messenger who is carrying the good news within her, and no one knows what it is. No one who happens to look at her.

A child. An American grandchild for her Flemish mother. Unlike the mother, the child will speak perfect American English. From the very beginning of their relationship Amos has refused to give her lessons in pronunciation. It was their first fight. He insisted that her European accent would open many doors in New York. And the doors have opened again and again over the years. She’s made her accent permanent, and now most New Yorkers think she’s a German.

It’s hard to believe she’s been living here so long. Months and years pass, like the garbage bags being tossed into a moving garbage truck. She’s spent more than a third of her life on the American continent thanks to her father, as unpleasant as that is to think about.

Her relief was immense when she left Belgium and said goodbye to her ashen-faced mother. She walked through the creaking metal jet bridge at Brussels airport, took her seat at the window, and put a Walkman in her ears, ready to re-emerge as another person in another land. The arrangement was that she would be delivered to her Aunt Lydia, her mother’s sister, who would take her under her wing. This didn’t deter her. Aunt Lydia was too engrossed in her volunteer work as chairwoman of an organization to promote democracy worldwide to get in Sarah’s way.

Throughout the flight she had the feeling that she was leaving the contagion of death behind in Belgium. ‘They never do anything until somebody dies,’ she often heard on the news in reports involving fire prevention or double-parking, but no one ever said anything about how people stand along the sidelines and silently drive each other into the arms of death. She had watched her father walk up to meet his death, step by step, and had done nothing to stop it. She’d have to carry that with her forever. In Europe she’d never dare to dream anymore.

Let’s see what America has to offer, she thought, as she emerged hours later at JFK airport with albino-red eyes but wide awake and with all her earthly goods, and dampened her wrists at the sink in the restroom. In the meantime, one American, a balding man with a spherical body in a pair of pocketless jeans, was waiting for her in the arrivals hall, holding a sign in front of his chest with her name on it. It was Uncle Christopher, Aunt Lydia’s husband. On the way to their house, which turned out to be in upstate New York, he talked about a cousin by marriage of a great-aunt who had immigrated long ago with his family because the potato harvest in West Flanders had failed miserably. Adventurers who came to try their luck and muscle on the North American continent. There were no inquiries about herself or her mother, much to her relief.

Two and a half hours later they came to a halt in the countryside. All she had seen from the plane was a glimpse of the metropolis. Aunt Lydia and Uncle Christopher lived in a beautiful wooden house of immense proportions, hidden away in the woods. The barbecue alone was as big as a garden hut. The ancient dog waddled back and forth from one end of the deck to the other. Sarah called her mother, as she had promised, to tell her she was still alive. She was assigned a room. It was dismally quiet in the house, but in the evenings Aunt Lydia dispelled the silence with her pleasant chatter. She was the driving force behind this household, a strong woman in whom she saw strong hints of her own mother. Her husband rummaged around like a chicken on barren soil. Aunt Lydia had found a place for Sarah in an apartment with two other young girls in the Village. Even though her school year wouldn’t be starting for a couple of weeks, perhaps Sarah would like to go to the city anyway? Sarah nodded her head vigorously, her mouth full of veggie burger and her head heavy with jetlag.

Conversing like adults, they talked about what Sarah might do now. Her aunt gave her the papers for the apartment, the code for the internet, and so forth. They agreed that Sarah could take a taxi to the city when she was ready for it. The other girls wouldn’t be arriving at the apartment for a couple of weeks. She could come back any time, day or night. As proof, Aunt Lydia handed her a key to the front door. The next morning her aunt gave her the number of their regular taxi company. They said goodbye, since her aunt, who had to rush off to her volunteers’ conference, knew that Sarah would be gone when she got home. Groaning under the weight of a fully-packed hiker’s backpack, a guitar case, and a suitcase that would explode spontaneously if you so much as tapped it, Sarah walked to the end of the driveway one hour later toward the yellow cab.

Getting out at Union Square she experienced a hallucinatory moment of pure gold, glittering so obscenely that it dazzled every angel in heaven and made them squint. Standing there on her own two feet in Coca-Cola Land, in no man’s land, strolling across a blank page, she thought about her father without a tinge of grief for the first time since his death. He had lived, he had begotten her, she had known him, and she was grateful for it. It was because of all the misery caused by his passing that she had found the strength to take this step in the first place. As if there was meaning in her father’s death. Or was it she who just wanted to attach some kind of meaning to the most absurd, the most meaningless thing in the world? Watch me walking here, she thought then, with the power in her body of a fighter jet at take-off. Here she was: Sarah Vandersanden. Eighteen years old. Washed up alone on the East Coast of the States.

She dumped her bags in the apartment and hit the streets again. At the first decent little hotel she came across she went inside and followed the arrows to the breakfast room. She took the elevator (complete with black elevator operator) down to the basement. Three women were standing around a glass dome with tiny little muffins inside, like the three Fates surrounding a globe. Their sole purpose was to lift the dome, hand you ten napkins, and place a muffin on a porcelain plate with a pair of steel tongs. That was their job, their reason for getting up at four o’clock in the morning.

There was little about New York that shocked Sarah during those first days, except the prices. She hadn’t counted on things costing so much. Her money disappeared noiselessly, as if she were tanking up day and night with the meter constantly running. Other people had always paid her bills for her silently, unnoticed, but now she had to fork over the money herself. It was so incomprehensible that she released all the brakes.

She was so busy finding her way and falling into bed dead tired that she had no time for reflection. She saw businesswomen walking around the Business District with bidons of water at the ready. Only one person came by on a bicycle, a female courier with a rolled-up pants leg that revealed a tattooed pin-up. Everywhere there were swarms of schoolgirls, splitting up like flocks of loud twittering sparrows.

She couldn’t get enough of wandering around and testing the restaurants all over New York. She had promised her mother that she would eat well, and had resolved never again to slip into that false obsession with putting as little in your mouth as possible. She ate exotic dishes at all sorts of strange eating establishments where she always engaged people in conversation. In the music clubs she had her first contact with other musicians, and she made a date to jam with the guitarist of a noise group. She got to know a great many people very superficially, mostly foreigners, because the real New Yorkers kept their distance. In the stream of people on Fifth Avenue she decided to assume the role of big city dweller. At one point she suddenly heard herself cry ‘fire’, but no one responded. No one had heard her, or everyone acted as if they hadn’t heard her. It was wonderful to be no one. In this city she fit right in.

Here she was brave enough to play the guitar on the street, submerged in the anonymity of the passers-by and the sidewalk dwellers. For a little while she even flirted with the illusion that she could earn extra money by busking, but half a day and two dollars later that illusion proved untenable. At night she’d come home alone to an apartment where the only other life forms seemed to come from the walls and the ceilings. Sitting on her rented sofa, totally wiped out, she’d listen to a CD of Jacques Brel’s greatest hits, the best thing she’d brought with her from Belgium. She kept all her father’s Dylan CDs in a special box. She understood what Dylan meant by ‘that wild mercury sound’, his description of the ideal music in his head. She wasn’t so spineless and transparent that she’d call her mother for money, but one evening, in the depth of her misery, she collapsed on the floor, short of breath, endlessly plodding on the treadmill of failures in her head. She called her mother. As she was keying in the number, she realized that she had never made good on her promise to call every week.

‘Ah, you’re still alive.’

‘Yes.’ (Just barely, you should know. I’m tottering on the edge, I’m floating on the Styx.)

‘Why are you calling?’

‘Oh, you know, no reason.’ (How difficult it is to make this call, how happy I am to hear your voice.)

‘That’s strange, calling me for no reason.’

‘I just wanted to hear how you’re doing.’ (Two minutes to get those sentences out.)

‘I’m finally completely finished redecorating your room. It’s now my hobby room. I also bought a new desktop. The other one was very out of date, apparently. It’s up in the attic. It is a reminder of Papa, after all.’

‘I know.’

‘Everything is fine, Sarah. It’s still difficult, but it’s okay.’

‘I’m pleased to hear it.’

‘You’re pleased to hear it?’ laughed her mother mischievously. ‘That’s the first time I’ve ever heard you use that expression.’

‘I don’t know.’ Suddenly Sarah was fighting back tears.

‘Say (Mieke’s voice dropped on octave), how’s it going there?’

‘Fine, fine.’ (Chop off her head or ask for money, it’s all the same thing. Neither is an option.) She couldn’t hold back. The waterfall came crashing down. She began crying.

‘Not as easy as you thought, is it, honey?’ said her mother softly.

‘I’m doing my best, Mama,’ Sarah sobbed. ‘It’s terrific here.’

‘And the prices? Everything is expensive, right? Are you getting by with your monthly allowance?’

‘Everything costs at least five times as much.’

‘I’ll transfer some more money,’ said her mother. Not a hint of reproach in her voice.

‘Aww.’ (Brimming with love, the outstretched hand.)

‘You’re grown-up and sensible now, right? I’m counting on you not to fritter it away. Buy yourself a good piece of meat.’

When Sarah hung up she felt irradiated with affection for her mother. She understood her and agreed with her: money says a lot more than expressions of love.

A card from Suri, travelling by a very circuitous route, found its way to her. There was crocheting on one side and a very compressed text on the other with the title The Lady Di’s have a record contract!!!! Suri was doing fashion design, Emily was studying psychology at the university, and MH still hadn’t decided what she wanted to do with her life. Suri suggested visiting Sarah and asked if Sarah’s postal address had changed. The other Ladies all sent their greetings as well. They really missed her and her songs. It seemed like light years away.

Once her new monthly allowance had been deposited, Sarah let herself be persuaded by the neon signs and the buzzing ambience of the clubs. She was foolhardy enough to try an unknown drug—she and a good-looking Jewish architecture student in a horrible T-shirt whom she had met less than an hour before. One minute she was standing at the bar sipping a Cosmopolitan and carelessly accepting an edible postage stamp that Amos handed her, the next minute she felt like a staple had been shot through her spinal cord.

She did remain standing for one full minute, then recklessly collapsed with this Amos into the armchairs in the back room of the club. There he was, panting with excitement, and eager to declare his love for the whole universe, a ten-dimensional universe without borders or vectors, and there she was, panting with nausea, calming herself, and surfing along on that wave of love, but immediately tumbling off her surfboard into the deep, salt sea, after which she came back up, sputtering, her throat raw with bile, staring into a steel wash basin in the women’s restroom.

The next day, in the piercing daylight and in an unknown little apartment, she was spat out onto the shore. Looking in the mirror, she saw a girl as grey as driftwood.

‘Good evening,’ Amos grinned. He plugged a tiny electric kettle into the socket of his wash basin. ‘Instant coffee?’

‘Yes, great,’ she heard herself jabber. She detested instant coffee. The apartment was furnished with multifunctional pieces of furniture he had designed himself, Amos told her proudly. At the head of the bed were a laptop and a desk lamp.

‘What time is it?’ It was already four in the afternoon. She could shower if she wanted. Amos came back to bed and resumed his work at his computer. Had she been lying here the whole time while he was working? She sat straight up with her back to him and looked out the window.

She had lost her centre, as if her life were a set of pick-up sticks that a giant had gathered up and dropped again. She couldn’t think without everything in her head wobbling. Her disconcerting ability to qualify everything to death dragged her deep into its narrow tunnel. How do you explain something like that to a carefree guy you don’t know from Adam?

When she saw her face reflected in the window, she barely recognized herself. Her clothes were clinging to the idea of a girl who was no longer there. The body itself, with arms, legs, breasts, and a nose that was too small, was sitting in front of the window, but it was uninhabited, like an empty room. Her spirit was wandering out there somewhere.

Suddenly Amos was standing next to her with a big, red mug that had MIT printed on it. ‘Great,’ she said again. Amos watched her try to lurch out of bed, and offered to take her clothes to the basement of the building to wash them, but she flatly turned him down. This guy was much too sweet. She went to take a shower, to escape the coffee and to cry.

When she came back to the living room she was immediately struck by the smell of paint, furniture, and perfume. As if this were a brand-new decor, thrown up in a hurry, she looked for the emergency exit. There was a piece of paper hanging on the door explaining that Amos had gone to pick up a syllabus from a fellow student but that he’d be back soon. He asked her to wait for him. She began snooping around like an intruder. Amos was an orderly guy who had a clean ashtray and kept his important documents in an orange folder. A kippah lay on his personally designed, experimental desk.

Quiet, she said to herself. Go lie down on the bed for a little while. This body is so tired. It’s going to stretch itself out and let go of all its thoughts. It’ll keep on lying forever. Like a field on the earth’s surface. In the summer the heat can dance over it, in the winter it will burst from the cold. Heat and cold will follow each other naturally, whether I want them to or not.

Amos came in with a banana smoothie with ginger. ‘This’ll help you regenerate,’ he said. ‘What are you looking at?’

‘The window.’

‘No, I mean, what are you looking at through the window?’

‘The opposite window.’

‘You’re looking at yourself,’ he laughed. ‘So would I if I were you.’

It was half past five. Darkness stole into the streets. One by one the lights in the apartments went on. It was the only time you could catch someone at home. Someone could spend the whole evening in a dark room with a bottle of wine and a radio, but when the light was turned on or off you knew for sure that someone was there.

‘I’ve been sitting here watching you for a long time and you haven’t blinked once. As if you weren’t there.’

‘Uh,’ said Sarah. She was desperate for fresh air.

‘Come on, let’s get out of here. How about breakfast?’ Amos asked.

Sarah could have known that Amos, every inch the gentleman, wouldn’t have dared to just show her the door. She found that both polite and annoying. Without forcing her, but with a reassuring sense of initiative on his part, he took her with him her up the Hudson River. He had borrowed the car from a friend, which hadn’t been easy. She didn’t even have the energy to mumble that she’d rather go home. Amos drove calmly, bent over the steering wheel, to make sure nothing escaped his attention in the darkness. By the time they had reached the town of Wappingers Falls it was pitch-dark. They went into a diner because Sarah had indicated she’d like to eat there, which Amos said was ‘wicked’.

Their stomachs rumbling with hunger, they sat down at the counter on the chrome-plated, firmly anchored stools. On the TV screen was coverage of a shooting that had taken place in Maryland, with lots of police tape, people rushing back and forth, a mother standing with her hand on her pillowy bosom and crying. Amos said he was sometimes afraid a war might break out in America itself. Maybe that was why Americans were so eager to fight overseas, he said to her in a whisper, that kind of talk being distinctly unpopular in a Republican joint like this one. When the good-humoured waitress Diane came to take their order, they switched to talking about the weather and about turkeys. Turkeys were so stupid that their mouths fell open with surprise when it started raining. They’d throw back their heads to see where the water was coming from and then drown. After every heavy rainfall there’d be all these swollen turkey bodies scattered in the woods. Diane was a funny woman. When she brought them their chicken wings and Caesar salad she invited them to join her at her dancing school. This evening, after she was finished with her work here, she was going to introduce her students to the tango. Sarah warmed to the companionship of Amos and the waitress. He told all kinds of stories about how wonderful Israel was, and she didn’t have it in her to argue. She ate five chicken wings and licked her fingers. Sliding off the bar stool, she heard herself suddenly say, ‘I want to go back.’

Amos frowned but didn’t object. On the way back she congratulated herself. Another helping hand refused, or more likely chopped off. Amos offered her chewing gum and tried to get the radio going, without success. Neither of them said more than was absolutely necessary. The whole ride back through the darkness felt like crawling into a long sock in order to arrive at the foot, her apartment in the Village. She didn’t ask Amos to come up because she didn’t dare, and because the last dregs of energy had leaked out of her. She didn’t even have the strength to shut the car door when she got out, and he had to lean over to the passenger’s side to pull it closed. She saw in his glance that he was glad to be rid of her.

No matter how silly it seemed later on, at that point she couldn’t put such experiences behind her. She was terribly disappointed in herself. She had set herself free, taken her life in hand, and now she seemed no more powerful than a bowl of pudding. She hurled reproaches at herself in an endless loop. With her coat still on, she curled up in the armchair and fell into a foggy half-sleep. She dreamed she was married to Amos and that they lived in a small apartment with their five children. When Amos left for work in the morning he locked them all in together. The children were little demons. They attacked their only armchair with a pair of scissors. Where they got the matches from she didn’t know, but she had to keep walking from one end of the apartment to the other to stamp out the flames. She threw a sheet over them, tied it up, and left her crying children behind. She stepped into the apartment’s garbage chute and slid to the bottom. When she awoke twelve hours later, totally exhausted, she felt as if she were still sliding.

A few more nights of sleep brought no change in her enervated condition. The madness that resonated through the building on Indian summer evenings echoed in her head. All kinds of scenarios played themselves out within her that she couldn’t make any sense out of. So it is hereditary, she thought. The sadness. The despair.

Insanity only becomes really deranged and depressing if you can’t share it with anyone, and the insanity stole into the apartment with the new guitar and the towers of styrofoam cups, her little hovel that could be completely cleared out in five minutes, that’s how few possessions she had with her. After three days of lonely seclusion she went down and ate her first Big Bacon ever from a plastic tray. The Big Bacon failed to provide a solution to her lethargy, so she began wandering through the city that never sleeps.

She walked until the soles of her shoes were as thin as paper. Each of the three times that she smoked backstage with The Lady Di’s, waiting to perform, their group ritual was to scrape the soles of their shoes on the ground like bellowing wild steers ready to storm the arena. When she was a little girl and she scraped her shoes behind the shopping cart, her mother would ask: Are you being paid to mop the floor here?, at which she would always enthusiastically reply: Yes. She could have mopped all of New York, including the subway.

She went back to her apartment. She pulled the stopper out of the bathtub, beat the sofa cushions, and spread the down comforter on the fire escape as the tub let out a deep burp. In no time at all the apartment was straightened up and aired. She crawled under her bed and pulled out her guitar case. Eat well, sleep well, and do what you’re good at.

A few days later her roommates arrived. She was going to live with two worldly-wise students who certainly had better things to do than to spy on her. Alicia came from New Orleans and was studying marketing. When the division of the rooms was being negotiated it soon became clear that Alicia had chosen the right course of study. She praised the two rooms she didn’t want as if they were suites at the Plaza Hotel. The room she had in mind for herself, which happened to be the biggest and where the sun shone in gloriously every morning, was a room she thought would make a good storage room. But then someone would have to sleep in the living room, so she relented and took that room instead. The other roommate, Stacey, was an Iraq veteran from the Gulf War who was studying on the army’s dime. Sarah had almost lost sight of the fact that she was going to be studying, too. The arts, a mishmash of subjects, workshops, and independent projects.

That night Sarah went to buy groceries at the very pricey Whole Foods organic supermarket. The store was packed with watercress still dripping from a shower, mangos blushing with sweet happiness, naked bananas sunning themselves under the store’s gracious lights, salmon just back from a swim in Swedish waters and subtly smoked over an oak fire, and blueberries that had been picked in a Canadian pine forest only a few hours before.

The next morning Sarah was standing in the kitchen, rummaging through the drawers and cabinets full of ice cube bags and tumblers. ‘God, am I hungry. Anybody know where my muesli is?’ she asked.

Sarah almost jumped out of her skin that first time Stacey hiccupped with laughter. Panicking, she wondered whether she had said something with a double meaning, or whether an earbud had gotten lost in her hair, or whether she had managed to make herself look ridiculous. But soon she learned the principles of American laughter. Laughing from embarrassment, laughing to be friendly, laughing to be sociable. It wasn’t a form of criticism, nor was it the timid smile of her father. It was just a friendly way of saying, ‘Oh, gosh, I’m afraid I’ve eaten some of your muesli. I’m sorry! Here, have some of mine!’

Stacey’s muesli proved to be a super-sweet, sticky, generic brand of Honey Pops, but it was nice of her to offer. If you were to see Stacey sitting at the kitchen table like that with a pink marking pen in her mouth, bent over her three-volume Oxford Dictionary, you’d never believe that not so very long ago she’d been careening through the desert sand in a tank in Kuwait.

Sarah started her courses, which were surprisingly easy and gave her plenty of time to work on her own experimental music. Students spoke to their professors quite bluntly here and saw to it that the amount of theoretical material they needed to know was approximately zero. One evening after a workshop on soundtrack writing and a student meeting about nothing, Sarah came home. She saw that a package the size of a novel had come for her in the mail. It was The Lady Di’s debut album. Emily had put a Post-it note on the album with an arrow pointing to the liner notes, where Sarah was the first one to be thanked. Almost all the numbers had been written by her. Suri had wrapped the CD in a piece of fabric that proved to be a T-shirt with three sleeves, a cool consolation prize. It had been Sarah’s own decision to leave The Lady Di’s for good, but that didn’t mean she didn’t feel jealous every now and then. As she poured herself a large glass of cider in the light of the stove exhaust fan, Stacey asked if she knew how to spell ‘existential’. Sarah scribbled the word on a piece of paper that Stacey had shoved across to her. She saw a whole list of words.

‘Hey, nice,’ said Sarah, who had adopted the up-beat, enthusiastic tone of her roommates. ‘Are you going to write something?’

‘Well, not really,’ said Stacey. ‘Or yes, that’s the general idea. But only for myself.’

‘Great!’ said Sarah. ‘Cider?’

‘Sure, why not.’

Sarah poured Stacey a glass and pushed it across the table. Stacey pulled a photo album out from under the dictionaries. When she woke up in the middle of the night and all of New York was surrounding her like a jungle, it felt as if an elephant were resting its foot on her chest. She hated those attacks; it was much worse than Iraq itself. She had a photo album, but no words, not enough words.

‘Can I see your pictures?’ Sarah asked.

They sat down together on the sofa and looked at the pictures of a hefty, muscular Stacey in uniform in front of a military bus on an overcast day, or in a tent with a mess tin and a festively decorated turkey, or pressed in between dozens of soldiers on a boat, most of them with their thumbs in the air. Cheerful photos, dripping with camaraderie, as if they were on a field trip or playing paintball with a group of friends in a desert setting. She pointed to a speck on the photo, an Iraqi citizen. She tore open a bag of sour cream potato chips. ‘Did you know I killed someone?’

Sarah was shocked to be given this information so casually.

‘It’s so easy to kill someone. You’re standing there, heavily armed, under the blazing sun. One day you take a picture, the next day you shoot a civilian—or was it a spy, or was it a suicide terrorist with sticks of dynamite stuck all over him on his way to your camp?’

‘It was an order. You did it because you had to.’

‘No I didn’t,’ said Stacey, cold as ice, and she shoved a handful of rough-cut chips into her mouth.

Sarah understood Stacey. Stacey felt guilty for the ugliness she had experienced, just like Sarah’s father had. There was no word to describe it. No matter how much time Stacey spent gazing at the radar of her dictionary, the word would never appear. It was a defect of the language. Stacey and Sarah discovered that there were many concepts without words. Sarah’s English was far from perfect, and Stacey was no intellectual, but they both wanted to know why, after all this time, no one had come up with a word for the fear that everything is going to get worse, the fear of the end times, when it won’t be a global conflagration that does you in, but the universal loss of hope. Was there a language that had such a word?

At around midnight they heard a key turn in the lock. Stacey slammed her photo album shut. Alicia came tripping in and stole into the little open kitchen. Deep in thought, she put the tea kettle on the burner and let out an unadulterated American shriek when she saw Sarah and Stacey sitting together in the armchair with a photo album on their laps. The intimacy was broken, and Stacey snorted with irritation.

‘Hey, Alicia, what’s in the bags?’ Sarah asked to break the tension.

‘They’re body bags,’ laughed Stacey huskily, ‘she drags all kinds of stuff into our apartment and we don’t even know what it is.’

Alicia stifled a giggle, but she didn’t understand that Stacey, whose barometer had suddenly registered stormy weather, was expecting a real answer. A wave of anger rippled through Stacey’s body. ‘This isn’t the theatre, you know,’ Stacey said. ‘It’s real. People who’ve always lived safely in mommy’s nest and then get a pile of money to go study in New York, they seem to think you can laugh or scream at everything. But there’s a real goddamned world out there. It exists, too.’

The whistle of Alicia’s kettle punctured the silence. Alicia leapt to the kitchen, busied herself with tea cups and cookies in noisy wrappings, and began mumbling to herself under her breath.

‘What?’ Stacey asked.

‘Soldiers are bad people,’ Alicia repeated.

Americans were still difficult to size up. The next day Stacey and Alicia were back at the kitchen table, having a good laugh about nothing in particular. It was hysterical, pointless, uncontrollable laughter, and it was infectious. Without knowing why, Sarah burst out laughing, too. They could have been standing in a circle and laughing at each other.

After completing her studies Alicia left the apartment, while Stacey and Sarah grew closer together. Sarah has been sharing the apartment for more than ten years with Stacey, who’s slimmed down considerably over the years due to loss of muscle mass. She follows a pathologically healthy diet, smokes on the roof like a Turk, and works hard at irregular hours. She often walks through the apartment in rags, jabbering into the phone and making all kinds of appointments. She and Sarah respect each other’s privacy and don’t get in each other’s way.

Amos and Sarah bumped into each other again in a very roundabout way. Sarah had walked into Barney’s in Soho, one of the chain of luxury stores, to buy a new perfume. It took her a very long time to make up her mind, so long that her bladder started jumping up and down. She quickly paid for a vanilla-honeysuckle scent in order to get to the restroom as soon as possible. She held herself in a contorted position over the toilet bowl, carefully avoiding any contact with the seat. In this position, used by the indigenous women of the great American continent when they were about to give birth, surrounded by trees and squatting out there in the wild to ease their contractions, at the glorious moment that Sarah, after a week of serious constipation, was reaching the point of deliverance and felt the universe of her lower body go into a spasm, two hands belonging to some filthy woman slid under the large opening of her stall and stole the bag that contained all of Sarah’s belongings, from a student visa and a Visa card to indispensable phone numbers, the fresh dollars she had just earned at Zefirelli’s by turning the crank of a pasta machine for ten hours, to the unfortunate purchase of the perfume. Sarah, who had barely had time to pull up her pants, stormed out of the restroom and began delivering an incoherent and indignant tirade about dirty hands in a mixture of Dutch and English to an oak of a security guard. When her indignation turned to rage at the men, who just stood there swaggering instead of running after the thief and getting her bag back, she gave up on any form of help.

After a trip to the Belgian embassy, a three-hour wait, seven transatlantic phone calls with her mother, and a chipped front tooth that came from biting down too hard on a caramel in her anger, her eyes filled with tears when her turn in line finally came up. She was confronted with her first American catch-22 situation: in order to report a robbery, you needed your ID card. When she tried to explain, frantically gesturing, that her card had been stolen, the woman said that wasn’t her problem and that those were the rules. Sentences like it may not be your problem but it sure is mine! had little impact on the clerk. Sarah had long forgotten that her name was right there in the database. In the constricting tunnel vision of her fury she didn’t even hear the clerk calling her back. She went outside and did something that a real New York woman would never do: display her emotions in public. (With the exception of 9/11, which was well over a year away.)

She stood in the middle of the wide sidewalk and made not the slightest attempt to hide her tears of anger and frustration. The tears did not go unnoticed. They were an irresistible enticement for Amos, who had a good view of the passers-by on Park Avenue from behind the counter of his coffee shop. While doing his best to make a perfect macchiato, as he later repeatedly related, he noticed an attractive woman crying outside his window who was neither homeless nor high and whom he recognized as Sarah the German. A woman of flesh and blood and tears of rage, he said, unlike anything he had ever seen before.

He wanted to know what had happened. She told him how she had been rudely treated—by a security guard, no less. She kept on blubbering, deeply incensed, but she was grateful to Amos that he didn’t join her rant about the bully of a security guard. Instead he just handed her his far from perfect macchiato and asked her to wait for him for just a minute. He said he wanted to take her to the roof garden of the coffee shop during his break. Fine, she said. Her blind exasperation had subsided, and now she was just mildly embarrassed about her broken front tooth.

Cup in hand, she followed him to the roof of the tall building. It was liberating to look out over the Big Apple from an almost helicopter perspective, as if it were a movie. Now she understood what her father had found so enthralling about a roof. And not only her father. Amos said that in the Middle East people spend much of their lives on their roofs, to sleep under the open sky or to be safe. From a roof you’re a sniper of reality.

She cast a sidelong glance at the man staring off into the distance. When she asked if he had been working here long, he responded, ‘Five months, but it won’t be long before I’m the owner.’ He was quite attractive, objectively speaking. She found his boasting both clownish and charming. He looked at his watch. They rushed downstairs so he could wash his hands and start a new shift. Amos was hard-working and dedicated. He had three jobs, one of which was the designing of restaurant interiors. Those kinds of people were a dime a dozen in New York, but Amos had lots of ambition and refused to waste his energy on a dead-end job.

Two years later he was already the owner of three successful cafes. He discovered that there was more money to be made in New York with coffee shops than with drinking establishments. He served only coffee and tea. Today he has seven coffee shops, spread out across all the trendy or soon-to-be-trendy neighbourhoods of New York City. Step by step he’s realizing his own cunning plan to climb higher up the ladder until he’s almost ready to drop. According to Amos, an exemplary Jew is one who skims off the surface of the globe, dreams of his homeland, and earns enough money in the meantime to buy up everything the world has to offer.

During those first years they couldn’t see each other before two in the morning. That worked out very well for Sarah, the same Sarah who laughed at the very idea of fear of commitment. She spent all those evenings tinkering with demos that were meant for no one’s ears. MH had asked her for new numbers, but she wrote back that she wasn’t doing that kind of music anymore. Through friends of Amos she came in contact with a maker of art films, for whom she composed her first soundtrack. It’s been a long time since she was able to accept all the requests she received; today she selects only the projects that interest her. She writes and plays music while Amos delegates and supervises.

During their first walks across the roofs Amos taught her the coded language of the New York street gangs. He sometimes cautioned her to look away when they passed corners where crack was being smoked, or not to pay any attention to all the forbidden things that had moved uptown from downtown. Amos knew New York so much better than she did. When she strolled across the roofs with Amos, she felt as if she’d been walking around during daylight hours with her eyes glued shut. He showed her the hanging gardens, the ingenious sleeping shelters for the homeless, beehives dozens of feet above the ground on the flat fields of the roofs. And later, with his friends on the roofs of the Lower East Side, the menageries: rabbits, chickens, and even a couple of goats. It was a whole different world up there, of which the ordinary pedestrians were totally unaware.

Their roof journeys have now become a hobby. You might think the roofs had been inhabited by some nomadic tribe, living high above the heads of the commuters who, until just a few years ago, would only travel through this neighbourhood by AirTrain on their way downtown, never getting out in Queens because of all the problems there. At the present time, however, hordes of hipsters are streaming in, many to visit MOMA PS1.

Today the plan is for Sarah to pick up Amos at about noon. They’re going to Governor’s Island. Governor’s Island was once the private playground of Lord Cornbury, the English governor of New York and New Jersey more than three hundred years ago. He partied there to his heart’s content and was able to indulge his proclivity for cross-dressing. At every party he got glammed up as a different woman. It’s the kind of place that requires a certain fantasy.

It’s about time Amos was informed. How long before it’s actually a child? And how long can you keep a child hidden? Recently she read a story in The New York Times about a woman who was a professional kick-boxer. She said she felt something after a match and proceeded to give birth in the dressing room. She never even realized she was pregnant. Sarah, of course, is not such a marginal character. How is Amos going to respond to the news of her totally unexpected pregnancy? She’s seen how he buys large gifts for the children of friends, quite unashamedly, and how he keeps dropping obscure hints, but at the same time he’s so fiercely outspoken about the baby boomers and overpopulation that it’s become one of his favourite rants.

Now that she’s known since the day before yesterday that there’s life growing within her, she feels incredibly strong and vulnerable at the same time. She’s the mother of all tissue paper. It’s a secret she wants to protect. One minute she has no idea how to handle it all, the next minute she’s deep in conversation with her little monster, her explorer, who’s about to see Governor’s Island.

In Washington Square Park an old black man roars something at her from behind his chessboard, a curse or a blessing, it’s hard to tell which. And yet. A child? In these times? In New York? She can’t even begin to think about it rationally. In her fantasy she locates her child in playgrounds the size of Central Park, but without the dirty old men behind the trees. But in the world of today and in a metropolis like New York, it’s madness just to let your child walk from one end of the street to the other by himself. Or is that her mother talking? Is she going to overprotect her child, too, and is she no better than her mother was?

So here she is, a resident of New York and partner of a rich Jewish businessman, a musician who is doing what she likes far more than when she was an adolescent grimly trying to prove herself with The Lady Di’s, a daughter whose relationship with her mother is steadily improving, much to the surprise of both. The last time they were together was in Boston. Sarah had flown up to spend a day with her mother, who was there for some sort of appointment. They walked the Freedom Trail together, which went past sixteen historical locations. Although Sarah has been a grown woman for quite some time now, her mother flatly refuses to let her pay one cent of the lunch or to let her treat herself to one postcard in the museum shop. It makes Sarah laugh. After all these years she no longer lets her mother get under her skin with her rock-hard principles and her occasional rants about the decline of good manners and traditions.

If she tells Amos she’s pregnant, there’s no turning back. If she doesn’t tell him and decides to terminate instead, will she ever be able to look him in the eye again? Wouldn’t she be tearing down the happiness they’ve been building up all these years? Can a child destroy such happiness? She catches herself thinking in Dutch. When in doubt, the washing machine in her head always switches to a Dutch cycle.

She has to decide before Amos starts suspecting. Should she tell Amos, or is it better not to?

If only she had her mother’s consistency. Her mother never doubts. She suffers in silence, but then she picks up a knife and cuts. The price she pays for this are her neuroses, but lately she’s grown much calmer. Fortunately I’m not like my mother, Sarah often says to Amos, although she misses her mother’s decisiveness when she’s back at the deli and is faced with a choice between vitello tonato and maki sushi with tuna, or if she doesn’t know whether she wants the red boots or the super-cool hand-braided calfskin shoes. When she suddenly remembers that it’s all bad for the environment anyway, she leaves the shop red-faced, promising to come back. Unlike her mother, she can’t even decide whether she should decide at all. ‘Your mother is indecisive,’ said Amos after having met her mother for the first time. ‘Even there you’re a lot alike.’ For that he got a Rolling Stone hurled at his head.

At a newspaper stand in Washington Square Garden is the most pathetic bouquet of flowers she’s ever seen, waiting for a buyer who will never appear. It’s plastic, she realizes: a miserable old-fashioned nosegay stuck on a green skewer. She and Amos like to buy ugly presents for each other, for no particular reason. It’s their private form of humour. She wonders whether this will make Amos laugh. Maybe it would be better to buy him a tie-dyed T-shirt from the hippie on MacDougal Street. He already has two, both of them hideous. He was wearing a yellow tie-dyed T-shirt when they first met in that club. She couldn’t take her eyes off him, so mesmerized was she by that horrible T-shirt.

Two people who fall for each other can later recount those first memories down to the smallest detail. He couldn’t believe that she had three kinds of painkillers in her bag (two painkillers and her birth control pill), and that she had drawn a pirate on her foot (it was a koala), and that for their first dinner together she had ordered eggplant millefeuille (chicken wings). As their feelings for each other became intenser and deeper, their memories grew into something that had actually happened, something they repeated so many times that it began to glow and glisten, and all they could do was decide that their first meeting contained within it the fullness of a promise. For twenty dollars she buys the fake bouquet.

Her mobile rings. It’s Amos. The Black Keys whistle her ringtone twice. She doesn’t answer. It’s her right to be out of reach, as it will become an ever greater right for everyone. Her mobile rings again. Santigold rings out; this time it’s Stacey. Her mobile is at the bottom of her bag, and both Amos and Stacey know the thing is hopelessly lost, drowned in the confusion of nail polish, lip balm, half a piece of cake, the occasionally misplaced corkscrew, notebooks, squashed popcorn, a recording device for environmental sounds that she never uses, newspaper clippings, etc. She sticks the fake flowers in her bag and keeps on walking.

There’s snow in the air. There have been more and more springtime snows in recent years. The city will fall asleep as soon as the snow starts falling. Not that there won’t be any people on the street, but the buildings withdraw into themselves, the heating units whine, and no one goes out to face the elements unarmed. Walking through the snow with a newborn baby. She can already imagine Amos calling her back. He’s going to be perfect in the role of overanxious father. And she’s already conjuring up scenes of horror, something she’s very good at.

She keeps repeating the images in her head until there’s a whole tree hut growing from one withered branch, an immense structure that has no contact with the ground anywhere but is based on a single insignificant detail and a whole stack of considerations and objections. At any rate, she reasons with herself, the child is an accident. They hadn’t planned on conceiving a child, not at all. And although they don’t have to tell the child later on, they will know it, and that makes for bad vibes. It isn’t even three months yet, so it isn’t a child. And while Amos will make a dream father in theory, in practice he’s never home, which is why no one really notices that they don’t live together. She’ll confront him with his ecological objections, too. And she smokes, another argument against keeping it. Sometimes she languishes from self-doubt. She always wants her way. There are thousands of reasons for not keeping the child. She’ll strangle the foetus in the womb to protect it from its own fate.

Sarah catches herself hurtling down the street stamping her feet, as if she were trying to literally stamp out the images of doom and gloom. She lets the shame blow through her. No one here knows anything about her life in the shabby Old World. She’s so much happier in New York. New York is a beautiful body. Europe is like the innards, a quivering mass of organs with which she would rather not identify, even though they’re inside her.

She walks past an advertisement featuring enormous melons swollen to Freudian proportions that sings the praises of a new shower gel. She bursts out laughing. Pregnant women view the world through the lens of pregnancy. She interprets melons as oversexed machismo. Turning the corner she sees the chairs at the windows. Amos has decided against placing bar stools in the front window, which makes the coffee drinkers look like mounted animals on display. He’s decorated this coffee bar with antique Chinese seating and the usual kitsch, which also fits in with the Village’s hippie legacy.

His headful of raven black curls is immediately visible. Amos is behind the counter, scurrying back and forth. He’s got his hands full with aluminium milk foamers, shakers full of ground cinnamon, and ginger syrup. It’s very busy in the coffee bar at this hour of the day. The line of people waiting for counter service runs almost as far as the door, and a couple of them are making their coffee themselves. Amos is taking advantage of the recent recession. He charges only half price for coffee made at the DIY counter. The idea is so successful that he’s winning on all fronts: less work and ultimately more income.

A Hispanic woman with extravagant earrings and too much glittery eyeshadow to ever appeal to Amos is hanging over the counter and telling him a complicated story. He nods every now and then by way of response and keeps on working. He fills the milk foamer, picks up the dirty cups that a waitress puts on the counter, and knocks out the coffee grounds.

Sarah pushes against the door, and a couple of people in line are forced to step aside. As soon as Amos catches sight of her he waves and purses his lips. His dark brown eyes are laughing.

To give herself a little more time Sarah checks her Facebook page. Suri has put a hilarious image of a fortune cookie on her timeline that says, ‘I can’t tell you anything cause I’m only a fortune cookie.’ Suri, someone else who is indecision personified. They often laugh about it the few times they still see each other: when she goes to visit her mother for the holidays or when Suri comes to visit her. Suri’s fashion designs are making a big splash. Her eclecticism has never been so all-embracing: five sleeves and three legs on one garment that qualifies as neither pants nor pullover, one size fits all. Suri can design maternity clothing for her: a dress with not one but five openings to accommodate the bump.

The woman at the counter takes a tiny sip of coffee to indicate that her story is finished. Sarah goes behind the bar and hands Amos the flimsy fake bouquet. He throws his arms in the air and covers his mouth with his hands in sham rapture over the ugliest bouquet in the world.

‘I cannot accept this,’ he says. ‘It’s too much, too beautiful. What did I do to deserve this?’

‘Not a thing,’ Sarah replies blandly.

His iPhone buzzes a new calendar message: Governor’s Island! Amos pulls off his apron, steps out of his role as sociable barista, and turns into an urban explorer with faded jeans.

‘Subway or taxi?’ he asks.

‘I’m not going,’ says Sarah.

‘Hey,’ says Amos, who’s surprised by the sudden distance.

‘No, I’m not going.’

‘Don’t you feel well? What’s wrong? Should I stay in town, too?’

‘Don’t be silly. Just go,’ she says testily. ‘I have to write out the orchestral score for Gus Van Sant’s soundtrack. He wants to see a proposal by next week.’

Amos is familiar with her moods of sullen silence, and he knows how pointless it is to insist. ‘Okay, I’ll go with Todd then,’ Amos says. He takes a few seconds to walk down the bar and say goodbye to the personnel. On his way back he goes behind her chair and kisses the top of her head. ‘Call me if you decide to come anyway, or if there’s something else. I’ll pick you up later and we can go get a bite to eat.’ He lays his hands on her shoulders and kisses her cheek. His stubble scratches.

Lost in daydreams, she imagines a gigantic baby hanging over New York, a little boy with the face of Amos, a kippah on his soft baby skull. He hangs over the city like a zeppelin, his shadow cast over her. She’s the only one who can see him and pluck him out of the air. He glances over her shoulder, and the two of them are looking at the open newspaper on the table. There’s a photo of a veiled woman staring at her with indifference. It must be nice sometimes to walk around so anonymously, Sarah says to herself. Then a sudden cramp in her lower belly keeps her from reading any further.

We are alarmed. Without asking the permission of the Hispanic behind the counter who has taken Amos’s place, Sarah takes the key hanging from the shoehorn and dashes to the bathroom. She shuts the door and locks it as the pain rips through her. Good riddance, she thinks. So be it. No, we admonish her, it’s not good, it must not happen. I wasn’t ready for it anyway, she sighs in her own defence. You’re thirty-two years old, we cry. Of course you’re ready. We have to keep imposing ourselves on the world. She’s gasping for air. ‘No, this is not what I want,’ she wails. She takes a wad of toilet paper and checks to see if any blood is coming out of her. Nothing. Not a drop.

A war could break out while she’s sitting there on the toilet, hesitating, Sarah says to herself. A war with China. Not a relatively small, local flare-up, but an explosion of violence across the entire Western and Asiatic world. A deadly game of power and prestige. A global coup that will make everyone bleed. He’ll sit at the kitchen table and tell his secrets to his little friends in Chinese so that she and Amos won’t be able to understand him.

Her stomach cramps subside and Sarah is back in the coffee bar, but nothing has changed. None of the coffee snobs, the chronic fatigue sufferers, or the student coffee bar habitués notice her. Only the woman behind the counter. The woman opens and shuts her mouth like a fish, making every effort to ask her politely how she’s doing and what Sarah would like to drink.

‘A medium latte, please,’ says Sarah with a dull voice. She wants to say something else to the woman, something meaningful. She tries to worm her way into the woman’s thought processes and to respond to what’s going on around them. Interaction is the greatest challenge of the twenty-first century, she believes—or at least my greatest challenge. She can start with the blueberry cake, China, babies, babies, babies. If an online therapist were to ask her how she’s feeling, she would say: ‘As if I had swallowed the whole world and I’m going to give birth in seven months.’

Meekly she pays four dollars and ninety cents, exact change, with Amos’s money, in Amos’s bar.

She finds a place to sit next to a table occupied by an old woman and a boy with a bright red cap on his head, relatively atypical customers in this bar. She listens in on their conversation while pretending to study the fake plants. She takes a first sip and thinks about the baby. The baby is drinking the coffee with her, coffee made with a generous amount of milk. The milk provides calcium for the fingernails.

The boy with the red cap is talking to the old woman. Sarah takes him to be about sixteen years old. His body is growing faster than his gestures can keep up with. He still has to get used to his dangling limbs and burgeoning trunk. He’s holding a Mars bar in his hand, peels back the paper, and takes a bite. The boy and the older woman are talking about this and that. Suddenly he tells the grey-haired woman, in a quiet, confidential tone that it may be weird for him because he’s not very old-fashioned, but he’d really like to get married.

At another table she sees a pair of lovers. He takes her hands in his and kisses her fingertips. The woman feels uncomfortable with this and giggles it away. A student frowns at her laptop. She types a short message, ostentatiously pushes ‘send’, and leans back, waiting, sipping from her cup of coffee. As soon as the answer comes rolling in with a bleep, she bangs away at the keyboard. The door opens and two men come in. One takes the coat of the other, who thanks him by kissing him on the lips. The other man sticks out the tip of his tongue and tastes the kiss.

All these little plays being acted out around me, Sarah says to herself, as if I were an extra in some clever ensemble film. The walls are barely visible, but you as the viewer feel them. Each scene sets another scene in motion, and together they form a powerful portrait of the fictional struggle we are all engaged in, the struggle called life. At the end we all lip-sync the same song. This may have been what Jules meant years ago, although in retrospect Sarah suspects that Jules was dealing in anti-establishment clichés.

‘How long have you two been together?’ the old woman kindly asks the boy with the red cap. She is a confidante with whom he can talk much more easily than with his own blood relations.

‘Two months.’ (The details fit together nicely). A baby in her belly: is it a two-month-old work of fiction that keeps knocking against her inner walls? If only she could feel him, the argument in support of life would be more convincing.

The wrinkled woman nods slowly. Sarah can almost hear her thinking how trivial two months really are, but she understands that for a beanpole with a cap, two months is a long time because he doesn’t yet know how much life is ahead of him and how many tragedies, babies, and deaths will follow so naturally and be forgotten so naturally as time goes by.

‘I married young,’ the old woman tells him. ‘My husband is long dead. I’ve been a widow for years. If I hadn’t shut myself in so much, if I had tried to build a new life for myself, I’d have company now.’ The woman falls silent and thinks: it’s important that I listen, that I don’t start talking about people he’s never known, like my husband Fred, who was a road worker and only had three fingers. Stories like that will chase the boy away.

The eyes glimmer in a face full of crow’s feet. Her forehead has deep, wavy furrows. The old woman quickly switches to a different topic. Languid beats waft through the bar. She thinks new music is very interesting, she says, but she doesn’t know that much about it.

‘If I were to buy an album of pop music, what would you recommend? I’d like to do more things with my time.’ The woman is overweight, but it’s not the obesity of the hamburger generations. She has a body that a whole life has passed through like a patchwork quilt wrapped around her. A woman who chatters to keep from thinking about her loneliness. ‘Do you think anyone could still find me attractive?’ She says this timidly, more to herself than to the boy. The boy doesn’t answer but looks instead at the grey drizzle outside.

Sarah’s throat is suddenly as dry as sandpaper. They shouldn’t let coffee be called a drink. The more of this beverage she imbibes, the more intensely she feels a raging thirst. She’ll go to her own apartment through the drizzling rain and stay nice and dry indoors.

As she wanders past the shops she experiences a kind of invisibility. All her life she’s been searching for a margin to manoeuvre in, an air bubble in which she could float happily through the world like a manga figure in a cartoon. She loves looking at an abandoned garbage bag and seeing a little robot, or transforming a street light into a mannequin on stilts, or just walking down the street and hallucinating and fantasizing, with nothing but a medium latte to assist her. Sober, euphoric, and filled with fantasy. It’s normal for your brains to supply what your senses only partly observe. But an unborn creature is no fantasy.

Instinctively she places her hand protectively on her belly. It’s not having a baby as such that’s the problem. She’s fine with having a baby. If she could only insulate the child and carry the little block around with her, beyond the past and beyond the present, to a timeless planet where everything just starts with zero and where each little block stands on its own two feet and they don’t all get stacked up together to form one big shaky house, she’d sign up for that journey in an instant. But on this planet she has one panic attack after another and she’s still too cowardly to let Amos in on her secret. Wrong, wrong, wrong, that’s the rhythm of the subway cars as they zoom past her nose.

She comes up out of the subway, and just before she gets home she notices a missed call from Amos. Has that much time really passed? Sensitive, thoughtful, a tiny bit anxious: that’s him. Anxious for his own little circle, unashamedly egocentric. She can wake up at night with a start, bathed in sweat and thinking about the injustice in the world, misunderstood Muslims, irritating Republicans, outrageously stupid Democrats, criminal oil companies, the contrast between us and them, all that bad music that no one can even tolerate but that’s constantly being nominated, rednecks who exploit their children on reality TV shows and fish out pig’s trotters from a tank of slime, European obtuseness, and the complete deplorable lack of solidarity. All that quickly provides enough fodder for a sleepless night. Sometimes she wonders whether her concern for the world isn’t simply a projection of her own problems; sometimes she knows for sure it is. Amos always says he understands her when she expresses her anxieties in words. His understanding is like a blanket that you throw over a fire. It suffocates her and totally extinguishes her, while she just wants to keep on raging.

Whenever she tries to explain this to him he nods, full of understanding once again. He takes the toast out of the toaster and puts it on her plate while kissing her and moving on to the order of the day: designing a liquor cabinet for a new cafe, or trying to figure out whether spelt bread is really more nutritious than cornbread.

Sarah keeps on walking. She decides not to call Amos back. What she could really use right now is a whole lot of oxygen and a little bit of alcohol. And stretching out on the wall-to-wall in her music studio with Jacques Brel on repeat.

She enters the apartment building and turns her attention to climbing the stairs, all the way up to the sixteenth floor. It’s a ridiculous effort that she’d never otherwise make. Physical exertion is indispensable for pregnant women. She read that last night on one of the pregnancy blogs she skimmed, only to erase the search history afterwards as if she had been lurking around some porn site.

At the front door she bends over from the waist, panting heavily. She lets herself into the apartment, where she occupies two bedrooms: one is perfectly equipped as a music studio, and in the other are her desk and a bed. Stacey pulls a towel over the big mirror in the narrow front hallway. She’s walking around in her customary baggy sweatpants and a Hello Kitty T-shirt with whiskers that she got from Alicia.

‘What’s up?’ Sarah murmurs.

Not much, according to Stacey, who slips into the bathroom with some anti-limescale product. Sarah takes a wine glass from the cabinet and senses that Stacey is lingering behind her. She taps her finger against a bottle in the cherrywood wine rack, changes her mind, and pulls out a Montepulciano d’Abruzzo. Would the child have been conceived in her bedroom or Amos’s? How could a baby ever walk around here in this artsy chaos, still way too redolent of the student life? What kinds of walls and gates are necessary to provide a baby with safe accommodations? What life-threatening, sharp little corners and objects will have to be done away with for a baby to have free rein here, and what incriminating material?

She struggles at opening the bottle, aware of an uneasy tension hanging over the room.

‘Say-Stacey-hey-Sarah-what-should-I …’ Both Stacey and Sarah decide to break the silence at the same time. Their words overlap and interconnect, then simultaneously they revert to silence once again.

‘Say,’ says Stacey, the first to toss something out, ‘I saw you walking around this morning near the Toys R Us on Union Square. You looked a little worried.’ She takes the tea kettle and the espresso pot off the stove and puts them on the counter.

‘I seem to have a face with only two settings: anxiously awake and anxiously asleep,’ Sarah says.

‘At least let me know if you want to trade your cute little snoot for my mug.’ Stacey goes over the burners with a scouring sponge. Her whole body moves along with her. She pauses for a moment and looks up, strands of hair falling over her eyes. ‘But are you okay?’

‘Yes,’ says Sarah curtly. She’s going to do what every doctor advises against to minimize the chance of a miscarriage: drink. It’s wrong and it’s reckless, but it’s also a useful way of conducting a showdown with herself. She’ll leave it up to natural selection. If the little one can survive this, then surely it will be able to cope with everything else. She puts her iPhone in the docking station and plays The XX. A somewhat disappointing second album, a boiled down version of their strong debut. Sarah installs herself at the kitchen table with her glass and the bottle of wine. The table is littered with bottled water, samples of various creams that Stacey has apparently torn out of fashion glossies, Sarah’s music magazines, expired discount coupons, and five substantial dictionaries. She thumbs through the Q-Z volume indifferently. Stacey must know those dictionaries by heart by now. They’re filled with Post-its and notations made with marking pen. They’re Stacey’s personal talmud. Stacey herself has withdrawn to her room.

It may be the powerful herbal fragrance from the red wine or the creaking in the speakers, a pale imitation of her earlier cassette tapes, but suddenly she’s seized by the idea of calling Uncle Jempy. He’s the one man who’s willing to listen to her endlessly (at least if she’s calling him) and who gives her his totally useless advice only if she explicitly asks for it. But she can’t bring herself to get the words out of her mouth. As soon as they come in contact with oxygen, they undergo some weird chemical process that changes them into Problems That Must Be Dealt With.

At the selfsame moment there’s someone inside her who is desperate to stay alive. She is now reproducing the species. She is a fertilized flower, a kangaroo with a little one in her belly bag. The conga drums from The XX startle her and call her attention to the fact that there are only two inches of wine left in the bottle. For a seasoned alcoholic that may be a lunch of meagre rations, but not for Sarah. She’s giddy and drunk. There’s no choice but to keep on drinking and head through the narrow tunnel of her own thoughts.

Sarah thumbs through the dictionaries. One word after another passes through her fingers. The letters drop away and leave her body filled to the brim. It’s as if they were pushing against the walls of her insides and shouting: let us out of this miserable, indecipherable body. Stacey sticks her head back in the room and dives into the refrigerator.

‘Don’t you want anything to eat?’ she asks. ‘It’s three o’clock already.’ Sarah’s iPhone is humming on top of the microwave. Stacey slices cheese, washes arugula, and toasts a piece of spelt bread. The house phone rings. Stacey answers it.

‘Yes, she’s right next to me. I’ll get her. Bye, Mickey.’ Stacey hands her the phone and whispers: ‘Your mother.’

Her mother, naturally. Saturday, at the stroke of three: that’s her mother’s fixed routine, to call at nine o’clock from one of the many rooms in her villa. When Sarah gets on the line her voice is trembling so badly that her mother immediately knows something is wrong. Why are mothers like that? Sarah knows she’s making an immense, unforgivably big mistake, but she can’t help it. Nor does she care at this point. She breaks down. Throwing all caution to the winds, she tells her mother, startling herself by her own words. ‘Mama,’ she says. ‘I’m pregnant.’

Yes, she’s done it. She has just committed a terrible sin against the universal rule that says: never dump an intimate secret on your mother just like that, and especially not if you’re pregnant and your whole world is tottering on the brink and the hormones are tearing through you like Ferrari owners on speed on a highway at night—and especially, especially not if you’re less than three months gone, and never, ever, under any circumstances, if you haven’t told the father yet.

She realizes her mistake, but it’s too late. Seized by the same panic that seizes an attacker when he shoots the struggling night watchman, she goes on to take an even bigger misstep and turns off her phone. She doesn’t want to know how her mother is going to react. She stands there, her legs shaking, holding the phone in her hand like a contaminated object. The phone is connected to the entire world of phones. Signals travel through wires from the sixteenth floor in NYC to the cables on the sunken road, up the mountain, to number 7 Nightingale Lane. She locks the telephone away in her soundproof studio.

‘Another glass of wine?’ Sarah asks Stacey.

‘Please,’ Stacey says. Sarah opens a new bottle and fills both their glasses. They clink without saying a word. Stacey has understood nothing from the brief conversation in Dutch, and she lets her uninformed head bob along to the beat of the music.

Glass in hand, Sarah goes out into the corridor. In the stairwell she takes the narrow stairway going up to the roof. It’s quite cold, but she doesn’t feel like going back for a scarf or coat. She gently pushes the door, a worthless fibreboard affair that flaps and slams shut behind her.

She kicks a sun-bleached Budweiser can and goes closer to the edge. She’s often stood here with Amos. One of the first times she stood with him on the roof of his coffee bar in Queens she threw a can in a graceful arch down to the street out of wanton nervousness. Amos was furious. A hurtling can is a knife, he taught her. A childhood friend of his was hit by such a can thrown from an apartment building and lost an eye.

Sarah stands there for a long time, sobering up in the fresh wind. She’s holding the glass so hard that her fingers are clenched around it. She notices this when the door on the roof swings open, revealing Amos in the doorway. Has an intercontinental alarm system kicked in? Has her mother called Amos? No, impossible. She doesn’t have Amos’s mobile number. Amos comes over to her and takes a sip of wine.

‘Hi, statue,’ he says. ‘I used to practise doing that when I was a kid, being a statue. I haven’t done it in a long time.’ Amos takes off his anorak and lets it fall to the roof. He stands on one leg, balancing his body and remaining immobile, a flamingo in a concrete river full of lichen, cans, and wrappers. He looks in the direction of Ground Zero, to the most tangible phantom buildings in the world. Sarah is tempted to give him a push just for the joke, but then she sees the seriousness and dedication on Amos’s face, and there’s something that holds her back. For minutes all his attention is concentrated on standing on one leg. Why is he doing this? To prove he excels in everything? The sceptic Sarah might make that claim, but she’d much rather see it in a different way: he’s doing it out of pure dedication to her.

He’s been so quiet for so long now that she can no longer say anything, nor does she feel the need to. There are enough sounds in the streets below. From the roof you can still see people walking in the streets, but their faces are erased. Sarah lowers herself to the surface of the roof. She realizes how frozen she is when she sits down on Amos’s anorak and feels the warmth it’s giving off.

Then Amos breaks off his exercise. Sarah is shaken from the spell. They look down and fantasize about what they should do with the street below. Bring a mammoth back to life and let him thunder through the streets. They imagine it so vividly that Sarah stretches out her hand to touch the trunk of the mammoth, which has come squeaking over the building, and to feel his rough hide before he goes to die out on the prairies of the Great Plains.

Together they watch a small group of runners. There are five of them. Sarah and Amos can easily follow their movements from the roof. They disappear and reappear between the buildings and the park. There’s something very reassuring about just looking at them.

‘They’re training for the New York Marathon six months from now,’ says Amos. ‘I saw guys like that years ago in Egypt. Marathon runners with wiry bodies. They run their legs off. Day after day, in the sand, just to do it. Or maybe they had too much energy, or they were running away from something. We saw them pass by every day, but we couldn’t talk to them because they were so fast. They didn’t seem to do anything but run.’

An hour later she’s soaking in the bathtub, dead beat and wiped out, when the bathroom door opens. Amos comes in and kisses her. Without saying a word he takes off his clothes. It’s a small tub, yet he succeeds in lying down next to her, so they can soak in the water like a pair of shrimp. Instead of chasing him out of a bathtub on the brink of exploding, eating a couple of pounds of Galler chocolate, and grumbling for a night and a day to make him think she has a problem, she responds to his kiss. Sarah would sooner bite her tongue off than to even consider revealing anything about the pregnancy. She’d rather make love to her unwitting husband.

Their lovemaking follows a familiar routine. Sarah and Amos know how it usually goes: how he grabs her by the hips, how she wraps her legs around him so they can touch each other with the maximum number of body parts. It’s genuine, familiar, sweet sex, not the bungling sort associated with first times and well-buffed, preened, anonymous bodies, but real sex with the rumblings of too much wine and the relaxation of a hot bath. She sinks her teeth into his shoulders: that thick, hard collarbone that she’d so like to bite through. She presses him hard against her, as if she were a moulded form into which he was meant to disappear. He has to pass through her in order to end up in another place. A place where they can lose their way together.

Mothers are too close to reality. They invite reality to their table and wheedle all kinds of secrets out of it. Sarah is sitting at her laptop, reading the date on the airplane ticket in her mailbox for the third time. The message contains the details of a Brussels-New York flight under the name of Mieke Vandersanden. In two days her mother is coming to visit. In a following e-mail her mother explains that she’s dropping in because she has to be at a conference in Boston anyway. She’s making a stopover in New York so she can visit Sarah in the city as well as her sister Lydia in upstate New York. If it’s not an imposition, that is. Her mother has e-mailed her two or three times a day over the last few days, usually on the most trifling pretexts. Should I book a hotel room (because I don’t want to be a burden to you two)? There aren’t too many steps, are there (because I can’t manage that with my hip)?

Mothers don’t change, they evolve. Her mother actually seems to have flourished in recent years. She comes to America quite frequently to visit Sarah and her sister. She travels all over the world for the foundation. Elvira and she are still the driving forces, but there are also many newcomers who are taking the foundation even further. Sarah takes genuine pleasure in watching her mother cautiously get to know new people.

When Sarah goes to JFK to wait for her mother, an odd character approaches her and offers to carry her luggage, although Sarah has only a handbag. She gives the character two dollar bills and sends him away. The stooped little man vanishes into the restroom. Beggars aren’t allowed at JFK, but they’re infiltrating the airport unnoticed with greater frequency. If things go on like this the whole country will soon be begging at the airports—another way to welcome foreigners to their American dream. Sarah’s high heels are not such a good idea from a practical point of view, but they do wonders for her self-confidence.

Like a whale, her mother comes swimming over from the threadbare continent of Europe, covered with seaweed and lichen but more vital than ever. At the first sight of her mother the nerves start racing through her body. Mother and daughter exchange kisses. They have never hugged each other; no need for it. Her mother’s appearance hardly ever changes anymore. She probably has her grandfather to thank for that, a man who looked the same on his deathbed as he did in his wedding photo. For years, Mieke, too, has maintained her wedding weight, until she dropped below it after the death of her husband. Not a single word is said about the pregnancy. On the way to the taxi stand, Sarah senses that her mother’s nerves are also tightly wound. They haven’t mentioned it again, either in their e-mails or on the phone. Sarah has decided to let everything run its course, but she knows without being told that her mother knows that Amos is still in the dark.

Sarah listens to her mother with amazement. It’s brilliant how even during an innocent ride from the airport to Amos’s apartment she manages to bring up the very subjects that Sarah doesn’t want to hear anything about. She tells her that the foundation is restoring the castle at the foot of the mountain, which has been a huge project because the place had been utterly destroyed by the previous owners. She’s full of praise for Emily’s improbably darling baby, and for Ulrike’s oldest daughter’s twins, two eight-year-old girls who walk up and shake hands completely unprompted and then let the big people talk in peace. They’re not getting an iPad; Ulrike thinks they should just play with wooden blocks. She does exaggerate a bit, however. Moderation is the way to go. You just wait until you have grandchildren, Ulrike says. Then you’ll see how much you want to spoil them rotten. It’s your first reflex, but Ulrike has armed herself against it.

They walk into Amos’s apartment. It’s reasonably in keeping with what her mother regards as a decent place to live. What’s more, they can talk in peace here. There’s no Stacey lugging dictionaries around, and Amos won’t be home until this evening. Her mother looks around. They can’t get the heating under control. The whole building has been panting from the heat since last night.

‘Where’s Amos?’ she asks.

‘He’s working.’

‘Always working,’ her mother sighs. ‘By the way, I’ll have to get Amos to explain to me what the story is behind that menorah again. Why does a simple candleholder have so much significance? I know so little about Jewish culture. I know that Jews are fanatics, but they’re clever. Muslims are even more fanatical, but unfortunately they’re less clever. We’ve been given another fine example of that.’

‘Would you like something to eat?’ Sarah asks, interrupting her mother before another of their endless discussions unfolds. She rummages through the closet, between the baking powder, Brazil nuts, and instant pudding mix. She wonders why she’s hasn’t even baked anything, or taken the trouble to pick up some cakes from Dean & DeLuca.

Fortunately her mother declines any food or drink. She does want a glass of water. Mieke paces back and forth, turning on her heels. There’s a crumb hanging on her trousers, a sign that all is not well with her.

‘They look good on you, Mama, those trousers. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen you wear them.’

‘Oh, I’ve been wearing trousers for a couple of years now. Much handier than a skirt, and there are such elegant styles. At my age I’m not going to start wearing jeans, of course.’

‘How’s life in Belgium?’

‘Which Belgium?’ Mieke asks. ‘There’s not much left of it.’

‘I mean: how is it at home?’

‘Fine, fine. They’re building a villa on that wooded lot next to us, with a green roof and an indoor swimming pool, and with hand-selected red stones from a special reopened quarry. Guess how much that nonsense costs?’

‘Not much, I bet, with this recession,’ Sarah laughs, temporarily relieved that they haven’t yet broached the Big Subject.

‘Four million euros. That’s right. And of course they’re cutting down all the remaining trees. What’s the point of living in the woods?’

‘Has the recession had much impact in Belgium?’

‘I can’t complain, but you see it in the details. Strange things can happen in life. You remember how we used to laugh when we went to the post office and we saw those old matrons with their big fat pocketbooks filled with government bonds? Last year I bought government bonds myself, at 4.3 percent if you hold onto them for eight years. There’s not a single bank that pays that much interest. Ha. I guess I’ve become an old matron myself.’

‘You’re not that old, Mama. You look very good, actually.’ She means it. She’s sticking to her resolution not to tell lies or twist the truth.

Mieke looks around the apartment. She sees a real Calder mobile hanging from a length of fishing line and an imitation Rietveld chair from the MoMA museum that still must have cost a couple of months’ rental income.

‘A very attractive apartment, I must say,’ she decides. ‘Cosy, not too small, and nice and warm.’

Sarah knows her mother. ‘You go rest,’ she says. ‘You must be tired.’

‘For a minute then.’ So they continue their little drama, because both of them are eager to postpone the conversation, preferably forever, which was the reason her mother rushed off to America in the first place. She brings her mother to the guest room, where the laundry is still hanging that’s been dry for a couple of days. How could she have forgotten to take it down? Mieke pulls over her wheeled suitcase, zips it open, and takes out an envelope from the front compartment containing a coupon for four hundred dollars for the children’s department of Macy’s, purchased online. She’d rather give her a coupon, she explains, because she’d never be able to buy anything without Sarah thinking it was ugly. ‘And now I’m going to sleep.’

Ten minutes later Mieke is back in the living room with a laundry basket full of folded clothes.

‘Well, that did me a lot of good.’

‘You could sleep a little bit longer, Mama. You hardly had enough time to close your eyes.’

‘Thank you, dear. I know. But I can’t get any real sleep with all that dust. I’ll do a little vacuuming in there later on.’

‘Sorry, I haven’t had the time, and our cleaning guy has run out on us.’

Mieke gives her daughter an uncomfortably long look.

‘How about a snack?’

‘No, no, Sarah. Don’t trouble yourself on my account.’

‘I can just pop over to the store.’

‘We’re not going to die of hunger, surely.’

‘Yes, I’m sorry. I’ve just been so busy … ’ The spring sun is shining in, but not far enough to reach her.

‘You’re facing this on your own, too. Amos works far too much. When you have a child, he’s going to have to cut down.’

‘Stop it, Mama,’ Sarah says, interrupting her. ‘It’s not going to happen. I just can’t do it.’ There’s no other way to make this announcement.

‘Look, Sarah,’ Mieke begins. Her hand is trembling. Her mother squeezes herself into the space between a kitchen chair and the counter. She takes a glass from the drainboard and fills it from the tap. A blood vessel in her neck is doing a subterranean dance.

For a long time now, Sarah has regarded her mother as an elderly woman who needs to be constantly comforted and reassured. This is a job she cannot take on. That’s why she fled Belgium years ago: because grief incites grief. Two grieving people just pull each other down until they end up at the bottom, mourning in the inky darkness. Shared grief is double grief. She fervently hopes there’s a devoted man in Belgium, or somewhere, who’s willing to take on her immeasurable need for consolation. And even if such a stranger never materializes, she does have to get on with her own life.

‘I’m sorry, Mama. That’s the way it is. There isn’t going to be any grandchild.’ She doesn’t even feel like giving the matter any thought or arguing about it. She’s too sad for that. This open recognition of her total and catastrophic ignorance is humiliating. Keep that in mind, she wants to say: it’s the catastrophe that’s in my blood. Rather than look at the little woman sitting at her kitchen table, she casts a glance outside.

Her mother, who never used to miss an opportunity to squabble with her daughter, remains silent for an alarmingly long time. Not a word comes out of her mouth. Suddenly she’s thirty years older, a tiny, shrivelled-up, hundred-year-old woman with the waist of a doll, sitting on a kitchen chair, caved in, with her hands lying helplessly in her lap, shrouded in profound silence. Sarah doesn’t know what to do. Go away and close the kitchen door forever, leaving the little woman to sit there alone? Give her mother a good shake in a rare expression of physical contact? Try to carry on something like a dialogue with a member of the Silent and Corked Up generation?

‘If you only knew how happy your father was when you were born,’ says her mother out of nowhere. ‘If he were still alive and knew you were pregnant he’d be beside himself with joy.’

‘You just want a grandchild to compensate for Papa.’ There it is, the ghastly accusation, smouldering between them. ‘But that’s not the way it works, is it? I can’t just go ahead and have a baby, can I? Our whole family is contaminated by death.’

Mieke snaps upright. In less than a second she’s the lively woman again from number 7 Nightingale Lane. ‘Stop the dramatizing. Listen to me. You are not your father. When your father left us it was his own decision. You would never do such a thing.’

She falls back in her chair and pounds her chest three times, panting and expelling little breaths of air.

‘Yes, it was Papa’s choice,’ Sarah says. ‘So you know that, too.’

‘For all these years we spared each other, but we’re smarter than that.’

‘And I’m too smart than to get swept up in that endless repetition of the same doomed Vandersanden pattern. I’m the last Vandersanden, the last of a family that can’t find its place in life so it rubs itself out. But not me. I’ve searched long and hard, but now I’ve found my place. And I don’t want to throw it off balance. Certainly not by a child who in all likelihood would have the same cloudy Vandersanden genes as mine. If I were a good mother I’d put an end to it now.’

‘You can’t do that, love. It’s murder. You’d regret it for the rest of your life.’

‘If you could start all over again, you’d make a different choice, wouldn’t you? I don’t believe for a minute those people who come slogging out of their misery, ankle-deep in muck, cheeks collapsed, marked for life, and who turn right around and swear up and down that they’d do it all again—all of it. Stupid! And arrogant to boot.’

Mieke takes a deep breath and locks eyes with her daughter. They’re the eyes of a woman who has lived. There’s not a trace of venom in them, no matter how intensely Sarah searches for it.

‘After years of fighting I’ve finally found some form of happiness,’ says Mieke. ‘And you know I’ve been strict with myself—and yes, strict with you, too. I did what I thought I had to do. I didn’t let myself get talked into anything else.’

That partial admission of guilt is not enough. Sarah wants to have her cake and eat it, too. After all those years she thinks she has a right to it.

‘Don’t be afraid. Can I be honest with you? I still remember it as if it were yesterday, that day you were born … ’

‘Mama, I know that story. There were so many people who came to celebrate on the day I was born, and Elvira had a gold brooch made that I later dropped down the drain … ’

‘On the day you were born I forgot all the days that had come before.’

‘You won’t fool me with that. And even if it is true, it says a lot about you.’

‘Stop.’ Mieke brings her hand down hard on the table, right in a puddle of sweet-and-sour sauce. She walks coolly to the tap, rinses off her hand, and goes on. ‘What I wanted to tell you—if I may proceed, that is, if you will let me have my say just this once.’ Like a great orator, her mother lets fall a moment of defiant silence. ‘I didn’t know what to do when I discovered I was pregnant with you. We had tried for so long. We had had a big house built for lots of children, so it shouldn’t have been such a surprise. But it was. Look, I’ll be honest with you. Even Papa never knew this. But I’m telling you, those first moments were pure panic. But now I cannot imagine my life without you.’

She picks up the dishcloth from the tap, holds it under running water, wrings it out, and brings it back to the table.

‘It’s all about the change in your body, pure and simple. Suddenly everything starts rumbling. All the interior furnishings get moved around to make room for something new. And not a little something, either. It comes in and takes over. I can understand that you’ve been knocked for a loop, but you just have to grin and bear it. With us there was no question of other options. My God, no, I don’t even want to think about it. And yes, maybe we were from another generation and we’ll never get the hang of this one.’ Her consistent use of the word ‘we’ is annoying. It makes a mockery of reality.

‘But does that mean it’s so much better now? I seriously doubt it,’ Mieke continues.

‘So?’

‘No, it’s something I can’t explain, Sarah, but you’ll see what I mean once the child is born.’

‘A little miracle worker, this baby, curing you of depression and life’s insecurities?’

‘Who knows.’

‘But who itself is utterly miserable.’

‘These are confusing times.’ Mieke bows her head.

Confusing times? Since when does her mother lie awake at night worrying about the melting ice caps and the SUVs that are driving the world to shreds? About the banks that are gobbling up capital and the citizens who are shitting it out? That’s never been her concern. As an affluent baby boomer her interests have never been infringed upon.

Sarah says nothing. She looks at the little figure on the collar of her mother’s turtleneck. The horseman is lobbing a puck to some unknown place beyond the shirt.

‘You look pale, love. It wouldn’t hurt for you to rest a few hours, if that’s possible in this madhouse of a city.’

‘You think it’s noisy here?’ Sarah asks.

‘I think you should get more sleep,’ Mieke continues. ‘When you’re pregnant you need a good night’s sleep. When I was pregnant with you I slept for about nine months.’

‘Mama, what are you talking about?’ Mieke just ignores Sarah’s whole line of reasoning, her doubt and despair. Mieke knows all of propriety’s secret pathways, but she can be just as hard and ruthless with her own daughter.

‘Oh my dear, we’re never going to get along. For the life of me I cannot understand how you can’t even find the time to give your kitchen table a good cleaning with a dishcloth, and that’s just one detail. But … ’

‘Mama, just shut up.’

What if her mother had been allowed to wear trousers when she was young, to wander freely through her parents’ vast garden, for example, and pick strawberries? And what if she had been granted permission to consume a glass of beer when she was young, just once, by the society around her and by herself? What if her mother had been a plain old ordinary mother? Would they have been able to get along then?

‘Did you come all this way,’ Sarah asks, ‘to trash my life, which I’ve worked so hard to build up, and to talk me into exposing myself to a very real possibility of total destruction?’

‘Oh, Sarah, you’re going to be so glad to see that baby,’ she says, as if to reassure her. ‘And you’ll develop some excellent fighting skills, just like we have.’

‘Ha, ha,’ Sarah says slowly.

The sound of fumbling can be heard at the front door. Stacey lets herself in. She politely shakes Sarah’s mother’s hand and tries to engage her in a little small talk, but her mother clamps her lips together and gestures as if she were a deaf mute. Stacey quickly folds up her forgotten tripod. Yesterday she and Amos had a photo session for a new menu for bottled water. You don’t have to be a clairvoyant to sense that the atmosphere isn’t particularly relaxed. Stacey gives Sarah a wink and disappears once more.

‘That’s just what I mean,’ says Mieke, as soon as Stacey has pulled the front door shut.

‘What do you mean, Mama?’ Sarah asks calmly. She crosses her arms high on her chest.

‘It’s always open house here. You can’t have that if you want to raise a child, believe me. A child needs structure, order. Fixed times for eating and sleeping and the potty.’

‘Mama, you’re not listening to me.’

‘How can I help you, Sarah? I just want to make my little contribution. I can come to New York more often. Maybe I can rent a room, or stay with Aunt Lydia and Uncle Christopher. Or the little one can come spend a month with me during the summer. I’m not saying you can’t do it alone, mind you. To be honest, you’re living very nicely here. Yes, I’m glad you’re doing so well, although I’d rather you didn’t live on the other side of the world.’

Time is standing still, as still as the cactus on the windowsill, which could stay there for all eternity.

Sarah is standing in front of her bulletin board, where a photo has been tacked up along with a number of bills and the folder from the best Chinese takeout in all of New York. She picks a bit at the thumbtacks. ‘Why don’t you look for a new partner, or just someone to go to concerts and exhibitions with? There are specialized sites for that sort of thing. There’s nothing wrong with it at all,’ says Sarah. ‘I’d be happy for you.’

And then her mother, without a hint of condescension or slavishness, says, ‘You can’t control everything, Sarah. If you just consider all the things that can go wrong in life, it’s a miracle we live longer than fruit flies. Do you know what would have been easiest for me to do? To have done the right thing and kept you with me when I needed you most, instead of letting you go to New York. But I could see that you needed it. You needed to live your own life and to make your own mistakes, far away from me—mistakes I don’t even want to hear about. We all make mistakes, myself included, and I’m happy to let you make your own. But not this one crucial mistake. I won’t let you make this one.’

‘Now I’ve got to go to Aunt Lydia’s,’ she says, ‘but tomorrow morning I’ll be back here at eleven o’clock, as agreed. Amos is a good man. Tell him, and I’m convinced that together you’ll make the right decision.’

Without saying a decent goodbye, her mother continues on her way, tottering with her bad hip and dragging her suitcase, which she hardly opened, to the elevator. Sarah is furious with the intensity that she reserves for her mother alone. It’s rude for her to let her elderly mother struggle like that with her suitcase, while with every rasping breath she takes, and by folding her houndstooth jacket over her arm instead of wearing it, she acts out the plea: help me.

Sarah goes to the kitchen and waits at the window until her mother leaves the building and does something that any true-blue New Yorker could only manage with difficulty: she hails a cab. For her mother it seems effortless. She’s probably emanating vast quantities of radioactive arrogance, scandalized by the distressing lack of attentiveness on the part of the little men who think they’re somebody, with their taxis that go much too fast and are cleaned much too infrequently, especially the upholstery. You have to keep your eyes open. There isn’t a single cab driver who doesn’t dare stop for her.

After her mother’s visit Sarah crawls into bed, emotionally spent, physically exhausted. Suddenly, without any warning Sarah’s body reacts violently. So much has happened and so much is happening.

She lies there between the clammy sheets, steaming on a bed of lava. The fever creeps up to her jaws and sinks its teeth in.

We dab the sweat from her body and whisper encouraging words into her ear. We wrap her up completely so she feels safe with us. We take her along to the side of life she’s always avoided. It’s very busy there. Words that are never spoken now fly into the air. Sounds she can’t otherwise hear are distinctly audible. We ask her to push all the incomplete images together. Some of them disintegrate before she can touch them, others click into place and step out from the darkness into the foreground.

Sarah wakes up in the hole of sheets she has dug for herself. She can breathe again.

We stroll through the city when suddenly we hear a starting signal resounding through the broad streets. Tens of thousands of runners are taking part in the New York Marathon. Tens of thousands of feet beat out the cadence of the city. People stream in in droves to support the runners. Children with blue slushie tongues. Runners’ wives with sacks of peanut butter sandwiches that are never going to be delivered because it’s impossible to find anybody amid the thousands of runners. A couple of reporters who’ve stationed themselves at a strategic corner of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. While the reporter from CNN continues with his excited spiel, we manoeuvre ourselves through the masses. A first group of ten runners catches up with us. Ten athletes with legs like giraffes that barely touch the asphalt.

We walk farther. We’re always en route. It began countless years ago, and we’re doing all we can to keep on going.