Philip and Deborah have been trying for several years to have a child; by the time they give up, Philip is already fifty years old. He’d like to just drop the subject – he feels he could live out his life perfectly sensibly without a child. He is a successful photographer; there are still some things in this world he would like to photograph, things he’d like to put his mind to; it’s not as if new ideas weren’t occurring to him any more. But Deborah sees things differently. Deborah feels that she can’t be happy without a child; she feels a terrible incompleteness, as if, without a child, a very crucial portion of knowledge would be denied her once and for all.
That is how she expresses it.
She keeps repeating it over and over again. She says, I feel as if I can’t breathe any more without a child, and Philip can’t think of anything to say in reply.
So, they agree to adopt.
Back then they were married and well off. Deborah had brought money to their marriage; she hails from prosperous circumstances. Money is not the problem. The problem is Philip’s age; actually, he is too old to adopt a child. Deborah is exactly the right age; she is thirty-five, but Philip is a good ten years more, and only after some research does Deborah find an agency that also places children with old, with older parents – exclusively children from Russia. This agency doesn’t care at all about the age of the parents.
Philip and Deborah spend a weekend at the agency. They sit together in a circle with seven other couples and talk about themselves, attempting to say something about themselves; they are supposed to try to be open. They listen to one another; it is astounding and also touching, how similar they are to one another; their modest needs, the simple longing for a family.
I long to get to this point, Deborah says. I have a longing for a table set for three.
Philip, sitting next to her, watches as she searches for words, wringing her hands, twisting her wedding ring – a woman in a state of extreme distress. But the sentences she then decides on are the exact opposite of the complicated theories she normally favours, her often-fatal weakness for on-the-one-hand-and-on-the-other; here there seems to be just the one hand. Deborah is facing away from him, her knees drawn up to her chest and her eyes fixed on the floor; she is surprisingly and totally alien to him. She is barefoot; he looks closely at her bare feet. He hears the way in which she pronounces the word ‘longing’, how she draws it out. He imagines a table set for three. The light on the table, falling on the table from the side, the blinding whiteness of the tablecloth.
The agency’s residential meeting centre is located in the mountains. In the morning when Philip steps out on the terrace he doesn’t know for one dizzying moment why they are really here. The smell of pine trees, snow on the mountaintops. What are they doing here? Deborah behind him in the shadowy room lying in bed, her hair spread out on the pillow like a fan. Then he remembers.
Sunday afternoon, the agency representative invites them to come to the conference room, just the two of them. The other couples are gone, have left, or they never really existed, just a sham, an arrangement of mirrors to allow the couple Philip and Deborah to become visible. To let everything come out into the open, especially those things they want to conceal.
The conference room is empty. The mats on which they had sat in a circle and were supposed to talk about themselves have been neatly piled up in a corner. The agent asks them to sit down at the table that is now in the middle of the room; he sits down across from them, puts a portfolio on the table, opens it, leafs through it searching, hesitating at one spot, turning back a page then forward again. He pauses one very last moment, then he turns the portfolio around and places it in front of Philip and Deborah, precisely between them.
He says, Alexej. As if there were only this one choice, no other.
In a shiny plastic cover, the photo of a child, perhaps two years old, below it a few details about his origin and adoption history.
Why Alexej, Philip says. Why this child. He senses that this is a question Deborah would never have asked. She already knows. This is her child.
The agency representative says, Because of the look in his eyes.
Deborah says nothing. She looks at the picture of the child, bends down close to examine it.
Philip and Deborah fly to Russia. Philip has been in Russia several times before, Deborah never. It doesn’t seem to matter in the slightest to her that they are flying to Russia; since the weekend in the mountains, since the decision for Alexej, she has turned oddly silent, and sometimes Philip thinks of it as brooding, an image he would rather avoid. They fly to Moscow and from Moscow they proceed by bus; outside the city a broad, dark plain stretches to the horizon. In N. they take a hotel room in which you can neither turn off the heat nor open the windows. The orphanage is at the edge of the city; a Soviet-style building in an overgrown birch forest. For an hour they wait in a room that has seven chairs standing next to each other against a wall painted red; then the door opens and someone pushes Alexej into the room. He looks paler and thinner than in the photo. He looks stunted. He immediately goes to stand in a corner of the room and refuses to come out of it.
Come here, Deborah says. Come, come out; I won’t hurt you. Sitting on her chair by the wall she leans forward and tries to entice the child as if he were a kitten; she is crying as she cajoles him. The child stands in the corner, not moving. He stares at them.
At supper they eat in the empty, spooky hotel dining room; they eat green salad with hard-boiled eggs and ice-cold peas and drink a sweet red wine that immediately goes to Philip’s head. The waitresses stand in a row like soldiers; they stand there motionless, hands folded over their aprons; outside snow is falling in fantastic, fat flakes.
The peas are very good, Deborah says. The wine is a bit strange, don’t you think; it’s pretty sweet. But I think it’s good. I’m OK with everything.
Besides them there’s no one else eating supper in the hotel, and they take what’s left of the wine back to their hot room. They phone their families. Philip phones his brother Joseph who sells cars and is the father of three children; the feeling of a family bond – his brother’s voice, the barking of the golden retriever in the background, the noise of the television and the children fighting; Philips’s sister-in-law calling them for supper, then someone ringing the doorbell – is absolutely overpowering. Where are you, Joseph calls into the telephone. Philip! The connection is terrible; I can’t understand you. Call me again later! All the best!
Deborah calls her sister who lives in Hawaii and is a teacher. She leans her back against Philip’s back while she’s talking; Philip feels the vibration of her voice in his spine. She says, I don’t know; maybe he’s autistic. He seems so odd to me, motionless and silent; he doesn’t talk; he just stares at us; can we risk it. Can we do this.
Deborah’s sister seems to be saying something reassuring, to know a way of giving some comfort.
On the second day Alexej takes a hesitant step out of the corner. He clings to the wall, keeps his hands on the wall; he says nothing but turns around to Deborah three times. Philip, having thought long and hard about it, finally took his camera. He photographs the visitors’ room. The view from the window. Deborah on the chair, her hands reaching out to the child; she is wearing a sweater made of brown, fluffy wool, and all the colours in the room turn darker from the outside towards the inside.
He also photographs the child’s back, his soft, fragile neck.
On the third day Alexej comes towards them already in the entrance hall of the orphanage; Philip suspects that someone may have had a serious talk with him. He’s wearing an anorak that’s much too big for him, and he reaches for Deborah’s hand in a calm and definitive way. The three of them take a short walk in the garden. They walk around the birches and look at their tracks in the freshly fallen snow, two big sets and between them one small set.
We’ll take him, Philip says that evening to the director of the orphanage; we are quite certain; we want to take him. The silent manner in which the director adds this information to the files seems right to him, appropriate.
That evening in their hotel room Deborah blows up several balloons. She had bought the balloons back home and taken them along to Russia; that had been her preparation. Red, yellow and blue, round and heart-shaped balloons; she leaves them lying around in the room, and during the night they keep bumping against each other in the hot drafts from the radiator. The next morning they pick Alexej up from the orphanage, and he walks out with them and between them without once turning around. Later they have the impression that this is the first time in his life that he has ever seen a balloon. He is delighted, totally enraptured.
One year later Philip begins working again. He has stayed home for all of twelve months; each and every day was spent taking care of the child together with Deborah; the child has adapted, he’s doing well; Philip feels he can start working again, and it’s high time. He rents a new studio and starts a new series; he has always had a great interest in surgical medicine, and he starts photographing in operating rooms; first during heart surgery, then during brain surgery. He photographs the delicate, highly specialised technological surgical instruments, silvery robots behind shimmering plastic sheets that seem to him like poetical images in the bluish light of the operating room, like deepsea creatures. He photographs this for quite a while, for several weeks, and finally, at the end of the series, he photographs an operation on an exposed brain.
He talks about this photo with Deborah that evening at the table in the kitchen. He tells her about the arrangement of the machines, the surgeons’ conversations during the operation, which of course were not about essentials, but rather strictly extraneous things, the exact opposite of the operation – tickets for the opera, the weather forecast, golf trips. In the past he used to talk a good deal about his work with Deborah, but since the child has been with them they’ve had little time for such conversations, and Philip thinks that he misses this; he misses Deborah’s former predilection to want to see things from all sides. The child, whom they renamed Aaron – the name Alexej was too harsh for them, the x in the middle of the name too hard – is sitting with them; he is supposed to be eating his supper, and he is listening to them.
What sort of person was it on whose brain they were operating. Whose brain you photographed today, Deborah says as she looks at the child eating, watching him as he eats, again and again pointing to the cut-up tomatoes, the butterfly pasta; how is that person doing now. After the operation. What will happen from now on.
A woman, Philip says. The person whose brain I photographed was a woman. I photographed a female brain. I discussed it with the doctors first, and she agreed to it. I assume she’s doing well.
Deborah waits for the child to swallow. She wipes the child’s mouth; she praises him.
Philip hesitates, then he says, If I had known what kind of person lived with this brain, how she would do after the operation, I wouldn’t have been able to photograph it.
He watches as Deborah hands the child a glass of water, and he sees from the look she gives him while the child is drinking that they have arrived at a demarcation line, a fork in the road where, surprisingly enough, he will again be compelled to make a decision. Even though he has told the truth. In spite of having told the truth. Precisely because he did.
The child drinks all the water in the glass and puts the glass back on the table by himself, carefully. Not looking at anyone.