9

Maybe there never really was a beginning for Ivo and me. Maybe that was precisely what was so disastrous about that cold afternoon when his father came home unannounced. That this stole our beginning; that our beginning happened at the end.

Back at my apartment, I took a long shower and went to bed. It had not been made, and there were empty beer bottles lying around the kitchen. I don’t know why I didn’t panic, or feel overcome with guilt. Mark wasn’t there. Theo wasn’t home yet; Mark was picking him up that evening. Then we would read him a bedtime story.

I fell asleep immediately. Perhaps I had long since passed the point when I abandoned control, when I turned my back on my life.

The emptiness inside me was beguiling, and I slept, oblivious, all through the grey April Sunday, which was unusually cool and quiet.

I was woken by the sound of the key in the lock and the creak of floorboards in the hall. A moment later Mark stood before me, unshaven, hands in his trouser pockets, looking shocked. I can’t imagine what he was expecting, whether he thought I would already have moved out, or that I would be sitting at the table, red-faced and crying; he certainly hadn’t expected to find me sleeping peacefully in our marital bed.

‘Where were you?’ he asked, staring at me with tired eyes. He would certainly have got drunk the previous night.

‘I was at Leni’s.’

‘You’re lying.’

I don’t know why I lied to him: out of pride, out of fear, a last instinct of self-preservation, perhaps. But I was sure he would never have called Leni.

‘No. I’m not. Why would I still be lying to you now?’

Yes: why? I wondered.

No substitute for love, no substitute for your own life … The words echoed inside me.

I got out of bed, fetched some clean clothes from the wardrobe, and began to get dressed.

Mark stood there a while longer, as if rooted to the spot, and watched me silently, then left the room. I gave a sigh of relief and sat down on the edge of the bed to collect my thoughts. It was starting again: the lies that would lead to many more, one after another, until no one would know what the truth was.

Just as it had been in the last two years I was with Ivo. Before the anguish consumed me, ripped me to shreds.

I jumped. It couldn’t happen again. I had Theo now. I was seized with a sudden, terrible longing for him, and something in my body contracted painfully. I glanced at the clock. I had to pick him up from his grandparents’ right now, then everything would be okay. If he were with me, if I could just hug him close enough, I would know where I belonged. At the same time, I knew perfectly well that this was a lie, but all that was left for me to do was to cling to this lie. No substitute, I thought again, and noticed my hands were shaking.

‘It’s perverse, you know that?’ said Mark suddenly, from the kitchen. I leaped to my feet. His voice was cold, full of contempt. I wondered whether to go into the kitchen or wait for him to come to me. The kitchen was a neutral space.

My hair was still wet from the shower and stuck to my neck. I pinned it up and glanced quickly in the mirror to check whether my face still bore any traces of the previous night, but all I saw was a pale woman with wide eyes, quivering eyelids, and slightly swollen lips.

He was sitting at the breakfast bar, drinking beer. Desperate for a cigarette, I remembered that I had kept Ivo’s packet. I fetched it, and lit one. Mark stared at me, aghast. Had he expected remorse and tears, that I would beg for forgiveness, fall to my knees, and promise never to do something so monstrous ever again? But I felt no remorse, only infinite emptiness. Not even the beginnings of an explanation or answer that could have justified or excused the previous night. Nor did I want his understanding; I was the one who needed to understand myself, to understand that I had ripped open the guilt again, the deep hurt, the wound inside me that had been plastered and whitewashed over.

*

I had tried to make clear to Mark from the beginning that my life had been fundamentally different to his. Little by little, I had told him about my past. He was the kind of man who, when he said relationship, meant exactly that, who had clear moral values and lived by them. And I knew I would have to be honest with him.

And I was tired, just plain tired, of all the rows, the attempts at clarification, the desperate longing and hide-and-seek of the preceding years. I met Mark, and I could see in his clear, resolute eyes that he would love me if I let him. I recognised that he was attracted to what he described as my otherness, the eccentric imprint of my family on me, and that he was trying, through me, to buy his way into a freedom he had never had in his youth, and had never allowed himself as an adult. And I was prepared to provide him with this little portion of otherness and freedom.

I realised that it would mean turning my own life back to front; that in order to do all the things I had never done before, I would have to learn to live according to Mark’s system of right and wrong. When I decided that I wanted a life with Mark, I knew what I was doing. I had been yearning for this kind of normality, straightforwardness, and predictability; I longed to be healed, and knew that I needed to change my life if I were to avoid being completely overwhelmed by my own instability.

Mark was the fateful encounter I had secretly been hoping for; he was the lighthouse, the signpost pointing me towards my proper life.

Mark accepted as truth everything that, at the start of our relationship, I told him about me and my family, hesitantly at first, filtered, always slightly modified. Ivo also came into my stories; I allowed him to feature from time to time, but was careful not to speak of him too often.

It was only later I broke it to Mark that he was living with a woman who had shared her past with a man she had grown up with like a brother, a man with whom she had had a relationship that in every aspect was akin to a transgression. I told him I wanted to forget all this, that I accepted and was grateful for his help. He nodded, and kissed my wrist. Sympathetic. Understanding.

When he eventually asked me why I had left Ivo, I answered evasively: we weren’t a very healthy combination, as it turned out, we hadn’t always been good for one another. I also said that, as time went on, it became impossible to defy our family and all the others who didn’t necessarily approve of our liaison. He nodded at this, too. Finally, in a moment of weakness, by which time we already had Theo, I blurted out the reason why Ivo had become part of our family, and Mark actually had tears in his eyes when, in bed one windy night, he heard the story of Ivo’s parents for the first time.

He only ever asked me once whether my addiction to Ivo might also have been because of the sex. I looked him in the eye and gently kissed his lips. I was touched by his attempt to comprehend the abyss that was Ivo and me. I said the reasons had definitely also been physical in nature. Yes, I said, that too. It wasn’t what he thought, I said.

‘What do I think?’ he asked, giving me a wary look.

‘I think you’re thinking he was better than you.’

‘Was he?’

‘That’s not it. That’s what I meant. That’s not it.’

‘So, was he?’

‘No, he wasn’t. It was just different with him, and I was different, too.’

‘Different how?’

For Mark, sex was a way of talking about Ivo and me that he found accessible, comprehensible, and thus something that could be changed.

‘Just … different.’

‘How exactly?’

I was surprised that he was so persistent in his interest. We were in the car, driving to a party some friends of his were giving; it was a late Saturday afternoon, the atmosphere relaxed.

‘He was rougher, more urgent, much less romantic. It wasn’t pleasant, if you must know. We hurt each other. We hurt each other very often, very much.’

He said nothing for a while; he seemed to be chewing on the thought. Then, concentrating hard on the road, he asked: ‘So I’m soft, romantic, and my desire is less urgent?’

‘Oh, Mark, come on, stop this nonsense. You’re my husband. We don’t have any problems in bed, do we, as far as I’m aware?’

‘I didn’t think we did either, until now.’

‘Well, there you go.’

We didn’t continue the conversation, but I remember we spent the night at his friends’ place, a house in the country, and we drank a lot and then had sex in a tiny attic room, because Mark pushed me to, and I was terribly embarrassed because he was particularly loud and so was the provocatively squeaky bed. But that seemed to be exactly what Mark wanted; he seemed to want to prove to everyone, and especially to me, that he was totally capable of being wild, inconsiderate, and urgent.

*

In our eight years together, I was only unfaithful to Mark once. And I’d told him. Two months later.

It was on a research trip to London, when it turned out that the freelance photographer accompanying me was a man who reminded me of something I had lost. A good-looking, dark-haired man in dirty cowboy boots, who was always scratching his arms, smelled strongly of aftershave and nicotine, and whose fingernails, like mine, were bitten down to the quick. He was very professional and fulfilled the work brief precisely. We finished earlier than expected, went out for a drink, and ended up hanging around in a pub until two in the morning, telling each other about our jobs, then about our relationships.

Eventually we walked across snowy London back to our hotel. In the lobby he asked if he could come up to my room for a drink.

For the next few days, I could hardly believe I had slept with this man, but he didn’t refer to it, and when we landed back in Hamburg we just gave each other a quick hug goodbye. It was only then that it dawned on me that I had betrayed my husband, according to his system of right and wrong, and that I had to tell him. When I confessed to Mark, he yelled at me, pacing furiously up and down in our bedroom. It was a shock for him; he would never have thought me capable of such a thing.

He stayed with friends for a week, refused to speak to me at first, impressed my guilt upon me any way he could; he punished me. Months later he would still regularly remind me of my transgression and his superiority, the superiority of the one who forgives. For weeks I had to acquiesce when he decided which restaurant we would go to, for weeks he decided which films we would watch, for weeks I no longer had the right to disagree. And I acquiesced, because I knew I had given him the right to punish me the moment I abandoned his system. At the time, I wanted to believe it was a system that would deliver me from my mistakes, my waywardness, my misguided search.

*

This time, though, was different, and I could see in his eyes that he felt the same. I was smoking, which provoked him, because he was a militant non-smoker and considered smoking a weakness that characterised people with no willpower.

‘What are you doing, Stella?’ he hissed, propping himself on the breakfast bar.

‘I just feel like having a cigarette.’

‘Aha. Another novelty. What else have you got up your sleeve? Go on, spit it out; I’m listening. I’m devoting today entirely to you, my wife, who doesn’t come home at night and fucks around behind my back. With a man who’s her brother, no less. I mean, it’s worth making time for that. Theo will stay at my parents’ tonight. I can’t expect him to deal with a father who drinks and a mother who smokes.’

The sarcasm in his voice was unmistakable. It was a tone Mark borrowed from his father whenever he was at his wits’ end, when he was stressed out and exhausted. All his conciliatory gestures and sympathetic looks seemed to have been exchanged for contempt. He kept shifting on the bar stool, and when he looked at me, it was with disgust.

‘I can’t explain it to you, Mark, and I cannot and will not behave the way you probably expect me to right now. I know what I’ve jeopardised; I may not have grasped the full extent of it yet, but I have an inkling, and believe me, it scares me to death. We need to find a solution.’

He stared at me, wide-eyed. He had anticipated a full-on fight, that we would shout at each other, say hurtful things, perhaps that we would both cry afterwards. But he was expecting an admission, an admission that I had behaved badly. He hadn’t taken in anything I’d said to him at the bar the previous night; all that mattered was my egregious mistake.

‘Can you hear what you’re saying? Have you gone completely mad? What are you talking about, for God’s sake?’ he yelled. He stood and walked towards me, and when I tried to turn away, he grabbed my elbow and forced me to face him. We stared at each other, and again I doubted my strength, my will, to bear what was to come. But something inside me was throbbing, screaming, whirling. Something inside me was crying out to be lived. Something inside me yearned for chaos, the sensation of falling, the clarity that would come if I survived the storm. Fear tugged at me, plucked at my skin and stopped my breath. I was on the brink of throwing my arms around Mark’s neck and begging him for forgiveness.

And I might have done it, if at that very moment he hadn’t raised his hand and slapped me. It was the first time he had ever hit me. It was so unexpected that I staggered back, lost my balance, and banged into the corner of the table. The sharp edge dug into my back, but I felt no pain.

Shocked by his own behaviour, he stepped away and hid his face in his hands. I turned and propped myself up on the table; my left cheek was burning, and I felt numb.

I saw the fruit bowl, with the carrot on top, wizened and crooked, starting to go brown. It was perched on other, fresh pieces of fruit, which Mark always bought at the Turkish shop around the corner. There it sat, quite out of place next to all those lovely, plump fruits, its mere presence seeming to drain them of their colour, taste, and sheen.

Something about the image fascinated me. Why had Theo kept this carrot, and why had it sat there for so long? Why there, of all places? What was its significance?

‘Why didn’t we throw away the carrot?’ I asked Mark. I looked at him. He stood before me, pale and ashamed, barely taking in what I was saying.

‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered, instead of answering my question.

‘No need to be sorry. I’m not angry with you.’ I poured myself a glass of water and drank thirstily. The burn on my cheek was subsiding.

How do you live without scars? How do you live without constantly cutting yourself on your own desires, your own sharp edges?

*

‘What are you going to do now, Stella?’

It was the first meaningful sentence Mark had said to me that day. He was back on the bar stool again, his head propped on his hands, and he, too, was staring at the carrot.

‘I don’t know. I’ll have to see. Everything feels so empty.’

‘What about Theo? What’s going to happen to us? Can’t you see where all this is heading?’

I heard the despair in his voice, and I wished I could put my arms around him and reassure him that it would all be okay, that he just needed to give me some time. But that would be yet another lie, another promise I wouldn’t be able to keep. I sat down on the stool beside him.

‘How can I love, how can I be a wife to you, a mother to Theo, if I don’t know who I am, Mark?’

‘So all it takes is for him to turn up again after eight years, and you just throw everything overboard? Everything, Stella! You fuck him, then tell me some crap about finding yourself?’

‘It’s not about sex.’

‘So why are you sleeping with him?’

‘Perhaps because I thought it would help me remember something.’

‘This all just sounds sick. Do you realise that?’

I suddenly wondered whether Mark had ever been unfaithful to me.

‘Mark, I’m not asking you to understand. I’m well aware that I can’t undo what’s happened.’

‘What has he done to you? The guy is sick. He’s so sick even your family threw him out. Then he just disappears, and you — you have a good life, you have a bloody good life! And suddenly you’re standing there telling me, in all seriousness, that you’re screwing him in order to remember. What is it you want to remember, for fuck’s sake?’

‘Why it was the way it was with Ivo, why he is the way he is, why he took this path in life — it’s all my fault. I was the reason he took the decisions he did. He’s a very unhappy person.’

‘Unhappy? Stella, I’m really trying here, but my imagination won’t stretch to this. Unhappy! What about our son? Will he be happy if you’re fucking Ivo?’

‘I told you, it’s not about that!’ I shouted back. The room around us quivered. He opened his mouth as if to reply, then shook his head.

‘It’s not about that. But how can I explain it to you? Mark, please. I know it sounds terrible, but: I feel guilty. It’s not humanitarian aid I’m offering. It’s not a penance, either. There are many things I’ve denied for a very long time, and when you deny things, little by little you start to forget them. It’s about me, it’s all about me, please understand that. It’s just … Ivo is the one who knows me, who knows everything about me, even things I’ve forgotten, and vice versa. I don’t think we’re able to love each other. I don’t want that. It’s just that we need each other. We tried —’

At the word love, Mark had stood up; he shook his head again and disappeared into the bedroom.

I followed him and kept talking; it was my last chance to try to clarify things. He had started to get his clothes and pack his sports bag; he went on throwing things in randomly, ignoring me. When I went over to him, he rammed me with his elbows, and when I stood between him and the wardrobe, he pushed me aside. It wasn’t until he was in the hall that he stopped in front of me and looked at me sternly.

‘I don’t want to listen to this sick nonsense. I’ll give you a few days, Stella. I’ve run out of patience. Think it over carefully. I won’t give you a second or third chance. I’m going to leave Theo at my parents’, and you’re going to promise me you won’t show your face there. I’ll tell him you’re ill and you need to be alone for a while. Is that clear, Stella? Are you listening to me? Please don’t call me until you’ve decided. And I hope you realise that, if you don’t manage to sort this shit out, you won’t get to keep Theo without a fight.’

I wanted to respond, but he had already opened the door and gone down the stairs. His footsteps echoed in the stairwell. I stood in the doorway, heard the sound of the engine and the car driving away.