To the Back of Beyond(37)

Konrad had done the legally required minimum time at school and landed a traineeship at an insurance firm. In the summer he wanted to temp, to save up for a motor scooter. He had recently started asking about his father. Then Astrid would tell him this or that, but each time she felt painfully aware how little she knew about Thomas, and how little what she did know was able to convey about him. Each story was a betrayal of him, each account a tacit decision, this is the way it was, this is how it would always be remembered. Or perhaps it wasn’t like that at all, she said. She said, You take after him, and that seemed to make Konrad happy.

Ella had passed her leaving exam and was going on to college to study Romance languages. She would have loved to go to France for a month or two to brush up on her French. She had written for information from various language schools, and showed her mother the glossy brochures, where cheerful young people were shown sitting in classrooms, or riding on horseback, or on surfboards. Astrid just looked at the prices. We can’t afford that, she said, why don’t you try and get a job as an au pair? After Thomas’s disappearance, she’d had to tighten their belts, in spite of the pension. In the early years she was often asked by friends whether she didn’t want to go back to work. There was a job going here, or someone was looking for a person to help out in the office. When her onetime boss gave up the bookstore for reasons of age, she asked Astrid if she had any interest in taking it over. But even after the children had gotten older and more independent, she wasn’t interested in working. She didn’t apply anywhere. It wasn’t that she was depressed, as Manuela supposed when she came to mind the children for a day or two from time to time, so that Astrid could go away somewhere. Perhaps it’s just that I don’t want anything to change, she said. That would be tantamount to acknowledging that your husband is dead, said Patrick. Stop playing the amateur psychologist, said Astrid, I liked you better when you were a policeman. Anyway, you don’t want anything to change either. Then we’re agreed, said Patrick.

Later they went for a walk along the lakefront, talking about their children like two old friends. It’s no bad thing if Ella appreciates that we can’t afford everything, said Astrid. We’re not badly off. I can understand her disappointment, said Patrick. At her age, you just want to blend in. But that doesn’t excuse her language, said Astrid. Ella had called her father an asshole. Just because that asshole dumped us, she said, now I can’t go to language school. Then she had run off upstairs and locked herself in her room. Astrid had canceled her pocket money for the next month. You can be terribly hard sometimes, you know, said Patrick. Basically Ella’s right, even if she should have said it some other way. Now don’t you start too, said Astrid, and walked faster, as though to run away from him, or the things he was saying. Patrick sped up too. You won’t hear a word against him, he said, admit that he behaved like a son of a bitch. Astrid made no reply.

Eventually the contact with Patrick came to an end; there wasn’t any particular time or reason, Astrid didn’t even know which of them had stopped calling. She bought herself a dog.

The weeks passed, and the months and years. Konrad completed his traineeship and moved to the city. Ella went to Lyon to do a second degree. This was the time when Astrid sometimes wondered if it wouldn’t have been better if she’d never met Thomas and had married someone else who would still be around. But she rejected that thought after a while; it wasn’t possible to take Thomas out of her life like an object that had lost its utility, he was a part of her, just as she was a part of him, no matter what had happened and would happen.

Ella came back from Lyon pregnant by a man she didn’t want to live with. She took a job as a schoolteacher. After not being in touch with Astrid for a long time, she was glad now that she was there to mind the baby. Emilie spent two days a week with her grandmother, then when she started kindergarten, just two afternoons. Konrad married a woman who was seven years older than him and didn’t want children. They went on an around-the-world tour that must have cost a fortune. He always used to call his mother every week. Before he set off, he fixed her up with a Skype account, but after a couple of times, Astrid asked him to go back to standard phoning, he felt closer to her that way. How are you? You all right? he asked. Yes, she said. I’m fine.



The years had no particular chronology, the journeys no direction, the places stood in no discernible relation to one another. Thomas took on casual work that got him through the times when he earned nothing or rested or moved on. In Italy he worked off the books until he was caught and had to go; in France he got a new set of papers from people he would sooner have had nothing to do with. He worked as a janitor in a discount mall in the middle of nowhere, then as a janitor in an autobahn rest stop. When he had enough of the countryside, he went to Lyon and delivered bread for a large bakery. He had to get up extremely early, but it meant he got the afternoons off. Once he was involved in a minor accident, nothing grave, but the police ascertained that he had no driver’s license, and he was out of a job. For a time then he didn’t work at all, drank too much, and lived in ever shittier rooms. Then he got a grip, first helped out in a homeless kitchen, and got another job in a restaurant. He spent a year on the Irish island the teacher had shown him photographs of, at any rate he was pretty sure it was the same place. He had never forgotten those pictures of the landscape, the cliffs, the black-faced sheep, the endless sea that made him feel nostalgic and secure at the same time, only the name of the island, like that of the teacher, had slipped his mind. When there was no more work, he returned to the Continent, first to France again, then Germany. He had occasional affairs with women who tended to be just as lost as he was. At brief moments of arousal he sometimes managed not to think of Astrid. But as soon as the women were gone, he would think of her again, and he would feel ashamed of himself for his infidelity and clear off. He got along with almost everyone he worked with but felt no desire to be closer to any of them. Best of all he got along with children, because he could tell them anything. The thought that his own were by now grown up felt strange to him; he didn’t feel anything for their maturity, on the contrary it was as though they had taken something from him. When he thought of them, it was always the way they were when he had left. He remembered the last vacation they had all taken together, and he remembered the feeling that had kept sneaking up on him then, that he could never get close enough to them, that they were inevitably distancing themselves from him, as though following a law of nature.