We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [182]
He noticed that she kept switching between his first name and his last. He couldn't follow her train of thought. "I'm an old man," he said helplessly.
"Not too old for us to—well, you know what I mean." She looked away, then took another deep breath, as if about to deliver a message that was not only generally outrageous but also against her own nature. "So I'm suggesting that Knud Erik, Edith, and I move in here and that the two of us get married. So that—so that things can be put right." Suddenly she slumped. Her clenched fists opened up. She'd delivered her message. Now, exhausted, she awaited her fate.
Everything inside him contracted. This he hadn't expected. He sensed that the situation demanded an immediate and unequivocal answer, but nothing approaching it emerged. Instead, he asked, "But do you love me?" He put the question in the dutifully polite tone he'd have used with a stranger; at this moment they didn't trust each other.
"Do you love me?" she retorted sharply.
"I've missed you," he said, and his voice grew thick. He couldn't come up with a declaration of love; nor was there any way he could express the chaos inside him more precisely. The way it came out, it sounded like a plea for mercy.
A moment of silence followed. A shiver ran through her, then she grabbed his hands and squeezed them between hers. "I've missed you too." She leaned into him and gave way to tears. Unburdened now, she could surrender. He stroked her back mechanically. His own paralysis hadn't abated. He didn't share her relief. They'd reached a point where he felt he couldn't possibly deny her request. His answer had practically been dictated to him.
Did he want it himself? The question was as unanswerable as whether or not he loved her.
"That's how it'll be then," he said eventually. He tried to give his words the ring of reassurance, but she couldn't possibly have missed their undertone of resignation.
She'd won. But the victory came without joy for either of them.
The next day they appeared together in public. As they strolled down Kirkestræde, she held his arm and he bore himself tall and straight—not out of pride, but to avoid looking decrepit next to her. From then on, she regularly visited his house with Knud Erik and Edith, and all of them dined together. She didn't stay the night. They'd never yet spent a night together and they weren't going to start now. The eyes of the town still rested on them. They both felt there was a line that shouldn't be crossed. They weren't married yet.
Knud Erik's attitude to Albert changed unexpectedly, as if now, for the first time, he realized that his father would never return. Someone else was going to take over the empty space at his mother's side. Before, he'd felt magnetically drawn to Albert. Now the magnet had switched, and it repelled him.
He joined his mother reluctantly on their visits to Albert, and when Albert called on them in Snaregade he acted introverted. It was as though he wanted each of them to himself, separately. When his mother's world and Albert's finally met, he felt he'd lost ownership of both. His old ease with Albert reemerged only when the two of them were alone together.
Albert didn't mention this to Klara. So much remained unuttered between them. The unspoken is sometimes the preferred language of lovers, but for him it was an unknown tongue for which he had no dictionary. He constantly felt a pressure that he couldn't fathom. They neither kissed nor embraced in Knud Erik's presence. They'd never done so before, either, but then they'd had something to hide. Now that everything was out in the open, they didn't exchange so much as a reassuring squeeze of the hand.
Was there really nothing more between them than the raw passion that came only in sudden, illicit bursts? Ejaculation without relief—could that be all they had? He was unfamiliar with the conventions of marriage and could not interpret what was happening between them.
When he'd stayed with Cheng Sumei, there'd