addition the son has a double chin and his head is too large. The father indicates where his son should sit, they sit down side by side, always near the front, always beside the exit. Just before the end of the movie, as the music signifies an obvious conclusion, the father lifts his son’s jacket and makes him bend forward, guiding his arms into the sleeves, as you do only with children, the boy’s face is still fixed on thescreen and as the first credits roll into view, the father takes the grown-up boy by the hand and leads him out. It happens every time. The young man keeps pace with his father on the way out, but turns around to the screen one more time. The father who is escorting him to the exit before the lights go up. There is a hideous thoughtfulness in his action.
WE DID NOT manage to accept it. This lacking ability to accept an essential aspect of each other. My absent ability to acknowledge his sorrow, and his inability to accept my deficiency of sorrow, regret. He wanted me to recount the story of the child, my love for the boy I gave away. It is not my story, I said. He continued to insist that we ought to search for him. That it would be easier for him as a physician to do so. Eventually he discovered something, via contacts as he put it. A name, a totally ordinary surname, an address not far from us.
Simon thought he had found him, my son. He wanted me to go and look. Meet him. He lives here, he said. He has lived here in this city the whole time, not far away from us. It isn’t him, I said. It’s a common name. I did not want to go there.
After a while he stopped begging me, gave up talking about it. But I don’t believe he forgot it.
An address, a name.
He felt there had to be a common factor between my love for him, for our girls and this story about the adoption. He could not understand that it was not like that. He said that I was fond of the girls of course. I said it was not the same. Hecould not go along with that. He wanted something more, something else. There had to be something else.
He came out with theories.
When we were sitting up at night, he might start to talk about the boy. He thought it was possible that I had been suffering from depression, women could get a postpartum type. A depression that prevented me from bonding with the child. There was no selfishness involved in that. If I had suffered from depression, it was not uncommon.
Another time, he said something about the boy while Marija was there. A comment, an isolated remark I don’t recall. But I do remember I was afraid Marija would get to know that about me, that she would find out about the boy. Perhaps because there would then be two people who knew. Or perhaps because she with her Orthodox Catholic background, or what I persuaded myself at least was such, would consider this an unacceptable thing to do, the adoption. It seems paradoxical when I think about it now. In fact she once found the photograph of my son and me, I had put it together with photos of the girls as children. She initially thought it was one of them.
No, I said.
Who is it then, she asked and looked at the photograph and then at me. And then I convinced myself she perhaps realized who he was. But how on earth could she have done that. It’s a boy, I said.
She put the photograph away. I always wanted a son, she said.
W e had a dog at the time Marija was here. An old dog. It had been a long time since it had given up regarding itself as a guard dog with the garden as its territory. Now it mostly lay on its woolen blanket in the living room, by the window, the deep tan coloring of its pelt faded, white hairs on the girdle of black around its back, the terrier ears that had been glued when it was a puppy, to train them into the correct shape, still capturing sounds from outside, sounds that were now more a source of skittishness than curiosity. Simon likes dogs. The girls used to say that. Daddy and his dogs.
He was always approaching dogs,
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