prickles with perspiration. Gerhard’s expression turns softer, almost plaintive. He steps forward and reaches out to take her by the elbows.
“We must begin again,” he says. “For Johann’s sake.”
Elfriede gazes at this man, this husband, pale and gaunt and sweating, his blond hair thinning along his temples, and some panic takes hold of her chest. Some giant fear, some ache. She’s nursed him devotedly, on her knees before God she has sworn fealty in exchange for her good conscience, and now he stands before her, he’s only asking for something she has already promised him, and what does she feel? Panic. The heat in the summerhouse reminds her of August, reminds her of lying hazily on the chaise longue under the shadow of Gerhard’s giant, straining chest. At the time, she closed her eyes—she was too shy of this daylight that illuminated their intimacy—but she remembers the sound of his grunting, the sharp, rhythmic sway of her breasts, the sweat that dripped on her skin. The roar with which he ended it all, like an African lion pronouncing victory. That’s it, a lion. Except his mane, even then, wasn’t long enough or tawny enough. He’s so pale and crisp, and before she can banish it, she thinks of Wilfred’s ginger hair, his laugh, his heat, his twenty-six freckles she dreamed of kissing.
Elfriede tries to pull back her arms, but his grip is firm.
“I must know, Elfriede. I must know if you still mean what you said three years ago.”
“What did I say?”
“My God, what else? What else? Elfriede, think. I have thought of nothing else.” He squints his eyes and rocks back and forth on his feet. He bows his head and whispers ferociously, “When you told me you didn’t want any more children.”
“Oh! That. I see.”
“You see? Elfriede, you can’t imagine—I have never felt such a blow. You sat on the bed in your dressing gown and looked at me and said this thing. In all my life, I have never taken such a blow as that.”
“I never meant to hurt you. Oh, Gerhard. It wasn’t that I didn’t—that I didn’t want to. I was sick. I was afraid, I was terrified of having more children, of facing all that blackness again. I wanted you to comfort me, to understand my fear. And instead you walked away from me. I still remember the sound of that door as it closed behind you.”
“What else was I supposed to do?”
“To hold me! To comfort me!”
“What, you thought I could hold my wife in my arms without making love to her? After all those months like a monk? I’m only a man, Elfriede. Anyway, I thought you must loathe my touch.”
Somewhere inside Elfriede’s head, a voice clamors in fury: But it wasn’t about you, Gerhard. Why must everything be about you? But the voice is a small one, just a last gasp of anger that dies away gently. The rest is pity. A pity she can’t articulate, of course, because how for God’s sake do you express pity for Gerhard von Kleist? She wears her pity on her face, in her eyes, as she gazes at her husband.
He shifts his feet and looks to the side. “Well? And now? Are you still afraid?”
Again, Wilfred’s hair, Wilfred’s face, which she cannot quite see. How’s this possible, that his features are blurred in her memory? She can see one of them at a time, yes, his thin, plain cheeks and those eyelashes around his eyes of alpine blue. His long nose, the sharpness of his jaw, all of these dear things, one by one, each feature disappearing when she finds the next. Yet the sense of him remains in utmost clarity. The beat of him thunders in her chest. She shuts her eyes and pushes, pushes, thrusts him away, but it’s like trying to dislodge a pillar that holds up your roof, and Elfriede is not Samson. “I don’t know,” she says.
“Elfriede, look at me.”
She opens her eyes again.
“I must know. I must know if you’re well again. I must understand what you mean by returning.”
“I mean to—well, to return. To be Johann’s mother. To be your wife.”
“But what does that mean, Elfriede?” He pulls her elbows, pulls her even closer. “Listen to me. There, in that carriage. I thought to myself—it was all I could think—he’s so lonely, a small boy among grownups. He needs brothers and sisters. He needs a family, a mother and a father who will fill his nursery.”
“Gerhard, enough.