The Greenhouse (10 page)

A short moment later I feel the need to place more cards on the table.

—I assisted at her birth, I say to the actress, knowing full well that my linguistic skills won’t allow me to elaborate any further. It’s as if someone else is talking through me about my private affairs to the girl.

My traveling companion clearly approves.

—Really? She looks at me with a mixture of puzzlement and admiration. Admiration, though, seems to be the dominant expression.

Even though I was no substitute for the midwife or anything like that, I was certainly present at my daughter’s birth. And I wasn’t left unmoved either.

The corridor was flooded in milky light. I didn’t feel unwelcome, but at the same time I wasn’t needed; my role in the child’s conception had already been completed nine months earlier. Anna was in a white hospital gown that stretched over her taut belly, and she was wearing white socks. She seemed distant and anxious, as if she couldn’t quite handle the situation.

The midwife gave me a warm welcome and I smiled at Anna. I knew how difficult this was for her and pitied her terribly; now I felt I was all to blame. I wanted to apologize, to tell her how sorry I was and that I’d never intended for this to happen to her. Instead, though, I just did what I was told and sat still on the chair that was placed by her bedside and patted the back of the hand of the future mother of my child. Two black ravens were perched on the ledge on the other side of the window, and the women spoke to each other in hushed tones, while Anna lay in silence on her side, clutching a white pillow in her arms.

I couldn’t fathom how it had ever occurred to the mother of my child to have me present; we barely knew each other. I felt totally superfluous, but fortunately it all happened quite fast; I didn’t have to watch my friend agonizing for days on end. The birth went smoothly and swiftly, and the baby was born shortly after midnight on Friday the seventh of August, two hours after I arrived at the hospital. It was a girl, and she was gluey red and cried briefly, just while she filled her lungs with air and wriggled her limbs in all directions. Then she quieted down, grew calm, and looked around, tranquil pearly eyes emerging from the bowels of the earth. There was a faint glow in her deep blue eyes, as if they still belonged to the other world.

—What was it like to be at the birth of the child? my companion in the car asks.

—It was surprising.

—What was surprising?

—You think about death. Having a child gives you the certainty that you’re going to die one day.

—Weird guy, she says.

What makes her say that? Unless I misheard her. My brain is having problems dealing with so many things at once—translating, stringing together unfamiliar words, and trying to work out what extra meanings they might have. My traveling companion, on the other hand, expresses herself effortlessly. I don’t have the guts to ask her what she meant by
weird
. So instead I say:

—Weird girl yourself.

I didn’t know what was going through Anna’s head, but personally I was a little bit surprised that it was a girl. The midwife showed me how to hold the slippery baby and weave a little cocoon around its minuscule body. She gave off a slightly sweet smell, like vanilla caramel. My daughter also seemed to treat my amateurish attempts with understanding and looked at me with her big, alert eyes veiled in a mist, totally calm. At first sight, she seemed hairless, but when her head was wiped, a film of light yellow down appeared.

—My daughter had little hair when she was born, I say to my traveling companion, like some lawyer reopening an old case because some new evidence has been produced.

If it hadn’t been for the smell and the feel of the baby’s soft body, it might have all seemed very unreal to me, like watching a film. I tried to show my child’s mother some moral support and patted her shoulder. Her eyes were burning as if she’d just been through a life experience that I could never understand. The baby—I tried out the words
my daughter
—was incredibly tiny and beautiful, like a porcelain doll. The midwife who had wrapped the baby in a towel had also said she was beautiful. Her words were mainly directed at the mother, and then she gave me this slightly bewildered look, as if she were trying to figure out where I fit in with the child. Anna held the baby in her arms, but it was as if her mind were elsewhere, as if she’d done her duty now and wanted to go to sleep. Then she turned to me and said:

—She’s just like you. And then she handed me the bundle, as if to confirm that the child definitely wasn’t from her side of the family and that her contribution had been first and foremost to nourish my daughter with the right vitamins and then go through the inevitable process of bringing her into the world. It was two o’clock in the morning and I was wondering when might be the right time to take my leave. I could well understand that Anna was tired, but the baby’s gaze was fixed on me and I longed to hold her a little bit longer. I wanted to tell the child’s mother that she could have a rest now and fall asleep even and that I would just sit there a bit longer, alone with the baby, that’s if that was all right with her.

As I was practicing holding the child, her mother seemed to be sizing me up. She looked as if she either wanted to cry or just vanish from the scene, leaving me alone with the child. I was the one who started crying in the end, not the mother. She looked at me in puzzlement, as did the midwife and medical student.

—People are often overwhelmed by feelings when they have a baby, particularly their first one, the midwife explained. That’s how she put it, overwhelmed by feelings.

—I cried, I say unflinchingly in the car. The drama student looks at me with interest. I give myself some extra points for not falling into the temptation of glorifying myself in the girl’s eyes.

Even though we were, strictly speaking, two virtual strangers having a child together, the midwife strongly recommended that I stay with the mother and child in the hospital that night.

The room was equipped for fathers, too, their needs were also taken into account; there was an extra sofa bed. The baby slept in a Plexiglas cradle beside her mother’s bed. The child’s mother didn’t raise any objections, but stared at me, as if she were trying to place me in her life, as if her body remembered something her mind couldn’t quite recall. Because there was so little hair on my daughter’s head, it was recommended that she wear a bonnet, the midwife explained to me.

—The body mainly cools down from the head, she said, and I thought I detected an apologetic tone as she was placing the pink bonnet on my daughter. Before clocking off her shift, she gave each of us booklets on family insurance and parental leave.

My child’s mother dozed off as soon as her head hit the pillow, which was understandable, since she’d just brought a whole child into the world. She was both exhausted and aching. I would have been perfectly willing to say something beautiful to her, but she was too tired to listen. I imagined it must be strange to wake up on a Friday morning and go up to the hospital to give birth to a baby. I also would have liked to have been kind to her somehow, but just didn’t know how to go about it. I felt it was almost an act of sacrilege for me, a fully grown man, to fall asleep in a bed in a maternity ward. I’d never slept in the same room as the mother of my child before, and had only spent enough time with her to conceive a child. It would have been out of the question for me to wander around the maternity ward in my underpants, or even my blue striped pajamas, garments the mother of my child had never seen me in. This wasn’t a hotel room and we weren’t lovers. An adult male who went to the toilet and then forgot to put the seat down had no place in this silk-soft world of breast-suckers and mothers, in this smooth downy nest.

Once the midwife was gone and Anna had fallen asleep for the night, I wheeled the cradle over to the sofa bed and bent over it to stare at the baby. I was alone with the child. She was awake and staring right back at me; my moment of carelessness made flesh was staring at me.

—The baby was awake and staring at me, I say to my fellow passenger in the car. We’re finally out of the woods, which are supplanted by fields of golden sunflowers that stretch for as far as the eye can see, giant yellow flower heads. It has started to rain.

I bent over so that my daughter could make out the outlines of my face and see her father. She was an incredibly beautiful child—of course, I didn’t have much to compare her to, even though I’d caught fleeting glimpses of a few other startled newborns in the ward. They looked like old people, with their red-violet flesh, all wrinkled with apprehension and burdened by the new life that had just begun. My child—our child—was different. She seemed to neither resemble me nor her mother; she was unique somehow, a new issue—not that I’d had any preconceptions of what the baby would look like; on the contrary, I’d practically pushed any speculations of that kind out of my mind. I scrutinized the baby, drank her with my eyes.

Then I lifted the quilt, and my daughter stretched her legs and twinkled her toes as I examined her incredibly tiny foot. There was a lot of light around the child; I wondered whether it might have been coming from some material in the quilt cover.

—Welcome, I whispered gently, sticking my little finger into the baby’s palm. I didn’t undress but stayed up all night staring at the child, partly also because I didn’t know when I would see her again. My daughter’s mother and I weren’t a couple, and I wasn’t even sure I would meet my child’s mother that often, although I would undoubtedly be welcome to visit the child we had together.

Anna was exhausted and slept all night, with her mouth slightly ajar, the sleep of the just. I kind of checked on her several times, though I refrained from exploiting my position and staring at her at length. But I adjusted her quilt, spreading it over her a bit better, and then rearranged our daughter’s dwarf covers as well. That rounded off my tasks for the night. Mom also used to adjust my quilt when she was clearing up at night. It was the last thing I remembered before I fell asleep in the dark, Mom pulling the quilt over me; then she tidied up in the kitchen, closed the windows, turned off the lights, and called it a day. It was then that I realized I knew nothing about the family of my child’s mother and that I hadn’t even asked her about my child’s granddad and granny. I couldn’t very well walk up to the bed where she was sleeping, pale with her rosy cheeks and moist lips, bend over her, shake her shoulder, and ask:

—Who are your parents, Anna?

The drama student is all ears, wriggles in her seat, and sits up, waiting with bated breath to see if I can form another seven-word sentence:

—A newborn baby was staring at me, I repeat to her.

Then I bent all the way down to the baby and gently picked her up, as light as a feather, in her white frotté bodysuit, and carefully lay down on the pillow on the sofa bed with the baby in my arms, adjusting her as carefully as I could on my tummy and pulling the quilt over her. Her legs were in the fetal position, but I delicately pulled on one heel and then the other, and my daughter stretched out one leg herself and I felt it pressing against my belly button. Although I tried to breathe as lightly as I could, the baby rose and sank, like a baggy airbed; then I stroked her gently on the back until she fell asleep. I was very careful not to fall asleep myself.

The fresh new granddad asked whether he should collect Jósef at the community home to take him to see the baby. I told him how things were—that I barely knew the girl, that I hadn’t put her into the family picture yet, hadn’t even mentioned the brother who shared a birthday with me, hadn’t spoken about my relationship with Mom—we weren’t close, I told him, despite our one-off close encounter.

—We’re not a couple, Dad, I say.

—You’re not going to shirk your responsibilities, Lobbi lad? Your mother wouldn’t have liked that.

He felt this was a good cue to revive some old memories of when his twins were born.

—They didn’t know what was wrong with Jósef at first, but they put him in the incubator because he was weak. And because you were his twin brother they put you into the incubator with him for the first twenty-four hours. When I bent over the pair of you I saw that you had taken your brother’s hand, just a day old and already taking care of him.

He wasn’t just implying that we were holding hands, but that I was already taking care of my two-hours-younger brother who had something wrong with him; he had embellished the memory with the benefit of hindsight.

—You took his hand. Your brother slept for most of his first year. You, on the other hand, were wide awake and observing the world.

That’s how he set us brothers up, as opposites.

—You started walking when you were ten months old, while Jósef was still sleeping. Your mom spent a lot of time with you. I was more with your brother. We divided you between us. You and your mom liked to chat a lot together, and Jósef and myself were quiet together. It suited us all that way.

Then the electrician was offering to buy a stroller for the grandchild and outdoor overalls and leggings or anything else she might be short of. Once more, Mom had the last word.

—Your mother wouldn’t have had it any other way.

He insisted I buy three of everything: three bodysuits with buttons on the shoulder, three pairs of stockings, three pajamas with different patterns, elephants, giraffes, and teddy bears. He also wanted me to buy a baby carriage and outdoor overalls. Then Dad pulled out his wallet.

—Your mother wouldn’t have had it any other way.

—She’s just like you when you were her age, Dad said when he saw his granddaughter. I thought it was only grannies who said things like that.

—Twenty-four hours old? Do you remember what I looked like when I was twenty-four hours old? I asked the brand-new granddad.

—She’s the spitting image of your mother, he confirmed. As if Mom and I were one.

He was hoping the child would be named after Mom; I could see it when he was looking at the baby, he was looking for Mom.

—I’ve got no say in the name, Dad, I said. It would be different if we were living together. Besides, the child’s mother’s name is Anna, just like Mom, so she’d be naming her after herself.

He didn’t understand that point of view.

—Her name is Flóra Sól, my daughter, I say to the drama student.

—Cute, she says. Then we just sit in silence. We haven’t far to go now.