crème brûlée

These were the days when I would take long baths in the afternoon, watching the bubbles disappear on the water surface until my body became visible again. Or no, rather, these were the days when she would open a bottle of wine at around two in the afternoon and take it with her into her office. Or no, actually, these were the days that were completely defined by the way we poured our first coffee in the morning, which is to say they peaked very early.

And on one of these days she was in her office, the heavy door shut, no sound coming in or out, and I sat in the living room, hunched over a puzzle. A Bruegel reproduction, ten thousand pieces. Autumn light poured through the windows. I had not taken a bath, instead continued to work on the puzzle after lunch. I was intent on finishing that bridge crossing a frozen river, with an old woman carrying an absurdly huge bundle of branches across it, before sunset. There was so much brown and white. It felt like making the deepest, most secret coffee ever, if not for that magnificent silvery grey that meddled with it, more perfect than sugar.

I was just about to place another muddy white piece when the office doors opened and she asked whether I could quickly go to the store and get some mustard. I looked up from the puzzle and at her, inquisitively. For the book, she said. I nodded. But couldn’t you go, I asked. I am about to finish this bridge. She looked at me with a slight, crooked smile and I fell in love with her all over again.

I had met her in Valencia, where we were both staying for a spell, she to learn Spanish, I to write an article about a hospital that was occupied by wet nurses on strike. Or no, actually, I was there to soak up as much sun and sea as possible, and she was there to shake off a relationship that had turned sour.

I had met her in the aisle of a supermarket, as she was holding a shampoo bottle and laughing loudly, because the name of the shampoo meant something childishly obscene in her native Swiss German.

Her ex was the grandson of a somewhat famous painter. He would go on and on about how to continue his grandfather’s heritage, the clarity of his line, the precision of his constructions. The self-evidence his works exuded. He was not a painter himself, but he said to her (and to everyone else) how he would write a book on Mondrian, or on Morellet, or maybe about Comte. Or, alternatively, that he would pick up interior, design, maybe study at the Zurich University of the Arts and eventually build chairs and tables that took up the precision and the self-evidence where his grandfather had left it. After two beers, he would rail against the messiness he perceived in contemporary art (and, after three or four beers, in life), but in a sad rather than in an angry way. He was funny, clever, and caring, and supported her in her writing ambitions. But he did not write the book on Mondrian, or the one on Morellet, or the one on Comte. And he did not pick up interior design and did not build any chairs or tables. Whereas she published, in the four years of their relationship, six short stories in two different literary magazines and a short novel with a renowned Austrian press.

As she began to receive invitations from various literary institutions in Europe and even the US, something began to shift in a clear and definitive way. He still supported her, but and he remained someone she looked up to. But now she looked up to him for the way he held himself, the way he – perhaps – carried on something of his grandfather’s legacy, some of the precision and clarity. The way he gracefully tolerated her success while his own ambitions stalled. But it turned out that, actually, he was not all that graceful about it.

They were on their way home after a dinner with friends when they got into an argument. I would just like for you to admire me a little bit, he said, because true love is built on admiration as well as on other feelings. But I do admire you, she said. I admire you for how you hold yourself in life. But I would like it if you admired me for what I write, he said. For what I write and how I write it. But you don’t write anything, she said. She said it innocently and honestly, surprised by the turn the discussion had taken; and although she had seen the moment of shouting or even screaming appear rise over some metaphorical horizon like a sun, she said it calmly and straightforwardly, left with nothing but honesty. It was a simple statement of fact. But he made a slight turn with his head and called her a slut.

And she had not even responded when he unleashed a torrent of reproaches and accusations towards her; a bizarre mixture of callbacks to sentences she had actually never uttered, not even once, and incel lingo. The latter came out so perfectly trained, so readymade, that she, standing in the light of a bus stop in the Zurich outskirts, stared at by the two tired people sitting under it and waiting, started to wonder – started to wonder abruptly and violently – how much of the time she had spent writing he had spent browsing (hopefully, only browsing) incel forums. As if getting ready for this moment, secretly ready.

The last time she had seen him that infuriated was when he got angry at how inefficiently people boarded and de-boarded trams.

She was still thinking about that linguistic pandemonium served to her at a bus stop – as if a bus stop were the place to do something like that, as if anywhere were the place to do it – when she was on the train to Valencia, but she was no longer thinking about it when she held that shampoo bottle in her hands and laughed about its name. She was only thinking about how funny it was that you could turn the childishness of that name on and off depending on whether you looked at it Spanishly or Swiss-Germanly, and that was when I first saw her.

I had been in a bit of a state all day. Chaotic sadness is how I later took to calling it. I had spent a few hours interviewing the striking wet nurses. It was not really accurate to say that they occupied the whole hospital; rather, they had blocked off the South wing and turned it into a kind of fortress, a very friendly fortress. I had interviewed four of them, one hour each. I was in complete agreement with their arguments and their requests. In fact, I had begged our editor-in-chief to let me go to Valencia and cover their protest. I knew it was something important, something that should spread. So I was happy to document what they had to say.

However, I do believe that when someone tells you about something that’s wrong with the world you live in, it opens up a crack. And sometimes this crack seems as if you could put both your hands in there, and start pulling, and tear some bad corner of the world apart and unearth a better one. But sometimes the crack feels as if there is actually nothing behind it, and it is just that. An irreparable crack; a brokenness bound to, at some point in the future, devour you.

And on that day it had been the latter. Leaving the maternity-ward-turned-fortress, I had felt nauseous with abstract grief. A magnificent summer sunset turned the sky tangerine, but instead of admiring it, it had seemed to me like an expression of an unstoppable great wrong. The idea was to buy instant lasagna or maybe a frozen pizza, go home, run a bath, have dinner in the tub and then fall asleep as fast as possible.

Then, something mildly strange happened. There was music playing in the supermarket – that, of course, was normal. But the music that came out of the loudspeakers was the same song I was listening to on my headphones, except that I listened to a slowed-down, melancholic guitar cover of the song, while the supermarket played the 80s-soaked, upbeat synth original. I knew then it was a coincidence, but the few seconds it took me between hearing the original playing on the loudspeakers and the realization that they were, on some level, the same notes I was listening to on my headphones felt like discovering a miracle, and some taste of that miracle discovery lingered on in my mind, and made me take a wrong turn and enter the soap aisle instead of the frozen-food section, and there I saw her, holding a bottle of Fudí and laughing.

And I was and will always be ready to develop an immediate crush on a woman who laughs, in public, to herself.

Later, sipping on a glass of wine, she said she was in Valencia to learn Spanish. And as we ate spaghetti, she said that no, actually, she was in Valencia to shake off the memories of a relationship that had turned sour. And later still, as I lay next to her and was about to fall asleep, she said that no, actually, she was in Valencia to learn Portuguese. Why would you go to Valencia to learn Portuguese, I asked. So I can read Lispector in the original, she replied, and that made some sort of outer-spacey, between-the-planets sense to me and I fell in love and asleep at the same time.

When I woke up the next day, she was sitting on the edge of the bed and looked back at me, and smiled that asymmetrical smile, and the crack in the world felt like something I would be able to put both my hands in and pull, and tear, and force a better one out from behind the first.

Later, she would say that I loved that smile because it made her seem cooler than she was.

But she knew it worked; and when she stuck her head out through the office doors, and asked me to go get mustard, it did. I realized that she had gone for groceries that day, and made lunch, and that it was an agreement that during the afternoon she could concentrate on writing and be left alone. So I stood up, dedicated a last glance to the snowy bridge over the frozen river, then grabbed my coat and went out.

It was maybe one of the first evenings of the year when you could smell the coming winter; or, rather, the air still felt as if delivered to your nostrils in an envelope but there was a hint of coming crispness. A soft wind threw a few leaves around. The sky was of a cold dark blue, with only a streak of orange in the West, a deep, smooth orange. Back in my hometown, the oldest and saddest people would say that this was the sort of autumn evening when the boundary separating the living from the dead grew thin. You take one foul step and you’re with them, they said. Or they take one foul step and they’re with you. But they were sad old Irish Catholics and believed in all sorts of things.

There were protesters in front of the supermarket, maybe fifty or sixty. They held up signs and chanted. They were a usual sight, they protested against a proposed law that would grant private security firms even more rights. Across the street, two police teams were assembling. They were carrying the rubber bullet guns my father once told me would be globally outlawed before my twelfth birthday, seeing the havoc they had caused during the Antwerp protests. And my grandfather, who as a teenager had lost his left eye to the predecessor of that type of rubber bullet gun, courtesy of the Troubles, nodded in agreement. Not the only thing they were wrong about.

I went into the supermarket and grabbed a glass of mustard; the grainy, French type. And grabbed a second. On the way to the checkout, I also picked up some kitchen towels, just to be safe. You never knew when it came to the book.

When I left the store, the police were fully grouped into two teams, and the air was now heavy with impending violence. I made a quick turn into a small side street, a detour rather than a shortcut home, but I wanted to get out of there as fast as possible. I had covered so many protests in my life, and seen so much gore, and so much of that unnecessary, and most of it on the wrong side, on the side that didn’t deserve it, that I no longer felt comfortable at protests I didn’t organize myself.

As I walked down the narrow street, and started to hear shouts and the unmistakable sound of boots starting to march, I felt the twang of my possible cowardice sharp in the evening air. Suddenly, I remembered standing on the Pont de Bir-Hakeim during that unbelievable autumn 2027 when Paris brilliantly regurgitated its Commune past. Protest slogans have their seasons like everything else, and at the time, there had been a trend towards more abstract and philosophical-sounding phrases, the pendulum swinging back from two years of very concrete, this-is-what-we-want-sloganizing. I remembered standing on the Pont de Bir-Hakeim and watching a dozen protesters carrying a huge white banner with “things will happen while they can” scrawled in wild red letters across it. Walking down the narrow street, I realized it would make sense to remember having felt young then, and feeling old now, but I didn’t.

And I also remembered that as I stood on the Pont de Bir-Hakeim, she had just published Queen Lear, was working on Savage Cathedral, and would go on to write The Geodesic; slowly but certainly redefining what it meant to write fiction in the twenty-first century. Scaffolds out of ruins, I once saw a reviewer describe them. And I further remembered seeing the Borsa Italiana in flames, and some twenty protesters in front, barely visible in the smoke and the tear gas, holding up a banner with a short phrase written on it, in neat black letters, and only realizing much later that it was the opening sentence of Queen Lear.

The office doors were open as I arrived home, and she sat in the living room on the phone, smiled at me and blew me a kiss. I pretended catching it, then dropping it by accident, and picking it back up and putting it on my lips. Then I went into the kitchen. I opened the towel drawer, took out the one towel that was there and put the two in that I had bought. I put a bit of water in a pan, put the pan on the stove and turned the heat all the way up. I waited until it was boiling, then put in two spoons of the grainy mustard and stirred a little bit.

I had started heating the mustard not a second too early – and what luck, that she reminded me to buy some. As soon as the mustard was mostly dissolved, and had mixed with the water into a thick mustard-paste, I heard that familiar sound.

Imagine a breeze blowing through some dry, short reeds by a dark cold brook, and imagine you hear both the reeds as they rub against each other, the dry shuffle of their dance, and the deep, quick gurgling of the brook.

I scooped the mustard paste thickly onto the towel, using a butter knife to get it evenly spread out. Just as I folded the towel into a wrap, she came into the kitchen and gestured towards where the book was. I nodded and gave her a thumbs-up. I had heard it too. She made a silent thank-you-gesture, because she was still on the phone.

I opened the door to the book room, and there it lay on the table. The book had shat itself, which is how we called it when it had secreted more mucus than usual and looked as if it was bathing in it. No wonder it was screaming. I went back to the kitchen and grabbed paper towels and came back. The worst thing about it shitting itself was that you had to turn on the light proper so you could see every bit of mucus. And the book disliked bright light, so it usually screamed even more loudly. Luckily, this time, it was not as bad. I made a point of getting the book very dry while between it burbled and puttered between screams in a somewhat stressed-out way. She had the habit of talking to the book when she cared for it, but I preferred working in silence. What are words to a book, I thought. When I was finished, I turned the lights down low again. I pressed two fingers at the sides of its spine and let them run up and down, which I knew relaxed it. Indeed, it lowered what you could call its spout or its nozzle in a way that signaled beginning comfort and stopped screaming. Then I placed the mustard wrap on its front side. Some steam rose up. The book burped, and I relaxed, too. Soon it would begin a deep, quasi-tectonic purring, which meant that my work for tonight was done. In the somber half-light, I admired the ink-black slits where one day its wings would burst out – or maybe its fins or its pages or its breasts; who knew. What a beautiful thing, I thought. As soon as the book purred, I left the room.

She was now in the kitchen herself, starting up a mushroom risotto. Again, words would fail me if I tried to describe how lovely she looked, but I mean, you know her, so you can imagine. She smiled that magnificent crooked smile. It’s purring, I said. Thank you, she said. We kissed. Cristina called, she said. Oh, great, I said, I hope she’s well. Cristina was one of the wet nurses who had gone on strike during that summer in Valencia when she and I first met. Cristina and her had become good friends, and talked regularly on the phone. Cristina lived in Melbourne now. She’s doing great as always, she said, and started stirring the risotto.

I thought of my one-third finished Bruegel and asked whether it would be ok if I continued my puzzle while she was cooking. Of course, she said. And thanks again for getting the mustard, and taking care of the book. Of course, I said, and kissed her again, and went back into the living room. After all, there was a bridge to finish.

As I sat down and was about to go look for the next missing piece, I received an uncommon-looking message on my phone and checked it, and this is when and how we learned that le Pen had been assassinated.