A Beautiful Young Wife Read online

  He arranged scallops on a bed of chard, and took the plates to the dining room.

  Ruth and Henri were outside, cocooned in the late-evening light. Wine and cigarettes and her sunglasses were on the table. Diederik was standing away from them, a bottle of beer in hand. What was he seeing? Peat-moss paths between the borders, pergolas of rose and passion flower. Edward stood between the sliding doors to the garden. He removed his apron and said: ‘Dinner’s ready.’

  ‘Let’s eat outside,’ Ruth said. ‘It’s lovely here.’

  ‘It’s going to get colder soon.’

  ‘We won’t be that long,’ Ruth said. She stood up. Edward went inside, taking the plates from the table.

  ‘Wait, Mr. Landauer, let me help,’ Henri said.

  Behind Ruth and Diederik, the sun went down. Diederik stuck a whole scallop in his mouth. He doesn’t even chew, Edward thought. It could just as well have been a hamburger, for all he cared. He probably would have enjoyed that more.

  Henri had tickets for a dance party. He’d ordered a few extra, so they could both go along if they liked. ‘Fantastic,’ Ruth said, but Edward shook his head. He remembered the parties of the 1980s, how everything went on and on, and how morning came with a mouth full of grit. He wasn’t familiar with the music and drugs that were prevalent these days. That life had passed away; now he went to cafés, places where you could hear each other speak.

  Henri asked about his job. ‘Of course I know who you are, Mr. Landauer, but —’

  ‘Please, call me Edward.’

  Ruth laughed.

  ‘I saw you on the news once,’ the boy said, ‘but I don’t really know exactly what you do.’

  Edward told him about his virus research. He had just come back from a World Health Organisation mission to Hong Kong. All the poultry had been culled; the sky had turned black.

  ‘Couldn’t you be infected yourself now? How does that work?’ Diederik asked.

  ‘H5N1 doesn’t transmit to humans,’ Edward said. ‘But influenza viruses mutate like lightning. So, who knows, at this very moment, somewhere in my lungs …’

  He longed to be alone with her. The boys were an intrusion. Through their eyes, he saw what the two of them were: a young woman with a much older man, a forty-two-year-old man of whom they asked, ‘Are you still planning to have children?’

  And Ruth, does she want children? Edward wondered. The subject had never come up. They’d been together for such a short time.

  • • •

  One day in late January, they drove across the big Zuyderzee causeway to a place in Friesland called Bozum, and pulled up by a newly built house at the edge of the village. Her father’s silver Mercedes was in the carport. The back of the house faced onto pastureland that was vacant and glistening. This was where she had grown up. A life without major breakage — prosperity and the influx of information had burgeoned steadily here, just like everywhere else, but life had retained its pastoral quality.

  They were standing on the sun porch. He saw a spire in the distance — a vanishing point between the soft grey of the sky and the monotony of the grassland below.

  ‘Look, a hare,’ Edward said.

  ‘Plenty of those around here,’ said her father, from where he was sitting behind him.

  He was a contractor — he had built the house himself. He took a cigarette from the dice cup on the table, ticked the filter against his thumbnail a few times, and lit it with a flame he cupped in his hand. A man acquainted with wind and rain. Edward remembered how, on a few occasions, his grandfather had offered him a cigarette from a cup like that. He was proud then that the old man had viewed him as the kind of fellow who smoked.

  Her father leaned forward in his easy chair, elbows resting on his thighs, his head hunched down a bit between his shoulders; a labourer during his break.

  They drank coffee from fragile porcelain cups. ‘Do you use milk?’ the mother asked. His coffee went white from the dash of condensed.

  ‘They’re called Fryske dúmkes [hazelnut and aniseed biscuits],’ the mother said. ‘Ever had them before?’

  Try as she might, the echo of Frisian rang from every word. He shook his head, his mouth full of cookie.

  Later, Ruth and her mother disappeared upstairs to sort things out — what could be disposed of, what could not.

  Edward looked at the photos on the dresser: Ruth as a child, a creature woven of light and gold filigree; riding a horse, petting the powerful neck of a bull in some farmyard; smiling into the camera with big, strong teeth, her little brother on her back.

  Her father came and stood beside him, a bottle of aged gin and two glasses in his hand. ‘The old clock on the wall has almost reached five. You do drink now, don’t you?’ He poured for both of them. ‘Tsjoch, that’s what we say around these parts. Do you know what that means?’

  ‘Cheers, I guess?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Tsjoch,’ Edward said.

  ‘Tsjoch.’

  They drank. Her father tapped his index finger against one of the photos. ‘Do you know who that is?’

  Edward looked. ‘Ruth?’

  ‘No, this fella here.’

  Edward moved his face up closer, trying to look as though he might know something about cattle. ‘No idea,’ he said at last.

  ‘Sunny Boy. Still a young one then, not nearly the champion he became a few years later. But what a power he had in that body already … A million offspring, no less.’

  A pair of champions, the bull and the girl. The animal was awesome, but Edward couldn’t stop looking at Ruth. She was barely twelve, thirteen. Even back then, he would have desired her desperately.

  ‘And what plans do you have, if you don’t mind my asking?’ her father said with a force that made it seem as though he’d been holding back till then. He was shorter than Edward, but with the immovability of a wrestler. He had broad, strong fingers with cracks that had never come completely clean.

  ‘Plans?’ Edward said.

  ‘With Ruth. You’re a bit older, if I’m correct.’

  Edward wondered about the connection between the question concerning his plans and the stud bull her father had just pointed out to him. ‘There’s a few years’ difference, yes,’ he said. ‘It’s not ideal, but … I regret that I had to turn forty before meeting her …’

  ‘Forty-two, that’s what she said.’

  A hot glow spread up towards his ears.

  ‘You could have had a family of your own already.’

  Edward stood up straight. ‘I could have. But I didn’t.’

  ‘You know that she’s been married before?’

  Dizziness.

  ‘You didn’t know that?’

  His alarm-red thought: the secret chamber … he had found it. ‘No,’ Edward said, ‘no, I didn’t know that.’

  ‘It was right after she moved away from home.’

  They were making a fool of him, the father and the daughter. They were laughing, laughing.

  ‘I asked her whether she had a good reason for getting married. Love, she said. That’s not an answer, I said. He was a good boy, for sure, but he had never done an honest day’s work in his life. She’d never been so in love before, she said. When she came back from America, she showed us the ring. It was a surprise …’

  ‘A surprise. Indeed.’

  ‘We puzzled over it and puzzled over it, but never did understand why she had to go and do that.’ He sighed. ‘She never has let anyone tell her what to do.’ He tipped the second glass into his mouth and said, his lips wet: ‘You and me are ten years apart. You’re more like my own generation. I had hoped that she would take care of me someday, but the way things look now, it’ll be your wheelchair she’s pushing. Is that what you want, to have my daughter be your nurse?’

  ‘It’s … it’s maybe a little too early
to think about that yet.’

  ‘Oh, is that what you figure? Listen, let me tell your fortune for you, right down to the year. Ten years from now, some doctor will have already stuck his finger up you twice, to check your prostate. That hurts. You’ll already have been on one of those bicycles to measure your heart functions, after you felt that tingling spread down to your fingers. And the plumbing’s getting a bit rusty, too. To read the little information leaflet, you’re going to need your glasses. But where did you leave the damn things?’

  Edward smiled. Her father was a humourist, he was sure of that now.

  ‘There,’ he said. He pointed at Edward’s forehead.

  Edward didn’t get it.

  ‘There they are, on your forehead!’

  Edward ran his hand through his hair. ‘What?’

  ‘Your glasses! Your reading glasses!’

  ‘I still get along fine without them,’ Edward said, when the other man was finished laughing.

  ‘Talk to me again in three years’ time.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘Oh, we will indeed.’ He slapped him on the shoulder.

  After supper, he and Ruth took a walk around the village. At the edge of Bozum, in the dark, was the church. ‘It’s really old,’ Ruth said, her eyes fixed on the building. ‘I don’t even know exactly how old.’

  The gate was open. They walked along a gravel path between the headstones.

  ‘Your father shouldn’t have been the one to tell me,’ he said bluntly.

  They stopped, little stones gnashing beneath their soles. She didn’t know what he meant.

  ‘About your having been married,’ he said.

  ‘Oh no, not …’

  He ground little potholes with his heels. ‘It was painful.’

  ‘I was meaning to tell you myself.’

  The clock at the top of the tower struck the half hour.

  ‘It was no big deal, really. We went to Las Vegas — he’d been wearing cowboy boots since he was thirteen, for the day when he would drive into Vegas in a Chevrolet. Then we saw one of those little chapels … Well, that was it, really.’

  He shoved his hands into his pockets and walked on.

  ‘I’m sorry, love, that you had to hear about it this way,’ she said from behind him.

  Behind the church was a gravedigger’s hut. The door was open, so he ducked down and looked inside. In the semi-darkness he made out a few pallbearer’s poles and partitions they used to shore up the walls of the graves. He pulled Ruth inside and pushed her up against the wall; his hands disappeared under her sweater and grasped her little breasts. Gooseflesh. They did it standing against the wall; she breathed heavily against his neck. He fucked her hard and punishingly. With his ejaculation, he vanquished the man with the cowboy boots, and the father, too, and carried her away from there. The bull with the girl on its back.

  *

  When Edward Landauer was seventeen and had to decide what he was going to study, he saw two possibilities. He could either peer into the cosmos through a telescope, in search of new life, of moons and meteorites with grit in their tails, or he could bend over microscopes to study the fundaments of human life. In a youth hostel in Copenhagen, he read Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and found the answer in Nietzsche’s impassioned summons to remain faithful to the earth.

  In those days, medical microbiology was a fairly ho-hum field. The smallpox virus had been eliminated, tuberculosis no longer played a significant role in the Western world, and the polio vaccine was almost 100 per cent effective. The battle seemed over. What was left now were the residual illnesses, viruses and bacteria still rampant in the Third World, and Edward was prepared to dedicate his research life to those.

  Then, in 1981, a man in Amsterdam died from a mysterious stack of nasty diseases. ‘Patient Zero’ was a strong, healthy man who had been destroyed in a trice by a muddle of immune sicknesses. Almost every specialist in the hospital was at his bedside, but they were powerless to help him.

  In January 1983, three more patients were admitted with the same symptoms; a few months later, seven more. Before the year was over, most of them had died. Their immune systems were out of whack; opportunistic infections had destroyed their bodies. They served as staging grounds for a proliferation of viruses and fungi, of aggressive skin cancers and neurological ailments affecting the brain and spinal cord. They went blind and senile, and drowned in their own fluids. No one knew what kind of disease this was or where it had come from. The only apparent correlative was that it seemed to strike mostly homosexual men, men with an often highly promiscuous sex life — some of the respondents reported having hundreds of sex partners each year.

  Edward heard someone in the hospital refer to it as ‘homo-cancer’, but it soon became clear that haemophilia patients, drug addicts, and recipients of blood transfusions were also susceptible. The disease took on a name, ‘Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome’, otherwise known as AIDS.

  Edward was twenty-five, his thesis written in the company of those researching the new disease. That was how he came to be given an internship with virology professor Herman Wigboldus. Wigboldus, the story was legendary, had brought the isolated AIDS virus back from America in his breast pocket. As if by magic, he had transformed the sleepy field of medical microbiology into the frontline of modern science, and Edward, by a stroke of good luck, was right in the thick of it. There was money, prestige, and fame to be had. That was the glorious side of it: the epoch-making research, the thrill of the new, the pioneering work. People called them the cowboys of AIDS research.

  The other end of the spectrum was marked by fear and despair. There were surgeons who, fearing infection, refused to operate on homosexual males. No one knew how the virus spread. Anything was possible: airborne contact, sexual contact, or even the toilet seat. One female lab assistant quickly developed an acute form of nosophobia and panicked at the pipettes containing virus material. Wigboldus, when he came into the lab, would sometimes roar ‘Virus!,’ and everyone would laugh as she froze on her stool. She finished her internship at the veterinary faculty of the University of Utrecht.

  Edward lived in a whirl of excitement. Patients were dying en masse; scientific research was being carried out with warlike urgency. Laboratory staffers organised information evenings in meeting rooms filled with terrified homosexual men. ‘Dr. Landauer, my partner is HIV positive, and so am I. Should we be using condoms?’

  Questions to which there were no answers.

  During a departmental meeting, Wigboldus told them: ‘It looks like we’re going to have to say sorry to the entire first and second generations.’

  The lab assistants were silent. ‘What do you mean, “sorry”?’ one of the researchers asked at last.

  ‘Just that,’ Wigboldus said. ‘They’re all doomed.’

  One autumn day, Edward was in the canteen, watching an anti-nuclear march in The Hague on the little TV there. As hordes of people shuffled past, the reporter said it could very well develop into the largest protest demonstration ever held in the Netherlands.

  A man came up and stood beside Edward. For a while, the two of them watched the live broadcast from Malieveld. ‘The fools,’ the man said then. ‘What they don’t realise is that viruses are what’s going to kill them, not atom bombs.’

  Under Wigboldus’ forceful leadership, some seven interns and post-docs were kneaded into serviceable material. They published in Nature, Science, and The Lancet: the flow of research funding was endless. Edward went along to conferences, and learned from Wigboldus about who hated whom, and with whom he would do well to forge coalitions. ‘You need to understand the way the game is played,’ Wigboldus said. ‘That, combined with brilliant research — and we’ll pipette us together a Nobel Prize yet, my boy.’

  He sounded like a used-car salesman, Edward thought, yet he understood that Wigboldus’ pugnacity and lack
of scruples were the building blocks of his success.

  ‘Science is the destruction of reputations,’ his mentor told him one evening in a hotel bar. ‘Creative destruction. Scuttling other people’s careers when your study knocks theirs for a loop.’ The glee in his voice was unmissable.

  It was within this culture of dedicated pioneering and power lust that Edward was formed. Wigboldus’ hunkering for glory was fused seamlessly to the public interest; Edward had seen him profess great commitment to his patients while, once beyond range of the cameras, he granted much higher priority to cutting the National Institutes of Health or the Institut Pasteur off at the pass.

  Wigboldus’ authoritarian behaviour didn’t intimidate Edward. He knew the man valued him for his scientific intuition. In addition, Edward possessed a gift for clearly and simply explaining the state of affairs in their field of research, so that Wigboldus could leave most of the media contacts to him. And because the dynamic field surrounding the new retrovirus also included an element of hysteria, there was something to explain or comment on each week.

  Wigboldus lived with his wife and two dogs in a villa at the edge of Amstelveen. When Edward was invited over for dinner one time and crossed the lawn on his way to the front door, Wigboldus asked him to wipe his feet on the grass. ‘That keeps some of the filth of the city outside.’

  For an internationally celebrated virologist, Edward thought, this was a puzzling and highly unscientific train of thought. He wrote it off to eccentricity. The couple’s dalmatians lay on the easy chairs and were fed scraps from the dining-room table. He had never dared to ask why they had no children.

  One day, Edward walked into Wigboldus’ office. ‘Herman, there’s something I need your help with,’ he said.