Blut und Boden

Elsa flicks the lightswitch back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, before she steps away from the door and says, in a voice like cold tap water and numb toes, “The bulb burst, didn’t it.”

Not a question. Never questions. Things phrased like questions: didn’t it, shouldn’t you, couldn’t we, aren’t they. But Felix knows, because he’s good at this kind of thing and he’s always been able to read her like a book, that in essence what’s happened here is that the bulb burst, and Elsa is angry because the bulb burst. And he doesn’t want to say anything, or explain that he tried to buy a new bulb this morning but the shop was all out, so he just lies there in the dark and pretends he didn’t hear her, that he’s asleep, fast asleep, dreaming.

She sighs, and she whispers into the room like a feather caught in a gust of wind, like a scrap of paper snatched away by a hurricane, and she starts to undress. Blouse over the back of the chair, skirt on the floor, shoes kicked to the side, nightdress pulled over her head, resting on her shoulders like the weight of the world. And she’s making all this noise, and Felix is thinking that if he’d actually been asleep when she came back, he’d probably have been woken up by it.

She lights a candle, and she comes to a soft landing in front of the mirror, and she’s scraping the powder from her face like so much grease from the bottom of a pan, and her face is flickering, warm and orange, in the reflection, and she says, looking at him without turning her head, “I said, the bulb burst, didn’t it.”

Felix says yes, and he sits up in bed and reaches for his book and starts to read it so that he doesn’t have to look at her.

“Are you going to fix it?” She’s still scraping away, and her skin has gone red under her ministrations, and he reads the same sentence three times before he realises she’s said a word.

Felix says yes again, and he turns a page, even though he can’t remember anything on the last one, and he doesn’t even know what book he’s reading.

She stands up, and she walks over to the bed and pulls back the covers and lies down, and her hair is blonde like the women in the posters, and Felix wishes he had his father’s nose and his father’s eyes and his father’s hair, and he closes his book and he stares at the grotesque, crawling shadows the candle is projecting on the wall until he falls asleep.