Arnon Grunberg - Tirza

'De man to whom I wish is a knapperd, yes. My girlfriends said: "He is no knapperd, but he will be well on your children." They said: "He is listless, but he will cook for you and to do some shopping, remember." My girlfriends said: "He is old, but if he is dead you still have a life for you." Look at me and tell me: What do i for me? A few days ago I was at a fortune-teller netherlandsbelgiumall. "There will be a lot of change this year. Otherwise everything will be," she said. "Wait. Everything is different." Look at me, Jörgen. What else is?'

He instep by his hair, which their original color were lost. They were white. For the first time he felt something of compassion with her, for the first time in years she was not the woman who him and her children had left in the lurch to always voze happiness to search on a houseboat.

'You have two children with me,' he said.

'Yes, and? Should that now my consolation and my salvation? What is a woman without a child? A PROSTITUTE. Less. A whore can have children. And i told you already: to bring kids seemed to me to be perfectly suitable. I could find anyone who was better, Jörgen. No one who wanted in any case. But the children have not saved me. The powerless desire in the eyes of a man who has done me more than the begging look my daughters. Other mothers to think that the love is, but it is hunger, Jörgen, ordinary, death normal hunger. And then that screeching, sometimes night long, yes, did you ever ear buds in, and later did you find that not even more a screeching problem, you loved it, it gave you what to do, but i had other ideas about life than listening to the screeching of my thirsty girls.'

He did his best not to see her. Weather instep he over his head. He would have hairs can paints, as the color it was old. He thought that it had something that white. Something gedistingeerds, he found that he did. He felt that he by the color of his hair uitstraalde authority. But perhaps he was mistaken.

'I do not know what you want from me,' he said soft. 'I do not know and I am also nothing to, but I am not gay. And I also never has been.'

When that he possessed he had dreamed about this, that he had experienced it all in a dream, that he with her in the bathroom had been and that she was naked. She was often nude. In the summer they had parties for the children which they half or sometimes completely naked had appeared, to other parents complained of her behavior and ship's steward promise had to his wife to order and to ensure that they are also located on tropical days not nude among the children would be interfering, when operating under its apple tree India Antje played. Also not half-naked, he had himself to be added. Because he knew the wife. But in the dream in which he had already seen all the call was otherwise expired. It was not about homosexuals.

'What are you?'

'What would I do?'

'If you are not a uniform. What do you do? What are you in God's name?'

'Is that what you want to know?'

'Yes'. Perhaps. Now you mention it. I believe that I can have peace with what happened with everything that happened, if I finally know what you're. Who You Are, Jörgen. Who are you?'

Ship's steward outdated breath, his hand rested not more on his crown. There was a blue spot on its upper leg, he saw. She was overturned. Or she was kicked.

'I'm nobody,' he said. 'My ego was large but i have halved and you have the further crunched into a giant meatball. I am the father of Tirza and Ibi. Especially the latter. That is what I am, yes, not much more, but also not less. The father of Ibi and Tirza. I am father.'

'You know,' said they slowly, as if they had difficulty finding the right words as though they spoke a foreign language, 'What I wonder? Have you never thought: Wow, what strange?'

'What do you mean? Yee? What did I have to find strange?'

'What I mean? Come on, hold you do not Jörgen of Domme.'

'I do not know. I have no idea what you're talking about. I already have a time no idea what you're talking about.'

'Have you never thought: what strange that i my wife never have an orgasm? What strange. Perhaps it is time that I am going to do that, or go to learn how to do that. There are books about follow overwritten, educational videos about are for sale in almost every reform house. Have you never thought: I must agree to do something, even if only once. Have you never thought: what to. For her. What do they think of me? Perhaps I should study. Perhaps I should practice. To me do.'

He stared at her as to a mouse in a mousetrap that for twenty years in the kitchen is and where never has sat in a mouse. And on a morning, just a mouse. It is not to believe. You think of a hallucination. A mistake.

No, in the dream was all different. Not that it was a pleasant dream, quite uncomfortable even, but this was onprettiger.

'we will end this conversation?' he proposed. 'Dress. Let us go to sleep. Pull a pajamas. Or a t-shirt. And let us just go to sleep. As if nothing is wrong. There are enough t-shirts here. You pajamas there are. Everything is there. Everything has on your lying in wait.'

Weather slipped his gaze to the blue spot on her thigh. She was careless, and inconvenient. They are often bumped. The color of its pants Pink, pleasant pink was, salmon pink. Not that hard-hitting pink that hurt your eyes, but that it also had something. A little too exceiting, precisely because it hurt to the eyes.

'I want to know,' she said. 'There are a few things I would like to know now that I am here. This is one of them.'

He nodded.

"You want to know about it,' he said. 'You want to know about it. Now, what I can remember, but maybe my memory me in the insert, maybe I am already dement slightly, but what i remember is that I sometimes you have not delivered orgasm regularly but from time to time it happened. Not every month, not every quarter, from time to time. But anyway, I think it is ridiculous to talk about, at this point in time, I think it is unreasonable. I think it is inappropriate.'

'Never',' she said. 'You not, Jörgen. Others, yes. The man with the Rasta hair, almost every day. You never. Never, you hear me. Never.'

He did a step in her direction, as he had the challenge its resistance to the throat to intervene, his arm went up, but he already controlled itself.

'I have you,' he siste, 'two children. Is that not better than an orgasm, is that not a thousand times better? Where are you? Two children, two healthy children, weighs not against all of the world? orgasms'

He did a step backwards.

'Dus you is in the illusion,' she said, 'You wrong in the illusion — it is to whining and howl. Have you ever tried to look with whom you have lived all these years? Have you ever really looked at me? Where have you been actually? On which planet have you been all those years?'

He mass by his wrist. Since he had wrist sprains with tennis, mass did he often lost moments. Sometimes in the middle of the night, as he could not sleep, or in the garden between the wieden and saw by. There was a lot to weeding in his garden. And to saw. And then he was still the cottage of his parents in the Betuwe, with garden, and what for a!

'What do you want? I made a mistake. Is that what you want to hear? I would like to say it. I made a mistake, I have never stood still. I thought that I can do you a orgasm edited but it was a mistake, it now. Ok, congratulations. And it is too late, thank God it is too late to do it. It is over. Your orgasms are my case no longer and vice versa. Others will have to take care about you, others have you taken charge. Why you come to me you complain? You have three years had time of your life, you have three years of orgasm lived up to orgasm, if I am not mistaken, what do you now still pressure for such few years in which the life that something else than an orgasm?'