It was three days before Christmas, and the girls and I had motored into Berlin to shop, leaving Florian at home with his father and brothers. We traveled not in Johann’s black Mercedes, which we left in Paris, but in the massive Daimler Johann kept here in Germany, driven by a chauffeur in a field-gray uniform. The trip took two and a half hours along a highway of rich new asphalt, and Frieda did most of the talking. “He has a new tooth coming in, the one on the right side,” she said. “Did you see it?” “I didn’t need to see it. I’ve felt it the past few days,” I said, and I laughed to cover the ripping sound in my chest, because I hated leaving my son even for an hour, let alone for an entire day of shopping in Berlin. The Baroness von Kleist, she is such a devoted mother, they said in Paris, bewildered, where mothers of a certain class happily handed off the baby to the nursemaid after a friendly morning cuddle, but the truth was far more elemental than that, a chemical intensity of emotion that had begun its slow combustion about the third or fourth day after Florian’s birth, in some tranquil hour before dawn, when he was suckling at my breast and his eyes wandered up to mine in such a perfect representation of Stefan that I felt the universe move in my marrow, as if I had fastened all my ideas of the infinite upon a single black eyelash.
What do You think about Along The Infinite Sea (2015)?
