Chapter 2 Pieces of a Dream #2
“Well, I don’t! It’s a little sick, frankly. It’s like you hate yourself now, and so you can’t stand it when I try to love you.”
I removed myself from his lap, sliding onto my side of the bed. I pulled the covers back up to conceal my bare chest.
“No. It’s just ... it’s become such a routine between us ever since we started trying for a baby ...”
He collapsed back onto his pillow, closing his eyes in the manner of a mortally exhausted man.
“Let’s just go to sleep. We’re both tired. We’ll add this to the list of things to talk about on our holiday.”
He propped himself up again but only to switch the bedside lamp off. Resolute darkness enveloped us, still vaguely redolent of pines and ginger shampoo. I closed my eyes, willing sleep to take me away. Permanently, if possible.
Even though Petr’s manager at work needed some convincing to grant him leave on such short notice, we departed for Italy about a week later, just after I had incorporated the last of my editor’s feedback into my Viking romance translation.
Despite the holiday’s main purpose being a discussion about our future, we spent the beginning of our planned break evading the realisation of said purpose.
Without ever explicitly agreeing on it, we likely both felt that in order to approach such a conversation with open minds, we needed to clear our heads first by immersing ourselves in our new, exciting surroundings.
We sailed through Venice’s maze-like canals on a gondola, basking in the intense Mediterranean sunlight, and we dined on candle-lit balconies overlooking romantic arched bridges.
In Verona, we visited Juliet’s house, where the walls beneath the famed balcony were completely covered with notes asking for guidance in love.
Some written on colourful sticky notes, others on heart-shaped pieces of paper plastered to the wall with the use of an adhesive.
Then there were some that were less conventional, such as a few granola bar wrappers written over with a black marker.
Even a female sanitary pad stuck to the wall in one place, with a single question written in red, rather appropriately: ‘Dear Juliet, did I marry the wrong man?’
I stared at it in a faintly disgusted fascination until the crowd pushed me away, buzzing with voices of mainly young women, clamouring for their place at the wall.
We had hoped to visit the Arena afterwards, but were disappointed to find it closed due to a violent incident having just taken place there. So instead we went to a nearby gelateria with its dazzling display of twenty different flavours.
“The world is going crazy,” Petr remarked in between licks of his ice cream as we retreated back into the city’s archway-lined streets. “Don’t you feel like there is suddenly violence everywhere? It seems like people are going crazy.”
“Well, statistically speaking, if you feel like the world around you is going insane, chances are you are the mad one.”
“Do you want some?” he offered, indicating the gigantic cone in his hand.
“No thanks. Vanilla is the most boring flavour in the world.”
We finally broached the flammable topic of our winding fertility journey as we made our way across the deep blue waters of the immense, mountain-lined Lago di Garda on a paddleboat.
There were a few clouds in the sky above us, round and puffy like baby lambs, and a soft cypress-scented breeze tussled our hair.
“Do you think we should try again?” Petr asked me abruptly and carefully at once.
“What, IVF?” I stopped pedalling and so did he; our little vessel was being rocked in place by the gentle waves.
“Yeah. Do you believe it has any chance whatsoever of succeeding?”
“I’m not sure I ever believed that,” I replied honestly. “Our chances were never good. Not with my uterus.”
The short silence that ensued was only interrupted by the soft, lapping sounds of the surrounding water. A gull flew nearby with a low, piercing screech. Loud voices reached us from the shore.
“Would you perhaps ever consider adopting?” I asked Petr cautiously.
His eyes widened in a grimace of complete and not wholly pleasant surprise.
“Definitely not,” he replied briskly. “I’m sorry, but no.
It wouldn’t be fair. I know I couldn’t love the child properly, knowing that it wasn’t really mine.
” He paused momentarily, but his lips remained slightly parted and his eyes worked to and fro, both indicating that he was merely figuring out how to say whatever he wanted to say next.
“I mean, the ugly truth of it is, I couldn’t love an adopted child knowing that I can have one that shares my genes.”
He could, too. Just not with me. And he felt wretched about saying it, about even thinking it. That much was clear from the way his shoulders slumped as he hung his head, not meeting my eye.
“What about surrogacy? If we saved up for it?” I suggested unenthusiastically, already knowing what answer to anticipate.
“No way.” He shook his head fervently. “Too weird and controversial. How would we ever explain it to my parents or our friends?”
The sun hid behind a cloud, and the soft breeze felt cooler all of a sudden. I pulled my sweater tighter around my shoulders.
“Can you imagine not having children? Living together just the two of us?”
I saw no point in concealing the scepticism in my voice.
“No.”
“Me neither,” I admitted defeatedly before gathering the courage to ask plainly: “Do you think we should split up?”
I held my breath until I could no longer hold it, and Petr still didn’t reply, looking resolutely at the little puddle of water beneath the pedals of our flimsy vessel.
When it became clear that he was too slow to answer for the response to be a clear, unwavering ‘no’, I pondered what my feelings would be if he said a resolute ‘yes’ instead.
Would I be crushed or relieved or a combination of the two?
My heart sped up at the thought, but as terrified as I was, I also detected a certain loosening sensation in myself, like unzipping a dress that was two sizes too small.
“I don’t know.” He sighed. “I just don’t know what to do. I’m sorry, Renata.”
We didn’t speak of it again until we got to Cinque Terre. Not having enough time for a longer stay, we only stopped there to take pictures of brightly coloured houses perched on a sea cliff. As we drove on, Petr raised the subject as suddenly as before.
“I truly don’t know what to do here. I cannot live with either option available to me. There’s just no acceptable way forward ...”
“I understand.”
“You do?”
“Trust me.” I fixed my eyes on the zig-zagging road.
Cinque Terre was an assortment of five hamlets. As we passed through the vivid, narrow centre of one of these, there was a huge dark red puddle on the hot tarmac. It looked disturbingly like blood, and I tried to push aside thoughts of what might have happened there.
“I have no idea how to live with it either,” I continued, feeling a little nauseated.
Petr briefly took his eyes off the road to shoot a baffled glance in my direction.
“Growing up the way I did, I’ve always wanted a proper family.
You know, one where all the kids have the same father.
And where they know who that father is instead of always wondering.
I wanted them to have a proper home too, not just a place where you live for a few months at most. I wanted to be the opposite of my mother.
..” I scoffed, making the word sound like an insult.
“And I guess I am. Any man who as much as looked at her got her pregnant.”
Petr stifled a laugh.
“God, that’s true, isn’t it? When did she have the youngest one?”
Our road veered off the coast at last, climbing uphill in serpentine turns lined with cypresses.
“At forty-six,” I replied, not a little dourly.
“Damn.”
We drove into the tunnel. In the encroaching darkness, I couldn’t see Petr’s face, but I detected a smile in his tone.
“What I mean to say is that I made motherhood and caring for my future family my whole identity. I don’t know who I am anymore without it. Everything I have ever done was in preparation for a role I will likely never have.”
We left the tunnel, sunlight flooding the cabin of our vehicle once again. We drove into the rolling green valleys of Tuscany in silence, both lost in contemplation.
We arrived in Florence in the grips of melancholy, but it was not possible to visit that city without being swept away into a fantasy of being a Roman noble. The effect of which was only spoiled by the astonishing number of darkly uniformed policemen patrolling all the major squares and streets.
However, the streets also brimmed with history and art, not just with armed forces, and we enjoyed thin-crusted pizzas that exploded with flavour in our mouths as our eyes feasted on the views of the perfectly round dome of the Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral.
The city seemed a true cradle of civilisation.
It was as if time became a physical dimension in such a place, allowing us to witness the rise of our society through the centuries.
It made one feel smaller on one hand, but as an integral part of something spectacular on the other.
Little did I know how important that feeling would become over the next few weeks, months, and years.
The awareness of the sheer magnitude of humanity’s heritage, the fragility of it, and the indispensable role that each of us had in it.
Next on our itinerary was Pisa. And the fateful night that would become known as the Outbreak, a singular moment in history that would transform the steady rise of our civilisation into a neck-breaking fall.