Free The Childhood of Jesus by J. M. Coetzee

can share David’s bed. I’ll sleep in a chair. I am used to it.’
    It is a lie, he is not used to sleeping in chairs, and on the little straight-backed kitchen chair he doubts that sleep is humanly possible. But he gives Elena no chance to refuse. ‘You know where the bathroom is. Here is a towel.’
    By the time he himself returns from the bathroom she is in his bed and the two boys are asleep side by side. He wraps himself in the spare blanket and switches off the light.
    For a while there is silence. Then, out of the dark, she speaks: ‘If you are uncomfortable, as I am sure you are, I can make space.’
    He slips into bed with her. Quietly, discreetly, they do the business of sex, mindful of the children asleep an arm’s length away.
    It is not what he had hoped it would be. Her heart is not in it, he feels that at once; as for himself, the reserve of pent-up desire that he had counted on proves to be an illusion.
    â€˜You see what I mean?’ she whispers when it is over. With a finger she brushes his lips. ‘It doesn’t advance us, does it?’
    Is she right? Should he take this experience to heart and bid farewell to sex, as Elena appears to have done? Perhaps. Yet merely to hold a woman in his arms, even if she is no ship-stirring beauty, buoys him.
    â€˜I don’t agree,’ he murmurs back. ‘In fact, I think you are quite wrong.’ He pauses. ‘Have you ever asked yourself whether the price we pay for this new life, the price of forgetting, may not be too high?’
    She does not reply, but rearranges her underwear and turns away from him.
    Though they do not live together, he likes to think of himself and Elena, after that first shared night, as a couple, or a couple in the making, and therefore of the two boys as brothers or stepbrothers. It becomes more and more of a habit for the four of them to have their evening meal together; at weekends they go shopping or go on picnics or excursions into the countryside; and though he and Elena do not spend another whole night together, she now and again, when the boys are out of the way, allows him to make love to her. He begins to grow used to her body, with its jutting hipbones and tiny breasts. She has little sexual feeling for him, that is clear; but he likes to think of his lovemaking as a patient and prolonged act of resuscitation, of bringing back to life a female body that for all practical purposes has died.
    When she invites him to make love to her, it is without the slightest coquetry. ‘If you like, we can do it now,’ she will say, and close the door and take off her clothes.
    Such matter-of-factness might once have put him off, just as her unresponsiveness might once have humiliated him. But he decides he will neither be put off nor humiliated. What she offers he will accept, as readily and as gratefully as he can.
    Usually she refers to the act simply as doing it , but sometimes, when she wants to tease him, she uses the word descongelar , thaw: ‘If you like, you can have another go at thawing me.’ It was a word he once let slip in a heedless moment: ‘Let me thaw you!’ The notion of being thawed back into life struck her then and strikes her now as limitlessly funny.
    Between the two of them there is growing up, if not intimacy, then a friendship that he feels to be quite solid, quite reliable. Whether friendship would have grown up between them anyway, on the ground of the children’s friendship and of the many hours they spend together, whether doing it has contributed anything at all, he cannot say.
    Is this, he asks himself, how families come into being, here in this new world: founded on friendship rather than on love? It is not a condition he is familiar with, being mere friends with a woman. But he can see its benefits. He can even, cautiously, enjoy it.
    â€˜Tell me about Fidel’s father,’ he asks Elena.
    â€˜I don’t remember much about