Free A Beautiful Young Wife by Tommy Wieringa

atmosphere of benevolent household happiness has been made flesh, Edward thinks, as though he could grab hold of it if he wanted to. There are almost no thoughts of the life outside. He longs for nothing but this. He doesn’t want to think about Marjolein. It makes him restless. The ante has been upped. There is everything to lose.
    When they ran into each other on the institute parking lot and spoke for a few minutes, she had said she’d already noticed that something had changed. She understood, she said: after all, it was truly something, what he was going through now. Little clouds came out of her mouth. She waved to him from the car; he smiled gratefully. This was the end to his faux pas, he thought. It had come easier than he’d expected.
    â€¢ • •
    A few months after Morris is born, Ruth pronounces the term ‘fussy baby’, but then in the form of a denial. ‘He’s not a fussy baby,’ she says. ‘He’s just having trouble making a landing on Earth.’ The image of his son as a space traveller appeals to Edward. Knocked out of orbit and stranded in the wrong galaxy — but then where does he belong?
    Morris, it seems, can be lulled to sleep only by means both subtle and prolonged, and just when they think they’ve found such a routine, it starts all over again.
    It began two weeks after he was born, as though he was tormented by pain or by having left behind his life as a space traveller. He rips their nights apart with crying. The cradle is on her side of the bed; she sleeps with one hand on his stomach, and when she tries to withdraw it, he awakes with a start and cries. They spend the nights wandering, the baby on one arm, rocking and hushing him. The serene happiness of the first weeks has made way for irritability and despair. Morris is given Zantac against reflux, and Edward is too exhausted to make a smart remark about its manufacturer: GlaxoSmithKline.
    This, therefore, is how noise enters Edward’s life — like a cordon of striking truckers leaning on their horns, preceded by a parade by the Association of Muffler-Free Scooters. A hundredfold Semitic widows in disarray bring up the rear. There is no way he can protect himself; it worms its way into his defenceless ears, and crawls under his skin. The passing noises of the world, too, reduce him to a shambles — a magpie perched on the gutter, a scream from the park, anything at all can drag his son up from his hard-won sleep. In the frequencies emitted by cats meowing in the garden, or planes high in the sky, Edward hears the sound of Morris crying; his heart starts pounding, the hair on the back of his neck stands up. He’s awake … Goddamn it, he’s awake again …
    At the institute, he sometimes looks up in fright from his monitor, hearing his son’s cry in the shriek of a dry hinge.
    â€˜He’s not crying for the fun of it,’ Ruth says, ‘or just to vex you. You seem to forget that something is really bothering him.’
    The baby boy’s pain has welled up from the depths of his vital organs to his brain, yet the cause itself remains invisible. Neither Zantac nor Motilium seem to help. Ruth packs him off to doctors and herbal therapists; an osteopath slides his practised hands gently up and down the baby’s locomotor apparatus. They hang a hairdryer in his cradle, because the sound seems to soothe him.
    By the time a baby is six months old, Ruth and Edward tell each other, the worst of it is usually over. Even the most persistent of fussy babies calms down then. Six months, in any case, is a point far beyond their endurance. They will never make it to August; the crying would have torn them to the ground long before that, just as the walls of Jericho crumbled beneath the persistent roar of the rams’ horns.
    Her patience is greater than his; she never has the urge to silence Morris by force. She is surprised by the flames of impotent rage