The Supper

Pavel was sixteen, or seventeen, or somewhere between. I cannot place the year exactly, because I am telling you something that was not marked at the time.

He came home for supper later than he usually did. Anja had already set the table. The food was in the pot on the stove, and she had left the lid slightly off so the steam could go. She was in the garden when he came in, because the light was still good and she had the habit of using the good light.

I was in the kitchen. I was doing something I do not remember, standing at the counter. I heard him come in through the front door. I heard him put something down in the hallway — a bag, a coat — and I heard him walk through to where I was.

He came in, and he did not say anything right away, and he looked at the pot on the stove, and he looked at me, and he sat down at the table without taking off whatever he had on.

I saw his face.

I knew the tiredness I was looking at. I had never seen it before on my son. I had seen it before only on one person, and that was on my own face in the mornings of some years I had not thought about in a long time. It was not the tiredness of a boy who had been running, or the tiredness of a student who had been reading too long. It was the tiredness of a person who had been thinking about a problem for which there was no clean answer, and who had been thinking about it for longer than he had the equipment to think about it, and who had come home because the thinking was not something he could continue to do alone.

I did not ask him what he had been thinking about.

I want to say this carefully. I did not refuse to ask. I did not make a decision. The asking was not a thing I could have arrived at from where I was standing. I was looking at my son, and I was recognizing him as someone who carried a tiredness I had carried, and the recognition was filling up the room, and there was no room in the room for a question. There was only the recognizing.

I served him his supper. I sat down across from him. We ate. Anja came in from the garden partway through, and she kissed the top of his head the way she always did, and Pavel looked up at her and tried to smile, and Anja noticed the way he tried to smile and did not say anything about it either, and she sat down and ate her share, and we were three people eating together in a kitchen at the end of a day.

Pavel went upstairs after. I cleared the table. Anja washed. We did not speak about Pavel while we cleaned, because speaking about him would have meant using a vocabulary we did not have.

I never asked him, later, what he had been thinking about that evening. There was no later that was the right later. There was always either too little time or too much time. The question became a thing I carried instead of a thing I asked. I carried it for thirty more years.

I am telling you this because of what I know now that I did not know then. I could not have asked him because I did not have the kind of father who asked. My father, the man who held his cup a particular way, was not a man who asked. I had learned to be a father by being the son of a father, and the father I had learned to be did not ask his son about the tiredness on his son’s face.

Pavel lived his life after that evening. I do not know exactly what the tiredness was about. I suspect he worked it out by himself, the way my father would have worked it out by himself, the way I would have worked it out by myself. I suspect that was the shape of what it meant to be a man in our family. Three generations, each of us coming home tired, each of us recognized by the one who had made us, each of us not asked, each of us working it out alone.

I do not know if Pavel was real.

I do not know if the son I could not ask would have been a son a different father could have asked. I suspect he would have been, and I suspect the father who asked him would have been a different father, and that father would not have been me. I would not have been willing to be him, for the same reason I gave you about the cup.

I have one more thing to tell you. It is the smallest thing I have, and it will not take long, and then I will be done.