Joseph

Joseph is the narrator’s beloved former partner, and his departure shapes both her account of their past and her lonely life in Berlin. She understands that she helped end their relationship, yet continues to experience his absence as a death: he is alive and nearby, but has chosen not to exist in her life. A birthday plan from their earlier years captures the intimacy they once shared—and the way, after an awkward encounter, they found their way back to one another.

Identity and Relationship

Joseph is the person the narrator cannot bring herself to forget. In the darkness beside Stéphane, she silently forms Joseph’s name, finding the thought painful beyond naming. She regards his hatred of her as understandable, even comparatively mild beside the hatred she directs at herself. Her account presents the separation not as a clean ending but as a continuing injury: Joseph remains alive, yet his decision to leave makes his absence feel like a death that keeps reopening the wound.

The narrator says she left for Berlin because she was cowardly and could see no other way to make Joseph understand that she had lost hope for them. She also says she contributed to his loss, as she believes she has gradually destroyed the people she loves. The relationship therefore persists in her story not through contact or reconciliation, but through guilt and a painful conviction that she helped bring about the very absence she mourns.

The Birthday Plan

In October 2010, when Joseph turns twenty-one, the narrator devises an extravagant birthday present: an escort for a threesome. She thinks an ordinary gift—a sweater or concert ticket—would seem negligible beside their happiness, and she is excited enough by her elaborate plan that she cannot keep it secret. She has settled on the hotel and the time, and has imagined the evening in detail; only the third participant remains to be chosen.

Her first choice is Nathalie, whose profile says that she specializes in couples. But Nathalie will not provide a photograph, despite the narrator’s polite request. The narrator worries that an unseen face could ruin the encounter, and abandons the plan with her. She then chooses Larissa, a Russian escort in her twenties, whose photograph she proudly shows Joseph. In the two weeks before the meeting, they build anticipation together, imagining erotic possibilities and returning to Larissa’s name during their foreplay. The scheme is not simply a surprise arranged for Joseph: its pleasures begin in the couple’s shared imagining.

The Encounter and Its Aftermath

When Larissa leaves, the room is overtaken by an awkward silence. The narrator and Joseph are embarrassed and can do little but laugh. The encounter has cost seven hundred euros, a sum the narrator ruefully measures against the jeans it might have bought; the expense has pleased neither of them and leaves her feeling like a fool. The failed plan has turned their elaborate anticipation into a shared moment of humiliation.

Yet Larissa’s departure also clears the air. The narrator describes their warmth returning once the chill she brought with her is gone, and the idea of making love as they usually do moves them as intensely as if they had never kissed. Joseph reaches out to her with a teasing endearment, and the physical desire between them is unmistakable. The scene’s reversal is central to its meaning: the third person does not deepen their intimacy as planned; the failed encounter brings Joseph and the narrator back to the familiar closeness that had been obscured by their fantasy.

Separation and Narrative Significance

The birthday episode belongs to the earlier relationship recalled within the narrator’s account of life after Joseph. Its contrast with her present solitude makes the remembered intimacy more painful: once, they could imagine an erotic adventure together and recover their connection when it went wrong; later, she understands their relationship as hopeless and his departure as a loss she helped cause. The book offers no corresponding account here of Joseph’s life after he leaves. Instead, his importance is registered through the narrator’s memory, self-reproach, and insistence that separation can feel like a death precisely because the person remains alive.