Hermann and Susanna: Married Couple

Hermann and Susanna’s marriage is rendered as a relationship whose distance could be read in the furniture, interrupted by separations, and finally transformed by the practical demands of Hermann’s fatal illness. For years, their closeness and estrangement took visible form in the shifting positions of their beds; after they had lived apart, Susanna returned from Italy and the narrator found them sleeping together, tenderly close. Their late reconciliation does not erase the history of betrayal, but it gives the narrator an unprecedented glimpse of his parents as a loving couple.

A Marriage Measured in the Bedroom

The narrator watches the marriage through the bedroom at the end of the hall. In daylight the room appears neutral and almost unused, a carefully arranged space whose purpose seems to belong to nights he cannot know. Its beds, however, are never fixed. When Hermann and Susanna are on good terms, the beds stand beside each other in the middle of the room, separated only by the narrow gap between the mattresses, with the bedside tables at the outer edges. The arrangement makes proximity legible without requiring the child to enter the private life it signifies.

As the relationship worsens, the gap grows. The beds first move slightly apart while remaining in the center; later they travel toward opposite walls, and the once-open paths beside them are occupied by the bedside tables. Those tables then move inward, and books and magazines accumulate into walls that block the view between the beds. At the furthest remove, one bed is turned toward the back wall, its occupant’s gaze definitively averted. The room’s changing geometry gives the narrator a domestic measure of intimacy and withdrawal: he reads the placement as a thermometer for his parents’ nights.

The arrangement does not settle into a permanent separation. After the beds have reached the room’s limits, Hermann moves to the guest room in the basement, which the family calls the crypt. Susanna sleeps alone in the marital beds, now returned to the center of the room. When Hermann tires of the basement and comes back, the cycle begins again. The furniture records a recurring conflict rather than a single, decisive break: separation is enacted, partially reversed, and enacted once more.

Estrangement and Separation

The narrator recalls that when Susanna became too unhappy, she sometimes left for Munich to stay with her parents and receive help. On one occasion she was away for three months, leaving the children with Hermann. He cooked, but could not prepare offal; the meals became repeated servings of canned peas and minute steaks. Her absence thus appears not only as a marital rupture but as a change in the household’s daily care and rhythm.

After Susanna returned from these departures, she was almost conspicuously cheerful, laughing enough to make the children exchange questioning looks. In a quieter moment, the narrator overhears her sitting alone in a large armchair, hands resting on her knees, listing ordinary things she can do: lie in a bath and enjoy it, cook food her children like, dress well, go among people, recognize trees and flowers, set a table, read and understand a book, and sing. The narrator estimates that she names about fifty abilities. The plainness of the list is its force: capacities that seem self-evident are being affirmed as things she can still do. The passage places Susanna’s effort to recover a sense of herself alongside the strain of the marriage, without presenting that effort as a simple solution to it.

Years later, after Hermann becomes ill, the marriage finally breaks apart. The children have grown up and there is no dog at home; Hermann and Susanna find it increasingly difficult to endure one another amid his worries and her fears. Hermann meets another woman, moves in with her and her two young children in Lübeck, while Susanna leaves their house and goes to Italy. She finds work at a hospital on Lake Maggiore and tries to begin a new life. The narrator understands this as the separation that had seemed impossible for years. Their former house, situated within the psychiatric hospital, stands empty, with early plans to turn it into a supported-living ward.

Illness and Return

Hermann’s illness brings the estranged couple back into one another’s lives. After he has blood in his urine, his affected kidney is removed within twenty-four hours. He tells the narrator that six years must pass before the risk of recurrence falls significantly. The disease returns much sooner: pain in his leg leads to another operation, and tiny shadows on his lungs appear six weeks later. Hermann begins difficult treatment, including surgery and radiation, and tries to work again, but eventually has to clear out his practice. He lives with the new family for a time, increasingly feeling like a burden in a life that has only just taken shape around him. He then makes the bitter decision to return to the family house in Schleswig, sick and alone.

Susanna’s return follows, though the narrator admits that he took a long time to understand why she would dismantle the life she had rebuilt in Italy. Hermann had betrayed her over the years and tormented her through his emotional distance. The narrator advised her against going back, but she left Italy and returned to Schleswig. He later comes home, calls out, and finds no patients or other visitors in the house. Searching through it, he discovers his parents asleep together in one bed: Hermann’s arm is around Susanna, whose head rests on his chest. He has never seen them this close. The moment alters his understanding of them; he recognizes not merely a father and a mother, but parents together.

Care and a Changed Intimacy

The reunion is not presented as a clean resolution of their old injuries. The woman in Lübeck continues to call, and Susanna makes Hermann choose between ending secret telephone conversations and being left alone to die. The narrator doubts that Hermann kept his promise. Their renewed closeness therefore coexists with mistrust and with the unresolved history of his infidelity. What changes is not the past but the conditions under which they face the present.

As Hermann’s cancer advances, pain spreads from one part of his body to another, each new crisis following what had seemed to be its limit. He begins morphine too late, and the pain has become so difficult to control that he injects enormous doses into his swollen abdomen. The account describes this not as an abstract symbol of marital suffering but as a physical ordeal that consumes the household: the narrator lies in his former bedroom and feels his father’s pain reach through the walls. Susanna and Hermann endure the final weeks together through the everyday, practical labor of dying, far removed from the theories that had once seemed capable of explaining life.

After paralysis removes Hermann’s pain below the chest, he wakes, for the first time in almost two years, without pain. Susanna cares for him, and when the narrator visits he sees not simply two people sharing a house but two lovers: exhausted and exuberant, sustained by attention to one another. Hermann’s breathing later worsens, and he must be taken to hospital after a life-threatening suffocation episode. Susanna moves in with him there. Their reunion does not undo the separations or betrayals that preceded it; it gives them a shared, intimate passage through the last weeks, in which care becomes the relationship’s daily form.