Mother Returns Home to Care for Father

The narrator’s mother’s return from Italy to Schleswig brings her back to the husband who had betrayed and emotionally tormented her, and changes the narrator’s understanding of his parents. He had advised her against returning, yet she came back because, as he later understood it, she may have believed she could not leave his seriously ill father alone. The decision does not erase their history; it creates a brief, startling image of intimacy within it.

The Marriage Behind the Return

The narrator’s later account places the return against a long imbalance between his parents. His father was a prolific planner, while his mother did much of the work that made his plans real. When he imagined a self-sufficient life in the country, she painted the stalls, cultivated the garden, and cared for the animals. On weekends at the rural property, he read Thoreau’s Walden and gardening magazines, considered where a beehive should go, counted eggs, and studied the sheep; she continued working. The narrator describes this division as enduring: his mother put into practice what his father thought up.

The disparity extended beyond household and farm labor. Years earlier, she had written both his doctoral dissertation and his habilitation. He dictated the latter while smoking and pacing his room for fourteen days; she carried out the work of setting his ideas down. In retrospect, the narrator wonders whether family life, like his father’s imagined careers as a psychiatric director, a ship’s captain, and a self-sufficient farmer, had also remained more an idea than a life he could inhabit. This history gives the mother’s return a particular weight: she is going back not to an uncomplicated marriage, but to a relationship marked by distance and by labor she had repeatedly supplied.

Leaving Italy and Returning

The narrator says it took him a long time to understand his mother’s decision to dismantle the life she had only just built. His father had deceived her for years and hurt her through his emotional unavailability. The narrator advised her not to return. Nevertheless, she left Italy and went back to Schleswig. He interprets her choice cautiously: she must have thought she could not leave her husband alone. Her return is therefore both a practical act of care and a choice made in the shadow of injuries that the account does not suggest have simply disappeared.

The contrast with the narrator’s advice matters. He could see the reasons she had to leave; he could not then understand why she would go back. The decision remains hers, not his, and the narrative does not present it as a neat resolution of the marriage. Instead, it follows what happens when the son comes home and discovers the two of them together in a way he has never witnessed.

The Scene in the Bedroom

After driving home, the narrator unlocked the door and called out. There was no answer. He searched the house, concerned by the unexpected absence of patients and other people, and found his parents asleep in the same bed. His father had an arm around his mother, whose head rested on his chest. The narrator emphasizes that he had never seen them so close.

The discovery alters the meaning of the family roles he has known. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he thinks of them as his sleeping parents and recognizes a distinction he had not been able to make before: he had always had a father and a mother, but never parents. The thought does not deny that they were his parents in name or in daily life; it registers how rarely he had seen them together in an ordinary, tender intimacy. His mother wakes and looks at him without the startle he expects. He kisses her and his father’s hand; his father wakes and welcomes him. The narrator cannot remember how long they remain sitting together, only that it is the happiest moment of his life with them.

Care, Boundaries, and Uncertainty

The return also brings the marital betrayal back into the present. A woman from Lübeck telephones. The narrator’s mother confronts her husband with a condition: no more secret calls, or she will leave him and let him die alone. The ultimatum makes clear that returning to care for him does not mean accepting continued deception without protest. She remains with him, but sets a boundary around the hidden contact.

The narrator does not claim to know whether his father kept his promise; he suspects that he probably did not. That uncertainty prevents the tender bedroom scene from becoming evidence of a permanently repaired marriage. Its significance lies instead in its rarity and in what the son sees: his mother has returned despite the history of betrayal, his father is not alone, and for one moment the parents appear to him as a couple sharing physical closeness. The scene gives the return emotional force without resolving the conditions that made it painful.