The narrator’s mother’s return to Hermann marks a late, intimate reversal in their marriage: after years of betrayal and emotional distance, she comes back from Italy to care for him as his cancer advances. For Josse, finding his parents asleep together in the family home becomes a rare experience of seeing them not merely as mother and father, but as a couple who have chosen one another’s presence. Their renewed closeness does not erase the marriage’s history or settle every question between them; instead, it leads into the practical labor of accompanying Hermann through his final illness.

Separation and the Decision to Return

Hermann’s illness first accelerates a family life already strained by the parents’ inability to live easily together. After he becomes ill, his kidney is removed, and he tells Josse that six years must pass before the risk of recurrence falls significantly. The interval proves painfully short: the cancer returns, first with pain in his leg and then with tiny shadows detected on his lungs. As treatment continues, Hermann attempts to work, but eventually clears out his practice and feels increasingly like a burden in the household of the woman he has recently joined in Lübeck, where she lives with two young children. He makes the bitter decision to return alone to the family home, now empty and surrounded by the psychiatric hospital.

The narrator’s mother has, by then, built a life in Italy. Josse struggles to understand why she would dismantle it for a husband who had betrayed her for years and tormented her through his emotional remoteness. He advises her against returning. She nevertheless leaves Italy and goes back to Schleswig, apparently believing she cannot leave Hermann alone. Her decision reverses the parents’ separation without making the preceding hurts disappear: it is a choice to be present in the crisis, not evidence that the marriage has been repaired in every respect.

The Reunion in the Family Home

When Josse returns to the house and finds it silent, he calls out but hears no patients and no one answering. Concerned, he searches the rooms and discovers his parents asleep together in one bed. Hermann has an arm around the narrator’s mother, whose head rests on his chest. Josse has never seen them this close. The stillness of the scene makes the reunion legible through posture rather than explanation: their bodies, at rest beside one another, show a tenderness he had not known them to share.

The sight changes how Josse understands his own family. He has always had a father and a mother, he thinks, but never parents in the sense of a couple belonging to one another. The distinction gives the scene its force: this is not simply a son finding his parents in the same room, but a son unexpectedly witnessing a form of mutual closeness. The narrator’s mother wakes and looks at him without alarm. Josse kisses her and Hermann’s hand; Hermann wakes and welcomes him. Josse remembers the moment as the most beautiful he ever had with his parents.

Care, Intimacy, and an Unresolved Past

The reunion develops into a period in which Josse experiences his parents as lovers: playful and exhausted, yet sustained by attending to one another. The change is striking against the earlier pattern of their life together. Hermann made plans and ideas; the narrator’s mother carried out much of the practical work. On the country property, while he read, planned projects, or pursued the self-sufficiency ideal, she did the labor of maintaining the household and caring for the animals. Their final closeness is likewise expressed not through a theory of marriage but through the demanding, ordinary work of care.

That care does not remove the history of Hermann’s betrayals. The woman in Lübeck calls, and the narrator’s mother lays down a condition: he must end the secret phone calls, or she will leave and let him die alone. Josse doubts that Hermann keeps his promise. The return therefore contains both devotion and mistrust. His mother has chosen to stay beside him, but she does not pretend that loyalty can be separated from boundaries or from what he has done before.

The Final Weeks

As Hermann’s pain worsens, the restored partnership is tested by the physical demands of his illness. Morphine is begun too late to control the pain easily, and the advancing cancer eventually reaches his spine and spinal cord. After he becomes paralyzed below the chest, the pain disappears for the first time in almost two years. The relief alters the atmosphere of the remaining months: Josse sees his parents as two people who have found a shared tenderness even as Hermann’s condition continues to deteriorate.

His breathing later becomes increasingly difficult, and after a life-threatening attack of suffocation he is taken to hospital, though he would have preferred to die at home. The narrator’s mother moves in with him there. Far from Hermann’s former abstractions and plans, the couple spend the last weeks engaged in the practical, exhausting work of dying together. Her return cannot undo the separation or the betrayals that preceded it; it gives their final period a closeness Josse had once thought impossible.