The Father’s Obesity

The father’s obesity is at once a visible physical condition, a source of family comedy, and a force that unsettles the narrator’s sense of ordinary life. At his fortieth-birthday breakfast, the father turns his weight into the most vivid part of a declaration that he must change how he lives. Yet the narrator’s attachment to his belly makes the proposed transformation feel like a loss as well as an improvement: the body the father wants to reduce is also the body around which some of the child’s happiest memories have gathered.

The Birthday Reckoning

At breakfast, the father says that reaching eighty will require a healthier life. He announces that he will stop smoking, though he presents the abstinence as a forty-year pause and plans to resume on the morning of his eightieth birthday. He also wants to become thinner. The elaborate joke does not erase the seriousness beneath it: turning forty has made time feel limited, and he calls the occasion his last chance to change something in his life.

The family’s guesses about his weight lead him to exaggerate, telling the narrator that he weighs an impossible two hundred kilograms and making a bawdy joke about not being able to see his penis when urinating standing up. Then he gives his actual morning weight: 106 kilograms. His aim is to lose sixteen kilograms and return to ninety, the weight he says he last had at twenty. He hopes to lose half of that amount before the clinic’s opening, estimating that eight weeks at a kilogram per week would get him there.

His account of what the weight means is comic but concrete. He says he has to urinate sitting down, can barely get out of the bathtub, and has developed breasts visible beneath his shirt. He also feels ashamed when he sees his underwear on the washing line, which he thinks resembles a circus performer’s costume. At a lecture attended by two hundred people, a shirt button has burst away from his belly and flown as far as the third row. Afraid that the remaining buttons might follow, he says he breathed shallowly and did not dare look down. The episode turns his body into an unwanted public spectacle, even as his comic telling makes the embarrassment part of family performance.

Appetite, Jokes, and Self-Discipline

The father’s efforts meet resistance in the habits that have made the plan necessary. His eldest son points out that avoiding food only at night will not help if he eats too much during the day, and gestures toward the sweets that have already disappeared. The father had put them on the highest shelf to make them seem inaccessible and thereby curb his consumption. Instead, he stands on tiptoe, presses his belly against the cupboard, and reaches into the bowl. The staged obstacle does not stop him; it merely makes the contradiction visible.

The father himself adds a nocturnal image to the family’s portrait of his appetite: he sits in front of the refrigerator, illuminated by its light, eating sausage or cheese. His proposed response is not a modest adjustment but a coordinated campaign. He will give up cigarettes, diet, and exercise, rejecting his wife’s suggestion that he begin with one change at a time. In his theatrical formulation, a non-smoking man who remains overweight and a runner who chain-smokes are both unacceptable outcomes. His insistence is funny, but it also shows how he imagines health as a total reinvention rather than a series of manageable steps.

He dramatizes the danger through a stethoscope, which he has used in an attempt to listen to himself. He says he could not find his heart, imagining it buried under tons of fat like a victim trapped beneath an avalanche. The image briefly shifts the joke into fear: the body is not only cumbersome but conceivably at risk. His decision to run follows directly from that fear, while the language in which he presents it remains extravagant and playful.

The Attempt to Become Lighter

The father makes practical changes. He chooses a steak diet: each midday meal consists of a large steak and nothing else, while cucumbers replace the late-night meal. He actually stops smoking. The family continues eating its favorite organ meats while his separate meal makes the diet visible at the table. These details distinguish the effort from the birthday speech alone: for a time, he sustains changes to both eating and smoking.

The narrator accompanies him to the town’s only sports shop to buy running clothes and shoes. The father has long insisted that he wears size forty-three, but the salesperson finds that even size forty-four is too small. He buys size forty-five only after the salesperson assures him that running shoes are made to fit extremely small, and he wears them out of the shop to break them in, following advice from his books. At the Kochlöffel, the family’s favorite grill, he reflects that these may be the first shoes he has ever bought that actually fit. The narrator offers an explanation that the father likes and later repeats: perhaps he had thought a shoe should press because a comfortable one would soon be forgotten, whereas discomfort keeps its presence in mind. The father turns the observation into a general connection between comfort and forgetfulness.

The running plan breaks down almost as soon as it begins. The father says he was surprised that he could run at all, having walked for years without running. After setting out to cover the long path, he adds a short finishing sprint, then tries to jump across a rainwater rut. He lands in it and twists his ankle. An older woman with a walking stick helps him up; on the way home, the family has to stop repeatedly. His ankle is blue and swollen, and he asks the children to remove his shoe and sock. The injury becomes another episode in the family’s comic language, but it also halts the exercise plan in bodily fact, not merely through lack of resolve.

Progress and the Limits of the New Routine

During the following weeks, the father reads books about running and explains plans for returning to exercise after sports injuries while keeping his leg raised. He proudly calls the torn ligament a sports injury, buys books on marathon history, and tells the narrator stories about Paavo Nurmi and Emil Zatopek, known as the Locomotive from Prague. His vocabulary and reading keep the identity of a runner alive even while the injured ankle prevents him from running.

The diet succeeds more than the training. For a few years he weighs around ninety-five kilograms, substantially below the 106 kilograms he reported on the birthday morning, and he does not smoke another cigarette until a later, memorable event. By contrast, the size-forty-five shoes—his first properly fitting pair—cover no more than three hundred meters of running over their brief life. He never wears them again. The contrast makes his change partial rather than a simple triumph or failure: weight loss and smoking cessation endure for a time, while the sporting transformation remains almost entirely unrealized.

The Child’s Measure of the Body

For the narrator, the father’s belly has a meaning the health plan cannot capture. At the Ostsee, the father lies on his back in the sun and reads, while the child searches the beach for belemnites and rounded pieces of glass. When the child begs for one more unit of time, the father allows a final measure: the child brings seawater in cupped hands and fills the deep hollow of his navel. The child can stay until the water evaporates, checking from a distance whether any remains; the father probes the hollow with a finger to confirm that there is still time.

The prospect of weight loss therefore threatens the child’s precious beach-time, not because the child disputes the father’s health concerns but because the belly has become part of their shared measure of duration. At the birthday table, the child’s attention returns to that image even as a slice of salami falls from the bread and the Family dog snatches it. The father snaps his fingers near the child’s staring eyes to draw the narrator back from the daydream. The episode places the father’s body within a family world of appetite, attention, embarrassment, and affection: what he experiences as a burden is, for the child, also a familiar landscape and a source of closeness.