Susanna

Susanna, the narrator’s mother, is presented through a striking contrast: in the daily life of her northern German home she seems restrained and accommodating, while speaking Italian with Franco releases a more vivid, forceful self. Her longing for warmth and for Italy is not merely a complaint about the weather; it exposes the distance between the life she has made with Hermann and the life she still desires. Later, after the marriage breaks apart, she leaves Italy and returns to care for Hermann as he dies, making their renewed closeness one of the narrator’s most consequential discoveries about his parents.

Voice, Desire, and the Northern Home

At least once a month, Franco calls and urgently asks to speak with Susanna. As she crosses the room to answer, the narrator watches her seem to grow younger: she tosses her hair aside, and, once on the telephone, speaks fluent Italian. Her voice and gestures change; the narrator describes her speech as a rush of energy that displaces the habitual smoothing and conciliating he associates with her. Franco’s exuberance comes through the receiver, and Susanna answers in kind. From his chair, Hermann watches the transformation, drops his book—sometimes irritably, sometimes reproachfully—and leaves the room. The telephone call becomes a recurring domestic scene in which desire is audible, while the husband’s withdrawal is visible.

The calls often come in the evening. Afterward Susanna is too stirred to settle beside Hermann, who is accustomed to an early night and reading. The narrator’s image of her changing during the conversation—from a pale, cold northern woman into someone lit by southern warmth—makes the emotional distance between the two places bodily and immediate. When the call ends, Franco is setting out to celebrate with his friends; Susanna is left in the family home, restless with the energy the conversation has awakened. To the narrator, she has become an unsettling presence within the household’s appearance of well-being.

Her longing for Italy also breaks through in rare moments of bluntness. She complains that the cold keeps her occupied with trying not to freeze: her shoulders stay raised, her feet seem never to warm, and even a mild northern temperature has begun to feel like summer. She contrasts the fatigue and early bedtimes of life in Schleswig with the wakefulness and late nights she remembers in Italy. Hermann’s electric blanket, intended as care, strikes her as an insult and a danger; she imagines him reading undisturbed while she lies beneath it in August. Her outburst culminates in a demand to return to Italy. The scene shows how care within the marriage can also feel to her like evidence that she is being misunderstood.

Separation and the Return to Schleswig

Years later, after the narrator has left home, Hermann becomes ill. Blood in his urine leads to the rapid removal of an affected kidney, and he tells his son that it will take six years for the risk of recurrence to fall substantially. Meanwhile, the parents can scarcely bear living together: the children have left, the dog is gone, and illness and fear have become part of their shared life. Hermann meets another woman and moves to Lübeck, where she lives with her two young children. The separation that had once seemed impossible finally takes place. Their former home, situated within the psychiatric hospital grounds, stands empty, and there are plans to turn it into a ward for supported living.

When Hermann’s cancer returns, with pain in his leg and then tiny shadows on his lungs, Susanna is the one who calls the narrator with news of the second operation. The narrator is surprised that Hermann has contacted her, having assumed that they would no longer be in touch. As treatment continues, Hermann tries to work but cannot; clearing out his practice is described as a devastating loss. He feels increasingly like a burden to the new family, and the difficulty of living with the children contributes to his decision to return to the house in Schleswig, sick and alone in the middle of the psychiatric hospital. Susanna’s later return is therefore not a return to the marriage as it had been: it follows the failure of Hermann’s attempt to build a separate life and his retreat into isolation.

Care, Intimacy, and the Final Illness

The narrator initially struggles to understand Susanna’s decision to dismantle the life she has just established and go back to Hermann. He knows that Hermann had betrayed her for years and tormented her through his emotional distance; he advises her against returning. Susanna nevertheless leaves Italy and comes back to Schleswig. The narrator interprets her choice as a belief that she cannot leave Hermann alone, though the choice remains difficult for him to reconcile with their history.

Her return changes the household’s emotional arrangement. One day the narrator lets himself into the house and finds no patients or other visitors. He searches, worried, and discovers his parents asleep together in one bed, Hermann’s arm around Susanna and her head on his chest. He has never seen them so physically close. Sitting beside them, he understands them not only as the father and mother he has always known, but as parents sharing an intimacy he had not previously witnessed. He remembers the sight as the most beautiful moment of his life with them. The reconciliation is not presented as proof that their earlier injuries have disappeared: the woman from Lübeck continues to call, and Susanna tells Hermann he must stop speaking with her secretly or she will leave him to die alone. The narrator doubts that Hermann keeps his promise.

As the cancer advances, Susanna’s return becomes practical care as well as renewed closeness. Hermann’s pain intensifies and spreads; late and very high doses of morphine are needed to control it, and he injects himself in his swollen abdomen. When the disease reaches his spine and spinal cord, a night of screaming fills the house, alongside the cries of psychiatric patients nearby. After paralysis below the chest, the pain disappears for the first time in nearly two years, and Hermann wakes with a surprising cheerfulness. Susanna tends devotedly to her paralyzed husband. During this period the narrator, returning from work in Kassel, sees his parents as lovers: exhausted and exuberant, but sustained by attention to one another.

The respite does not last. After three or four months Hermann develops worsening breathing problems, new pain in his shoulders, and fear of suffocation; morphine both wards off withdrawal and threatens to suppress his breathing. He had wanted to die at home, but after another life-threatening episode of suffocation he is taken to hospital. Susanna moves in with him. In the final weeks, the two of them endure the everyday, physically demanding work of dying together, beyond the theories and knowledge that had once seemed able to govern Hermann’s life. Their shared endurance gives the return its final meaning: not a resolution of the past, but a sustained act of presence.

Narrative Role and Significance

Susanna’s story is shaped by repeated crossings between places and states of being: the northern home where cold and routine weigh on her, Italy as the setting of remembered warmth and renewed life, and Schleswig as the place to which she returns when Hermann is dying. The monthly calls with Franco first make her desire visible inside the family home; her departure later turns that tension into an actual separation. Her return then reverses the movement, but not by restoring the old household unchanged. Instead, the narrator sees an intimacy between his parents that had been hidden from him, and watches Susanna choose to remain as illness and dependence transform their life together.

The account is also carefully limited by the narrator’s perspective. Susanna’s longing and her complaints are vividly conveyed, but the meaning of her return is partly the son’s interpretation: he cannot at first understand it, and only gradually recognizes the possibility that she believes Hermann should not face the end alone. The portrait holds both the injuries of the marriage and the tenderness of its final phase in view. Susanna’s defining action is not simply leaving or coming back, but making that return despite the history between them and staying through the practical burden of Hermann’s last illness.