Suite d'Existence - 2. Sarabande

Even though the previous evening had looked promising, this morning everything looked grey and wet. A thin film of water covered everything that hadn´t been able to hide from the rain. Bike seats were humid because of the heat they still contained and the morning newspaper felt damp. The black ink from the headlines was spreading around them, while the photographs slowly dissected intro a three-coloured palette. Now it just looked like autumn.

It was still spring, though, and Tristan awoke together with the world outside the windows. Normally he didn’t mind the six-kilometre bike ride to school. The weather however gave a good cause to be annoyed this morning. If he’d decide to stay in bed for another while, surely he’d be late for his first class. It didn’t stop him from turning around once more.

One of his colleagues, Sigurd Watne, was going to take leave today. With sixty-seven years of life experience and an enormous amount of fluffy grey hair he’d resigned from his job as a physics teacher. In the last few weeks he’d often told Tristan about his plans: somewhere around Haugesund, Southwest Norway, he had bought a house. Tristan wasn’t exactly familiar with the area, but the ideas sounded great. Sigurd wanted to spend the remaining years of his life with his wife in the wooden house with blue walls. They planned on living completely self-sufficient. Watne wanted to return to his roots.

Tristan had always admired the functionality of this (in his eyes) old man. He’d just passed his thirties himself and wasn’t thinking about moving anywhere soon, let alone growing his own vegetables. For some reason though, he wished that someday he’d be in the same position as his friend. During the two years they’d been colleagues, he’d built a strong friendship with the Norwegian man. Together they had traveled to various baroque concerts, repaired each other’s bicycles and were similarly annoyed by the failing school organization. He’d miss him dearly.

-

The five minutes the ‘Sleep button’ had given him had passed; monotonous beeping interfered with his stream of thoughts. He didn’t wake Mara just yet. She was due in about twenty days and hadn’t slept well in about two months. The fatigue was beginning to take its toll.
Gently he pulled the duvet aside while trying to roll out of bed without making too much noise. Daan had probably already woken up, like almost every morning since his first birthday. It seemed he compensated the decrease of nightly feeds with a biological alarmclock that went off at five.

The tiles in the hall were cold and made Tristan’s feet stick to the floor. While sounding like someone was pulling pieces of tape from the floor, he walked to his son’s room. Daan was awake, like he’d expected. The boy followed him with his dark brown eyes from the door to his bed. Tristan lifted him up from the cover with laughing yellow bears and let him grab his shoulder.

Yes, Daan was awake but he drifted somewhere between conscience and sleep while doing nothing but staring and hanging. He didn’t cry; he hadn’t cried a lot since his birth, something Mara had been extremely grateful for. The little boy watched, observed, looked, sucked the world up in his wonderfully curious eyes. Of course he played, of course there were times he screamed like someone was going to kill him, but every morning Daan awoke while being awake already. His dad was fascinated by it.

Even the house hadn’t got rid of the warmth yet. While Tristan put the kettle on, he looked through the windows above the sink. A steady stream of water was flowing from the roof gutter onto the stacked garden chairs. It was really wet outside; the world wasn’t doing really great at inviting him to come outside. He’d seen better attempts.
Today everything would be grey. It was grey outside, and a friend was leaving. Tristan felt somewhat melancholic. Not depressed, no, his medication took good care of that. No, just melancholic. Before the kettle could start a deafening whistle, he poured some of the boiling water in a mug. The rest went in a thermos; he wasn’t sure when Mara would wake up.
With the mug in one hand and his boy leaning on his other arm he walked to the kitchen table and started making a sandwich. He didn’t have many classes today, so he’d be able to have lunch at home.

-

After having kissed Mara and Daan goodbye and cycling the short distance between home and school, he put his bike aside and walked up to the front doors. The grammar-school was established in an old, detached building and carried along almost two-hundred years of history.

When Tristan had arrived here for the first time, two years ago, he’d been really impressed with the interior. When you talked in the halls, your words echoed through the entire building. The old windows were really high, the dark blue curtains long and heavy. It felt like a prestigious environment when he taught his classes here. Luckily his colleagues didn’t match the formal impression the institution made. That would have been uncomfortable. No, the people he worked with varied from slightly absent-minded biologists to well-dressed men who taught Dutch. It made the school a pleasant environment to work in. That, ánd an inexhaustible source of knowledge, of course.

The last fact was confirmed again when Tristan opened the door that lead to the staff-room. Sigurd was sitting on a table while discussing something with Sofie, who taught Geography. Their conversation turned out to be about an announcement from CERN. Scientists apparently had discovered a particle that travelled faster than the speed of light. Like most of the things Sigurd had told him about physics, he didn’t understand this completely either. His friend seemed exited and frustrated at the same time, though.

When Watne noticed him, he was immediately pulled to the table. The other teachers were drinking coffee, read articles, made notes for upcoming classes. “Mulder, it’s a disaster! A disaster and a miracle in one! When the CERN turns out to be right, which I don’t doubt, I will lose my job!”

Tristan grinned. He obviously had forgotten about the fact he’d soon retire. Today.
“Sigurd, it all sounds awful”, he said while trying to suppress his laughter, “but you won’t have to work thát long anymore, you know.” Now the physicist seemed to have noticed his error too. He took a sip from his coffee and grinned. “I think I haven’t woken up completely, yet. You seem to be alert, though, Mulder.”

It was really only four hours he had to teach today, but it seemed like four days, which wasn’t great. Outside it had started to rain unbelievably hard and his year five was incredibly annoying. Furthermore, he wanted to see Mara. Mara, but most of all Daan. He had started to really walk a couple of days ago, on two legs, without falling over. He wanted to stroke his dark hair, to pick him up and tell him everything that…

“Sir!” Laughing. Staring. He’d stopped talking in the middle of his explanation of Beowulf. Great. The seventeen-year-olds loved this. Just six minutes to go, six long minutes and then tea and saying goodbye. All it took was a little perseverance.