A Beautiful Young Wife by Tommy Wieringa

caresses away the sad turn of her mouth.
    The priest is an icy ascetic. He stands atop the tomb of a mediaeval hermit called Walaric, who is honoured here as Saint Valery. A holy man, miracles happen at his grave. Ceremoniously and resolutely, the priest pronounces his blessing over the marriage.
    The sun is at its zenith. Grains of rice gleam in the light. ‘I didn’t understand a word of it, but it was lovely,’ Edward’s father-in-law says. They drink champagne, and walk down to the source de la fidélité that flows from the bottom of the hill beneath the church — a dark spring, closed off with iron grillwork. The priest has the key, but he has already climbed into his Peugeot and driven off down the narrow dirt road. Edward and Ruth pose beneath the word FIDES chiselled in the stone above the gateway, toss coins through the grillwork into the black water behind, and kiss again. Everyone cheers and claps.
    Tipsy and happy, they walk through the fields back to the village. The estuary at the bottom of the hill is drained; the mud flats glisten in the sunlight.
    In the mirror of the men’s room in the restaurant on the quay, he glances at himself. With his beard streaked with grey and the two top buttons of his snowy-white shirt unbuttoned, he looks like a Greek singer.
    On the tables are silver platters full of shellfish on ice, an image of plenty. Edward looks over at his wife, how she cracks open a crab leg and picks out the meat. Just this once, she says, because she doesn’t know how to say ‘sustainably caught’ in French. He wishes his mother could have shared in his happiness. Almost across from him is his father, his hair white and frothy, his new girlfriend at his side. Will he ever again be as happy as he was with his mother, Edward wonders. Is a human truly, fully equipped to love only once, as he once read somewhere, or does one get another chance? Is life that generous? He admits the sweet pain of the thought of a life without her, and can’t imagine that his cup would ever run so full again.
    He drinks cool, light-green wine, Ruth whispers in his ear that she loves him, and that later, when they’re alone —
    There we leave them, in the midst of their happiness, at the mouth of the river that rises forth two hundred and fifty kilometres inland.
    â€¢ • •
    When Ruth just didn’t get pregnant, they went in for a fertility test. Edward jerked off in a hospital room equipped with well-thumbed smut and a silent movie from the prehistory of pornography bouncing across the screen. He closed his eyes and thought about Marjolein van Unen and her breasts, her skin glistening with youth, as she popped the snaps on her lab coat, one by one. She leant back on her stool, her back against the fume cupboard, and let him go in …
    The receptionist jotted down his particulars on a label, which she then stuck to the pot, so that his seed would not be taken for that of the North African who sat beside him, expressionless as a piece of fruit. A little later they passed each other again, driving at a snail’s pace across the parking lot: the North African in a weathered Fiat, he in his Volkswagen Touareg. His sperm may have been as worthless as an immigrant’s, but his car was a cut above.
    Only 35 per cent of his cells were viable, the gynaecologist told him a few weeks later, ‘more or less the percentage you’d expect from a truck driver’. The bulletin board behind the doctor’s back was hung with birth announcements. Joy, joy. He told Edward about his research, which focused on exceptionally fertile men. ‘If you want to find out what makes Porsches so good,’ he said, ‘then you need to study Porsches, not Trabants.’ They left the office only after the gynaecologist had told them about the future they could expect: a route that would lead them in ascending degrees of despair past the wonders of modern