Epitaph for a Working ManO Read Online Free Page A

anything.”
    *
    Seven o’clock, the morning news. While Sophie was in the bathroom painting her eyelids I made salami and cheese sandwiches. By that time Father was already on the bus. Since they didn’t start serving breakfast before a quarter past seven at the home, it was on an empty stomach that he’d left at ten to seven.
    At twenty past eight, with the radiotherapy treatment already over, he was sitting at one of the round tables in the entrance hall.
    As the hospital restaurant was closed to patients in the mornings we drank tea out of a machine – very sweet, lemon-flavoured tea. Father split open one of the sandwiches, took out the salami slices and ate them first. He’d always liked salami. He ate the bread and butter with his second cup of tea. Ever since I’d found out that he liked that tea I always made sure to take along enough small change in fifty and ten centime coins.
    We watched the cleaners, a woman and a man who spoke to each other in Italian. The man pushed the floor-polishing machine across the stone floor; the woman emptied the ashtrays, ran her duster over the tables and chairs. Some of the tables were still stacked to one side to make way for the cleaning.
    Father told me why stone floors were best for that kind of entrance hall.
    After eating the salami and the bread and butter he swept the crumbs off the table. He’d eat the cheese sandwich later on, he said; perhaps he’d wait until he was on the bus, or he might even save it for the afternoon.
    On the first morning of his radiotherapy treatment I hadn’t taken him anything to eat, and he’d tried to stop me going to the nearest shop to buy him something after I’d found out he’d left home on an empty stomach. Nevertheless I’d run down to the Co-op on the Schützenplatz and he’d bitten hungrily into the ham sandwich. Now I always took him salami and cheese sandwiches from home. At his request the salami sandwiches would be spread with butter, and the cheese sandwiches with mustard.
    If he’d said anything at the home, he’d probably have been able to have breakfast earlier. But he didn’t say anything. “After all, they know that I have to leave before seven. If it doesn’t occur to them themselves to put something out for me, there’s no point in asking.”
    *
    It would have been useful to have had a car now. We hadn’t had one for the past eighteen months. Did we really need one, Sophie had asked, when the time came round for the customary trade-in at the Renault garage. She’d always gone to the office on foot, and I myself didn’t have a long way to work either (I still had a job at the time). We seldom went on trips, and for holidays we could use the train.
    It would have come in useful now. I could have picked Father up from the home and taken him back again. It would have saved him the bus rides and the hours sitting around in the entrance hall.
    *
    Sitting at the table watching the people come in, go out, cross the hall, inquire at the desk. No signs of impatience now he’d got it over with again, that quarter of an hour in the basement: to the changing cubicle, remove shirt and vest, lie flat on stomach under the machine, keep still; put on vest and shirt again, exchange a couple of words with the nurse, then back out into the corridor. By half past eight at the latest it was over. And the bus to Breitmoos didn’t leave until eleven.
    Sitting at the table in the entrance hall. At regular intervals he’d draw a fresh cigarette out of the packet. With a deft flick of his wrist he’d extinguish the match and drop it into the ashtray.
    The season recognisable by the flower-boxes, the fresh green leaves on the poplars. Changeable weather, bright one moment, overcast the next. Clouds drew shadows across the carpark. Taxis turned off the road and drove up the ramp. Bunches of tulips were handed in at the desk, ice cream