Lord, sure—as far as I am concerned. What I cannot explain to myself is: how I could become a father without at least a moment’s hesitation. It is one of those mysteries others call “the way things go,” for they don’t dare admit that the unhesitating conceals the evillest secret of man.

Julia was a bright, bold little student when I met her. She fucked up her BA for the two us to have time. We lived at her mother’s apartment, who had to spend the autumn in a cardiac clinic. Everywhere, between the standard items of a bourgeois existence, Julia’s things lay scattered and signaled the discontinuance of something: barely smoked cigarettes; undrunk coffee with cirrus of curdled milk; chocolate stains from collapsed Nutella-spread slices of bread; a VHS cassette that was stuck aslant in the recorder’s slot and amazed us with holding its position for weeks. Although we aired the rooms until our teeth chattered, the whole flat reeked of sex. One day, after we’d returned from a futile attempt to see a movie, the bathmat was floating in the tub on top of a green-yellow sludge. A memo from the cleaning-lady clung to the mirror: Had to soak this first b. o. the stains. Julia wanted to die of shame, while I found nothing wrong in having become a decadent pervert in the eyes of a lower employee.

When I shot my load just so, without pulling it out first...

She admired my indifference. She understood that indifference was what it was, that I was fine and that I didn’t care what would become of it, but she converted it into love by loving me for it: a sublime indifference, like a single lacquer-black cloud floating above life in whose shadow we moved ahead. From that day on we fucked without a contraceptive and without wasting a thought on what we never, not until the very end termed the consequences. This, we knew, would have trivialized it more than we could bear, and the causal nexus was clear anyway. When the doctor calculated days back after the test, it became apparent that the weeks-long rapture, this endless discharge of semen and semen and semen, had had no effect whatsoever. With a probability bordering on certainty, Julia had got pregnant right at the very first time.

I went through a period of fear, while she considered whether she should have an abortion or have the baby. She changed her opinion daily, several times a day, and after it had looked as if the matter was doomed to end up at the clinic and she just needed sufficient time in order to have nothing to blame herself for, I gradually started to realize that the scale was about to tilt to the other side. Julia listed the reasons: She loved me, and once the wild times of this initial phase were gone I sure wouldn’t muster the imprudence to knock her up anymore. Hence, this was her only chance to elicit a scion from me, the man with the most crazy DNA in the world. Moreover, having graduated, she, no doubt, would focus on her career and postpone the wish to have children.

‘And maybe for too long. You know how slowly time passes at universities, and how it seeps away between book pages. I don’t want to end up as an old spinster, who lacks a family though she never renounced the ideology of family life. And that’s why...I’d rather have it too early.’

Could be she just waited for some genuine resistance from my part. Sometimes I believed that she wished for nothing more urgently than for me to put my foot down and forbid her to play with our future.

‘You’ve arranged yourself entirely in this state of uncertainty about my decision,’ she once said, smiling. ‘I get the impression that among the two of us you are the woman. Don’t you think?’

That evening I declared that I would leave her did she insist on carrying the child full term. I used this expression ‘full term.’ I remember how her face contorted in disgust.

A friend came to stay overnight in Julia’s room. Anne and I remained at the kitchen table at the far end of an evening spent with watching videos and smoking weed. We emptied a bottle of bitter Hungarian herbal liqueur, discussed the imminent students’ strike, and incidentally stacked up the dishes, while Julia’s sonorous snoring broke in cable car-like tremors through the wall. For someone like me, I tried hard to seduce Anne. I even attempted to slip through the closing door crack after having said ‘good-night’ —but of her former interest in me little seemed left. She'd either smelled that something which poisoned the air between me and Julia, or Julia had already told her everything on the phone. Anyhow, I found myself standing on the bathmat at four in the morning, regarding, full of sadness and anger, the pale yellow rings that the extra soaking hadn’t erased.

I struggled to figure out how much obedience a threat would extract from her. More than once Julia had assured me she’d rather die than lose me. Yet, though that had sounded honest and reliable like a child’s oath, it occurred to me now I was likely to depend on it that she didn’t mean the same with dying as I. Her dying was something quite practical—something like kissing, sucking, crying, wiping your ass, not the great unfathomable death that encircled my world in its tiny spot of trying to go on. She would, as I was loath to comprehend, react reasonably, even when the death concerned the fortune of our love, and it didn’t surprise me at all when she explained she’d have the baby all the same.

‘Anne is going to be the godmother. She said, she’ll start knitting the christening robe right away, so it’ll be ready by September. With her thoroughness that might be an adequate schedule. I ordered her to make something that suits a terribly agnostic christening at the wet dock. And, will you leave me now?’

She really did expect me to. She considered it perfectly likely.

‘Do you think that if...’

I left Julia. It hit her harder than I had thought. She made an admirably large number of admirably inventive attempts to win me back, promised to do everything in her power to rescue me from the hell I was in, concocted fictions of our living together that couldn’t fail to please me (she knew me repellently well). At some point there even arrived a sort of slave contract with the mail, where she covenanted to be available for any kind of sexual abuse and earn my living through prostitution. The child she didn’t mention. She sacrificed her dignity to me, her body, the part of her soul that she owned—but all for the price of a decision made, whose sovereignty outbalanced the offered humiliation, and rendered it worthless in my hands. Wherefore, after a period of contemplation, I declined.

Julia betrayed me with other men. I betrayed her with staying alone, celebrating my solitude like a great foreplay, admitting to the casual insinuations that would have me as the lover of her (...) or him (...). If we both felt it was betrayal, our own behavior as much as the other’s, it only showed to what extent we still misconceived of our relation as something existing. The news about her marriage reached me in...