“Are you satisfied with the care it gets at the Crèche?” I asked him. He shrugged his shoulders, said that collectively they could not receive the same attention as they would if they were cared for individually. He then volunteered the information that of course the baby was more liable to get ill and even die if it was in the Crèche, but that it was a chance, and after all his wife’s life was not going to be reduced to feeding, washing, and dressing a baby. That was no sort of existence, and so, what alternative was there except the Crèche?
It was the cold, dispassionate way in which he said it that gave me the creeps.
“What is your wife’s work?” I said.
“Politics, same as mine,” he said.
“Are you fond of your baby?”
“Yes.”
“Is your wife fond of it?”
“Yes.”
I thought to myself that she has not had to pray for a baby, and weep because the months went by. She has not had to wait, and wait—it is not infinitely precious to her, her baby.
He then counter-questioned me: