Lucca

6

Lucca hovered over the ribbed sand for a moment. She felt pressure in her ear drums and her head was buzzing. She let herself rise upwards and shot through the unresisting silver mirror gasping for breath. The sunlight flashed in the drops caught in her eyelashes and the little waves glittered as she swam towards the light. On shore, against the white sky, she could see the towers and high-rise blocks of the city, the slim chimneys of the heating station and the harbour gantries, all of them black and in miniature. She started to swim back. It was a Thursday afternoon at the beginning of June and there were only a few people on the swimming jetty. Otto sat leaning against the green wooden wall with his legs stretched out in front of him and a towel over his lap. He was too far away for her to see his face as anything but a blind spot. It looked as if he was watching her, but she couldn’t be sure yet. She swam nearer. He watched her as she approached.

She swayed for a moment with exhaustion and a sudden feeling of lightness as she climbed out of the water. Otto was reading the paper. She sat down on the towel beside him and asked for a cigarette. He went on reading as he passed her the pack and the lighter. She enjoyed the slight dizziness when she inhaled. He asked if it was cold. She looked at him through the blue plastic of the lighter, it distorted his profile. Not once you’re in. She rolled her swimsuit down to her navel, lay down and closed her eyes so the sun was dulled to an orange fog behind her eyelids.

The drops shrivelled up on her skin which tingled as they evaporated. She licked her under-lip to remove a shred of tobacco, and the taste of salt blended with the taste of smoke. The sun bit into her skin but the slight puffs of wind felt cooling. She let her fingertips slide languidly along his flank under the edge of the towel and on down his thigh. Her fingers recognised his muscular contours and she imagined the faint tickling it gave him, the sensation of her nails among the tiny curled hairs. She smiled at the thought of what might be going on underneath the towel, as she went on casually caressing him.

Someone had seen her the other evening… his voice penetrated through the orange fog, the other voices and the cars further away, and the waves lapped around the stakes beneath them. The stakes she held onto, with slight distaste because they were slimy to the touch, as she let herself be rocked up and down by the waves. Yes? She visualised the stakes, they were black and covered with shells and green fringes of seaweed, which alternately stuck to them and streamed out in the water like loosened hair.

One of his friends had seen her with Harry Wiener, getting into his car. Otto’s voice was as firm and supple as his body. It was at home with facts, everything that was firm and essential. It was a voice that handled words with the same matter-of-factness as when his broad hands took hold of objects or of her, opened a jar of capers with a single snap of compressed air or closed round her wrist when he bent over her in bed. He didn’t know they knew each other, she and Wiener.

She pushed the stub between two planks. Nor did they. She saw it fall through the shade and hit the water with a brief hiss. Honestly, she said… that old poseur! She shaded her eyes with her hand, he leafed through the paper and bent over as he read a headline, as if he was short-sighted. Did he really think…?

He didn’t know what to think. The sun shone on the page and made her screw up her eyes. She couldn’t see what it said. He turned towards her, she smiled. He lay down and closed his eyes. She turned onto her stomach and leaned over him, so that damp ends of hair brushed his chest. He put his hands round her neck and with his thumbs rubbed between the vertebrae of her neck. He just wondered why she hadn’t said anything about it… that she had met him. She studied her fingers, they were still crinkled like the sand on the seabed. Otto’s voice sounded different when he lay down, flatter, she thought and, putting on her sunglasses, she lay down beside him so his shoulder was against hers. She must have forgotten to.

She had almost forgotten. At least, until Otto reminded her, she had not thought about it for several days. Nothing had happened anyway, not like that. It was one of the last evenings of the run, and the theatre was half empty. The reviews had been positive, and she had been singled out for mention in several of them. But the weather was too good that spring, there were too many evenings when people just wanted to drift around town and sit in the twilight feeling summer was on the way. Only very few would feel like spending such evenings in a dusty cinema converted into an underground theatre, on a gloomy street away from the city centre. Besides, none of them was really well known, certainly not the dramatist, a big-headed Swede of their own age, in his mid-twenties, always in black, of course. They had spent all their time imitating his arrogant Stockholm accent.

She knew she had been good that night, better than ever before. The words had come of their own volition, as if they had formulated themselves, and they had left her mouth with no effort, without need of thought. She had forgotten herself and merely followed the movements of the role, yielded to them, given over to them, totally attentive. He talked about that, Harry Wiener, her presence on stage. She had caught sight of him during the performance, but strangely enough that had not made her nervous. She knew she could not do it any other way, and the feeling of exposing herself was not at all unnerving. It was like admitting something painful, while thinking that now one has nothing more to lose. The same strange calm.

She had never spoken to him before, only seen him in pictures and in the distance at a first night. His grey hair, combed back from his tanned forehead, was long and curly at the neck. There was something resigned about his face with its vertical lines and narrow lips, as if he looked upon the world through the bitter wisdom of a hard-won experience of life. But perhaps this was just how people came to look with the years, whether or not they grew wiser or more stupid. He was always elegant, wearing a camel-hair coat and Italian suit or letting himself be photographed during a rehearsal in a T-shirt and baggy chinos, with his spectacles on a cord round his neck and his narrow eyes on the stage. He was on his fourth marriage, but that did not prevent him from playing the part of seducer left and right. For a few months each year he retired to his house on a mountain in Andalucia, where he was said to be writing his memoirs.

The Gypsy King. It was Otto who had come up with that, and since then he had been called nothing else. It was not kindly meant, but king he certainly was. No one could surpass Harry Wiener. Otto had had a part in one of his Ibsen productions and could raise a laugh with his stories of brutal humiliations and hysterical attacks of weeping when the Gypsy King cracked his invisible whip. The actors feared him and dreamed of nothing else but getting a part with him. To be directed by Harry Wiener was like dipping your toes in eternity.

Otto was not impressed, it seemed as if he was determined not to be. In his opinion the Gypsy King’s productions were no more than mundane theatrical gastronomy for the culturally hungry bourgeois, weighted with psychophile symbolism. That was yet another expression he had coined, psychophile. And why was it, in fact, that the Gypsy King only put on gilt-edged classics? When had he last stuck his neck out with a piece of new drama, where he could not automatically rely on his audience flocking in with reverently folded hands? Otto would much rather make films, he had already won several leading parts and come close to winning a Bodil award.

Lucca wasn’t sure. She could see what he meant, yes, and she had once sprayed a whole mouthful of red wine over him laughing when he parodied the Gypsy King giving a demonstration of how to play Shylock. With all the drawers open at once, juggling with the whole of Judaism, as Otto had said. All the same, she had been gripped, almost secretly, when she and Otto had been to see one of the Gypsy King’s shows. She was thinking of that on the spring evening when, after the performance, she was sitting at her mirror taking off her make-up, and caught sight of Harry Wiener in the dressing-room doorway.

He was different, that was the first thing she had thought, different from the person she had imagined. He seemed almost shy as he stood hesitantly on the threshold. He looked like an apology for himself and his colourful reputation. Might he interrupt? The other actors gaped like shepherds who had caught sight of their guiding star, and it had been Lucca who pulled herself together first, smiling and unconcerned, to offer him a chair. He just wanted to come and tell them how outstanding they had been. The word he used was superb. Lucca’s cheeks burned when he looked at her and said a few things about her interpretation, words of a kind she had never heard anyone use before.

They sat listening in a semi-circle around Harry Wiener while he commented on their performance. Lucca thought it was only now she understood what she had been doing on stage during the past few weeks. He had a good deal of criticism of the text itself, but their production had not merely released the best aspects of it, they had managed to imbue a deeper psychological resonance into it as well. Harry Wiener’s words sounded old-fashioned and stately, like old silver fish knives lying each in their perfectly demarcated space, wrapped in moss green baize. He had not taken off his camel-hair coat, perhaps because no one had asked him to. Underneath it he wore a dark blue T-shirt and black jeans, but he sported real crocodile moccasins. The right mix of elegance and something informal, now he had come to see what the young actors had to offer. She could just hear Otto.

She looked round at her colleagues. They were all ears. They barely managed to keep their mouths shut, and she was glad Otto was not there. He would have derided them for feeling so honoured by a visit from this illustrious guest and being the recipients of his gracious words of praise. Like a cub scout pack given an audience with Baden Powell himself. But what about Otto? How could it be that he was so horrified and sarcastic as soon as the conversation took on an emotional tone? Was he actually a bit ashamed of being an actor? Maybe that was why he always had to make a laughing stock of the old theatre chiefs and their silk scarves and gas lamp diction, which he could mimic to make you fall about with streaming eyes. In his heart he probably dreamed of appearing with a bare torso in some action-packed American gun-slinging film.

At a certain point Harry Wiener caught her eye in one of the mirrors, and she smiled a little ironic smile which was both lightly conspiratorial and sexily challenging in an aloof way. As if she wished to keep a certain distance and yet make herself known. Possibly she noticed a particular interest in his brief glance, which seemed to read her in a flash before he looked away again. Perhaps she was flirting a little. It was too fleeting to reflect on more closely, it was just a glance, and he removed it so quickly. There was something modest about him, and she tightened the belt of her dressing gown, suddenly conscious of having nothing on underneath. She had just come out of the shower when he turned up, but then he must be used to that.

He was downright clumsy, she discovered, when he looked around for an ashtray and happened to upset a box of powder over his elegant coat. He smiled and talked on while brushing it off with the back of his hand. There was not much of the gypsy king about him there in that messy dressing room. He spoke quietly and seriously in his deep, hoarse voice about the stage as a mental space in which we keep a tryst with our inner demons. Lucca took pleasure in listening to his voice and looking at him as he spoke. He sounded like someone who knew what he was talking about, someone who had paid for every single one of his insights.

Now she understood why all the actors he had worked with spoke about him as they did. With the exception of Otto. When Harry Wiener now and then looked at her she felt he saw something she was not aware of herself, as if there was more in her than she realised. He spoke meticulously and hesitantly, searching for words, almost as if he were thinking aloud, while he looked down at the toes of his shoes or the cigarette between his tanned fingers. His hands were surprisingly delicate. He interrupted himself in the middle of a sentence and smiled apologetically as he asked if they were thirsty.

They went to a nearby café, he ordered champagne, the exaggerated gesture embarrassed them. He regaled them with anecdotes about well-known actors, both living and dead. He made them laugh and was even ironic without seeming affected. He listened too, when they dared voice their own reflections and feelings, and gave good advice without being didactic, as if he just wanted to share his experiences with them and his wonder at all the questions for which even he had not found answers. The next day they asked each other why he had bothered to spend a whole evening with them. Maybe he had simply been relaxing, taking a break from the role of peripatetic myth. Maybe he took pleasure in their enthusiasm because it reminded him of the deeper reasons he himself had had for going on, year after year, instead of resting on his laurels.

When the café closed only Lucca, her friend Miriam and Harry Wiener were left. They stood for a few moments on the pavement talking, while a waiter piled chairs on tables. Miriam unlocked her bicycle and kissed Lucca on the cheek, fairly demonstratively, she thought, as her friend waved and disappeared round the corner. But suddenly she was standing with the Gypsy King in front of a closed café after midnight, in a square on the edge of the city centre. He turned up his coat collar and offered her a cigarette. She accepted it without considering whether she wanted to smoke or not, and he lit his silver lighter, looking curiously at her, as if now the initiative rested with her alone.

Later she had to admit to herself that his simple and direct way of handling things was impressive. There was no longer any constraint about him. He asked if she was hungry. He had a flat he used for work in town, they could go along there and have a snack. He said this with suitable innocence and yet with a droll look she couldn’t help smiling at. She was tired, she said. But then the least he could do was drive her home! His car was a street or two away.

As they walked along the quiet side streets she wondered at their walking there together, she and Harry Wiener. He said he had wanted to see her on stage for a long time. He had seen photographs of her. They had interested him, the photos, she had a distinctive face. He looked at her. She didn’t need to be sorry about that! He spoke of photography, about how photographs reveal what we can never see with the naked eye because our eyes are always seeking a mirror of our ideas. How photography can reveal a reality that is otherwise inaccessible to us, how faces become visible in all their startling and fascinating strangeness. She had never thought about it like that before.

It was an old Mercedes cabriolet, silver-grey with a beige-coloured leather trim. She wondered if he might have chosen that colour because it matched his grey hair. Everything about Harry Wiener was tinged with silver. She sat with her hands between her thighs in the thin dress. Now and then he threw a glance at her knees in their black tights under the hem, beside his hand resting on the gear lever, but she felt it would be absurd to cover them. She listened to the hum of the motor and looked out at the illuminated town turning and turning around her. It seemed slightly foreign, the town, seen from his car. She told him where to turn off and asked him to stop a few doors from her own. He switched off the engine and turned towards her. Again she was astonished at his directness. He would like to kiss her, would she permit him? She smiled and shook her head. She was both very talented and very attractive, he said, and she was wrong if she thought the two things had nothing to do with each other.

After she got out she bent forward with another smile. He hoped they would meet again. She thanked him for the evening and slammed the door. His front lights threw a hard beam on the pavement slabs. The cats’ eyes on the bicycles leaning against the wall shone red, and her long shadow rose abruptly and swung over the façade as he passed. She caught a brief glimpse of his silhouette in the back window before he turned and was out of sight. Otto had gone to bed. She took off her shoes in the hall and undressed without switching on the light. She imagined Harry Wiener thinking of her while he drove through the town. A strange thought. She lay down close to Otto’s back, so they lay skin to skin beneath the duvet, pleased with herself.

In the morning Miriam called while Otto was in the bath. Had anything happened? Lucca was irritated. What did she mean, happened? Miriam laughed, that was obvious enough. Lucca protested, he had talked to the others just as much. Miriam laughed again. Lucca sat in an easy chair with a shiny, worn silk cover, pink flowers on a curry yellow background. They had found it in a skip. She was wearing one of Otto’s creased shirts, nothing else, she had just woken up. She pulled her legs up in the chair and looked at herself in the tall mirror leaning against the wall beside the bed. She held the phone between her chin and shoulder as she gathered her hair into a loose knot. It had grown long, half of it fell down again around her cheeks. Otto liked her to put her hair up that way, casually. Miriam talked about her boyfriend, she wanted to have a baby, he was not keen. She was afraid he didn’t love her any more. Lucca let her talk on. A child, that was almost impossible to imagine.

She looked at her legs. She had nice legs, they were long, and her thighs were narrow and firm. Her cunt was nice too. She had shaved it so only a little tuft was left. That was where the King of the Gypsies would have liked to make his way. It was comical to think of all the wiles he had made use of, with champagne and stories and sage advice drawn from the experience of a long life, all of it to no earthly use. Just because he had seen a picture of her and taken a fancy to such a young, talented cunt.

She spread her legs so they lay over the chair arm, listening to Miriam going on about the child she so much wanted. Now she looked like the front page of one of the porn magazines she sometimes saw Otto glance at sideways in the all-night kiosk. Imagine if the Gypsy King could see her now. He would go right out of his mind. Be jolted out of his old, flabby, wrinkled skin. It would almost have been worth letting him, just to be able to enjoy his crestfallen face afterwards. Was that all? Yes, your Majesty, that was the lot! She decided not to say anything to Otto. Even though she had been firm he might go on thinking about it all the same. Besides, it irritated her that she had stayed there listening to the Gypsy King and his profundities and allowed him to drive her home in his flash Mercedes.

When she had put down the receiver she rose and stood for a while in front of the mirror. She unbuttoned the shirt, she had lost weight, her stomach was perfectly flat. She didn’t want any child, for the time being she would keep her stomach to herself. Otto had turned off the shower, she could hear him swishing water down the drain with the rubber swabber. She pushed the duvet on to the floor and lay down on the bed with closed eyes. She felt the air from the open window on her face, stomach and thighs. Music wafted down from one of the other floors, a monotonous thumping bass rhythm. A dog barked down in the street.

Otto opened the door of the bathroom. In a moment he would be with her. It was a game. She would lie there without moving, and he would walk to and fro as if he were searching for something and had not even noticed her. He would let her wait, the room would grow silent, and in the silence she would be completely exposed to his gaze, unmoving, in an extremity of tension, trying to guess where on her body she would feel his first touch.

7

Lucca met Otto eighteen months after she left drama school. She had heard about him and seen him at cafés and bars when out with her friends. He was already then a star in the making, an underground star if such exists. He had been interviewed in a woman’s magazine as the rumbustious puppy of young film, and if he showed up at a party you could be sure of fireworks. He had been in a relationship with a well-known rock singer and in general was the type girls kept a watch on out of the corners of their eyes over their cappuccinos and looked away from with a chilly, unapproachable air. They always referred to him in ironical terms if one of their group lost her grip and naïvely gave way to her curiosity. In their opinion he was already established although according to the usual standards he was still only promising. And Lucca thought he seemed to fancy himself a bit too much when he swaggered around in a football shirt, knitted cap and flip-flops, or whatever he hit on, scanning the bar.

When she was offered a part in a television serial in which Otto was also appearing she felt surprised at first that he could be bothered with such a job, although she naturally accepted. He had just got out of prison, she was his girl, and while he was banged up she had naturally fallen for the cop who had run him in. It was a totally fatuous script, but Otto was good and that made her better than she would otherwise have been. He was kind to her, he calmed her down with a smile or made her laugh when she was nervous, and she was surprised at his discipline. He could sit and read the newspaper or tell stories until the moment before they had to go into action and then make his entry and throw himself into his part as if with a snap of the fingers he became one with it.

In fact, he did not act. He was always himself, a fictitious edition of himself, as he would have been if chance had shaped his life along the lines of the script. He summoned the aspects demanded of the role with ease and carried everything off with his drawling diction and adroit muscular physique. They sat chatting among the lamp stands and rolls of cable in a corner of the studio while the cameramen set up their lights. Otto had never been to drama school and wasn’t planning to do so. He couldn’t be bothered to spend three years lying on the floor touching people and breathing deeply. She might well have protested, but she didn’t.

How did it start? As such things do start, as vague notions, playful fantasies, a special feeling aroused merely by sitting beside him, listening to his voice and feeling his eyes. His presence was reflected in all her words and movements, even when she turned her back on him and talked to someone else. One moment she could be really dissatisfied with herself, with her appearance, her voice and what she said, and the next she could have a sneaking feeling of not being quite what she thought she was. As if she hid a secret version of herself, so secret that she was unable to make out who she actually might be, the other woman behind her distrustful reflection.

He provoked her with his self-assurance and cool dispassion. She felt he could see through her ironic aloofness. When she tried out a sharp comment he quite simply appeared not to have heard her, unless he stared straight in her eyes so that his silence seemed a grosser insult than the most offensive reply. She admired his insolence, but kept her mask on. She waited for him to relax for a second, open up a chink.

One day when she arrived at the studio he was sitting outside in the sun studying his script. A toy-shop carrier bag lay beside him. She glanced inside it without asking leave and found a transparent box containing a red toy car. She asked him if he still played with cars. He said it was for his son. She sat down beside him, how old was his son? Six, he replied, putting down the script. He leaned his head back against the red-painted planking wall of the studio and closed his eyes. He must have been very young to be a dad. He shrugged his shoulders, she felt stupid. What was his name, then? Lester… that was an unusual name. He looked across the courtyard. He hadn’t seen his son since he was born. He had met the mother when he was living in the States, she had fallen pregnant by accident. They hadn’t been able to make a go of it. He said this dryly as if just describing what he had done on Sunday.

The following week Lucca and Otto were filming at night in a marina. It was the last scene they were acting together. They had a long wait before the lights were set up. He had to fall into the water during a fight in a speedboat, and he fell again and again, but she was the one who got cold, although it was the middle of July. He lent her his jacket. Later they shared a taxi into town. They spoke of the difference between making a film and acting in a theatre and about one of their older colleagues who behaved like a silent film star even when he was in close-up. He shook her hand, a bit formally, she thought, and said it had been good to work together. She agreed. Standing in the street when the taxi had gone she discovered she still had his jacket on. It was a motor cycle jacket with a zip, the sleeves were too short. That made her smile, as if it was touching. She had not even noticed she was taller than him. She put her nose under the collar and caught the scent of his strange smell.

She called him next day about the jacket. He sounded as if she had woken him up. She was sorry. She asked him to forgive her. He said she could just come round. His apartment was in a side street. She rang several times and was about to go when he finally opened the door. He wore a shabby bath robe with claret-coloured stripes like the ones old men wear for the beach. She couldn’t help smiling and he smiled back. Smart, wasn’t it? She didn’t know if he meant the bath robe or the jacket he had let her keep. Then he pulled her inside, pushed the door to and kissed her. She closed her eyes and pressed herself against him with a sudden force that surprised her, as if she had to make haste not to be paralysed by the strangeness of the situation.

* * *

From the windows you looked down on a building site covered with weeds and rubble, haunted in winter by street girls and local pushers who warmed themselves at a fire in a rusty oil barrel. The flat was sparsely equipped with junk furniture which looked as if it had come from a house clearance. Some time in the Fifties it must have been in a working-class home with ambitions for higher things, and now it had been resurrected thanks to Otto’s slightly perverse but extremely chic feeling for teak and moquette. On one of the walls hung a huge, hand-drawn poster for a Sergio Leone film, and in the window a reversed neon sign in fiery red letters announced Fish is healthy. She sometimes wondered whether the junkies down on the building site brushed back their greasy fringes and raised their heavy eyes to Otto’s window. She pondered whether the message in their stoned brains seemed like a revelation or a studied insult.

The street offered a Turkish greengrocer, an Egyptian restaurant with belly dancers, a paraffin merchant, a Halal butcher and one or two massage salons. The entrance was dark and scruffy, it smelled of gas and cooking and wet dogs, and sometimes she surprised a bent figure on the stairs having a fix. She rather liked the atmosphere of kinky sex and shady dealings, the exotic scents, men with black moustaches and little knitted caps who spoke Turkish and Arabic, and women with their heads covered, wearing long coats. She had even grown used to the junkies and prostitutes. They knew her and scrounged cigarettes from her, and she had come to feel she belonged there as much as they did. But in their eyes she no doubt still seemed an upper-class git who had lost her way in town, strutting off with long steps and chin in the air.

When she wore high-heeled shoes she was almost a head taller than Otto, but he didn’t seem to mind that. If he had they would hardly have been lovers. She was a tall woman, but always wore high heels. She liked glancing at her legs, reflected in shop windows as she strode along the pavement and could still feel like a little girl playing at being a lady, hardly realising she was supposed to be grown up, although she had long ago taught herself to walk on high heels without looking awkward. As a teenager she had been clumsy, hadn’t known what to do with her long arms and legs, constantly tripping over furniture and knocking over glasses and china. She was still like a bean pole, her face was long and narrow, even her nose, and when she was in a bad mood she thought she looked like a horse. But that wasn’t the worst thing to be. Her hair was coarse and as fair as straw, with a reddish tinge, her eyes were green and her lips were full and kissable. Anyway that was what Otto said when for once he was playing the gallant.

They couldn’t have been more different. There was something compact and square about Otto. He had broad shoulders and broad hands, jaws and thighs, but his bottom was slight, and his eyes were a guileless blue which contradicted all the power he held within him. When he walked he put all his weight into each step he took. His movements were sure and precise and he always looked people straight in the eye without blinking. He had a dragon tattooed on one arm, he had been a sailor. Perhaps that was what had made him so meticulous about himself and his surroundings. He was always clean-shaven and his clothes newly laundered. He did all the housework, energetically with wide arm movements, as if it was the deck of a merchant ship he was scouring and swabbing.

When he embraced her it sometimes made her think of a drawing she had seen on a poster when she was small. She had forgotten what it advertised but could still remember the drawing of a naked man with legs apart holding a boa constrictor by its head and tail. The snake was much longer than the man, it wound itself around his muscular outline and hissed in his face with its cleft tongue, but it was held fast in his grip. She felt a bit like that snake. She liked teasing him and showing resistance and she quite enjoyed it when he got rough. When she finally gave in, reluctantly so he had to keep a tight hold on her, it seemed as if she was also enticing him to reveal who he really was. They had been together for almost two years now. She had never lived with anyone for so long, and she had not had other men since she moved in with him. Sometimes she wondered how long it would go on. She found it hard to imagine it just continuing, but still played with the idea.

It was not so much an idea, it was almost only an image, at a restaurant, for instance, when she saw a middle-aged man helping his wife on with her coat, lifting her hair over the collar and holding the door open for her with a smile. She calculated how long they might have been together, and for a second it was herself and Otto that her eyes followed through the window of the restaurant. Two slightly round, slightly wrinkled adults walking side by side looking at tempting kitchen equipment in the shop windows, chatting casually about everyday matters. Two who knew each other’s habits, weak points and embarrassing little secrets. Maybe they were happy and serene, maybe it was a comfortable hell of mute resignation and an inexplicable bitterness. Maybe a bit of each.

She didn’t talk to Otto about such things. That would have been out of order. She thought she knew him better as time went on, and they had more or less been through all they had to tell each other about previous lovers, and what else their lives had held. There were still closed doors and dark corners in him, she could feel that, but she would not have known what to ask about if she had dared. As far as she knew he had not been with anyone else since they met, but then she was there the whole time. It was easier to reach out for her than rush around town chasing strangers. Otto was not at all the lady-killer she had believed and everyone claimed he was. He was well aware of what he did to women, but didn’t allow himself to be affected by it. On the contrary, he seemed shy and hadn’t known anything like as many as she had believed. He had not pursued her, either, she came of her own choice.

Now when she was with her women friends she sensed she had crossed an invisible threshold. Their behaviour was unchanged, almost demonstratively the same, but she could see it in their eyes. If she casually mentioned Otto she had to take pains to make him sound like a perfectly ordinary guy. As if in reality he was a monster and not the unattainable object of their green-eyed jealousy. Everything was different, she had become visible at one blow. When she and Otto showed themselves in town people were gushingly friendly to her even when she had never met them before. The ones with stature even asked about her plans and responded with evasive half-promises. She mentioned it once to Otto but he didn’t understand her. If people were nice it must be because they liked her. She thought he must be rather ingenuous to be able to appear so confident.

She was fascinated by his composure. He was the same whether they were alone or with others. She often had the feeling that it didn’t make a lot of difference if she was there or not. Just as his body closed compactly around its perfect proportions, so his interior being was apparently self-sufficient. You could plant him on a desert island or in a foreign city whose language he did not speak, and the result would be the same. He seemed like someone who could get by anywhere, in any circumstances. He could spend hours without speaking, not because he was in a bad mood. It didn’t prevent him from suddenly stroking her bum as he passed by, or bringing her a cup of coffee she hadn’t asked for.

She had moved into his flat gradually, in a series of carriers and bags. They hadn’t said much about it. Her cosmetics packed the bathroom shelves, her clothes crowded against his in the wardrobe and her paperback editions of English and American plays mounted up in piles on the floors among his thrillers and videos. It seemed neither to bother him nor make him reflect on what it was all about, where it might take them. Was it taking them anywhere, in fact? They went to London one spring and Morocco one winter, when he had a break between two films. It looked as if they belonged together.

When they were going out she occasionally asked him what he thought she should wear, but he didn’t mind whether she pulled a sweater over her head or put on a short low-necked dress. He was never jealous, and although she gave him no reason to be, that did surprise her. There were plenty of men if she had been interested. There had never been a lack of those, for her. Several times she allowed herself to be talked into a corner by some stud who had the hots for her just to see if it provoked a reaction. But Otto went on calmly chatting to his friends without looking in her direction, and she had to disentangle herself from her experimental flirtation.

It wasn’t that he was indifferent to her. For the most part he was considerate, at times downright affectionate, but just as often he left her in peace, and she could feel he expected the same from her. Now and then she asked if he would rather be alone, but he merely looked at her in amazement and smiled, as if she had said something odd. When he wanted to be alone, he went out. There was a pub round the corner where he played billiards, a rough gloomy place with tobacco-yellow crochet curtains, where none of her friends would dare set their feet.

He could make her feel invisible when he concentrated on washing up, watching television, polishing shoes or lifting weights. As if she wasn’t there. At times she felt she was nothing more than a pair of hungry eyes that clung to his detached mien and perfect body. His attacks of introspective self-sufficiency had a titillating effect on her, like the maddening, pleasurable expectation when she lay in bed giving herself up to his circling, teasing caresses. His silence could fill the flat with an atmosphere that was as agonising as it was agitating, and it completely took possession of her until her body and gaze were a swollen, quivering receptivity.

If neither of them had anything to get up for they slept late. When she woke up one spring morning he was sitting in his underpants in front of the open window sunning himself and reading the paper. She called to him but he didn’t answer. She lay watching him for a long time. The strong light glistened on the hairs on his chest and the dust motes hovering in the air. She crept over to him from behind, placed her hands on his chest and bent forward to kiss him, so her hair fell over his face. He moved his head and with a preoccupied air took hold of her chin while he went on reading, just as you pick up the loose skin on a puppy’s jaws.

She sat down on the floor under the window and rested her feet on the edge of the chair seat between his knees. His face was hidden behind the paper. She let one big toe brush his inner thigh and massaged him softly in the crutch. He did not move but she could feel it worked. Then she bent forward and coaxed his cock out of the fly. It was violet in the spring sunshine, she took it into her mouth. He moved the paper and looked at her, neutral and interested, like a spectator. She met his eyes, trying to visualise what she looked like from up there with his cock in her mouth, like one of the whores in his daydreams.

The next moment she was lying underneath him on her stomach. He forced her down with all his weight so she could barely breathe and penetrated her, pressing her face against the dusty floorboards. She enjoyed his sudden violence, like a pent-up fury suddenly let loose. It hurt her, and he came before she had a chance herself, but soon afterwards when she was in the shower feeling his warm seed running down her thighs she couldn’t help smiling at the thought that his sudden passion must express part of everything he obviously had no words for. All that was hidden behind his silence and remote gaze.

It was getting hot. Drops of sweat crawled slowly down from the roots of her hair over her nose. She lay on her stomach sniffing the smell of sweat and sun cream on her arms, the smell of summer. The little waves melted together in a winking field of reflections, and in the empty sky she saw the jet stream of a plane making its way like a needle glowing whitely. She turned and shaded her eyes with a hand. The tail of the white line spread out and dissolved into small clouds like the knobs on a backbone.

She closed her eyes. More people had arrived, children screamed when they jumped into the water, and the adult voices blended together so she couldn’t hear what they said. The planks gave under her every time someone walked past. She stretched out her arm and let the back of her hand rest on Otto’s belly. She looked at him. He lay motionless, as if asleep. She could perfectly well have told him about her meeting with Harry Wiener when they were at breakfast the next day. They could have laughed over the Gypsy King’s unsuccessful attempt at seducing her. It was too stupid, and still more stupid of him to suspect something had happened.

Otto sat up, her hand slipped off his stomach. He looked out at the Sound. She wanted to say something, it didn’t matter what. He stood up too quickly for her to be able to catch his eye. He walked to the end of the jetty and stood for a moment with his back to her before jumping in and vanishing. A few seconds later he emerged and began to swim off.

He had looked at her without interest when she described how Harry Wiener had turned up at the dressing room unannounced and invited them all for champagne. She plastered herself with sun block, slowly and thoroughly, so she didn’t have to look straight at him all the time, as she reported what he had said about their performance. She described how happy that had made her, mostly to offset her astonishment when she came to his approaches in the car. She had taken it in good faith, she would never have dreamed that the Gypsy King could come to humble himself like that. She even exaggerated slightly and took pains to go into details about his old, rather feminine hands and how pathetically he had displayed his slobbering raunchiness. But the more she said the more she felt it sounded as if she was hiding something.

Smiling crookedly Otto said she would soon be getting an offer to play Ophelia or Juliet, it wouldn’t be long. Couldn’t she speak up for him and get him the part of Hamlet or Romeo? Or would that interfere with her plans? He said it lightly and she cuffed him on the shoulder, pretending annoyance in return for his ironical smile.

Rows of people were lying along the jetty and on the beach, so many by now it was impossible to see who was with whom. Quite close to her was a group of fragile-looking teenagers with budding breasts and bony shoulders. They whispered and giggled, now and then one of them raised herself a little and shaded her eyes as if looking for someone. At the edge of the sea a bald fat man carried a small boy in water wings. The man’s stomach wore a mat of black hair and the boy’s arms were so thin that the water wings kept sliding down to his wrists.

The wind was getting up and stirring the water into confused golden points. It whipped the sheets against the mast of a sailing dinghy keeled over on its side on the wet sand where the waves fell together and slid back. The sound reached right over to her, sharp and rhythmical, and the gusts of wind tore at the trunks of the tall beech trees in front of the sun. The top branches waved and their leaves glittered nervously in quivering sighs behind the intricate tape of smoke winding up from the cigarette between her fingers.

When she turned round Otto was on his way over to the jetty with long strokes. She lay down again. Soon she felt his heavy stride making the planks rock. He dripped over her and the cold drops woke her heated skin out of its trance. One drop fell on a lens of her shades as he sat down beside her with a sigh. The drop made the sky quiver and melt. He lit a cigarette and placed a hand on her knee. Her kneecap rested within it as in a cave. She asked if he was hungry. She sounded like a little housewife worrying about her spouse’s nourishment. He took his hand away from her knee. Not specially… was she? He ate in a revolting manner, it was the only unpleasant thing about him. She had never thought much about it, merely noticed it. He smacked his lips and bent over with a protective arm round his plate as he shovelled in his food with his right hand and looked around scowling as if he was afraid someone might come and steal it.

He asked if she would like to go. Obviously he too was at a loss for something to talk about. As they cycled into town she asked herself whether she had invited the Gypsy King to try it on when she met his eyes in the dressing-room mirror. Maybe she had waited too long to look away or else she had taken her eyes off him too quickly as if feeling herself seen through. She bit her under-lip in irritation. Couldn’t you look around as you liked? It might well be that she had wondered for a second what impression she had made on him, and so what? Surely her thoughts were her private property. Besides he had seemed to mean what he said about her performance. Could it all have been just a manoeuvre, a stage in the cunning strategy of seduction?

It was her first leading role and she had been dreadfully nervous. When Otto came home the afternoon before the première she had been standing in the living room doing voice exercises. He had bought a CD of Iggy Pop and played it at once, throwing himself on the sofa and starting to roll a joint. She caught his eye and narrowed her lips. He asked with false innocence if the music worried her. She went into the bedroom and slammed the door behind her. The drone of Iggy Pop’s voice penetrated through the door with its monotonous bass and throbbing drums. On the other side of the narrow back yard she could look into a kitchen lit by an unshaded light bulb behind the dirty window. An old man in a net vest stood at the stove. His back was bent, it faced her so she saw only his bony shoulders and prominent shoulder blades in the vest, which was too big for him. He was frying bacon, she could smell it.

She took a deep breath and produced a low note that rose like a column from her diaphragm, as she had been taught. Then Iggy Pop started up again. She lay down on the bed, she couldn’t remember a single line, and in three hours she had to be on stage. She turned and in surprise regarded the little dark spot spreading over the pillowcase, as if it was not hers, the tear sucked in by the finely woven cotton.

During the curtain calls Lucca couldn’t understand how they had pulled it off so well. She didn’t know whether she had been good or bad, she had merely followed the patterns laid down by the words and movements, mechanically like a toy train that rushes confidently around on its rails. But everybody talked of how she had lived the part, so full of genuine feeling. She was the centre of the first-night party, everyone wanted to kiss her and give her a big hug, even people she had only met once. She allowed herself to revel in it without holding back. Otto stayed in the background, he spent the evening in a corner with one of his friends. When she walked past them she could hear the sarcasm in his voice.

When they got home he did not spare her his outspoken opinion of the play, and when he read the reviews, which all emphasised her performance, he snorted and warned her not to let herself be flattered by such a pack of fawning poodles. She asked if he was jealous, but that was showing off, she didn’t believe it herself. It was not a great success with audiences, and the flowers she had been given, gift-wrapped like the ones at the big theatres, withered after a day or two. Otto was the one who threw them out, the flat stank like a bloody brothel. He said it in his usual studiedly bragging tones, as he did when he wanted her to understand he didn’t really mean it. But why couldn’t he grant her a spot of success, when he wallowed in admiration like a happy pig in his mud?

She thought of the contrast between Harry Wiener’s sympathetic, eloquent compliments and Otto’s scornful comments. Who was she to believe? Maybe neither of them. Obviously the Gypsy King had had his demonstrable reasons for smothering her with his wit, but why couldn’t Otto be generous about her success? Was he jealous, after all? In her scattered thoughts on the way home from swimming she confused the order of events, and saw Otto’s scorn after the première as a reaction to the Gypsy King’s erotic tricks three weeks later.

Maybe Otto had foreseen what might happen in the wake of her first outstanding reviews and the first newspaper interview she had ever given, in which she was presented with doe eyes, long legs and high acting ideals. Maybe he even felt that all the attention she was suddenly getting was a threat to his right of possession to what lay hidden behind those very eyes and between those very legs. If she had wanted to she could easily have stayed there in the Gypsy King’s Mercedes. She could have gone up with him just like that into the legendary roof-top apartment where so many had gone before her, a little shy, a little girlish, with a coquettishly nervous hand constantly running through her hair, with her coat still on, as he mixed drinks and told stories about his meetings with Bergman and Strehler.

Otto cycled fast, as if trying to throw her off, and she had to tramp on the pedals to keep up. Sweat stung her forehead and her cheeks and made her blouse stick. When they had to stop at a red light she rode up beside him. She held on to his shoulder for support without putting her feet down, while the crossing traffic passed in a blue mist of exhaust and dazzling reflections. She couldn’t see his eyes behind all the shining movement in his shades. He smiled as he put out a hand and moved a lock of hair that had fallen in front of her eyes and stuck to her forehead. She felt like kissing him, but the lights changed to green.

She ought to be glad he had shown a touch of jealousy at the Gypsy King’s come-on. It must be proof that after all she meant more to him than he cared to shout about. But that wasn’t like him, it was more like Daniel. It was ironic, she hadn’t thought of him for several months. Perhaps he was still sitting with his broken heart in his lap picking at the scabs.

She had never promised him anything. She broke it to him gently, at the same time safe-guarding herself. He sat on the piano stool staring down at the lid covering the keys. She could see herself, legs crossed, as a misty shining reflection in the curving instrument. The grand piano took up a third of the room, and his unmade mattress occupied another third. There was just room in between for the small table where he wrote out his scores. Here he spent most of his time bent over his bizarre music with its scattered, shrill notes and confused chords written for an orchestra he only heard in his own dark curly head. She had been fascinated by the invisible aura that spread around him when he played to her so that even the depressing surroundings took on a mystic air. He raised his head and looked at her through little steel spectacles. She stood up and walked to the window. He said he loved her. It was all very sad.

At the end of his street there was a damp-stained viaduct, and on the corner a run-down discount supermarket boasted garish posters advertising special offers. From the window she could look down on the street in front of an auto-repair shop. Splotches of bird mess shaped like flames covered the skylights and the cracked asphalt was blotched with oil. A tree stood in a corner of the yard, and even its roots were black with oil where they emerged from the asphalt. It was raining, the drops struck the window with a muffled sound and speckled the view with little pearl-shaped domes in which earth and sky changed places.

She turned round when she had taken in the scene’s inventory of details. He asked who it was. He had been badgering her for a month at all hours of the day, at the Drama School, in cafés, on the telephone. He had burst in to pester her in the middle of the night in the crazed hope that she could be persuaded to love him. As if sheer dogged persistence could serve his cause. She conjured up Otto’s secretive face, which she had been studying that very morning in bed while he was still asleep, to note each particular of it. The uneven arch of his brow beneath the long fair hair, strong eyebrows, broad nose and full lips.

Daniel had been jealous from the start, even when he had her to himself. On the other hand he could be happy in his ignorance, when she came straight from another man to visit him in his ascetic apartment. She felt like a dazzling guest from a differently callous and profligate world, and she marvelled at how abruptly reality could change in the space of a few hours. He gave her tea in the English faience cups he had inherited from his grandmother as he described the piece he was composing. She let him talk and studied the pictures on the tea cups of romantic lovers reclining in little rowing boats, rocked by tiny waves on a lake in the moonlight, surrounded by mountain peaks, tall trees and reeds swaying gently in the wind.

When they lay together on his mattress he could go into ecstasies over her high-heeled shoes and lace underclothes and the black stockings mingled with his biographies of composers and symphony scores like sexy meteorites come flying from space to land in the midst of his solitude. She had enjoyed closing her eyes and listening when he spoke of his music or read aloud to her from the Bhagavad Gita or Omar Khayyam. She had taken pleasure in playing with the idea of the oddness in the combination of him and her, but it had been only a game, an idea.

It had never occurred to her that it would be other than what it was. That he should be the man to exclude all other men. She had certainly not anticipated much. She had deferred all anticipations to some indefinite time, completely open to what might happen. The future had been white and untouched, and she had felt about it as you do when you open the door of a house in the country one morning when snow has fallen. You hesitate on the threshold, hardly having the heart to go outside and leave tracks in the unbroken whiteness where only the blackbirds’ claws have left simple dots and dashes that end as abruptly as they begin.

She had liked Daniel best when he sat at his piano and seemed to forget she was there. Something hard and decisive came over his mouth and eyes when he bent over the instrument, head slightly on one side. As if the music hid itself somewhere inside the black, varnished box, and he had to search for it with the keys, blindly, infinitely careful not to chase it away. There was a restrained strength in the touch of his hands on the chords, his fingers moving so swiftly and precisely. On the keys his hands displayed a disciplined confidence at odds with his clumsy, vague way of caressing her in bed.

As soon as he looked up his expression took on a short-sighted, otherworldly look. When she embraced him she could feel a sudden urge to protect him from colliding with hard reality. But she did not listen when he moved close to her and whispered tenderly in her ear. His adoring words and humble fondling were like a sticky web spun around her, and she wanted to provoke him into forcing a more dangerous, unfathomable music out of her than her conventional sighs rewarding his efforts. She did not believe him when, breathless and blissful, he told her how wonderful she was. He hadn’t the least idea what he was talking about, she didn’t deserve the words he took into his mouth.

But she did not properly understand that until she met Otto. Strangely enough, for Otto made her feel stupid and bungling, not because of anything he said but simply by letting his expressionless blue eyes rest on her unguarded face. In her thoughts she kept on returning to the morning she rang his doorbell with his jacket over her shoulder and a churning feeling in her stomach. He had just smiled and pulled her inside in a long, astonishing kiss. He could do what he liked, she had come of her own will.

She had been around a good deal, and men had passed through her life, young or slightly older, more or less briefly. She had been in love with some of them, until they submitted completely and reached out for her like shipwrecked sailors about to drown. Others had been more cautious, whether they were married and remorseful or just saw her as a gorgeous lay, available when the urge came over them. She had day-dreamed about them for months on end until her dreams were threadbare from being dreamed over and over again.

Otto was different, he didn’t beg for love, and he didn’t run away either, as she gradually stopped bothering to hide her feelings behind a mask of uncommitted ease. She was tired of throwing off emotional, snivelling guys who dreamed of nothing but tying her down. But she was equally exhausted from being a fuckable doll dreaming her sweet dreams of exciting, unattainable men who lay pumping between her legs like creatures possessed. When Otto embraced her she had no wish to flee or dream.

They had stayed in his bed that first day. She questioned him about the boy in America who had been sent a red car by post from his far away, unknown father. He didn’t mind her asking, but when he replied, in a curt and matter-of-fact way, he made it sound like a kind of technical hiccup. A child clearly belonged to life’s contingencies. All the same she couldn’t help musing over the unknown areas in him no one had infiltrated before. Maybe he himself was unaware of them. While she lay in the twilight looking into his shadowy face, she fantasised about being the one who, like a traveller on a voyage of discovery, found and charted the blank spots in his interior and one day had them named after her.

One rainy day a few weeks later when she went to see Daniel she knew it was the last time. He played her a new piece he had just finished. She sipped the hot tea and gazed at the romantic pair on the cup in their rowing boat in moonlight. The black and white keys were reflected in his spectacles. His face was closed in concentration in a way that made her recall he was actually several years older than she was. It was only when he played that she thought of it. She hoped he would go on, that the music wouldn’t come to an end, maybe because she knew what was coming, but also because that was how she liked to see him, buried in himself and his music.

She turned to the window again to avoid his suffering gaze and looked through the drops down at the yard of the car workshop. One of the branches swayed and spread a little silver cloud of drops around it when a bird flew up and vanished in an irregular lurching curve. A skinny tabby cat slunk along the fence with lithe steps and bent head. It stopped, lifted its head and sniffed, ears laid back. Cautiously it stretched out a paw, tested the cracked asphalt and drew the paw back again before sitting down with its tail curled round its forepaws, nonchalant and completely motionless as if it had sat there always.

She felt Daniel’s hands on her hips and his breath against her neck. He loved her. Remorse struck her in the stomach with a hard, cold blow, but only one, immediately followed by a totally different feeling. It rushed through her with its warmth, as if guilt had released it. She visualised Otto. He could have her if he liked, whether he wanted her or not. That was how it had to be, and no one could help it. But if it hadn’t been for Daniel, she might not have felt it so simply, so clearly.

Couldn’t they be together one last time? She turned towards him. He looked at her with a strange expression, as if nothing mattered to him. He couldn’t mean that. He blushed. Would she do that for him? He tried to kiss her, she turned her head away, he went on pestering. Then she gave in, as amazed as he was, and while it happened for the last time she looked into his ignominious, despairing face, but it was not so much contempt she felt, and in fact not pity either. Most of all it resembled gratitude.

She could still feel the heat from asphalt and walls even though the sun had disappeared behind the houses when they rode down their street. The sky over the roofs was yellow. Otto went on round the corner to get a pizza. She couldn’t make out how the staircase could smell of wet dog when it had not rained for a fortnight. A pile of trash mail was on the floor inside the door and among it a couple of letters, one for Otto from the inspector of taxes, the other for her. The corner of the envelope bore the Royal Theatre logo. She registered that without thinking, maybe because she was tired after the cycle trip and the hours in the sun. Then she tore open the envelope, went over to the window and unfolded the letter.

It held just a few lines, signed by a secretary. In the coming season the theatre was putting on August Strindberg’s The Father, directed by Harry Wiener. One of the women actors had fallen pregnant and would therefore not be able to play the part of Bertha, the daughter of the cavalry captain, as planned. Would Lucca consider taking her place? To further their planning, she was asked to respond within a week. She could feel she had caught the sun, her cheeks felt stretched and burning. A light was switched on behind a window on the other side of the building site and she saw a small figure walking up and down in the yellow square. She stuffed the letter back in its envelope and put it in the pocket of her jacket. She could hear Otto on the stairs.

They ate in front of the television and drank beer. Neither of them said anything special. Otto sat with his feet on the sofa table among the beer bottles and the empty pizza box, lazily watching a hit man in a dirty vest empty the magazine of his submachine gun with a resentful twitch of the jaw. She picked up a magazine and leafed through the pages of pretty girls showing off the summer fashions, strolling along with head on one side in the evening sunshine, now among slim palms in a Moroccan oasis, now beneath the wet laundry and drawn blinds above the balconies of an alleyway in Lisbon.

Later that evening they met up with some friends at a bar. Lucca fingered the folded letter in her pocket. She could have told him about it while they were at home, but Otto had been lost in his film. She felt irritated at having hidden it instead of leaving it out so he could find it for himself. As if she felt guilty. The place was packed and the crowd swayed back and forth every time someone pushed over to the bar counter. Standing beside Otto in the din of music and voices it dawned on her that she had been given the chance she had dreamed of ever since she hit on the idea of becoming an actor. Obviously Harry Wiener had meant what he said. She looked round at the clusters of faces. One day they would all know who she was. She felt a bit ashamed at the thought but couldn’t help thinking it.

She caught sight of a tall man standing at the end of the bar bending over a beautiful girl. She was sure she had seen him before but could not remember where. He wore an elegant black jacket and his curly hair was cut short. The girl’s face was thickly powdered and her breasts looked as if at any moment they might burst out of the bulging C cups. She smiled with her red lips and nodded assent to what the man was saying. Lucca recognised his self-effacing smile and awkward gesticulations. He seemed to have overcome the worst of his shyness, but where were his spectacles? Daniel had obviously taken to contact lenses.

She pushed her way over to them. When he caught sight of her she could see how he swallowed before smiling, but otherwise there was not much left of his old uncertainty. He introduced Lucca and the inflated beauty to each other. Her name was Barbara, and she widened her nostrils as she smilingly took Lucca’s measure with her large dramatic eyes. They had just come back from a festival of new music in Munich, where he had conducted one of his works. He had even been interviewed by the Süddeutsche Zeitung. He managed to make quite a story of it. She said it was nice to see him and kissed his cheek before going on to the toilets.

She held her hands under the cold tap for a long time. The water splashed up on the mirror and she met her own eyes behind the trickling drops as she pressed her hands to her sore red cheeks. She shouldn’t have stayed so long in the sun. Did Daniel also read Omar Khayyam’s love poems to Barbara with the big breasts? Did she drink Chinese tea from a cup with romantic dreamers in the moonlight, while he entertained her with his twelve-tone serenades? And if he did? When she forced her way back through the crowd and the fog of cigarette smoke again, Daniel and Barbara had left. Otto followed her with his eyes from the end of the bar. Lucca smiled at him, but he didn’t smile back, merely looked at her as if he had caught sight of something she was not aware of. She said she was tired. He could stay on if he liked.

It was warm, the window was open and she lay naked under a sheet, listening to the sounds of the city, the voices from other apartments, and the hollow rattling from the container in the yard when the chef of the Egyptian restaurant took the rubbish out. An Arabian song came from the restaurant kitchen, a woman’s wailing voice accompanied by abrupt drums and strings. She pondered on Otto’s calculating expression when she returned from the toilet. She lay absolutely still, listening. At last she heard the street door slam downstairs and recognised his quick step as he climbed. She closed her eyes. The sound of steps came closer and stopped suddenly. Then she heard the rattle of his keys, the lock clicked and the door opened. The floorboards in the hall creaked and a moment later she heard him peeing into the lavatory pan and the explosion of water when he flushed it away.

He came into the bedroom. She felt the soft air on her breasts, stomach and thighs when he lifted the edge of the sheet. She imagined his hands, their dry warmth and firm grip. She didn’t move, holding her breath as she waited, tense and excited. Her nipples gathered into two small hard spikes and she felt her pores open wide like so many baby birds’ gaping beaks, stretched in the air, hungrily piping.

Nothing happened. Afterwards she couldn’t tell how long she had been lying there waiting before she felt the mattress give under him as he sat up on the edge of the bed. She heard the metallic click of his lighter and breathed in the smell of cigarette smoke. She opened her eyes. He was still in his jacket. He sat with his back to her looking out into the courtyard. She asked for a drag. He turned and passed her the cigarette. She could not see his face, he was just a dark outline against the open window. He took back the cigarette and knocked off the ash into the ashtray on the floor between his feet. There was something they needed to talk about.

It was quiet down in the courtyard. He inhaled deeply and blew out the smoke in rings that hovered like soft zeroes in front of the lavender blue sky. Yes? She tried to sound relaxed but was unsuccessful. Her stomach contracted. Maybe he had found the letter from the Royal Theatre in her pocket. But after all, it was only an offer of a job. Nothing had happened between her and the Gypsy King. She had told him all there was to tell, and as she spoke he had looked at her in a disinterested way that reassured her. They had even made a joke of it. How had it come to be a problem? Why hadn’t she just shown him the letter?

She cleared her throat. What was it? Her voice was faint and dry. She propped herself on an elbow and looked at his dim silhouette. It was no good, he was sorry. She sat up in bed and pulled the sheet around her. What was no good? He turned towards the window. It would be best if they stopped here. The bluish light from outside fell on one side of his face. She could hardly recognise him. Was there someone else? He stubbed out his cigarette and stood up. If she really wanted to know… She looked up at him. Was it someone she knew? He went over to the door. He would spend the night somewhere else. It would probably be best if she moved out tomorrow.

8

The knife point had barely touched the white belly of the fish before it opened out in a long slit around the red and mauve entrails that gushed out onto the marble counter. She remembered how the sight had made her press her face against her father’s stomach in the soft checked shirt he always wore when they were in the country. She hadn’t seen him for years and sometimes was afraid of forgetting what he looked like, just as she had been when he went away. She lay in bed at night with a pocket torch, frightened of her mother surprising her with the faded black and white photograph she had eased out of the album from the desk in his study without her discovering. In the picture Giorgio was young, about her age. It had been taken on a square in his home town, the town she was named after. She had never been there. He had black hair and a smooth chin, he sat rocking on a café chair in front of a church wall where low-flying swallows cast their shadows.

Fascinated, she watched the fishmonger’s knife severing the head of the fish, then discarding it, gaping with astonishment, among the blue veins of the counter. The knife scraped the slimy scales from the green and brown body covered with black freckles. She thought of the red neon sign in Otto’s window. She had always hated fish. Outside she could hear the hollow thumping sound of a cutter’s motor and the cars driving ashore from the little ferry with varnished wooden rails. She had leaned her cheek against them so as to feel the vibrations through the hull as she saw the fishing village disappear behind the fan of wake, as if they were sailing far away and never coming back. She’s shot up all right, said the fishmonger, smiling knowingly. He said that every summer. His short nails were bloody at the roots.

They cycled through the plantation as usual. Lucca rode behind her mother on Giorgio’s old bicycle. The plastic bag of fish dangled from the rusty handlebars, it kept almost sticking between the spokes of the front wheel. Else was still slim, but each summer the veins behind her knees stood out more, and her hair had gradually turned completely grey. You could hear the distant roar of the sea behind the rows of dark pine trees. The house, built of tarred planks, was the last one on a path with wooden fences around the small gardens of fir and birch. The sun only reached down for a few hours in late afternoon. For the rest of the day their garden was a shadowy morass of tree trunks, tall grass and raspberry bushes completely hid the stone wall dividing the garden from the woods.

The sun shone almost vertically on the planking wall. They lay in deck chairs, the smell of tar blended with the fusty odour from the damp-stained canvas. There was no telephone in the house, Otto would not be able to call even if he guessed where she was. Else lay with closed eyes, arms outstretched so the sun could shine on their paler undersides. The skin in the low neck of her dress was lobster-red and swollen, with deep lines between her flabby breasts. She did not talk much, perhaps she wanted to seem considerate, it was understandable for Lucca to be quiet. Although she should be glad it had happened now and not later, as Else had said when she met her off the ferry. Imagine if they had actually had a child! Lucca thought of Miriam, dreaming of having her own little baby.

She had called Miriam after Otto had left. Suddenly everything seemed very clear, and half an hour later she had finished packing her clothes and other things. It all went into two suitcases and four plastic bags, that was all she had contributed to Otto’s life. She waited down on the corner to hail a taxi. A prostitute stood smoking, a little round-shouldered as if cold. She held the cigarette away from her body and bent first one leg in tight jeans, then the other. Lucca greeted her, they passed one another every day. Hey, was she off travelling? You could say that. Where? She didn’t know yet. The prostitute nodded sympathetically. She knew all about that.

Miriam looked at her with a tragic face when she opened the door. She was a head shorter than Lucca, who had to bend down to let her friend embrace her. They stood there locked in each other’s arms, rocking from side to side. Lucca began to cry, simultaneously asking herself why she had only begun to cry now. Was it Miriam’s sympathy that had set her off, rather than grief at Otto ditching her? Miriam was alone at home, her boyfriend was a jazz musician and had a gig that night. They sat in the kitchen drinking vodka, turning the glowing ends of their cigarettes around in the ashtray so they grew as sharp as flaming spears. Miriam had always thought Otto was a shit, Lucca wasn’t the first one to be dropped like that. But she couldn’t well have said that while they were together. Incidentally, Miriam’s boyfriend had seen him in town recently with a mulatto, a photographer’s model, as far as she knew. Miriam hadn’t wanted to say anything about that to Lucca, so as not to upset her.

She went on heaping scorn and condemnation over Otto until Lucca interrupted her. Were they going to have a child or what? Lucca was not really interested, but Otto had been slated enough for the time being. She felt battered by her friend’s vicious words. Miriam changed channels promptly and lowered her voice, modest but also flattered at being able to share her dream of happiness with her sorrowing friend. Her beloved couldn’t make up his mind, he had mumbled something about his freedom. What did he want that for? They had had a row. But Miriam herself was ready, it was a feeling in her body, she just wanted to have this child, besides, it would strengthen their relationship. If only he would understand. What else was there to look forward to? A gig and a cabaret here and there, like that comic one. She could actually sing very well, but no better than a lot of others. She was not the one Harry Wiener had invited to supper! She saw the little flicker in Lucca’s eyes and laid a hand on her shoulder. The Royal Theatre, that was quite fantastic! She was really happy for Lucca.

Later they lay in bed with their arms around each other, the jazz man would have to sleep on the sofa, but Lucca could not fall asleep. She cautiously wriggled free of Miriam’s heavy embrace and sat on the edge of the bed. The grey morning light was already penetrating the blind. Plastic baskets full of briefs, underpants and socks sat among the few books on the backless bookcase. Once they had been white but had faded into pale pink or pale blue shades after all the times they had been through the washing machine. The walls were adorned with photographs of sweaty, exhausted jazz musicians fastened with drawing pins, and ranged along the wainscot were Miriam and her boyfriend’s trodden-down shoes in rows amidst the dust. On the bedside table a foot file and a pessary sat beside the alarm clock. It was only just past five.

Miriam turned over on her side, she had a heavy face, in sleep she almost resembled a man. None the less she always wore close-fitting tops that emphasised her full bosom, and leggings despite her hefty thighs. There was something brash about Miriam. When she made a real effort she could look quite good, but she was particularly noisy and coarse if she was in the company of women better looking than herself. As if she was secretly offended by their genes. Several times Lucca had been taken aback by the way she bossed her man about, the tall, skinny guy with a ring in his ear, only to sit the next moment on his lap and start tongue-kissing. She had told Lucca with a grin that she had practically had to rape him the first time they made love. Miriam used her initiative when things did not develop of their own accord. In her opinion to be desired was a simple human right.

Lucca felt a tickling sensation on one foot. A wood ant was on its way along the vein protruding under the thin skin of the arch. The deck chair creaked as she bent down. The mouldy canvas tore underneath her as the ant curled up and fell through her fingers. It was hot, she rose, and everything went black for a moment.

She retreated into the shade at the end of the garden, where the wild growth around the stone wall made a chaotic barrier facing the woods. In some places dusty broken rays of sunlight broke through the thicket and touched a reddish trunk or a tuft of dark green needles, disorientating the eyes in a confused web of golden light surrounded by soft formless shadows. Everything had been in movement, the heavy tree trunks and the shadows and beams of sunlight, when she clamped her legs around his neck. His beard tickled the sides of her knees as he walked over the domed forest floor covered by dead needles with a firm grip of her ankles. He stumbled and almost lost his balance every time she threw out her arms because she caught sight of a squirrel or a pigeon that flew up and flapped against the branches, but then the trees opened out and gave way to the sand dunes covered with marram grass waving smoothly in the wind, and there was the sea, vast and very, very blue.

She turned round and sat down on the grass. Else’s deck chair was empty. She hadn’t seen her get up. Her stomach tied itself into a knot and she lay down on the grass, thinking of Otto’s eyes and his broad hands. The earth was cool and damp through her dress. Maybe he was lying looking at his hands right now as they explored a delicious mulatto girl’s body, infatuated by the difference between his own pale skin and hers. The sizzling of butter in the frying pan blended with the grasshoppers’ song. Lucca got to her feet. The top of the stable door to the kitchen was open. She stood watching Else coat the fish fillets in egg and breadcrumbs before putting them into the pan. She stood with one hand on her side as she turned them. Her grey hair was gathered into a careless, girlish knot and she had tied a pink sash round her waist as a skirt, indomitably feminine, thought Lucca.

There is more to life than love, she said, pouring out white wine. They sat at the garden table in the last golden light. You’ll discover that sooner or later. She looked down into her glass and up again at Lucca. Work, for instance… Strindberg, wasn’t it? They drank a toast to that. And children, what about children? Else thought about that as she parted flesh from bone. Children were a trap. Not you, she hastened to add with a reassuring pat on Lucca’s hand. Lucca had been so easy. Else removed a tiny bone from the corner of her mouth and put it on the edge of her plate. But you look like a cow, she said, and you feel like a cow, and you turn into a cow. Lucca thought of Miriam.

What if they had had a child? He would definitely not have wanted that. She thought of the American boy who had been given a red car for his birthday. Otto never spoke of him, apparently he had said all there was to say. The boy existed, but they did not know each other and that’s how it was. Otto didn’t even have a picture of him. A letter from Lester enclosing a drawing had arrived in the autumn. The only sign of the mother’s life was the neat, formal handwriting on the envelope. Lucca fixed the drawing to the fridge door with sticky tape. Otto accepted that, but when it fell down one windy day he left it on the floor. She got him to send the boy an advent calendar. She bought it herself. He looked at her as if he thought she was crazy, but he sent it.

She hadn’t even contemplated the possibility of their having a child. Only now did she calculate how many potential children had spurted out of him every time to no purpose. A whole class, a whole school, a whole city of unborn babies. She had never seriously imagined them walking down the street one day with a buggy, on a Saturday morning shopping trip. Maybe because she hadn’t dared. She visualised Otto’s blue eyes. She didn’t even know what they had seen, those eyes. Probably just a girl among so many others, a face in the line of faces blotting each other out on his sheet like transparencies projected on a screen. Click, and the world changed. But that can’t have been how he saw it. His world was probably always the same, only it was full of girls.

Lucca turned to look at the woods. The shadows had grown thicker among the straight columns of spruce. She tried to recall the men she had been with, either for a night, a few months or longer. There were twenty-four altogether, if she counted her first sweethearts. She recalled the advent calendar she had bought for Otto’s son. It pictured a crowd of children sledging and building snowmen and having snowball fights, all of them rosy-cheeked. She tried to reconstruct the sequence of the men she had known and visualised them with excited red cheeks and a number on their foreheads. When she kissed a new, strange face it had been like opening yet another lid, thrilled as a child with what might be hidden behind it. Had she really believed that Otto’s face was the last one? Was she so naïve? Had she imagined it would be Christmas every night for ever?

It was still light when she went to bed, having told Else she had a headache. She closed the blind to darken the room, light nights had never appealed to her. As a child she had been afraid night would not come, she didn’t know why, and she had been just as scared when Else drew down the black blind. She had insisted on keeping the bedside light on until she fell asleep. Else had draped one of her Indian scarves over the lamp and she had lain looking at the grey woollen petals and stems spreading over the ceiling and walls, where the embroidered flowers on the scarf threw their enlarged shadows. Now she lay open-eyed in the thick darkness of the room.

In the spring of 1965 Else and her first husband toured Italy by car. They were young and had only been married four years. She had married a successful young man, at least his parents were well-off, and Else’s mother and father were more than pleased. She had played with the idea of being an actor and studied with one for a few months, but nothing came of it. In one of the photographs from that trip she sits smiling in a white open-top Aston Martin. She wears sunglasses and a light-coloured silk scarf tied under her chin, and the road snakes behind her through rows of black pines on the Tyrolean mountainsides. Else’s first husband doesn’t appear in any of the pictures. He was the one who took them.

In Lucca’s opinion it was quite appropriate for him not to be in a single one of the snapshots. He was nothing but an eye in the camera he directed towards her mother, who did not yet know she was to be a mother the next year, standing in St Mark’s Square and beneath the arches of the Colosseum, smiling the same delighted smile. Lucca smiled when she looked at those pictures. They made her feel she was the surprise itself in her own person. If Else had had a child with the invisible photographer, Lucca would never have been born.

On the way back from Rome the young couple spent a few days in Viareggio, where one evening the invisible photographer ate some oysters he should not have eaten. Who knows, thought Lucca. If his bourgeois upbringing had not equipped him with this fateful weakness for oysters, the world might have been different. It would have been a world without her, in other words a completely unthinkable world, since she was the one thinking about it. But no less real for that reason.

While Else’s husband was lying ill she went for walks in the town and along the promenade. One afternoon a film was being shot, and she stood at the edge of the crowd of spectators behind the camera and the lamps shining whitely in the sun on a pale beautiful woman in sunglasses and a suit almost the same as Else’s. The lovely woman walked along the promenade again and again with quick steps wearing a contemplative air. Else recognised Marcello Mastroianni as the anxious man in a black suit with a white shirt and tie who followed the woman, trying in vain to persuade her to stop. Only after the fourth or fifth shot did Else notice the young man in a striped sailing shirt walking alongside the camera rails with the boom held high above his sunburned head. He himself had been keeping an eye on the tall Nordic woman among the spectators for some time.

It turned out that the film crew were staying at the same hotel as Else and her husband, and the very next day Else got out of the lift on the wrong floor, astounded and delighted at her own faithlessness, while the invisible photographer sat chained to a lavatory pan on the floor below. She allowed him to recover a bit before she informed him of what she had decided in the meantime. He must drive home without her. She didn’t love him any more, and she was bound to obey her feelings, she told him, and so the white Aston Martin had driven north with its lonely, rejected driver, out of the story. He left no more than a handful of holiday snaps of his lost beloved, which he sent her later without a covering letter, enclosed with the divorce papers so she could ponder whether it was a desperate or aloof, condoning gesture.

After he left, Else moved into the young sound engineer’s room, but she soon grew tired of watching the filming. Instead she lay on the beach all day long, alone for the first time in weeks. For once in her life, she thought rebelliously. Later she went with Giorgio to his home town to be introduced to his mother, a black-clad grey-haired woman who lent them her bedroom and gave them breakfast in bed, secretly crossing herself. There, in a Tuscan widow’s creaking bed, far too short and far too soft, Lucca had been conceived, according to her mother. In Lucca, with a view over the flat, tiled roofs and the hills with their olive groves and cypresses. It was Else’s idea to give her that name, to remember the view from their room each time she uttered it. Giorgio had told her Lucca was a boy’s name. What if it was a girl? Else didn’t care. Boy or girl, the view over the roofs of Lucca was the same.

Later on she said that had been the happiest time of her life. They cavorted around Italy for three months. There was so much he wanted to show her, and in every place there were people he knew. To start with she didn’t understand a word he said, but that didn’t matter. His eyes and his hands and his laughter were expressive enough. It was a never-ending party, one long chain of light, shining hours and endless warm nights of hunting for yet another riotous moment’s surrender to laughter and the craziest whims.

Giorgio went to Copenhagen with her. They were married at the town hall and spent the first year or two living in an attic flat with slanting walls and a loo in the courtyard. That was something Else always had to mention, the loo in the courtyard, as if it had been a special attraction. She gave up her dream of acting and became a presenter on the radio, while Giorgio knocked on the doors of the film studios in vain. But no one could use a sound engineer who did not understand the dialogue he recorded, and Else had to feed the family on her own. Lucca had no memories of that time. The first thing she remembered was the bedroom of the villa in Frederiksberg they moved into when her grandparents died, one soon after the other. The old mahogany bed where she snuggled up between Giorgio and Else in the mornings. She would creep in under his duvet, and he would bend one knee so the duvet made a cave with a narrow opening out to Else’s soft body in the morning light. She curled up in there like a little Eskimo in her igloo, knees up to her chin so she could fit between his thigh and chest, sniffing up the safe smell of his body.

When she woke up one morning he was gone. Else sat on the edge of the bed stroking her hair, speaking calmly to her in the wonderful voice that could say anything to anyone in every radio set in the land. Lucca became accustomed to the strange friends who came to dinner. Sometimes they were still there in the morning when she had to go to school. Her father had been a dreamer, Else told her many years later, a spoiled slacker. But hadn’t they been happy? Her mother fell silent for a long time before replying. Probably you were only happy a few moments at a time.

Lucca recalled the mornings in their bed when she pressed herself close to Giorgio’s warm body, a summer day when she rode on his shoulders through the plantation and a New Year’s Eve when she had been carried around the house by one strange guest after another, dressed as an Indian princess, wrapped up in silk with a red spot of lipstick on her forehead. She remembered Giorgio and Else dancing together, slowly and clasped close in the sweet, sickly smell of the funny pipes with no mouth-pieces that were passed round, and she remembered the music they danced to, Ravi Shankar, Carole King. Of course she had been in love with him, said Else, but they had been so young, it had been a young dream. There came a moment when you woke up.

Lucca thought about the morning she had woken up with Else sitting silently on the edge of the bed stroking her cheek. Lucca was afraid of forgetting Giorgio, and gradually did come to forget him. She saw no more of him during her childhood, but it never occurred to her to reproach him for that, and she did not ask Else why he never visited them. She did not want to hear her speaking ill of him, she would rather know nothing. So he became still more remote and indistinct. When she thought back to the morning when she awoke to the news that he had left, it was as if her father had been no more than a dream.

She found it hard to call up his face. It was his body she remembered, his brown skin and black beard and the soft sound of his voice, not what he had said. She forgot the language they had spoken together. As time went on she pictured him only in isolated images. She could remember him recording sounds for her on his tape recorder. She had to guess what they were. The cooing of a pigeon, wet sheets flapping in the wind, a chamois leather rubbing a window pane or the thin tones of a guitar from an egg slicer.

He had taught her to make spaghetti with butter and grated nutmeg. She recalled the sweet scent of nutmeg and sitting in the kitchen watching him eat while they listened to Else’s cool, precise voice on the radio. Neither of them understood perfectly what she said. It was the voice itself they listened to, both familiar and strange as she spoke to all and sundry. Suddenly he wasn’t there any more. She was in class one. She had her meals by herself in the kitchen, looked after by a nanny, when Else was on the radio at night. When she grew older, she made herself pasta al burro with nutmeg while listening to her mother speaking through the transistor’s vibrating plastic trellis, far away and yet so close she could hear the saliva between the consonants in her mouth.

There had been quarrels behind closed doors, and once while she was listening to them shouting at each other, she stole into his room with its bookcase filled with tapes of the sounds of rain and thunder and crackling fire, of dogs and birds, telephones and slamming doors. She found the album with photographs of him when young, the pictures from the town of her name. Cautiously she picked off the old glue that fixed her favourite pictures to the thick cardboard page, fearful as a thief. As if she were not merely taking what belonged to her. For it was her own story which began with the black and white photographs she was hiding. The one of Else in an open Aston Martin on the way through the Tyrol, unaware that she was on the way to her meeting with Lucca’s father. The one of Giorgio on a square in his home town, rocking a café chair in front of a church wall, brushed by the arrow-shaped shadows of the swallows, waiting for Else without himself being aware of it.

9

Else’s loneliness had acquired a purposeful character. All those men, thought Lucca, only to end up sitting alone in her childhood home surrounded by the wreckage of three marriages in the shape of furniture in various styles, according to the differing taste of the men and what had been in fashion at the time. Lucca was fascinated by her mother’s transformations as they came to light in the pictures of her.

With her first husband she had been a coquettish high-heeled blonde with narrow sunglasses and projectile breasts, undulating along in one checked suit after the other. Lucca couldn’t remember his name. With Giorgio Else had become a hennaed hippie in loosely fitting Indian cotton, and when Ivan came on the scene she turned into an authoritative career woman in dark, tailored jackets. Else laughed at herself, how could she have fallen for that Jacqueline Kennedy hat or that djellaba with embroidery around the collar. She did not seem surprised at the actual transformations, times changed, she had merely gone along with them.

Ivan ran an advertising agency. He had a square, brutal face and was always tanned, but Lucca wasn’t sure whether that was sun or whisky. His voice was very deep and she could hear how he loved it. He always sounded authoritative and effective, rather like pilots when they announce the cruising height and calculated flying time, so a feeling of shaving lotion and optimism fills the cabin. When he came back from one of his numerous business trips he always brought Lucca a gigantic box of chocolates. She felt suffocated by all that chocolate and the shame of accepting his bribes.

At first she didn’t believe it when Else told her he had moved in. She could not imagine a man more different from Giorgio and the other men who had lived with them for a short or longer spell. They had all been actors, journalists or architects, and Ivan didn’t suit the vegetating jumble of shabby heirlooms, palsied cane furniture and wilting pot plants. Oceans of newspapers, magazines and books flowed everywhere, and housework was done only when strictly necessary once a month when Else made a trip through the rooms with the vacuum cleaner in one hand and a cigarette in the other. But in a trice everything was transfigured. The cane furniture was replaced by bent-wood chairs, an opulent leather sofa made its entrance in company with a sofa table made of marble, and the walls of the damp-stained hovel were painted so white they made Lucca’s eyes hurt.

Else herself underwent a gradual transformation. She started to shave her armpits and cut her long hair. She was a different woman in her new buckled shoes, lipstick and eye shadow, and pale stripes. Previously lazy and untidy, she now radiated energy when she got home from broadcasting and served up a beautifully prepared dinner in no time. Formerly she had not been slow to put her changing lovers in their place with a sharp, cynical remark. Now she smiled in a feminine way as she listened to Ivan’s boring, self-satisfied accounts of the brilliant concept he had proposed for some campaign or other for a bank or a travel firm or a new kind of toffee. She was quite simply in love.

Lucca had to ask herself how this same woman could have fallen in love with her father. At dinner she mentioned Giorgio several times, but Ivan did not allow himself to be affected. He questioned them with interest about his predecessor, and although his cold-bloodedness irritated Lucca, she managed to enjoy seeing Else squirm as she answered his questions in subdued tones. No, they had no contact with him apart from an occasional postcard and a present every few years when he remembered Lucca’s birthday. That’s very strange, Ivan thought, giving Lucca a sympathetic glance that infuriated her.

Else laughed a lot when she was with Ivan, and it was no longer the ironical, at times scornful laughter as when she and her women friends sat in the kitchen drinking white wine and telling stories about the stupidity of men. It was open, unrestrained laughter, as if above all she was laughing at herself. Her laughter often left her smiling unconsciously, lost in wonder at what had happened to her. Ivan made her laugh, as Lucca faintly remembered her laughing when Giorgio picked her up and carried her out into the cold waves, kicking and flinging out her arms and legs.

She was thoughtful when she came down to the kitchen in the mornings. Previously she had talked like a machine-gun. Now she was the one who, distrait and delayed, looked up from her mug of coffee and asked Lucca to repeat what she had just said. Lucca thought that perhaps it didn’t matter who made her mother happy, and the thought confused her. Over the years Else had known so many men, one face had succeeded another like the numbers on a wheel of fortune clicking past the little peg that always reminded Lucca of the fuse on a huge firecracker. As if the whole tombola and its contents of gigantic teddy bears would explode in crackling fireworks if the wheel of fortune revolved too fast and started to shoot out sparks. But the wheel didn’t bolt, it stopped at Ivan. He was to be the lucky teddy bear Else could hug at night.

They were married, in church, the year after Lucca’s matriculation. She felt that she had landed up in the middle of a film under production and was forced to stay in the pew because the camera kept running. Incredulously she watched her mother in the low-cut, slit wedding dress of cream Thai silk as she walked alone up the aisle, with Ivan waiting at the altar, shining with sweat in his dress-suit. In the past, when she sat in the kitchen with her hennaed friends, Else always had a ruthless comment at the ready on bourgeois marriage as disguised prostitution. Now she herself had taken to it like another prize cunt in gift-wrap.

At the reception Lucca was surprised to find she knew so few of the guests. Most of them were Ivan’s friends, but many seemed more like business contacts than what one understands as friends. At Lucca’s table the talk was of segments and communications strategy. She slipped away during the bridal waltz and didn’t come home until late. Else sat on the kitchen table with a cigarette in one hand and a sausage sandwich in the other, in her white corsage and white silk stockings and suspender belt. Her thighs bulged out in the bare patch above the stockings and her bra was so tight it looked as if she had four breasts. Laughter bubbled up in Lucca’s throat, she could not stop it. Else looked stiffly at her for a moment, deathly pale, then she put the sandwich down on the worktop, jumped off the table and slapped her.

Lucca couldn’t remember ever having been beaten. Wordlessly she left the kitchen and went up to her room. Her cheek still burned and she regretted her cruel laughter. The next morning she apologised to Else. Ivan had gone to work and they sat over their coffee mugs as usual. Else stroked her cheek, the same cheek. She must try to understand, even if it might be hard. Else looked at her with tired, sorrowful eyes. She wanted this. She was going to try for happiness, and no-one, not even Lucca, would stop her.

That summer Lucca stayed at the villa as little as possible, she often slept with a girlfriend. She took a job as an assistant at a nursery school. None of her friends were in town, she was on her own, Else and Ivan spent most of the time at the holiday cottage. They drove into town together every day and Ivan fetched her from Radio House in the evening. Lucca hardly ever saw them. The school holidays had begun and there were only a few children left at the nursery school. It was an easy job, she spent most of the time at the playground sitting in the sun smoking with the teaching staff, while the children took care of themselves.

One afternoon it was her turn to lock up. One of the children was still waiting to be fetched, a boy of three. He anxiously asked where his father was. She took out a puzzle for him. In the end he started to cry. She sat cuddling the sniffing child until finally his father turned up, red in the face and full of excuses. He had been at an important meeting.

She had not seen him before. Usually the mother fetched the boy. He might be any age between thirty and forty, his short hair was grizzled, but his face looked young. He picked up the boy and stretched out his free hand. Apparently he thought they should say goodbye properly now he had let her wait so long. He fetched the boy on the following days as well, and every time he went out of his way to ask if it had been a good day, smiling shyly.

He was good-looking, broad-shouldered with a narrow waist, and there was something lithe about his movements, but she did not give much thought to that before she met him one Saturday afternoon, cycling. His hair was wet and stood on end and he wore a sleeveless vest so you could see his brown, sinewy upper arms. A badminton racket stuck out of a bag on his luggage carrier. He had been playing, he said needlessly, awkward because of the unexpected meeting, then plucked up courage and invited her for a beer.

His shyness reassured her, although he was twice as old as she was. He seemed like a contemporary who had happened to be born much earlier. He turned out to be easy to talk to, and he smiled boyishly at nothing. Later on she remembered him for his restrained strength, as if he was afraid of hurting her. It was the first time she had had an affair with a man who was so much older than herself.

It lasted a month. He visited her in the evening once or twice a week, and he always remembered to have a shower before cycling home. They had the villa to themselves, but the risk of Else or Ivan happening to turn up only made her nervous and still more impatient when she was waiting for him. They used the mahogany bed in Else and Ivan’s room, where Else and Giorgio had slept in their time and where she had crept into her father’s warmth under the duvet on Sunday mornings. She liked thinking of that when she looked at herself in the mirror on the wardrobe door, infatuated and marvelling as she sat there astride a strange, married man in the selfsame bed.

In the days that passed between their meetings she felt she was moving in a different world. The dangerous and dramatic world where each of them carried the secret of the other. She thought of him practically all the time, both when she was alone and in the playground listening with half an ear to what the teachers were saying. She watched his son running around among the other children, knowing nothing of what his father got up to with her in a strange house when he had kissed him goodnight and cycled off with his racket. Was she in love? She did not know. She always remembered him somewhat differently from what he was when they were once again in Else’s bed. She felt more in love with him when they were not together and she cycled through town alone, surrounded by the invisible aura of their secret.

He did not come for his son so often any more, but the few times he did she was surprised at how good he was at seeming natural. Her legs started to tremble when she caught sight of him. He even looked into her eyes as he bade her a smiling farewell with the boy on his arm, as if they had never been closer than that. Usually his wife came. She had short hair and looked like a mouse with her pointed nose and receding chin. It seemed a bit strange to greet her, but not as strange as she had feared. The trysts with her husband took place in a world where the mouse-faced woman did not exist. Just as Lucca did not exist either in the safe, everyday world in which she was only the assistant who looked after the woman’s child.

The mahogany bed in the quiet villa was a white island in the twilight, an enchanted island where you forgot what you had left behind. A secret island where you could live a whole life without becoming a day older than you were when you went ashore. He was only a dark figure on the white sheet in the dusk, and she felt she put everything she had known behind her when she slowly undressed before him and felt the air from the open window on her skin. She closed her eyes and he caressed her cautiously until she could wait no longer. When at last he penetrated her it felt as if she split in two lengthways and her limbs and bones parted from each other, light and delicate as birds’ bones. She imagined they were held together by his hard sinewy arms, that she would float away on the wind if he let go, and she clung to him so that he should hold her still tighter and pierce still deeper inside her and split her into even smaller, even more splintered and vanishing fragments.

One evening when she lay listening to the water running onto the bathroom tiles, she heard a muted sobbing from in there. She went into the corridor and opened the door. He was crouching under the shower with his head between his knees and his hands folded around his neck. The water trickled down his back, which shuddered rhythmically in time with his sobs. She squatted down beside him and was about to put her arm round his shoulders, but something made her stop, she didn’t know what. Maybe it was the sight of a grown man sitting on the tiled floor weeping. He stood up, found a towel and went into the bedroom. She sat on the bed watching him dress. When he had laced up his shoes he said they would have to stop meeting. He was suddenly very calm. He couldn’t. He couldn’t do it. What? He glanced at her briefly. Nothing… She followed him with her eyes from the window as he disappeared on his bicycle with his badminton racket sticking out of the sports bag on his luggage carrier. The next day she called the nursery school and handed in her notice.

She went up to the holiday cottage that afternoon. Ivan sat reading in the garden. He had on a faded T-shirt and sandals, almost playing the part of an ageing hippie with a haircut, and not the dynamic advertising chief who talked like an energetic pilot. She had never seen him with a book before. He got to his feet when she went into the garden, not specially surprised, it seemed. He explained, almost apologetically, that Else was working late and would probably come the next day. But she would stay? He had bought a large steak, there would be enough for two. Actually he was one of those people who could get a bit sick of fish. Lucca smiled, and he looked inquiringly at her, awkwardly waving the book he still held in his hand. It was a yellowing paperback, he had found it on the book shelf, The Outsider by Camus. He hadn’t read it for years. He had read a lot when he was young, he added, as if frightened she might not believe him.

He was different, more subdued than usual, friendly without seeming to launch a charm offensive. It struck her that he behaved like someone at home with himself. They were both at home, but they behaved very politely, as if they were also each other’s guest. He opened a bottle of white wine, she brought glasses. They sat in the garden talking of Camus. The best thing in the book was the beginning, he thought. The descriptions of an oddly stupefied life, the heat and the sea, the women, the monotony. The feeling of being anonymous, as if everything was at one and the same time very close and yet distant. That was how he had felt for years, until he met her mother.

He had worked and worked, he hadn’t really done much else, there hadn’t been time for private life, nor had it interested him. In fact nothing had interested him. Maybe his work, when he was immersed in it, but otherwise… He had known various women, but each time he had let it fall apart. He had had the feeling of being adrift, as if in a boat without oars, taken by the current, just on and on, he had no idea where.

He had never believed he was suited to living in a permanent relationship. Perhaps he wasn’t, he added with a smile, time would tell. He looked down at his glass, embarrassed. It wasn’t always easy, he went on after a pause. Her mother was demanding, but she knew everything about that, of course. And when you both had a past… they weren’t so young any more. Enthusiasm alone… he smiled again and left the sentence hanging in the air.

Lucca looked at him, attentive to every single word and gesture. She felt her gaze made him shy, he dared only respond to it for a second at a time. The rest of the time he looked ahead or studied the creases in his trousers, smoothing them thoughtfully with his palm. For the first time she glimpsed what Else must have seen in him behind the façade of self-confidence, shaving lotion and expensive habits. Something lonely and unguarded which at moments came in sight on his face, almost innocent in his appeal for understanding or at least acceptance.

He opened another bottle at dinner time. They ate outside as they did when Else was there. He asked her what she was going to do. She didn’t know what to say. Travel, she said. Maybe she wanted to be an actor. It sounded naïve. She had not really thought through the idea herself, and Else had not been particularly encouraging when she heard that her daughter was thinking of repeating the foundered ambitions of her own youth. She did not consider it the right thing for Lucca and asked what made her think she had any acting talent? But Ivan seemed to take her seriously.

She had radiance, anyway. He didn’t know anything about drama, but he knew something about radiance, about presence. She seemed very mature, he felt, older than she was. But luckily she was still too young to mind being told that. He smiled and winked at her. Lucca was about to get irritated at his wink and the way he pronounced the word presence when he asked why she didn’t go and look for her father. She said she didn’t even know where he lived. But she could probably find out! It was important for her, more so than she might realise. He had eyes in his head…

He looked at her, and now it was Lucca’s turn to look down. But who was he to sit here and talk twaddle, he went on reassuringly and started to talk about his childhood. His parents had sent him to boarding school when they were divorced. His mother was said to have found someone else. His father prevented him from seeing her but he didn’t discover that until he had grown up and it was too late. Imagine living in hatred of your mother, he said, and then finding you had been wrong. Again she caught a glimpse of something vulnerable in his eyes, as if a boarding-school boy stood on tiptoe inside him, in shorts and with grass on his knees, squinting through the cracks in the hardened mask his face had turned into with the years.

He had bought strawberries. He opened the third bottle of wine, although she protested. Had their wedding been ghastly? She shrugged her shoulders and let him fill her glass. It had been Else’s idea. She put her feet up on the chair and leaned back, supporting her glass against her knees. She felt drowsy in a pleasant way. To have a white wedding, he went on, lifting his glass. She thought of Else’s thighs, bulging out in the bare patch between her stockings and suspender belt when they met in the kitchen on her wedding night. He looked over at the edge of the woods before drinking.

He could well have done without such an exhibition, himself. He sought her eyes again. She looked at him over the rim of her glass, sipping her wine. He perfectly understood why she had made herself scarce. He himself had felt like heading off just then, he smiled, that is, if it hadn’t been for Else. But she had been so happy that day. Lucca nodded. The strawberries were big and dark red, she ate them with her fingers and bit them off at the stalk. The juice made her lips sting slightly. He asked if she would like coffee. She said she felt like an early night. It had been nice, he went on. Yes, she replied, and met his eyes. He thought they understood each other better.

Not until she lay down did she realise how drunk she was. The air was hot and stuffy in the little room. She opened the window and threw off the duvet, felt the coolness on her naked body, curled up with her knees under her chin as she had done when as a little girl she had crept up close to Giorgio in the mornings. The wine made her dizzy although she lay quite still. She felt the room turning slowly around her, if she herself wasn’t turning, as if she was in a boat without oars, adrift on the whirling currents that carried her along in circles, on and on through the half-dark summer night.

She thought of the weeping badminton player under the shower and of his strong arms that had crushed her and at the same time held her together so she should not break apart and be blown away like the almost weightless remains of a disintegrated bird. It already seemed so remote, something she had long since left behind. She turned and turned, floating unceasingly on the current, and with a little, strangely happy pain it came to her that she had felt his hands for the last time when she lay like this curled around herself, as he lay beside her with his tensed stomach against her spine and pressed his warm, hard cock between her thighs.

But it was neither his hands nor his cock she felt and it was not like gliding from a doze into a dream. It was like awakening, not to reality, but from a misty dream to one that was crude and sharp, when, as if struck by an electric shock, she turned round and kicked. Ivan fell on the floor with a crash, pale in the dim light and with an erection that looked both comical and macabre in the midst of his flaccid nakedness. She had pushed herself into the furthest corner of the bed and pressed against the wooden wall with the duvet held tightly around her. Out, she screamed, out, get out! He rose, swayed and looked at her in despair before going out and closing the door behind him. She remained in her corner, shaking all over. Soon afterwards she heard his car start and the gravel on the road crunch beneath the tyres as he drove away. When she began to breathe calmly she got out of bed and dressed.

She walked along the cycle path through the plantation although it was a detour, shivering among the spruce trees in the dim light. When she came down to the harbour she looked anxiously around her, but could not see Ivan’s car anywhere. No one was about. She sat on a bench near the ferry quay and looked across at the fishmongers’ empty window-panes, where a crooked little moon shone above the marble counter and the posts along the quay and their floating shadows on the undulations of the calm water. The last ferry had sailed. She was afraid of falling asleep while she waited, and it was like a cut in a film, dreamless and without transition when the sun roused her and she rose, dazed, from the bench and saw the cars boarding the ferry, clattering over the steel ramp.

She put her hands on the varnished rail and felt the faint quivering of the engine’s vibrations drumming through the hull. Slowly the wake opened its fan of foam in the increasing distance from the wharf beneath the little red lighthouse that had always made her think of a clown in a red jersey, with a white stripe on his stomach and his clown’s nose in the clouds. She recalled how she had stood between Giorgio and Else screwing up her eyes against the reflections on the water, like needles in a chaos of flashes. She remembered that it had been like travelling for real, far away from everything she knew.

Her mother never found out what had happened. Lucca waited before going home to the villa until she was sure Else was at work. She was thinking of the last postcard she had received from Giorgio a few days after her birthday. It was as brief as ever and written in the usual careless handwriting. The card showed an early Renaissance painting, an altarpiece with the Madonna and child, blue-white and with set features, slim, with narrow eyes, against a golden background. The card had been stamped in Florence like the others he had sent in recent years. He probably lived there. Anyway, it was all she had to go on.

She packed a bag with essentials and left a note to Else saying she was going away for a week with a friend. Then she found her passport, went to the bank and withdrew all her money. That evening she was in a train travelling south. She changed in Hamburg and slept through most of Germany, leaning on her bag. In the morning she arrived at Munich where she changed again. A few hours later she was gazing out at the spruce-clad slopes of the Tyrol.

10

The brakes squealed underneath her, the train stopped abruptly and she was jerked forwards. There was blood all over her thighs. A droning voice from the loudspeakers drowned out her sobs with its list of town names. The sun shone horizontally through the frosted window glass of the toilet, golden like the background to the stiff-necked Virgin Mary and her chubby child on Giorgio’s postcard. In her haste she had forgotten her period was due. She had put down the leaden feeling in her stomach to the shock, the delayed anger and sense of being left completely on her own. She had woken up in a tunnel through the Alps feeling a stickiness in her crotch, and cursed herself when the train emerged into the light and she saw blood trickling down her legs under her skirt. She placed her jacket over the dark patch on the seat and rummaged feverishly in her bag for a pair of clean briefs.

The toilet stank and the floor was soiled around the lavatory pan where male passengers had stood swaying in time to the movements of the train. She threw the blood-soaked briefs in the refuse bin, pulled a handful of tissues from the holder on the wall and stuffed them into the clean briefs, but she bled through them at once. She had sat there bleeding for the best part of an hour when the train stopped. Several times impatient hands had rattled the door handle. For the past twenty-four hours she had eaten nothing but a dry ham sandwich in Munich station, and had thrown half of that away because the bread swelled like a sponge in her mouth. Hunger, pains and loss of blood made her tremble, and her forehead was covered with cold drops of sweat.

The train did not arrive in Milan until the evening. Her legs buckled under her when she tried to stand up. She took off the long-sleeved blouse she wore under her denim jacket, and tied it like a loin cloth under her skirt, buttoned the jacket over her bare torso and looked at herself in the mirror. She resembled a pregnant drug addict, pale and sweating, with red circles round her eyes and a swollen stomach. Her head swam as if she was doped when she climbed down to the platform clutching her bag.

She found the way to the ladies’ cloakroom with a bag from the station pharmacy. A bent old woman in a blue overall was washing the floor with a gigantic mop. Her face was dark and wrinkled and her eyes were big and black beneath the headscarf she had pulled right over her forehead. She looked Lucca up and down and shook her head, smiling. Half her teeth were missing and her cooing voice sounded more like that of an infant than an old woman.

She put down her mop, took Lucca by the wrist and led her out of the door. Her hand was crippled with rheumatism. Maybe she was a real witch, thought Lucca, letting herself be led along a dark passage and further on down a corridor with dirty walls. The witch went on mumbling to herself in her cooing baby’s voice without letting go of Lucca’s wrist for a moment, rocking from side to side like a little tugboat.

The last door along the corridor led into a whitewashed room with a shower and a basin. Lucca started to undress and the witch clapped her small crooked hands. She picked up the bloody clothes and went out. Lucca gasped when the streams of icy water struck her. She turned on the hot tap and closed her eyes as the heat went through her, into her flesh.

She wondered how Else would have reacted if she had told her what had happened. She wasn’t sure her mother would have sided with her as a matter of course, remembering what Else had said the night of the wedding when she found her sitting on the kitchen table in her corset and silk stockings. She was going to try to be happy, and Lucca was not going to stop her. Maybe she would even have looked at her sceptically, in the way she briefly and secretly glanced at her firm, slim body and taut breasts.

She might even have asked whether Lucca had not herself played up to Ivan, possibly without realising it. She was still so young that she probably did not fully understand the extent of the impression she made on an adult man. Lucca recalled the glances Ivan had given her now and then, if he went into the kitchen as she bent over the dishwasher, her breasts visible in the neck of her blouse, or when they met in the corridor on their way to the bathroom, he in a dressing gown, she in briefs and a T-shirt. Veiled glances he felt ashamed to acknowledge. She had not allowed herself to take any notice of those glances, and when she thought of them she felt sticky. She tried to remember whether she had made any wrong moves as they sat in the garden drinking white wine. Whether she had looked into his eyes in an ambiguous way or allowed a smile to stay on her lips a second or two longer than necessary, marvelling as she did that he could talk so sensitively about himself.

She wasn’t ignorant of the impression she made on adult men. She provoked them, she felt that, whether because of her long-limbed slenderness or her courageous eyes that dared to meet and hold a stranger’s gaze. Perhaps it was the contrast between her young fragility and the fearlessness in her eyes that was so provocative. Sometimes it amused her, at others she was alarmed at how little was needed for the sight of her to make cracks in their armour of even-tempered maturity. It might be a chance exchange of glances on the street, it might be the father of a friend or one of Else’s acquaintances she chatted to with a girlish smile, but it was only a game, as when you pick up a knife and feel how sharp it is, with a cautious finger along the edge of the blade. She herself felt a thrill, but also a touch of fright, when mature men opened the door to give a glimpse of their experienced, slightly superior façade. In fact there was something distasteful in their betrayal of themselves as they interviewed her about her future plans, as if that could interest them. She was only attracted to those men who did not allow themselves to be provoked by her youth. Serene men resting confidently in their ageing skins.

When she met the badminton player she knew at once it would not last long. They walked through Frederiksberg Gardens on that Saturday when they met by chance. They passed several newly-weds being photographed by the lake with its swans and the island with the Chinese pavilion. So many couples were coming to the garden, he said, they would have to take care not to get into each other’s pictures. He stopped to tie his shoelace. She held his cycle for him as he bent down, balancing on one leg. There was a big black patch of sweat on his vest between the shoulder blades, and suddenly, without thinking, she laid her hand on his back. Maybe it was only because she wanted to feel the thin damp cotton sticking to his spine. He put his foot back on the ground and looked at her with a sorrowful expression, as if her touch had inflicted him with an unexpected pain. They stood opposite each other, he raised one hand, then stopped and held the hand in front of him as if he was about to change his mind, before cautiously brushing her cheek with the back of his hand. He knew himself it was meaningless, but all the same he did it.

When she had dried herself and put on clean clothes she went out into the corridor again. She found the witch behind a half-open door, sitting at a small table covered with oil-cloth. The walls were filled with metal shelves full of cleaning materials, and an army of mops was deployed in a corner. Her clothes were in a bucket of soapy water. The witch nodded and cooed something, as she poured out coffee in a bowl, put some sugar in it and set it before her on the oil-cloth. Lucca sipped the hot coffee. The witch’s wrinkled mouth worked like a hamster’s as she observed Lucca with her black eyes, that made her haggard face seem still smaller. The coffee was strong and very sweet and Lucca felt the sugar and caffeine spreading through her starved body.

Suddenly the witch struck the table as if seized by an idea, and started rummaging in a shabby mock leather handbag. She put a photograph in front of Lucca, bent at the corners from the numerous times it had been fished out of the worn bag. The three smiling people had red eyes in the flashlight. A hefty, balding man in a loose shirt held a cigar in one hand and had an arm round the shoulders of an equally stout woman with a child in her arms. They stood on a pavement and on the other side of the street behind a basketball court surrounded by wire fencing could be glimpsed a square, brown brick building. A car was on its way out of the picture, only the tailboard was left, and Lucca recognised its yellow colour from films. Mio figlio, cooed the witch, drumming the smiling man in the face with a bent forefinger. America, America, she went on and looked at Lucca encouragingly.

As they sat silently opposite each other she heard someone turning on the tap in the bathroom. Soon afterwards a tall African joined them. He nodded politely and went over to the far end of the room where the mops were ranged. He wore a blue overall like the witch, he was tonsured and very thin, and his bare feet left wet prints on the dusty floor. His feet were very large. He rolled a small carpet out in front of him on the floor and stood facing one of the shelves of scouring powder and chlorine in big plastic cans. The witch looked down at the picture of her son, daughter-in-law and grandchild, lost in her own thoughts while the man in the corner raised his hands to his face and spoke out hoarsely in a subdued, chanting tone. Lucca wanted to leave, but couldn’t raise the energy. The man kneeled on the carpet and rose again, he repeated this several times. He kneeled again and bent over with his forehead to the floor, so she saw only his bent back in the blue overall and the pale skin on the soles of his feet, etched with dark lines.

It was evening when she was in a train again, freshly washed, all in clean clothes with a fresh sanitary towel in her briefs. She watched the dreary tenements beside the railway, where lights had already been lit behind the half-closed blinds, sometimes catching a glimpse of garishly lit rooms or along monotonous side-streets with parked cars and flashing neon lights. A pine tree stood on a little hill in front of the evening sky. The trunk was crooked and bent, and the spidery crown’s ramifications were stretched out under the dense clusters of needles. She leaned her forehead against the dark, vibrating pane, feeling an increasing tension in her body, as if she were a clock being wound up.

11

She arrived in Florence after midnight and found a cheap pensione in a side street. A bald man with liver spots on his pate showed her the way along a murky corridor. She opened the shutters, the window looked onto a narrow courtyard. She put her head out and looked up to the small section of dark sky. When she had undressed and was lying under the blanket between the worn sheets, it seemed completely absurd that she should be in the same town as Giorgio, that he was in another bed somewhere, alone or with an unknown woman. Maybe she would never find him, maybe he would have no wish to see her. Maybe he had moved to another town.

In the morning when she went out to the little reception desk at the end of the corridor the bald man had been replaced by a pregnant woman in a large apron. Behind her the door to the kitchen stood open, pots were already steaming on the stove. An elderly black-clad woman sat in a corner of the kitchen watching television. The television voices almost drowned out Lucca’s and she had to gesture furiously before managing to convey to the woman that she needed a telephone directory. There were four people with the name of Giorgio Montale. She wrote down the addresses and phone numbers. The pregnant woman stood at the stove stirring the pot with one hand pressed to her side. Lucca asked to borrow the telephone and held a clenched fist to one ear. The pregnant woman smilingly shook her head without ceasing the mechanical circular movement of her ladle in the steaming pot.

There was a bar at the end of the street. Lucca asked for an espresso and poured in three bags of sugar. She had never drunk black coffee before. That was something the witch in Milan had taught her. There was a pay-phone at the end of the bar. She dialled the top number on her list and pressed a finger in her ear to muffle the loud voices and the hiss of the coffee machine. The first Giorgio Montale was an old man with a cracked, piping voice. A woman’s voice answered to the next number. Lucca asked for Giorgio Montale, and the woman’s voice repeated the same incomprehensible question in an insistent tone until she finally gave up. Lucca thought the woman had cut her off, but the next moment she heard a soft man’s voice. She asked in English if he was Giorgio Montale. He was. The man with the soft voice spoke a little German.

Lucca started to shake at the knees as she introduced herself and explained why she was calling. The man was very friendly. No, unfortunately he didn’t have a daughter in Denmark, but he and his wife had always wanted to go to Stockholm. He had two sons, but she was a girl, why was she called Lucca? She explained that she was named after her father’s home town. It was a beautiful town, he said, she must be a beautiful girl. He himself came from Palermo. Lucca could hear his wife talking to him in the background. He was sorry, he would have to hang up. He was sure she would find her father.

Neither the third nor the fourth Giorgio Montale answered the telephone. Lucca found her way to the station and bought a street plan at a kiosk. She found the addresses in the index, unfolded the map on the floor and bent down over the crooked web of streets, surrounded by the shoes and suitcases on wheels of passers-by. One of the Giorgios lived in a suburb, the other in the city centre, on the other side of the river. She decided to walk across there. It was hot, and the narrow streets were crowded with tourists, trudging sluggishly along in groups. She walked map in hand so as not to lose her way and only fleetingly noticed the façades of green and white marble of the churches she passed en route. The river was yellowish brown like the house walls, and from the bridge where she crossed she could see another bridge with small houses built on it, at a distance they looked like birds’ nesting-boxes. Behind the flat, tiled roofs beside the river rose the dome of the cathedral, it too was covered with red tiles, slightly pointed in its vast curvature.

Soon afterwards she was on the second floor of an old building ringing the doorbell. The marble floor of the landing was checked like a chess board, and the wooden panels of the staircase were dark and shone with varnish. She rang again and was about to go when she heard a bolt being drawn. She jumped, she had not heard steps inside the apartment. The man who opened the door must have been in his early thirties. His short hair was fair and stood on end, but his skin was dark and his eyes brown. He was very muscular, and there was a marked contrast between his broad hairy arms and the soft movement he used to smooth the collar of his kimono, as if he was caressing himself. He smiled and put his head on one side, giving her an inquiring look.

She asked if he was Giorgio Montale. He shook his head, still smiling, negatively waving his index finger to and fro as if she was a child who had done something wrong. She asked if Giorgio Montale lived there. He nodded but she could not understand what he said in his lazy, melodious voice, which was surprisingly high. The man looked at her expectantly. A large blue-grey cat appeared in the doorway. It laid back its ears and pressed its head lovingly against the man’s powerful legs. She couldn’t find anything to say. He held up a flat hand as a sign for her to wait, pushed the door partly closed and came back soon afterwards with a notebook and pen. She wrote her name and the name of the pensione.

Walking back to the river she realised she hadn’t eaten anything yet. Everything seemed pretty hopeless. She felt sure it was not her Giorgio who lived with the blue cat and the man with yellow hair. The idea made her smile. The list of addresses was already crumpled from being clutched in her hand. When she caught sight of a taxi she signalled. She gave the driver the last address and leaned back in the seat. Gradually the historic buildings came to an end, and the town looked like any other city with straight streets and modern houses. They drove for a long way before the taxi suddenly stopped in front of a big housing block. She paid and stood looking around her. A group of boys were kicking a football around on the bare ground between the blocks of damp-stained concrete with covered balconies where washing hung in layers. The sun was already low in the sky. In the distance a water tower loomed over the row of cypresses beside a motorway. On the other side she saw the silhouette of the big arched roof over the rows of seats in a stadium.

She rang several times when she had finally found the right door. No one was in. She sat down on the stairs and leaned against the cool wall. Voices sounded from the surrounding flats, a child cried, and a television blared a high-pitched fanfare. She bent her knees and pushed against the wall when a woman passed her on her way up with her bulging bags of shopping. Shortly afterwards an old man came down, slowly, his back was bent. He stopped a few steps further down and looked at her curiously with his runny eyes. His shirt stuck out of the fly on his shiny worn trousers and he had forgotten to shave his throat. Lucca smiled at him. He didn’t seem to notice or else did not take in her friendly expression. He merely stared at her vacantly before going on downstairs.

Half an hour passed before Lucca heard steps approaching again. A woman came in sight and stopped where the old man had stood. She must have been in her late forties, fifty perhaps. Her thick hair was a grey and black bird’s nest around her pale, worn features. She had narrow eyes which fixed Lucca with a hard glance as she slowly came on up the stairs. Lucca stood up and introduced herself. The woman brushed the hair from her eyes with a bony hand before hesitantly extending it towards Lucca. She spoke English with a strong accent, in a hoarse voice. As she unlocked the door she explained that Giorgio would be in later. She turned in the open door. Her name was Stella, by the way. She looked at Lucca and gave her a delayed smile.

She apologised for the mess. Lucca glanced round. It looked as if no housework or tidying up had been done for a long time. The furnishings were so anonymous that they said nothing about the inhabitants of the flat, other than their total lack of interest in its appearance. There was a dining table at one end of the living room, still adorned with cups and plates from breakfast. At the other end were a shabby sofa and two assorted armchairs. There were no curtains and the walls were bare. In one corner were a television and an ironing board in front of a pile of cardboard boxes full of clothes. Stella asked if she was hungry and started to clear away the cups and plates.

The door to the bedroom was open, Lucca glimpsed an unmade bed. It is a small flat, said Stella behind her back, putting a plate of cheese and salami on the table. Did she have somewhere to stay? Lucca nodded and sat down. When had she arrived? Stella lit a cigarette as Lucca ate and explained how she had found them. Stella would have to go out again soon, but she could just wait for Giorgio. They both worked in the evenings, actually he should be home by now. But she should have something to drink as well! She shook her head at her own vagueness and went back into the kitchen. Lucca looked out at the covered balcony. Three man’s shirts hung on the line floppily waving their sleeves.

Stella came back with a bottle of mineral water and a glass. Unfortunately that was all she had. She should have known Lucca was coming. Lucca said she had tried to telephone. Stella lit another cigarette and inhaled, looking at Lucca with her hard narrow eyes. She had expected her to turn up one day. Suddenly she got to her feet, Giorgio would be sure to come soon. She went into the bedroom. When she came back she had on a white shirt with a black bow tie, a black, thigh-length skirt and black stockings. There was something inappropriate about the tie, and Stella looked as if she could see what Lucca was thinking. Her hair was combed back from her forehead and gathered with a clasp. Her face seemed still more angular and wasted without the bird’s nest of unkempt hair to frame it. She put out her hand in farewell. Lucca would probably have left when she came back. She hoped she would have a pleasant stay in Italy.

Lucca heard her steps fade out of hearing down the stairs. She rose and opened the bedroom door. Their clothes were jumbled together in heaps on the bed, the floor and over a chair. A low bookcase held books in close-packed piles and on top of it was a framed photograph. She recognised Stella, a younger, sunburned Stella in a flowered dress. Beside her stood a man with dark curly hair and a full beard. He wore a checked shirt hanging loose over his trousers. The same old shirt he had worn when they were at the summer cottage. Lucca recalled the feeling of the soft, washed-out material when she pressed her face against his stomach. She put a hand over his jaw. The eyes were the same too, the creases around them when he smiled.

She lay down on the sofa in the living room. Now it was just a question of waiting and she would hear the steps coming up the stairs and a key inserted in the lock. She thought of Stella’s hard, inquiring scrutiny before she took the last steps up and stretched out her hand.

She awoke in semi-darkness. At first she did not know where she was. She could feel there was someone in the room and sat up in confusion. He sat astride a chair over at the table with his arms resting on its back. He looked at her, supporting his chin on his crossed arms. His beard had gone and his unruly hair looked as if someone had emptied an ashtray over his head. Slowly she recognised his features from the youthful black and white picture, behind the furrows carved into his face. He had been observing her while she slept. It’s me, she said in Danish, in a muted voice. It’s me, Lucca…

He nodded and smiled faintly, and only then did she notice the tears that had gathered at the corners of his eyes. She rose and went over to him, but stopped when he turned his face away. She stood still for a moment before cautiously laying a hand on his shoulder. He looked up at her, dried his cheeks with his palms and got up from the chair. Then he suddenly smiled and flung out his arms like a clown, as if to excuse his tears. He embraced her. She didn’t cry. She would have liked to cry, she had pictured herself weeping.

She was surprised he was not taller. He smelled slightly of sweat, but his smell was not as she remembered. While they stood there embracing he said something she did not understand. He held her away from him and smiled again. He spoke Italian to her. Apparently he had forgotten the scraps of Danish he had learned while he lived with Else. She hadn’t imagined they might not be able to talk together. It made them shy. He pointed to his watch and smiled again. Andiamo, he said and nodded towards the door.

She had no idea where he was taking her. Now and then he looked at her with his sad eyes and smiled mysteriously. He asked her to wait outside a shop and soon returned with a bottle of wine and a bag smelling of grilled chicken. He waved the wine and the bag and smiled, indicating they should go on. He put on speed, occasionally glancing at his watch. They had walked for a quarter of an hour when they came to a cinema. Was he going to invite her to the movies? Giorgio went first up a steep staircase on the side of the building. The steps led to a door in the middle of the bare wall. He unlocked it, switched on the light inside and held open the door for her with a gallant gesture.

While she watched he took a big reel of film from a round box and fixed it with practised movements on one of the projectors. He called her over with a cunning look and pointed to a little window. Down in the auditorium the audience were taking their places. He pressed a button and the lights dimmed in the hall. Then he started the machine and the spool began to rotate with a ticking sound while the film ran past the bright ray of light that penetrated the darkness of the cinema. Giorgio pointed to his watch again and shook his wrist as if he had burned himself. Lucca had to smile.

He took plates, cutlery and glasses from a cupboard and laid a small table between the projectors. The grilled chicken was still warm and Giorgio watched her gleefully as she gnawed the meat from her half and sucked her fingers. He took a sip of wine and washed it around his mouth with the air of a discriminating connoisseur which brought the smile to her face again. They drank a silent toast, Giorgio assumed a ceremonial expression, and it all made her feel she was in a silent film, partly because of the ticking sound of the machine, partly Giorgio’s comic gestures. He wanted to amuse her, but the melancholy look did not leave his eyes. The wine relaxed her, and the tension that had held her in its hard grip for two days was replaced by a crestfallen flatness. There was so much she would have liked to ask him about, so much she had wanted to tell him.

He rose, put a reel of film on the other machine and told her by signs to look out of the little window. Lucca viewed the distant picture floating in the dark. A man and a woman lay in a four-poster bed making love in the golden light of an open fire, and suddenly she saw a little white flash in the right hand corner of the picture. Immediately Giorgio set the other projector going and the next moment the couple in bed were succeeded by a group of riders in fluttering cloaks galloping beside a wood at dawn. He stopped the first projector, took the reel off and carried it over to a table with two steel plates on which he rewound the film. He went to the window and absent-mindedly watched what was happening on the screen.

When they were in the street after the show he took her arm and led her to a bus stop. Fishing a crumpled packet of cigarettes out of his breast pocket he offered her one. She accepted it, although she didn’t feel like smoking. There was hardly any traffic. Long rows of cars were parked beside the closed shutters of the shops. A little further on they heard the shrill yelp of a burglar alarm. Giorgio stooped slightly, one hand in his pocket, now and then taking a drag at his cigarette. He looked at her and shook his head as if he still couldn’t believe his eyes. Lucca… he said softly. She smiled back, but it was a slow smile, her mouth felt sluggish and stiff.

There were only a few people on the bus. A girl of her own age sat looking blankly out at the shuttered façades. The thick layer of powder on her cheeks made her look like a doll in the dull light. She cautiously pulled at the nylon stocking on one knee where a stitch had run and moved her head from side to side, she must have had a stiff neck from sitting on an office chair all day. Behind her sat a young man in soldier’s uniform with a rucksack between his legs. He had his earphones on and sat with closed eyes, nodding mechanically. Lucca could hear a faintly pulsing whisper from his ears.

Giorgio patted her arm and pointed at the window pane reflecting their transparent faces. He straightened her profile like any street photographer and rearranged his own face in profile, alternately pointing at her nose and his own, glancing at her out of the corner of his eye in a way that made her laugh. He laughed himself. It was true, she had his nose. He looked down at the hands on her lap, laughed again and let his shoulders drop as he shook his head wonderingly. Lucca, he mumbled, Lucca… she laid a cautious hand over his and stroked the prominent veins on its back. He regarded her fingers attentively.

They left the bus in front of a big modern hotel. The porter glanced disapprovingly at Giorgio’s crumpled shirt hanging outside the faded jeans. When they had passed him Giorgio turned and put out his tongue at the figure, back turned, in top hat and tails. He winked at Lucca with a cheeky expression that made him look like a schoolboy, soliciting her admiration for his pranks. She followed him into the empty bar. It was furnished like an English club with dark panels and deep leather sofas. A tall woman in a white shirt with a bow tie stood behind the bar. Stella looked neither surprised nor glad when she caught sight of them. Giorgio went to introduce them to each other, but she interrupted him with a quick remark. He flung out his arms and sat on a bar stool. Stella asked what she would like to drink. Lucca asked for orange juice, Giorgio had a beer.

Stella translated what he said in a neutral tone, like a professional interpreter, but Lucca could hear she did not translate everything, and not precisely as it was said. He had been very surprised. If he had known she was coming he would have taken time off so they could go out to eat. He was very glad to see her. Lucca replied to the questions Stella translated, and watched Giorgio as he listened intently to Stella’s rendering of her replies. He asked about ordinary things, whether she was still at school and what plans she had for further education. She told him she might be going to act. He looked at her seriously, it was an insecure way of life.

She asked why he did not work in films any more. Stella hesitated a moment before translating. He smiled and gesticulated with fingertips together. He did still work with films! Then he cast a long look into the mirror behind the bar. It wasn’t so easy. Besides, they didn’t make real films any more. They only made stories of car chases and bare breasts! Stella gave a crooked smile as she translated. And he didn’t want to do it just for the money. He looked at her like a teacher. You had to believe in what you did or it wouldn’t be any good. There was always a way to survive. He wagged his chin rebelliously. He survived… Lucca nodded, he looked at her warmly. Maybe she would become a great actress. Maybe one day she would play the leading part in one of the films he showed at the cinema! He laughed at the thought.

They sat in silence for a while. Stella served a German couple who came to sit at the end of the bar. For the first time Lucca was aware of the synthetic music for strings that seemed to come from all around them. Giorgio put his head on one side with a dreaming air as he played on an invisible violin. Stella came back. Lucca cleared her throat. Why had he never been to visit them? Stella gave her a brief glance before translating. He looked away and took the last cigarette in the pack and patted his pockets, he couldn’t find his lighter. Stella handed him a box of matches. He burned his fingers when he lit the match and sucked greedily at the cigarette. It was a long story. He didn’t know how much her mother had told her. They had been so different… he sent her an appealing look. He had once suggested coming, but her mother had thought it wasn’t a good idea. Lucca couldn’t tell whether he was lying. He slid off the bar stool and looked at her apologetically as he nodded in the direction of the toilet.

Stella removed the ashtray by his place and put down a fresh one. When he was out of sight she looked at Lucca and held her eyes with her own narrow ones. She seemed very tired suddenly, her cheeks drooped around the corners of her mouth. Lucca didn’t know whether it was fear or anger she saw in the other woman’s gaze. Stella spoke in such a low voice that it was hard to hear what she said. Leave him alone… she whispered… please… Lucca turned her face away. The German made a sign to Stella, holding out a note in his fingers. Giorgio came back. He clapped his hands together and said something loudly to Stella, who turned round and threw him a stern glance, as the astonished German picked up his change from the counter. Giorgio looked at Lucca with raised eyebrows and an expression that seemed to say something like: What a right shrew he had to live with.

When the Germans had left he repeated what he had said. Stella translated in a weary voice. He would take her out to see the town tomorrow, if she could come. Did she know where the cathedral was? They could meet there. Twelve o’clock? Giorgio nodded questioningly. Lucca nodded back. Stella asked how long she was staying. She didn’t translate that. Lucca replied that she hadn’t decided yet. She said she wanted to go back to her pensione. Giorgio offered to walk back with her, but she said she would take a taxi. Stella went to ring for one. He walked out of the hotel with her, neither of them said anything while they waited. When at last the taxi came he smiled brightly, almost as if relieved, she thought, as he hugged her close.

She hesitated when she saw him waiting outside the Baptistery next day, behind the dense traffic. He had on a brown velvet suit, even though it was very hot, and a white, newly ironed shirt. She had wept in the taxi on the way back to the pensione, soundlessly so the driver wouldn’t notice. She had lain awake a long time, listening to the sounds of the town that reached into the courtyard. But what had she expected, in fact? He had changed into someone else after all these years, his life was different now. To him she was a distant, painful memory.

Had Else prevented him from seeing her? She didn’t believe that. She would like to, but she couldn’t. Neither could she decide whether he looked touching or simply pitiful as he stood in front of the Baptistery’s green and white-striped marble façade in his best suit, nervously watching out for her. She hesitated as he caught sight of her and waved exaggeratedly, as if she was ashamed, either of him or of herself. He looked quite good with his pronounced features and unruly, grizzled hair, but his stooping shoulders and perpetual clowning left the impression of a man life had cowed. A man who had resigned himself to its blindly banal necessities.

He showed her the cathedral and the Galleria dell’Accademia with Michelangelo’s David and the slaves fighting to release themselves from the marble they have only half escaped from. He led her through the Uffizi galleries and she walked beside him among the Japanese and American tourists and only caught disconnected glimpses of faces, bodies and landscapes in the old paintings. He talked incessantly as if believing she would understand in the end if he just kept on, as he had done when she was little. He was tireless, but the sights of Florence were all they had to keep them there together. Luckily there was plenty to see. She recalled Stella’s timid, threatening face when she asked her to leave him alone.

They ate at a restaurant in a side street, a simple place with sawdust on the floor, frequented by workmen. He was obviously a regular customer. The owner smiled at her and shook his head in acknowledgement of life’s singularity when Giorgio introduced his grown-up daughter from Denmark. No, she didn’t speak Italian. What a shame! She understood that much. After lunch, as they were having their espresso, Giorgio pulled a photograph out of his pocket with a secretive look on his face. Was it a picture of them together? Maybe there was still a trace of the years when he had after all been there. A fleeting impression of a New Year’s Eve when she sat in his arms dressed as an Indian princess. A proof that it was true that he had once run with her on his shoulders among the spruce trees of the plantation, with laughter bubbling and rising inside her like waves.

She looked at the black and white photograph and recognised the young Giorgio. He stood with a boom in one hand, the other resting on the shoulder of a man she also thought she had seen before. A handsome man, more handsome than Giorgio, with tired, screwed up eyes and a prominent chin. He placed a finger on the picture and she remembered the witch in Milan and her portrait of her son and daughter-in-law with red eyes. He looked at her in triumph. Mastroianni! he said, smiling nostalgically as he emptied his coffee cup. She gave him back the picture. He looked out at the street through the coloured fly curtain. Suddenly he pointed at his watch, as he had done the previous day. She visualised the projecting room where they had sat eating chicken and smiled, embarrassed.

They went back to the cathedral. Now it was time to say goodbye. She knew it, and she could see he knew it too. They embraced. She had decided to leave him alone, but only now did she realise what it meant. He stood looking at her, hands at his sides, for a moment without the clown’s conciliatory grimaces, which swore by laughter because the last freedom in the world was obviously that of being voluntarily comical, ridiculous at one’s own expense. But she did not think of that until long afterwards, many years later. She would remember his face framed by the Baptistery’s limpid uncluttered Renaissance geometry, his face devoid of waggishness. He too knew their parting was behind them, that it was only a matter of seconds, and so he could allow himself to stay a little longer.

She noted his untidy grey hair, the furrows on his forehead and cheeks, his mouth’s natural expression of mute regret and the eyes with the smile lines deeply scored into the thin skin. He must have smiled so much in his life. He raised his hand, hesitated a second and gently brushed the tip of her nose with the knuckle of his index finger. His nose. The only trace of himself he had left apart from her name and a few blurred pictures. Then he slowly took a step backwards, and another. His eyes turned dark as tunnels and he raised his arms a little way, hands open, as he turned and walked away with quick steps.

Everything inside her clenched into a hard breathless knot, and for a moment she clung to the iron railing between the traffic and the marble wall of the Baptistery, until the knot loosened and the cobbles beneath her melted and flowed out of sight. She let the tears run at will down her cheeks, indifferent to the worried or curious glances of passers-by. It was easier to breathe when she walked with long steps and a salty smarting at the corners of her mouth. When she reached the station her eyes had dried. Only the dried-up traces of tears made her cheeks feel slightly taut.

12

The sky above the walls encircling the courtyard had taken on a deeper blue when she was woken by a knock on her door. She got up and opened it. The pregnant woman in the apron signed for Lucca to follow her. When they came to the desk at the end of the corridor she caught sight of a tall man dressed entirely in white. He was probably in his mid-thirties, his long, chestnut-brown hair fell over his forehead and his green eyes looked straight into hers as he stretched out his hand with a smile. He spoke fluent English, his name was Giorgio Montale.

He had got her message. She looked at him, uncomprehending. He showed her the note with her name and that of the boarding-house and she recognised her own handwriting. She explained that she had thought he might be her father. He looked at her attentively, apparently he understood everything straight away. He had no children. He smiled again, more carefully now. He had thought she might be one of his unknown cousins. He had come back to Italy a year or two ago, had been living in England. But had she found her father, then? She nodded. The pregnant woman observed them curiously from the kitchen, stirring her eternal pot. Couldn’t he at least offer her a drink? Now they had established the fact that they had absolutely no connection with each other… she smiled. Why not?

His car was parked at the door, a black Ferrari. As she leaned back in the soft leather seat she came to think of the little white dot, like a visual disturbance in a corner of the picture, which had told her father to start the second projector so that the cinema audience did not notice the reel-change. But this was not just another reel, it was quite a different film. The white-clad Giorgio drove along the narrow streets completely at home. He taught English at the university, he had studied at Cambridge.

She told him about her journey, about the reunion with Giorgio and about Stella, surprised that she could talk so easily to him. It was like hearing someone else telling the story. It had been an illusion, she said, astonished at the word. She had believed the reunion would be a revelation, but he was nothing more than the man who happened to be her father. How could they have anything to say to each other after all those years? Giorgio contemplated her with his green eyes, and his serious face made her feel she was discovering something about life as she spoke, something hard and adult.

They had a glass of white wine on a terrace from where they could look over the town’s misty silhouette with the irregular tiled roofs and the dome of the cathedral in the evening light among the gentle wooded slopes of the mountains. During a pause he suddenly smiled. Listen, he said, and she heard the bells, some faint and distant, others closer, linked in a pealing perspective of high and low resonant strokes. He asked if she had any plans for the evening. She shrugged her shoulders and shook her head with a smile. He rose and went inside to telephone. She saw him standing at the pay phone, a fabulous white figure in the semi-darkness of the bar. Soon he returned. Did she like lobster? Carlo had gone out shopping.

The whole property belonged to Carlo’s family, it was a seventeenth-century palazzo. He was not boastful about it, rather apologetic as he led the way through the gateway with its large, iron-framed lantern. The gateway led to a courtyard garden which had a little fountain surrounded by dark foliage. The bleached Carlo met them at the door, in a kimono as before, of dark red shiny silk. Later she thought Carlo must have at least as many kimonos as there were rooms in Giorgio’s apartment. She was not sure she got to see all of them, either the rooms or the kimonos. The apartment seemed endless and all the rooms were high-ceilinged and square, with chess-board marble floors, heavy velvet curtains and imposing, formal antiques.

It all happened without noticeable transition, in one gentle movement that resembled Carlo’s way of moving in his smooth kimonos, as muscular and lithe as the big blue cat that followed him everywhere. While they ate Lucca kept laughing at his exaggerated theatrical attitudes and melodious voice, which lingered over the words. He didn’t mind her laughing, almost caricatured himself to amuse her, and meanwhile Giorgio observed them slyly with his shining eyes. He translated what Carlo said and talked of the English writers he was writing a thesis on. Gays, the lot of them, as he said with one of his unexpected smiles.

Lucca had never heard of Forster or Isherwood, but she enjoyed listening to his Cambridge accent and being looked at by his green eyes. Giorgio talked at length of the homeless Isherwood, who had cast off the chains of his bourgeois English childhood in favour of the decadent Berlin of the Twenties and later, when the Nazis took power, had fled to California where he flirted with Hinduism. His identity had no solid foundation, said Giorgio, because he had cut off one anchorage after the other, as he gradually realised in his life the sentence which commenced his Berlin novel: I am a Camera.

When he spoke to her it was as if an ancient eccentric world had bred this charming, grown-up boy to open itself to her through his words and his wise eyes. He spoke to her as you speak to someone you have known for a long time. He listened attentively to her account of the course of her young life, and gently, so that she should not be embarrassed, he showed her how to eat a lobster without cracking it into a thousand orange pieces. She felt she had found a friend. She had never felt like this with a man, certainly not with the boys of her own age, but she felt safe, for Carlo was always there to remind her that Giorgio could not possibly intend anything but simply sitting together chatting and listening and laughing.

Why didn’t she stay the night? They were all lounging on separate sofas drinking green tea, which Carlo prepared on a charcoal pan on the huge stove. Yes, why not? Carlo showed her the way to a room with a four-poster bed similar to the one she had seen in the film the previous afternoon, in the suburban cinema where her father worked. A towel, a toothbrush and a kimono were laid out, as if it had always been intended that she should stay. When he waved goodnight she laughed at the affected waving movement he made with his fingers, and he smiled back companionably and closed the door behind him.

She slept until late into the morning. When she opened the shutters she looked out over a jumble of tiled roofs, a sea of stiff, terracotta waves. Her bag was on a stool beside the window. She heard a faint chinking behind her back and turned round in a fright, as Carlo put a tray with a cup of coffee on the bedside table. Today his kimono was mint green with yellow flowers. The blue cat jumped onto the bed. He picked it up by the scruff of the neck and carried it out. She found Giorgio in the kitchen. He had been to fetch her bag in the morning and paid for her room at the boarding-house. She asked if he had kidnapped her. He smiled. Had he? The green eyes looked at her inquiringly.

That day they took her with them to the Uffizi. She didn’t like to say she had been there the previous day. And it was completely different from when she visited the museum with her father. She had felt almost choked by all the pictures she hadn’t looked at properly. Giorgio reassured her, they would only do one floor. You could spend a lifetime at the Uffizi, he said. So you had to choose what to miss, he went on with a smile, art or life outside. He was dressed in white again, and Carlo wore black silk pyjamas. She took pleasure in noticing how the tourists stared at the tall slim girl laughing with the white-clad aristocrat and their bleached muscular friend.

Giorgio wanted to show her one of the rooms with altar pieces from the early Renaissance. He spoke of the pure, stylised severity in the presentation of the faces, the figures and the folds of the clothing, and he told her of the Byzantine influence. Carlo went on ahead. She stopped before one of the numerous paintings of the Madonna and Child. She was not sure but she felt she recognised the picture from the postcard she had been staring at in the train, the only clue she had in the search for her father. She gazed for a long time at the pale young woman’s face with its faintly blue tinge, introspectively dreaming as if she had forgotten the child in her arms, surrounded by the faded and mottled gilding that was cracked into finely branching lines. The gold melted before her eyes and flowed over the woman’s face. She made haste to dry her eyes with the back of her hand, but Giorgio had seen. He laid a hand lightly on her shoulder and smiled, fixing her eyes with his. It’s nothing, she said.

He took her arm and led her out into the gallery that ran the whole length of the building. She caught sight of Carlo at the end, in silhouette against a high window, he stopped and turned towards them. Giorgio let go of her arm. It’s strange, he said, as they went on. He looked up from the tiled floor and lowered his voice. You look like my sister… When they came up to Carlo she noticed he avoided her eyes. He put his head on one side and said something in a querulous voice that made Giorgio laugh. The poor man is about to pass out with hunger, he said. But they had probably had enough pre-Renaissance for one day.

They went into an expensive restaurant, an old-fashioned, formal place where the white cloths swam like ice floes in the quiet semi-darkness. When they had ordered Carlo got up and left the table with a remark that sounded ironical, almost taunting. Lucca asked what he had said. He says he’s jealous, smiled Giorgio. But she wasn’t to believe it. Carlo was wild about her, and he feigned jealousy purely for his own enjoyment. He gave her a long look and suddenly stretched out a hand, stroked her loose hair back from her forehead and gathered it into a knot in his hand at her neck. There really was a faint likeness, even though she was fairer. He shook his head in wonder and let go of her hair. Of course it was just an idea, but he couldn’t help thinking she might have grown to resemble Lucca.

She asked him to tell her about his sister. He fidgeted with the heavy cutlery. There had only been a couple of years between them, they had been like twins. They had always been together and told each other all their thoughts. When they were in the country they found hiding places in the trees so the grown-ups could not find them, and at night they crept into each other’s rooms. The first to wake up had to wake the other one so they were not found out. The wine waiter brought them a bottle. Giorgio looked dubiously at the label and asked the waiter a question or two, then with a resigned expression let him open it.

It had been like being cut in two, he went on, when their parents sent him to England. Carlo came back. He put his head on one side, rested his elbows on the table and laid his fingertips together as if he was listening with interest, but Lucca could see he did not understand anything Giorgio said. Giorgio took no notice of him. He had not only lost part of himself, he had also torn his sister apart and gone away with one half of her. He paused and pushed the foot of the wine-glass back and forth on the cloth. She had drowned during a holiday on Elba when she was fourteen. If only he had been there… It was an accident, but he had never forgiven their parents. After the funeral he went back to England and stayed there. He interrupted himself as he raised his glass and smiled at them.

It really was like being kidnapped, a fairy-tale flight from everything she knew. Every day they went out in the black Ferrari, driving along winding roads between terraces of vines and olive trees up to mountain villages surrounded by high walls. She was shown round medieval monasteries with cool vaulted ceilings, where water dripped in the gloom, and they sat over lunch for hours on sun-dappled terraces with views over the mountains. She drew her hair back from her forehead and tied it in a pony-tail. She had not worn a pony-tail since she was a child, she usually let it hang free. She could see Giorgio noticed it, but he made no comment.

She thought about what he had said when he lifted the hair from her face, that she resembled his little sister, his idea of what his sister might have looked like. If she had lived she would have been about Giorgio’s age now, a grown woman. Lucca could not visualise her own face in ten or twenty years. As a child she had often asked Else what she would look like when she was grown up, but Else had merely shrugged her shoulders. Time would tell, but she would probably look like herself. Lucca hadn’t believed her. After all, Else had changed over the years, since she was young, driving through Italy in an open sports car unaware of what the future would bring. Was it just age that made the difference, or was it something else?

When they drove home in the evening from yet another excursion she sat curled up under a rug on the back seat, listening to Giorgio and Carlo chatting casually to each other. Like a married couple, it occurred to her, a couple who had lived together a long time. But she still couldn’t understand how Giorgio lived with Carlo as if he were a woman. In contrast to Carlo there was nothing in the least feminine about Giorgio, and when she met his exploring gaze she had to remind herself that he did not look at her as other men did.

He did not mention his sister again, but she was sure he thought about her. She played with the idea that she was a living memory for him, or rather, a living reflection of his fantasy about the face and the figure his dead sister had never been able to develop. A smiling ghost walking beside him through the quiet villages with the unaccustomed tight feeling of her hair, which she had combed back and tied with an elastic band. When they walked beside the ruined ramparts facing the mountain slopes, surrounded by invisible cicadas, she fancied he was her brother, who had brought her back to the future she had been denied.

One hot afternoon they all lay on the big Persian carpet in front of the fireplace smoking a joint, lazily passing it around to each other. Sunlight smouldered through the cracks in the closed shutters and diffused a golden light through the semi-darkness. They had come home early and lay slouched in their kimonos, as if they had sought refuge from the midday heat in a shady oriental garden. Lucca had had a bath, her hair was still wet and the kimono stuck to her damp skin. Carlo was lying on his side with his head resting on his bent arm and half-open mouth. He had fallen asleep. She rose and the carpet’s wine-red and moss-green arabesques twisted and turned around her. She stood still for a moment, waiting for the rocking feeling beneath her feet to pass off. Giorgio sent her a muzzy smile and threw the end of the joint into the stove. A spidery wisp of smoke wavered upwards in the darkness there. She smiled back. She knew he was watching her as she walked across the cool marble floor.

She went into her room and lay down on her back in bed, feeling all her muscles relax. On a high, she felt as if her head, body and limbs drifted apart from each other so that each began floating out in different directions from an increasing vacuum without gravity. She didn’t know how long she lay like that. At first it was like being brushed by a warm draught from the open window, then she felt his breath on her feet, then his lips. She hadn’t heard him come into the room. To start with they merely brushed her, then he kissed her, his mouth finding its way up her legs and thighs. He clasped her buttocks and pulled her to him. She kept her eyes closed and lay completely limp as his tongue slid between her labia, totally concentrated on the pulses of sensation that streamed through her, again and again, ever stronger until she began to shudder in a long, convulsive release. The walls resounded with a hard, sharp clapping. Bravo! She recognised Carlo’s melodious, feminine voice.

Giorgio was still on his knees by the bed, between her thighs. Carlo stood in the doorway clapping his hands demonstratively with his head on one side, smiling sarcastically. Giorgio stood up and turned towards him. Carlo took his face between his hands in a hard grip and kissed him with his tongue. Then he let go of him and sent Lucca a triumphant glance, licking his lips and walking out of the door backwards. Giorgio stood with his back to her, head bent, facing the wall. It might be best if she left them, he said. He went out and closed the door behind him.

She dressed and packed her bag. She never saw either Giorgio or Carlo again. When she opened her door the apartment was utterly silent. Only the blue cat sat in a corner regarding her, calmly waving its tail back and forth over the tiles. She cautiously eased the bolt back and slipped out of the front door, like a thief, she thought. As she walked she took off the elastic band that held her hair in a pony tail and shook her head so the hair fell around her shoulders. When she drew near the railway station she passed the bus terminal and caught sight of a bus with her name above the windscreen. Without another thought she bought a ticket and took a seat at the very back of the bus. She still had no idea of where she was going.

As she sat looking out at the hills in the low sunlight she realised that from the beginning and up to now her journey had been directed by her name, her father’s name and her own. But she had not herself chosen her name, and she had not herself decided who was to be her father. She thought of the one Giorgio Montale, of the darkness in his eyes when he had embraced her in farewell and taken a step or two backwards alongside the façade of the Baptistery, raising his hands a little to the side in a gesture of regret. And she thought of the other Giorgio Montale, who an hour before had stood with his back to her and his face locked in Carlo’s hands, allowing himself to be kissed and hesitantly, with the same resigned movement, lifted his hands and placed them on Carlo’s hips. She thought of what he had said about homelessness, about severing all moorings. Hadn’t hers been severed long ago? Lucca was merely a name, a sound, no more. What was she going to do there? Was Lucca anything more than yet another tediously beautiful town, where she could walk around feeling sorry for herself among the flocks of Japanese tourists taking photographs of each other?

The bus stopped at a place where the road turned. A man made his way along the gangway with a suitcase and a cardboard box tied up with string. She seized her bag and got out just as the doors were closing. She stood on the roadside as the bus disappeared round the bend skirting a slope of cypresses. The man went down a path beside a high stone wall, rocking from side to side with his suitcase and his cardboard box until he disappeared among the crooked olive trees. She caught sight of a slim lizard sitting motionless on one of the rough, sunlit stones above the path. A drop of sweat crept down one eyelid and made her blink. When she opened her eyes again the lizard had vanished. She shouldered her bag and crossed over to the shade on the opposite side of the road.

13

She did not get up when the telephone rang downstairs, far away, so far it seemed nothing to do with her. It must be someone wanting to talk to Else. She had still not told anyone she had moved back to the villa. Even Miriam thought she was still staying with Else in the country, but she had only stayed at the cottage a couple of days. Perhaps it was Else phoning. She didn’t want to speak to her, anyway. She couldn’t stand her sympathy, constantly mixed with bitter advice and censorious analyses of Otto’s blunted emotional life. They were not kindred spirits, and she had no use for her mother’s comfort or that Else had known the whole time how it would end.

She had just woken up. She lay looking out of the French window that had been open through the night. It had rained and she listened to the whipping summer rain until she dozed off in a long, imperceptible transition in which the rain kept on foaming and whispering. The telephone rang again. The air was warm and damp, the sunlight filtered palely through the mist over the garden of the Agricultural College, and the wet crowns of the trees glittered softly. It kept on ringing.

How indomitable, Lucca thought and suddenly remembered walking hand in hand with Else beside the roses with their name plates, bearing their extravagant names in a neat hand. She remembered the Japanese trees with delicate, curling branches, which bloomed in spring and lost their white petals to the wind, disguised as snowflakes. In winter only the names of the roses stayed above the snow on their brave little name plates. They had laughed at that, Lucca and Else, the empty white beds where the names, undaunted, went on blooming. Whether it was summer or winter the walk always ended on the narrow path out to the lake, to the little island with an old tree which had a bench around its great trunk. They sat there watching the ducks and the walls of the college, and she remembered feeling lost, sitting beside her mother on their desert island, where nobody knew they were.

Only Else knew she was back in her old room. It had not changed in all the years that had passed since she left home a few days after she came back from Italy. Where had she been, by the way? She remembered her mother’s worried, accusing face. Luckily Ivan was on one of his business trips. Lucca described her meeting with Giorgio, and she told her about Stella, but she didn’t say anything about the other Giorgio, nor did she say anything about Ivan entering her bedroom the night before she left. Else asked a few questions about Stella, what she was like. Lucca could feel she was slightly interested, and she willingly told her about Stella’s hard-edged features, about her bar-tender’s costume and about the bar in the suburban hotel furnished in the English style.

It probably had to happen sometime, said Else. Of course she had had to go and find her father. The words sounded strange in her mouth, your father. Else regarded her with an expression that was both tender and exhausted. So it had been a disappointment? Lucca took her hand. It doesn’t matter now, she said, and as she said it she felt for the first time that she and her mother were equally adult. Else was just older, that was the only difference. She soon realised that Else knew nothing about what had happened at the cottage when she was alone with Ivan. How could she have known? She didn’t even know Lucca had been there that night.

At that time one of her friends from school shared a flat with another girl, and they needed a third tenant. That was how she met Miriam. She got a job in a café and earned just enough to manage. After she moved she avoided visiting Else and Ivan for several weeks, until she could no longer make excuses without it seeming strange and perhaps in itself suspicious. Ivan behaved normally when she went to Sunday lunch, but after the first course while Else was in the kitchen he smiled in a way that told her he did not feel threatened and even regarded her as a kind of fellow conspirator.

Miriam was taking lessons from an actor, she planned to apply for entrance to Drama School, and when she heard Lucca had been playing with the same idea she kept on urging her to go to an audition with her. Lucca was accepted, Miriam failed and was not admitted until the next year. Lucca could not understand why it had all gone so easily for her. She had only done what she was asked, but perhaps she succeeded because she was not quite so anxious to get in as her friend. She had just been herself, her teachers told her later. She had to smile. Just herself… who could that be, then?

She discussed it with one of the other students, a loud-voiced fellow already going bald, whom she befriended because he could always make her laugh. Herself! he giggled. How could you know yourself? If you knew yourself, you must be different from yourself. This was a linguistic misunderstanding, a logical deadlock. You could only get to know yourself if you could observe from somewhere outside yourself. But then you would no longer be yourself! On the contrary, you were always a second or a third or a fourth, all according to whom you were with. He had read philosophy for some years before deciding to become an actor, because after all everything was just one big comedy.

In reality she did not at all mind being a mystery to herself. When she was in the train on her way back from Italy she felt glad not to have been to Lucca. She pictured Giorgio, her own Giorgio, in front of the Baptistery. His gesture, at once ashamed and relieved, as he turned round and walked away without looking back. She was no longer his daughter, nor Else’s for that matter. She was her own, no one else’s. She thought of Ivan’s pale erect cock in the semi-darkness of the cottage and his dismayed expression when she had kicked him onto the floor. She would not try to stop Else being happy. When the train arrived in Munich she tore up Giorgio’s postcard. She gazed for a while at the Virgin Mary’s face, the child’s foot, the folds of the garments and the faded gold before throwing the pieces into the ashtray and getting her bag down from the luggage rack.

As time went on and she learned to work at a role and build up her characters with the aid of meticulous detail, it seemed to her that she herself held something of every single role she played. The playwrights also showed her how people resemble each other more than they care to admit. She had long talks with her sparse-haired friend about Peer Gynt and about the comparison of selfhood with an onion whose innermost core, when one peels it, turns out to be empty. He said that was what it had been like with the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. The holiest of holies, where none might enter, had been nothing but an empty room deep inside the temple. He laughed savagely so she could see his sharp canine teeth, and for a moment she wasn’t sure whether it was his wolfish grin or the thought of the innermost emptiness of the onion and the temple, that made her shudder.

She thought again of the town of Lucca which at the last moment she had decided not to visit. One day she would go there. Maybe she would go with her lover. She fantasised sitting in a car approaching the curve where she had got off the bus, between the olive grove and the slope of cypresses. She could see no further than where the road made a bend, just as she could not see who was behind the wheel. She replied to her cynical friend that all his emptiness was probably nothing in itself without what was outside, whether it was rings of onion or temple courtyards. That frightful emptiness was nothing more than an opening onto what you could not know. He looked at her sluggishly, putting his head back as he drank his beer, but she thought that was actually not a bad answer. Perhaps she was no more than a frame around the secret hollow space where something would one day show its face.

The telephone was still ringing. Maybe it was Otto… she sat up with a start, leapt out of bed and ran naked onto the landing and downstairs, two steps at a time so she nearly stumbled. Maybe he had guessed she had moved back home. It wasn’t so hard to guess. Who would call Else apart from him? Everyone knew she went to the country on holiday and stayed there the whole time. Maybe he regretted the brutal way he had dropped her. Maybe he just regretted… she forbade herself to think the thought to the end. But they ought to be able to talk about it. After all, they had lived together for two years.

As she rushed through the house she thought of his lazy voice. She could hear it already, maybe he would suggest they met for a chat. The loss overwhelmed her again. She had believed they belonged together. He was still the first man who had made her feel like that, whether he wanted her or not. She had felt he saw her as she was, and she had no longer dreamed of being anyone other than the one his eyes had lit on. His hard blue eyes had penetrated into her innermost place, and it had not been empty. She had been there the whole time, invisible in the darkness as she had been when she hid in Else and Giorgio’s wardrobe and spied through the keyhole’s little dot of light, until the light was extinguished because he had guessed where she was. Next second the door was torn open with a thrilling creak, so the light and his merry eyes fell on her simultaneously, and it made her jump as if she could already feel his hands under her arms picking her up.

She tried to quieten her breathing before picking up the receiver. It was Harry Wiener. Did he disturb her in the middle of her morning gymnastics? She said she had been out in the garden when she heard the telephone. She thought the garden sounded better than bed. She could hear him smile as he talked to her in his old-fashioned, well-articulated voice. Had she received her script? Yes, thank you. She thought of the script bound in red card that was on the floor beside her bed. She had not opened it yet, she had not been able to concentrate. Every time she picked it up she thought of Otto and how he had seemed jealous, no doubt to make it easier for himself.

She recalled his silence the day they swam and her own misgivings because she had not told him Harry Wiener had visited the dressing room after the performance to praise her empathetic presentation so fulsomely. Would everything have looked different if she had woken him when she got home and told him about the Gypsy King’s unsuccessful efforts? Was there actually no unknown mulatto model somewhere in the background as Miriam had imagined? Did Otto really think she had started something with the old drama guru? That she had fallen for his camel-hair coat and his unruly silver-grey locks? Had she herself ruined everything?

Although rehearsals were not due to begin for another few months, Harry Wiener said, it was his habit to meet the actors in good time so they could chat for a bit. He sounded as if he had forgotten his familiarity in the car when he drove her home. Asking if he might kiss her. What did she think of the role, then? She grew hot and bothered. It was hard to talk on the telephone. Exactly, replied the Gypsy King with another invisible smile. That was why he was phoning. That is, he was phoning to suggest they met over a cup of tea. Lucca suddenly felt he sounded a touch flustered beneath the self-assured, cultivated varnish. As if after all he had not quite been able to repress how he had compromised himself. Was she doing anything that afternoon? Lucca said she would just look at her diary.

She stood with the receiver in her hand and looked down at herself. She had got a tan, the mahogany colour stopped in a curve between her hips and stomach, where her own paler colour disappeared under the tuft of curly hair. She raised the receiver again. No, she wasn’t doing anything. Right, then, how about five o’clock? She thanked him. For the role, she added. He was the one to say thank you. It has been yours for a long time, he replied. It was a strange reply, she thought, when she had hung up. She was just about to pick up the receiver again and dial Otto’s number, but held back, like all the other times she had been about to give in to her need to hear his voice, regardless of what it would have to say, hear he still existed. She made coffee and took it upstairs, pulled a T-shirt over her head and sat in bed with the red script.

She had spent most of the week in bed or in the garden, she didn’t feel like seeing anyone. She had lain weeping or staring at the grass and the clouds and the square of sunshine that crossed her wall in the course of the day. She kept to her room if she was not in the garden. When she walked through the downstairs rooms, Else’s furniture and things seemed like silent witnesses waiting only to gossip about her. But what would they have gossiped about if they could? Her attacks of weeping? Her stony immobility when she lay prone, as if waiting for someone to come and find her?

She had eaten nothing but pot noodles and frozen pizzas for a week. She had lost weight, she had to tighten the belt of her jeans two holes more than usual. Her hair hung loose and greasy from the loose knot at the neck, she had not bothered to wash it, and she had pimples on her forehead and chin. She had not had pimples since she was fourteen, and when she pressed them out they left big pink scars. As a whole she did not look exactly ravishing as she cycled off in Else’s old Faroese sweater with the script in a plastic bag on her luggage carrier. But she looked as she ought to, she thought, as she caught sight of herself in the mirror on her way through the hall. She wasn’t going to make an impression on anyone and certainly not on the Gypsy King. Then she would see if she really had deserved her part.

She had collected her cycle from Otto’s entrance the day after she took a taxi to Miriam’s with her things. She had stood for a long time on the corner opposite the Egyptian restaurant before plucking up courage, afraid he might suddenly turn up and at the same time hoping he would. Suddenly the street seemed a strange, hostile place, the same street she had cycled along the evening before when they came back from swimming. She had looked at the golden evening sky between the buildings and felt at home. It was already in the past, another life. It took no more, a single sentence was enough. It will be best if we stop now… She knew she would not get him back, and yet she could not go on. It was like standing on the edge of an abyss knowing that the next step is a step out into the blue.

That was how it must have been for Daniel two years earlier when she stood in his apartment looking out at the rain as she said what she had to say. Daniel, with his stoop and his short sight. He had sat staring down at his black and white keys as if they could tell him what music to play now. But he had found it, obviously, when she ran into him that evening at a bar, cheerful and wearing black like a real artist and with a large-bosomed lady. Lucca asked herself whether they were real, his loving muse’s splendid breasts. She smiled at the thought of Daniel’s unhappy face. You survived, she knew that, but she didn’t want to know it. Who would be the next number in the series? What kind of face would she kiss now, fantasising about what was hidden behind the unknown eyes? Any old pleasant face with an invisible number on its forehead. It was probably never Christmas on grown-up calendars.

She thought of Else, who had entrenched herself behind her work and her women friends, because there was more to life than love, as she said. The problem was just that she did not start to question what was really interesting until love came to an end. The something more in life, was it anything but a substitute? One evening she had called in a strange voice and said she was going to swallow all the pills in the medicine cupboard. When Lucca arrived at the villa she had filled herself with, not pills, but Ivan’s whisky. He had gone off to New York with a girl of twenty-three. He too had come out with it plainly. Well, not quite. He had said he couldn’t feel whole-hearted about her, Else brought out, with a mouth quivering with wounded pride and held-back tears. He had said they had slipped away from each other, although what he probably meant was that his new girlfriend had a tighter cunt. Lucca held her mother’s head on her lap and stroked her hair as she wept. What she could have told her there was no point in telling now. Else could have asked about it herself. It must at least have occurred to her that something like that could have happened. Not least now when Ivan had hopped off with a girl her daughter’s age. She must have noticed Ivan’s discreet glances at Lucca’s long legs. But she didn’t ask. Poor old, flabby cunt, mumbled Lucca, and Else’s weeping changed into hollow, grating laughter. The next day she ordered a removal van and had Ivan’s furniture taken to the tip. He never even complained.

The sky had turned a hard blue and the sun glittered in the puddles after the downpour of the night. The water splashed around her spokes, it was windy and the air was full of whirling dust and flashing reflections which made it seem the wind was making the light gleam in everything that moved. As Lucca cycled through town she thought of the years which had passed since her trip to Florence. The years before she met Otto and believed that at last here was someone who saw into the depths of her, right in where she herself could not reach. She remembered the men she had known and remembered her hesitation, always the same whenever she was about to surrender, when for a fleeting second she already saw the end of the story that was just starting.

A second which came every time, while everything was still only circling movement and significant glances. A disconnected second where it became so strange, so hazardous, this game that was always played blindly, with bodies as pawns. But then she had closed her eyes in a hurry and kissed them, amazed at her own haste. She had hastened to kiss them before she began to doubt too much. She had hurried on into a fresh beginning, for there was no point in hesitating. There had to be more beginnings, all the time, if something more was to come of it one day, and she had begun and begun, sometimes for sheer fun, at others with a secret plan to sound out luck.

But all too soon once more it had been nothing but two bodies in a room going over the usual phrases surrounded by the usual furnishings with a view over the usual streets and days. It had turned out in the usual way. The usual slight lassitude during the same sweet assurances. The same excitement, the same brief dizzy dive from the usual feverish peaks of desire. For a time it was wildly thrilling again to meet a strange man at strange secret places and launch into new bold methods, screaming and yelling, hair unleashed. But either they grew too busy talking about the future, or they were suddenly too busy to meet, if she ventured to say something about tomorrow or next year. Some of them were married and dreamed of being divorced, while others wouldn’t dream of getting divorced even though they were bored with their spouse. Then there were those who were not married and became overwhelmed with claustrophobia at the mere thought of it, and finally those who had just split up and needed time, as they said. As if they had anything else.

When she met Daniel she was certainly not looking for yet another love affair. She had just dropped a film cameraman who had left his wife, convinced he was going to begin on a new and completely different life with Lucca. At that time she was in love with a lawyer who had no intention of leaving his wife but who nevertheless called her at intervals of weeks and months to ask her to meet him at some hotel or other. She knew there was no future in it, but she kept seeing him even though Miriam scolded her for allowing herself to be used, as she said. He had caught sight of her without her knowledge. Craftily, discreetly, he had found out who she was, what she did and where she lived. He had kept watch on her from a distance, until finally one day he made himself known with a brief anonymous letter in which he suggested they met at a café. She gave in to her curiosity and went along. The moment when she entered the café without knowing who she was going to meet was perhaps the most intense in their whole relationship.

She did something to him, he had said. That was the closest he came to expressing his feelings. She had been practically obsessed, she told Miriam later, by his remarkable ability to transform himself. When they met at a restaurant he was the cool arrogant solicitor in a distinguished suit, but as soon as they were in the hotel room he turned into a ferocious beast who threw himself over her with sudden violent rage. He always blindfolded her when she had undressed. That was how he wanted her. She never saw him naked and it fascinated her, when she lay in the hotel bed with her eyes covered, delivered over to his gaze and his ferocity.

After six months he stopped calling her, and every time she phoned his office, his secretary said he was in a meeting. Lucca pondered on the expression, but meetings were obviously something you could get stuck in. She waited for weeks until one day she happened to pass him in the street, coming out of a restaurant with another suit. Her beloved gave her a blank look as he passed, as if they had never met. She was shattered, until one evening Miriam asked if she might only be in love with him because she couldn’t have him.

She met Daniel at a party. Miriam had dragged her along, she didn’t know anyone there. She and Daniel left at the same time and walked through the town together. He suddenly started to talk about twelve-tone music, just as he had done while they were in the kitchen because neither of them felt like dancing. He was intelligent but very innocent as well, and she was charmed by his unworldly decency and suffering face. She sensed he had no idea of how to go about moving from words to action, so to speak. When he paused she kissed him and asked where he lived.

He fell in love without reservation, and his sincerity made her feel depraved, whereas with the lawyer she felt as young as a seduced maiden, defenceless against his raging lust. For a while she rather enjoyed her own cynicism, when she went straight from an assignation with the lawyer to Daniel in his comfortless suburb, to sit on his bed and drink tea out of his grandmother’s porcelain china cups while he played his strange music. There he sat at his piano, ignorant of where she had come from, and her secret made her feel free in a treacherous and homeless way. Like a double agent crossing frontiers in disguise so no-one knows who she really is, and wondering about that herself.

Perhaps Miriam was right, perhaps her passion for the lawyer was an illusion she could only maintain because the affair was never a reality outside the anonymous hotel rooms. But with Daniel, who wanted her so much, she was never in love. She was just fascinated, especially by oscillating between the two men who knew nothing about each other, between the roles of sacrificial lamb to desire and faithless fallen woman. Until at long last she met Otto and felt all her masks fall off.

As she cycled along to her appointment with Harry Wiener something came to mind which she had often thought of when she was with Otto. One day long before they met, she might have cycled past him, perhaps she had even seen him for a second and then forgotten him the next moment. At once she feared he might come walking across a pedestrian area with his arm round the waist of Miriam’s notorious mulatto, who had been haunting her tortured imagination for over a week. She made a detour to avoid the streets where she risked meeting him, which made her think that in a little while she might pass the man who would be able to love her. He must be somewhere, but maybe they had already crossed each other’s path. She came to think of Else, who must be sunning herself in the country in one of the deckchairs with their mouldy seats, red as a lobster, eyes closed and mouth sagging.

It was getting cloudy again. The wind urged the ragged grey clouds so fast over the town that the roofs were lit and quickly darkened again in waves of shadow. On one side she could see the arched zinc roof of The Royal Theatre, on the other the gilded onion domes of the Russian church, and behind them the harbour, alternately blue and grey in the movement of the clouds. The sky was slate grey behind the cranes of the naval dockyard and the broad drum-shaped tanks on the fuel island further out. If she leaned over the railing she could look down into the street, a horizontal beam peopled by wood-lice and ants walking on their hind legs in the bird’s eye perspective.

Better take care, said Harry Wiener as he came out on the balcony with teapot and cups on a tray. The sugar bowl was missing and he went inside again. As she waited, lightning made a crack in the cloud cover over the airport. It’s going to be a great show, he said, smiling cheerfully as he came back with the sugar bowl in one hand and his script in the other. He bent his head a little and looked at the thunder cloud over the spectacles on the tip of his curved, sun-tanned nose. His checked shirt hung half out of his trousers, his long grey locks curled around his ears like wings, and his feet were bare in the worn-down espadrilles.

It was obvious he had forgotten she was coming, when he opened the door and looked at her in confusion, as if with no idea of who she was. He admitted it at once and apologised politely. He had fallen asleep on the sofa. That calmed her as she stepped inside the rectangular room, the only one in the apartment apart from the kitchen-diner and the bedroom, which she glimpsed before he closed the sliding doors. A glass door between two wide panorama windows opened on to the balcony, the three other walls were occupied by bookcases from floor to ceiling. The place was smaller than she had imagined, more intimate, furnished with design pieces from the Sixties with worn, beige leather covers, faded Kelim carpets and the inevitable Poul Henningsen lamps.

When she was in the lift staring at herself in the narrow mirror she regretted not having done something about her appearance. She couldn’t decide whether she looked like a hanged cat or something the cat had dragged in, as Else used to say about herself when she stood in front of the hall mirror. Maybe she looked like something in between. A half-strangled cat dragging itself up to the renowned and awe-inspiring Gypsy King. In her melancholy state she had forgotten what it meant to her to be going to tea with Harry Wiener. She had forgotten to look forward to it and fear it, and when she sat in bed with the duvet around her reading The Father, she quite forgot why she was reading the play at all, completely engrossed in the story. Only in the lift did it strike her that the step onto the top floor would also be a decisive step in her career. That word usually made her smile ironically.

Harry Wiener poured out the tea and asked if she took sugar. No, thank you, she replied politely, but maybe a spot of milk. He beat his brow with an exaggerated gesture and rose again. It doesn’t matter, she hastened to say. He stopped and looked at her over his spectacles. Why did she say that when she had just said she liked milk in her tea? He smiled amiably as he said it and she smiled too. If you want milk you shall have it, he said, going inside. She looked at his script, it was already tattered and dog-eared even though rehearsals would not start for another three months.

He made her relax, she didn’t know how, and she couldn’t understand this was the very same feared and admired Harry Wiener she had heard so many stories about. The same Harry Wiener who had made a pass at her in his Mercedes. Good, now we’re about there, he said, placing a small silver jug on the tray. He really seemed to have forgotten everything that evening, but she was glad she had put on Else’s Faroese sweater. It had turned cooler, too. They sat silently listening to the distant rumbling and watching the purple flashes and white forks of lightning over the harbour. Lucca did not know what to say and she was surprised it was not difficult to sit, each in their bamboo chair, saying nothing. Harry Wiener slurped when he drank. That surprised her, considering how cultivated he was. He was at home in himself, and she almost thought he had forgotten her.

I went to see my wife today, he said suddenly in a low voice. She is in hospital, he added. Lucca looked at him expectantly. He looked over at the harbour entrance. I hope she’s awake, he said. She loves thunderstorms… He lit a cigarette. She is dying, he went on. Lucca looked at the script in her lap. It has spread, he added, there’s nothing to be done. Lucca said she was sorry. He looked at her. He hadn’t told her to appeal to her sympathy. He just thought she should know, now they were going to work together. If he should seem distrait. He regarded her for a moment before going on. She asked me to sell the house, he said. He had not thought of doing that before she died. It was a house north of town, he hadn’t been there for months. Yes, it is strange, he said, as if replying to something she had asked him. He looked at his cigarette. But enough of that. What did she think of the play?

She hesitated, then said Strindberg must have had problems with women. He smiled, but not patronisingly. That was true enough, but it was not true to say he hated them. He was afraid of them, which was something else. If anything it was a particularly virulent case of unhappy love, he smiled. Strindberg was a deserted child who as an adult cursed the mother’s womb that had exiled him. Incidentally, all artists were deserted children. He looked at her. ‘Your mother was your friend, but the woman was your enemy…’ he said slowly, as if to emphasise every word. He smiled again. Yes, it was banal, of course, but that’s how it was. That was why the Captain was so bewitched by the power of motherhood. And that is why, said Harry Wiener, he breaks down, because he doesn’t know for certain that he is your father.

Lucca jumped. She had forgotten she was sitting on his balcony only because she was going to play the cavalry captain’s daughter. Harry Wiener took a mouthful of tea. This time he did not slurp. Doubt over paternity is the oppressed woman’s only possible revenge in a patriarchal universe, he said, putting down his cup. But it was not the only cause of the captain’s suffering. He also suffered because, in Strindberg’s universe, life and the ability to pass it on belonged to the women and to them alone. Why do you think he paraphrases Shylock? he asked. For a moment she forgot who Shylock was, but he did not expect her to answer.

‘Hath not a man eyes?’ He leaned forwards in his chair, the bamboo creaked as he stretched out his hands in an appealing gesture. ‘Is he not warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a woman? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh?’ He let his hands drop into his lap and leaned back. Shylock had to argue for his humanity because he was a Jew, an outcast, and the Captain had to do likewise. You could go so far as to say that to Strindberg men were biology’s Jews, its wandering homeless. ‘In the midst of the moonlight…’ he added softly, holding her eyes, ‘… surrounded by ruins on all sides.’

A drop fell on the balcony floor, followed by another. The next moment the whole balcony was spotted with raindrops. The gilding on the Russian church’s onion dome sent a mysterious light on the background of the dark grey sky. Harry Wiener rose and picked up the tray, she carried in the cups, he let her enter before him. She sat down on the sofa, he settled in an armchair. The low lamps in the corners of the room surrounded them with a warm, subdued light. The view was already dim in the misty rain. He had left the door to the balcony open, and Lucca felt the rain like a cool breath in the warm damp air.

While the thunderstorm passed over the city he questioned her about the roles she had played and how she had interpreted them, and he listened to her with the same intensity he had shown in the dressing room after the performance a few weeks previously. While she had been paralysed with shyness when she arrived, now she suddenly noticed she had plenty to say, and heard herself voicing ideas she had never shared with anyone before. She told him how working on the roles had made her feel that the innermost core of her personality was a hollow space in which she could be anyone at all, and how the feeling sometimes terrified her and at other times overwhelmed her with its freedom. Harry Wiener smiled, almost wistfully, she thought. Yes, he said, we are separate, but not so different. That is why we both understand and misunderstand each other.

Again they were silent, looking out at the white vapour of rain above the glinting rooftops. He glanced at his watch and dispelled the enchantment when he rose and said he would have to ask her to leave. She was struck by how direct he could be without seeming rude. Maybe it was simply because he was used to getting his own way. He had an appointment soon with a young dramatist, they were going to discuss his manuscript. But perhaps she knew him? He must be about her age, perhaps slightly older. Andreas Bark was his name. Very promising, one of the really big talents. She had heard of him. Did she have a car? She said she was cycling. Oh, well, we must get hold of a taxi. Of course he would pay. She said that was too much. There you go again, he smiled and handed her a hundred kroner note. He really couldn’t have her catching a cold from sheer modesty.

The bell rang while he was phoning, and he motioned to her to press the door button. Then he came into the hall and shook hands with her. See you in the autumn, he said, and closed the door behind her. She walked down the stairs that wound around the bars of the lift shaft. The lift passed her when she was one floor down and through the window in the door she saw a dark, averted figure slide past.