Lucca

14

So far it had been a miserable summer. Every time you thought it was getting warm at last, it began to rain and blow again. Monica and Jan had had the right idea, to book a holiday in Lanzarote as early as April, but Robert still felt disappointed over not spending time with Lea when he was on holiday. She said nothing about it on her visits to him, not even when the end of term was approaching, and he suspected she was avoiding the subject to spare his feelings. That made him more dispirited than the thought of being without her. When she came they worked together on the kitchen garden, and one Sunday afternoon, when the sun shone for a change and the temperature climbed to a tolerable minimum of summertime, they went out to the beach to swim.

The water was icy cold and he only took a quick dip. Lea was a good swimmer now. He stood at the water’s edge shivering and watching her swim along the sandbank with sure, regular strokes. She swam over to one of the fishing stakes which were set in a straight row at right angles to the shore, forming an interrupted perspective against the calm expanses of sea and sky. As she held onto the post with one arm and waved to him with the other he felt both happy and sad, and when she came out of the water and waded towards him, tall and shining in her swimsuit, he realised why. It would not be long before he had to part with her, not because she would be catching the train as usual and going back to her mother, but because she would have no more use for either mother or father. It was only a question of a few years before she began to live her own life. They would still see each other, but she would be a guest, when she came. It would no longer be her second home, if in fact it ever had been, his overlarge house in the suburb on the edge of the quiet provincial town in which he had ended up after the divorce, by chance as it seemed to him now.

If there had been a meaning in his life during the many years that had passed it had existed in this girl coming towards him, wading through the cold water and wiping her eyes with her knuckles as she pulled down the corners of her mouth in a comical, troubled grimace. She had been the meaning of it all, anything else had come to seem pale and complicated compared with her. He stood waiting, holding her towel and then wrapping it round her and rubbing her back. She teased him for only having a dip and saucily grabbed at the loose skin on his hips. Hadn’t he better do something about those handles? He put out a hand to tickle her. She leaped away and ran off. He ran after her, but her legs had grown too long for him to catch up with her, and suddenly he felt a stabbing pain in one foot as he tripped and fell. He heard her laugh. She couldn’t go on being the meaning in his life, she would soon be busy enough with her own.

His heel was bleeding and he caught sight of a rotten plank with a bent rusty nail in it. A siding, he thought, as she came towards him. He had driven himself onto a siding. He thought of the quiet house where he sat listening to music every night the whole year round when he got home from the hospital. Should it be Brahms or Bruckner tonight, after he had driven Lea to the station, or Bartók for once? She put a supporting hand under his arm as they went back to the car. He asked her to fetch the first aid box from the boot. She insisted on helping him, and he let her clean the wound with iodine and showed her how to put on a bandage, secretly enjoying her sympathy.

They had brought her bag so they could drive straight from the beach to the station. His heel smarted and throbbed. She sat beside him looking out at the fields and the clouds. The weather was worsening, the light was grey and metallic over the restless corn. Silence fell between them, as it usually did before they parted. The first drops appeared on the windscreen followed by more until he had to switch on the wipers. When he stopped in front of the station she said he didn’t need to go in with her. She sat on for a moment. See you after the holidays, then, she said. Yes, he said, smiling. Take good care of Mum and Jan! She looked at him. Take good care of yourself, she said seriously and kissed his cheek. He watched her as she ran through the rain with her bag over her shoulder. She turned and waved, and he signalled with his headlights. Then she was gone. He could hear the train approaching and started the car again.

He had been to see Lucca every afternoon before going home, and he had remembered to take off his white coat before going into her room, as she had asked him to. What was it she had said? It seemed a strange notion. That she would rather be completely ignorant of what he looked like than have to content herself with knowing he had a white coat on. But she did ask when he went in to her the day after he had lent her his walkman. She asked what he was wearing, and he replied, slightly flurried. Blue shirt, beige trousers. But what kind of blue? He had to think about that. Twilight blue, he said finally, surprising himself at the comparison. Twilight blue, she repeated and smiled. He had made a new tape for her. He had enjoyed choosing the pieces of music and deciding on their order, and it had given him the chance of hearing music he had not listened to in years. Ravel, Fauré, Debussy, he kept to French music and Chopin. She had asked for more Chopin. He spent most of the evening on it.

He always came at the agreed time, when the ray of sunlight shone on her face through the blinds outside the window. He did not switch on the light when it began to rain, she asked him not to, as if it made a difference to her. Then she lay in the semi-darkness listening to the whipping of the drops on the aluminium blinds. He sat down on a chair beside the bed. Her arms and legs were still encapsulated in plaster, but her head was no longer bound up in bandages. It looked almost normal, apart from the stitches in her forehead and the yellow-green bruising that was wearing off, and her glass eyes. He recognised her from the photographs he had seen in the kitchen the day he drove Andreas and Lauritz home in the rain, but she had lost weight, her features had grown sharper.

She seldom mentioned Andreas and Lauritz. He did not ask why she stuck to her decision not to let Andreas visit her, but he could feel she missed her son and suffered because of her own obstinacy. The weeks went by with no word from Andreas, but she did not ask if he had called. Robert assumed he was still in Copenhagen, unless he had gone to Stockholm to try his luck with the exotic designer. He considered asking Lucca if he should contact Andreas, but never got around to it. Something about her silence held him back. She was remarkably silent about the drama that had ended when, drunk and beside herself, she had got into their car to drive to Copenhagen on the wrong side of the motorway.

She did not talk about the life she had lived with Andreas in the house by the woods, which they had transformed from a ruin into the home that now, in a different and more comprehensive sense, lay in ruins. It seemed as if she had completely repressed the fact that she was married and had a child, totally engrossed in the years that had gone before. Robert thought of old people who cannot recollect the immediate past and instead remember details and events from their early years which they thought they had forgotten. But he was not witnessing a loss of memory. She just no longer knew precisely where she was, surrounded by sounds and voices, an indeterminate space where hearing was the only sense by which she could distinguish what was close from what was far off.

She had suddenly been thrown into herself, without her eyes’ firm grip on reality, delivered over to the evasive images of memory. She seemed like someone who is obliged to tell the story from the beginning, try to describe herself as she had once been, ignorant of what awaited her later. Someone who attempts to return to the start and from there follows her own steps, as you do when you have dropped something on a walk and retrace your steps with your eyes fixed on the ground. Without her explaining it he understood, at first with only a vague apprehension, that this was how she had to approach the night when everything in her life crashed into sudden darkness.

Perhaps it helped to tell her story to a stranger who knew only the ending but had no idea how she had arrived there. He knew what it was she was slowly trying to isolate, this event which wrenched the words out of her mouth with its irresistible force. She approached it day by day, the thing she still could not talk about, but she held back, dwelling on each stage of her story and losing herself in tortuous digressions. Only by detours could she approach what she still did not understand. She took her time. Her words were like her hands, hesitantly reading the objects passed to her. With the words she touched each face that entered her story and traced the physiognomy of events, as if she could find the sudden turn, the unexpected gulf into which she had fallen.

She had just about got to Andreas, although she had not yet met him, when she was discharged and transferred to a rehabilitation centre. Her plaster had been removed a few days before. Robert and a nurse supported her when she attempted her first steps on the floor in front of her bed. Her long legs seemed even longer, thin and white after the lengthy confinement to bed, with protruding kneecaps. She was dizzy and her legs gave way, so he had to carry her back to bed. She wept and asked to be left alone. When he visited her in the afternoon she was asleep with the earphones on. The tape was still playing. He bent down with his head close to hers and heard Chopin’s Nocturne No. 4, the peaceful yet rhythmically changing chords, the strangely reckless melancholy. Twilight blue, he thought and smiled involuntarily as he crept towards the door and closed it carefully so as not to wake her.

When he told her about the rehabilitation centre, she realised she had no clothes to wear. She asked him to go out to the house and fill a suitcase. How could he do that? You’ll have to break in, she said. Was that such a good idea? She smiled as if she could see the worried look on his face. There was a key under a stone on the left of the door. The old lady’s bicycle had fallen over, and little piles of seeds and dust had gathered in the folds of the plastic cover over the pile of cement sacks. He picked up the bicycle and found the key. He still felt like a burglar as he walked through the quiet rooms where a grey transparent film of dust already covered the floors. She had said there was a suitcase on top of the bedroom wardrobe, but there was nothing there. Andreas must have taken it with him. He found a black plastic sack in the kitchen and took it back to the bedroom. He opened the wardrobe. Even though he was alone, and even though she had asked him to do it, he felt as if he was spying on her and pawing her as he began to select garments from the piles of blouses and lace underclothes and hangers with dresses and jackets. He avoided the brighter things without thinking why, and reminded himself she would need shoes as well. Most of her shoes had high heels, it would probably be better to avoid those at first. He chose a pair with moderately high heels and also found some trainers at the bottom of the wardrobe.

He stopped in front of the notice-board in the kitchen and studied the photographs he had kept glancing at when the unhappy Andreas invited him in for a glass of red wine. Lucca in overalls painting window frames with paint on her cheek. Lucca in the drive with the low sun behind her, the little boy hanging horizontally in the air at the end of her outstretched arms and her dress whirling around her brown legs like an open, illuminated fan. Lucca at a pavement café in Paris, under the plane trees, cool and elegant in her grey tailored jacket, hair combed back from her forehead and red lips parted in the middle of a thought or a word as her eyes seemed to meet his gaze, at once confidential and surprised.

They said goodbye in the hospital foyer. She was in a wheelchair. She turned her face towards him, so his white coat was reflected in her dark glasses. I haven’t told you everything, she said, stretching out her hand. He pressed it, after a slight pause because he was not prepared for her formal gesture. But he must be tired of listening to her going on about herself. He said he would be coming to see her. He stood and watched as she was pushed through the glass doors. As the wheelchair stood on the ramp and was lifted up to the level of the minibus rear doors, she was in profile with her red-blonde hair gathered into a pony tail, masked behind the big sun glasses, pale and unmoving as a photograph.

* * *

It rained all evening. Lea had left her wet swimsuit in the car. It was pink, almost cyclamen, but it looked good with her thick dark brown hair. She had inherited his hair, but she had Monica’s prominent chin and energetic way of moving. He hung up the swimsuit to dry on a hanger in the bathroom and stood there looking at the feminine object turning limblessly around itself as it dripped onto the tiles. It struck him as almost incredible that Lea was the only female who had been in the house since that night barely a year before when the librarian had sat on his sofa listening to Mahler. She had looked at him with her dark eyes just waiting for him to lean towards her and place a hand on one of her inviting knees in their black stockings. All too ready. That had probably been the problem. That he could visualise it, all too readily.

His foot hurt every time he walked on it. He cursed and again heard Lea’s teasing laughter when he stumbled on the beach. There was always a rusty nail somewhere when you felt at ease and carefree for a moment. He sat down on the lavatory seat cover and examined the wound. She had looked quite remorseful when she went up to him and saw the blood. As if it was her fault that he couldn’t look where he was going. She stroked his hair consolingly, and he glimpsed in her gesture the young woman she was slowly turning into. The night before she had told him about a boy at school. He was the tallest in her class. He was quite different from the other boys, she said, more mature. The word made him smile. The tall boy wasn’t keen on playing football like the others, and he generally kept to himself. He had brown eyes. They had chatted, one day at the bus stop, but otherwise he did not seem to notice her at all. She had written a letter and slipped it into his bag during the lunch break, but he had not replied. Robert said he was most probably just shy and found himself worrying about everything she would have to go through.

He put a plaster on his heel and limped into the kitchen. A bowl of cornflakes from the morning was still on the table. He did not clear it away. He liked to see the tracks she left behind, a swimsuit here, a plate there, an unmade bed or a comic among the newspapers. The rain pattered on the leaves of the trees outside, and behind the veil of drops on the kitchen window he could see the blurred glow of the lamps in the neighbours’ living room. He made an omelette although he wasn’t really hungry. When he had eaten he switched on the television and sat down. He did not usually watch, he had lost interest when he left Monica, and he had only bought a television set on Lea’s account. The idea of sitting watching television alone had seemed as depressing to him as the idea of drinking alone. He poured himself a double whisky and stretched out his legs in front of him on the sofa. He didn’t feel like listening to music, he only wanted to sit there with the pictures passing before him. News he only caught half of, episodes of serials he had not followed, guessing games whose rules were a mystery to him and pop videos of surly young men in disused factories. Whatever.

He zapped between channels. Two films were being shown simultaneously and at one point both of them showed a sex scene. He hopped back and forth between the two, both were filmed in subdued golden light, and the close-ups of distorted faces and hands on skin melted into each other until he could no longer determine which of the films they belonged to. There was an interesting contrast, thought Robert, between the pictures of naked body parts and the pictures of the lovers’ transported faces. One type of picture showed, or at least tried to indicate, what was happening. The other type showed, or tried to show, what it meant. The bodies slavishly followed their own agenda, but the faces were not content to reflect the purely physical excitement, they also witnessed something different, something more. The moist glances and pathetic expressions said that this was love, or rather that the rhythmical palpability on the screen was the urgent consequence of love, if not its urgent confirmation, which perhaps, came to the same thing.

Robert debated whether he might be getting slightly drunk. He switched off the television, poured yet another whisky and went to open the sliding door to the terrace. His foot did not hurt so much now. The rain splashed onto the paving stones, drummed against the white plastic furniture and soughed further off in the twilight, outside the semi-circle of yellow light from the room behind him. He breathed in deeply through his nose. Grass, she had said, when he opened the window that first afternoon when he sat with her and the scent of newly mown grass rose up to them from the lawn between the wings of the hospital. He looked out into the hissing garden. Grass and twilight blue. Lea must have got home long ago. She would have been fetched at the central station by Monica or Jan, they had probably finished eating by now. No doubt she was in bed dreaming of a boy with brown eyes.

He sat down on the step, lit a cigarette and tried to find out why the sex scenes on television had put him in a bad mood. Was it only because it had been so long since he himself had been to bed with someone? He clinked the ice cubes in his glass. Well, he could just have seized the opportunity when it was offered. He felt annoyed about that sometimes, and once almost called the librarian. She was certainly a charming woman, and they might have made a go of it. They might even have suited each other when they had been through the introductory manoeuvres. But when he and Lea were walking along the beach one Sunday and passed the librarian with a younger man in a baseball cap, he had been just as relieved as he had been when he put down his brandy glass on the sofa table and told her kindly that he would prefer to spend the night alone.

He had felt tired already at the prospect of having to begin all over again. The librarian’s pretty eyes had cornered him, full to the brim so they almost overflowed with expectation. Her dark gaze had tried to convince him there was so much significance in their meeting, the librarian and the doctor from the city hospital. She had presumably been in love, it was honest enough, but he had not been able to free himself of the suspicion that all she needed was a man, because she was pretty starved where men were concerned, and had wrapped up the elementary and entirely respectable needs of her body in a daydream in which the divorced doctor from Copenhagen was something unique. After all, a provincial town didn’t have all that much on offer.

But wasn’t he the one who was incurably romantic, since he was so disheartened by her slightly affected infatuation? Wasn’t it the best reason in the world for falling in love, that she was quite simply lonely in the good old-fashioned sense? Wasn’t there a secret, immature dream of the great revelation lurking beneath his cynical exploration of motive? Perhaps he had merely been piqued because her situation reminded him of his own, suddenly making him think of scruffy widows’ hen parties, where lonely hearts gather for mutual comfort. She had made him feel exposed and available, and he could not tolerate being recognised.

He remembered his shyness as a boy before his voice began to break, and he recalled the letter Lea had written to the boy with brown eyes. He thought of the times some girl or other had made her coltish approaches, and how he had rejected or simply ignored her brusquely, although she made his legs shake. Naturally he had been flattered, but at the same time he had been abashed by the girls’ looks and giggles and little folded notes with squares where he was supposed to put crosses. Actually quite a practical system, those little voting cards, he thought now, but then he couldn’t bear for a girl to anticipate his clumsy interest like that. He felt she recognised something in him which he had barely come to know, and that she put her fingerprints on this something, already all too familiar, as if it belonged to her merely because she had caught sight of it.

At other times a girl could make him feel guilty for no reason. Like the time his mother had got the idea of sending him to dancing class. It was held in a hall with stucco and red velvet curtains. The boys stood in a row along one wall and the girls sat on gilt rococo chairs along the opposite wall. The boys wore white shirts and bow ties and hair combed back with water. The girls were in dresses with stiffened skirts in soft colours, pale blue, pale yellow and white. At a given sign the boys had to cross the endless parquet floor, choose a girl and bow, and one day when he had trotted across the floor as usual and bowed to the first girl he came to, she looked expectantly into his eyes and asked an unexpected question which made him blush with shame and irritation. Had he chosen her because of her dress?

The feeling of shame stayed with him when he first ventured into the whispering, fumbling darkness of teenage years. When he had courted a girl long enough and she finally allowed him to kiss her with his tongue and explore her with his hands, she also beseeched him with her doe eyes to behave as if she alone out of all the girls had managed to set his heart on fire. He felt like a deceiver, although his aims were as artless as anything could be. It was then he first discovered the remarkable gap so-called erotic scenes on television had made him think of again. The gap between bodily sensations and the feelings those sensations were so cunningly named after, making it easier and more decent to confuse them.

He learned to lie both to himself and to the girls he wanted to go to bed with, but each time he was in bed with a strange body, he wondered again why it is called ‘being in love’, although you still only know each other as bodies. Lovely, strange bodies, which, it is true, do utter words, but words you can’t attach to anything because you haven’t in fact any idea of what those words mean, or who she is. It was ironic, he felt, but sad as well, for when you finally found out who it was you had been in love with, usually you were not in love any more because she had become so familiar. The promising strangeness that had aroused your fantasies was like a downy, shining surface that quickly wore away. Then all you could do was hope that before then you managed to become really good friends.

Monica had become his friend, and yes, he had loved her. It must have been love, the joy of seeing her again if they had been apart for a few days. The tenderness that could trickle out of him when he raised his nose from the grindstone and suddenly caught sight of her in the midst of the laborious daily routine that was so safe and boring. All the same, he had thrown himself at Sonia when she offered herself. Even though the previous day he had sat on the beach in the low sunlight watching Monica as she stood smoking a cigarette and looking out over the Sound, as if he understood in a flash why they were together. He had obviously forgotten it again as quickly, anyway there was no connection between his impulses. One day he fell in love afresh with his wife, and the next he went to bed with her little sister.

He could not get close to Sonia and be on intimate terms with her because she did not know the barrister was not her father, and his own secret cast him out of the intimate sphere where Monica and he had lived together. He was only half there, his other half stayed outside, and all the time he had to show himself to her sideways on so that she should not discover his unknown side, obscured by lies and dissimulation. The strange thing was that she was not surprised. Obviously she had grown used to not seeing him in full figure because they had gradually come to see each other in their fixed roles as colleagues, sexual partners and financial allies.

They started to talk less, more superficially on his part, since he felt the necessity for censorship. And on hers? He didn’t know. He never discovered when she started to distance herself, engaged as he was in covering his own remoteness with conventional demonstrations of tenderness and the usual chat about everyday matters. In time he forgot what it was she must not get to know. It stopped meaning anything. It didn’t matter who Sonia’s father was, and he grew indifferent to Sonia herself, a chance passing delusion, but then Monica and he had already grown used to the unnoticeable distance that had arisen. It had already made them less to each other, more indistinct.

Only in bed was he completely surrendered to her. That is, his body was, and their bodies’ commerce became a test of what things were like between them, when afterwards she cuddled up to him with a satisfied sigh and said it was good, or asked anxiously if it had been good for him. The question made it sound as if their bodies were no more than tools for the other’s satisfaction, and that was how it seemed now and then. When she straddled him and rode at a furious gallop on the spot, he sometimes thought of the little painted horses mounted on a plunger that children can ride on when you put a coin in the slot. It seemed to him that they were alone with their separate desire and satisfaction. He felt lonely in spite of their being as close as anyone can be. He felt he was seeing her body and his own from another place, but where was that?

It was raining harder. Every gust of wind threw rain at his face. It had grown cold. He rose from the threshold with stiff legs and threw his cigarette stub onto the lawn before closing the sliding door. It kept glowing on in the dark blades, surprisingly long. Then it went out. His eyes fell on the grey television screen, with the sofa and a standard lamp reflected in it. He took his glass and the whisky bottle into the bathroom. A bath, that was the thing. He put the plug into its hole and turned on the hot water until steam arose. Then he turned the cold tap on slowly, but only enough to stop him from being scalded.

As he undressed he pondered whether it was really the affair with Sonia that had ruined his marriage, and in that case whether the guilt or the memory of her young body had been the deciding factor. His clearest memory of her was the moment before they kissed each other for the first time, when she had hung up her jumper to dry on the floor-planing machine and strutted around among the paint-pots in the empty corner room clad only in bra, skirt and high-heeled shoes. As she went over to him and bent down her head to meet his eyes through her wet hair, there was a second when the well-known world raised a flap to reveal something quite different, so briefly that he could not make out what it was. The rest was less clear, his treachery and the wildness, her body beneath his on Lea’s mattress in what was to be the nursery. She had disappeared from him behind the grimaces of delirium.

He dropped his clothes in a heap on the floor and looked at himself in the mirror. He had grown heavier in recent years. He considered masturbating, but couldn’t be bothered. He could barely achieve a proper erection on his own, and it was a long time since he had had the opportunity of discovering whether a woman could do a better job. He remembered a nurse after a Christmas dinner when he had just moved to this town, but she had left shortly afterwards. He turned off the taps and got into the bath. Slowly he sank down into the hot water and leaned back with a sigh as the heat penetrated his flesh right to the bones. He had forgotten to take off the plaster, it loosened itself from his heel. Delicate winding threads of iodine spread like smoke in the greenish water.

He had been just as alone when he was in bed with Sonia as when he was with Monica again later. Alone some place far inside his body as it did what the two women and he himself expected of it, mechanical and obedient as a willing little horse. The difference was that with Sonia it had been sex from beginning to end. Other relationships had started with sex and had gradually come to include something more, friendship, tenderness, confidence. The particular thing about his relationship with Monica had been that it began with friendship, with an innocent, ironical agreement, when they had met in the circle of young friends who went skiing together. Whereas in the end it was about less and less until it ended in nothing but sex, food, washing and pay-cheques.

Not until long after becoming friends and much to their surprise had they found themselves together under a woollen blanket in a holiday apartment in the French Alps. If he had not broken his ankle and if she had not felt obliged to entertain him while the others were out in the snow, it might never have come to anything. But there had been a shy and unexpected gentleness in her otherwise ironic, authoritative or matter-of-fact face when she lowered it to his and pulled the blanket over their heads like a tent. That made him love her without warning, without transition, and he really experienced their bodies’ first, tentative approaches as the result of love, not as its confirmation, for neither had as yet asked anything or demanded an answer.

It was still raining in the morning, and it went on raining until midday. When Robert went into Lucca’s single room on his rounds, an old man was in there. Everything was as usual, apart from the old man the patients were the same as the day before, but he suddenly realised he felt bored. Since Lucca was brought into hospital he had grown used to seeing her twice a day, on his morning rounds and in the afternoon before going home, when he sat by the window listening to her story. Sometimes she did not say anything special, or she asked questions about the music he had recorded. At other times he stayed just for a quarter of an hour silently sharing a cigarette with her until she fell asleep.

To start with she had been an interesting interruption in his orderly life. When she had gone he discovered he had grown accustomed to her being there. Something was lacking without her, although her bed was quickly filled by another patient. He had not felt this with any other patient, and it disturbed him a little, although not until now. He suddenly saw that his afternoons with Lucca had been a breach of his medical professionalism. He had not given a thought to the possibility of his colleagues and the nursing staff finding it strange, but when he was on his rounds on Monday morning he felt he was being watched. He took pains to behave as if everything was normal, which in fact it was. That was the boring thing about that Monday. Everything was normal again after an interruption that had been so long that he had forgotten the everyday routine that had been broken.

It cleared up a little at midday and the sun shone cautiously on the wet grass of the lawns. He was in his office when Jacob put his head round the door. He smiled boyishly. It looked as if they might be able to play after all. If it didn’t start to rain again the court would have time to dry. Robert had forgotten they had arranged to play tennis that day, but Jacob didn’t seem to notice his confused expression. He smiled secretively. His wife had been away visiting her parents all Sunday. With the children. He made a fist and moved it to and fro beside his hip before closing the door behind him.

Several times Jacob had entertained him in the canteen with stories of his breathless trysts with the gym teacher, until one day Robert cut him short by snapping at him that he should be more discreet. Jacob looked quite scared and he was himself taken aback at his snarling tone. One evening when the weather was reasonable he had been persuaded to come over for dinner. While Jacob in his apron stood at the barbecue grilling steaks his wife walked past him, and he suddenly grabbed her round the waist, making her squeal, throwing a laddish glance at Robert. The man-to-man signal seemed repellent to Robert, but he was amazed at Jacob’s cold-bloodedness. Had he himself been as cold-blooded? He must have been.

A few years after their affair Sonia had married a young Danish solicitor she had met in New York. The barrister and his wife were extremely pleased. The young couple were married in Holmens Church in Copenhagen, and the wedding breakfast was held at the Langelinie Pavilion restaurant on the Lakes. Robert had not seen Sonia since he had gone to the airport with her and kissed her goodbye with assumed intensity, as if their shared afternoons had really meant a lot to him. He had to admit that she looked disturbingly good in the fussy wedding gown, her hair artificially piled. Her coltish air had gone, and although she still talked like a child with strongly voiced s’s and a lazy, clumsily articulated diction, nothing was left of the Bohemian slut he had allowed to seduce him.

It was a wearing feast, and the speeches were too long, full of jokes meant to give a thorough or moving portrayal of the bride or bridegroom. In between he conversed with his neighbour at table without paying attention to his own words. She was a stewardess and interested in tarot cards. Meanwhile he kept his eye on Sonia, pluming herself like a beautiful bird in a nest of white. He fantasised that at any moment she might take off from the table and fly away over the heads of the amazed, well-behaved guests, out the window and on over the harbour until she was only a white fluttering spot that could be taken for any roving seagull.

During the meal he drank a good deal to relieve his boredom as the stewardess explained the significance of the tarot cards to him. When he glanced now and again at Sonia he felt surprised over having tumbled around with his wife’s half-sister on his daughter’s mattress. As she sat there beside her husband, radiant and feminine in a completely grown-up manner, she was certainly very attractive, rather like the beautiful women in fashion magazines you offer a fleeting glance before leafing on, because they are after all only pictures.

He had been relieved when she went back to New York and he was just as relieved to see her married. Everything that took her further out of reach seemed to affirm that their affair had been a misunderstanding. They had had nothing to say to each other, all they had in common was their familial relationship, and even if their meeting had been a chance encounter, it still resembled a kind of traffic accident. The wrong woman in the wrong arms, that was the sort of thing that happened when the head lost control of the body. How was it to know the difference of its own accord?

He came on her after coffee in the cloakroom in front of the lavatories. She was alone. He said he was glad to see her. She said she had missed him. He didn’t believe that, but he smiled, nevertheless. She took a step forward, her white skirt meeting the creases of his trousers, and put a hand on his shoulder. It was an obvious invitation, and he kissed her, wondering how to escape. She took his hand and led him through the door of the women’s toilet. Luckily no one was in there. She pulled him into one of the cubicles, locked the door behind them and laughed softly as she half closed her eyes. He kissed the bride, what else could he do when they were standing there in the cramped cubicle? She unbuttoned her dress and pulled out her breasts, smiling and looking at him earnestly. They were bigger and more taut than he remembered them. I’m pregnant, she whispered. He could not decide whether her tone was triumphant or sarcastic. He kissed her breasts, she sighed. Her wide skirt whispered drily against the walls. He heard someone come into the toilet and the lock turned in one of the other cubicles. They stood quite still, as Sonia, with a hand on the hard bulge behind his fly, held his gaze.

15

He walked out to the point. The sand crackled in thin flakes beneath his feet. On it there were still traces of the rain, myriads of small craters. There was a smell of rotting seaweed. The cloud masses shifted slowly as they swelled and bulged, grey-blue with white edges where the sun touched them. The sea was blue-black under the horizon, closer to land the surface turned into a pale, milky blue. It resembled a bare wide floor, dull and granulated with small ruffles except where a current change left its smooth trace. Big seagulls landed on the beach and stalked off with arrogant, black eyes. Chief gulls, he thought, feeling intrusive when he obliged them to take off with indolent wing beats as he approached.

He looked at his watch. Jacob would be waiting in the changing room. There would not be any tennis that day. Robert couldn’t stand the challenging, self-satisfied expression when his eyebrows spoke meaningfully, merely waiting for Robert to pump him, duly impressed, about the passionate gym teacher with big boobs. This was the first time he had stood him up. In general it was a long time since he had stood anyone up. He was always there, ready and willing in his sparkling white coat, prepared to deal with the functional break-downs of his fellow beings when they were wheeled in, anxious or mistrustful. Mostly they came to trust him, patient, professional Robert with his cultured weakness for romantic symphonies. He stopped to light a cigarette, bent his head and shielded the lighter flame with his jacket. Like a sleeping bird, it occurred to him, with its beak buried in its wing.

Had he quite simply been unlucky? A player among players, who place their bets, win or lose? Was that how he had ended up on his siding, on a deserted shore, in a white coat at a provincial hospital, on a sofa in front of a panorama window looking out on his designed plot of landscaped, hedged-in nature? Was it merely one of the unpredictable results of love, a fortuitous outcome of its meaningless and inevitable power to change bodies and faces about and distribute them further. Once more he meditated on how far, how immeasurably far he was from Monica’s blushing tenderness under the blanket in the Alps when she called him about Lea’s arrangements in a practical, measured tone. As if Lea was not their daughter but merely a mutual task to be undertaken with suitable care and efficiency. It was clearly of no importance that she was their joint flesh and blood, as they say. It was just a trick their bodies had played on them, his microscopic tadpole that had turned into a little folded frog in her womb, a complete little person in embryo.

Once they had been close. They had known each other so well, but with the passage of time he had come to confuse his knowledge of her, crystallised by habit, with the particular moments when he felt her face loosen up and reveal what she was like inside. He knew more about her than anyone else, but it had still not been her, he thought now, walking by himself on the heavy sand, heading for the point. She had shown herself to him in the way she had grown to be, but it was not really herself he had seen and heard. Only the outward echo of her being, the reflections in her tone of voice and her manner, all the little quirks and habits of behaviour. Only rarely had he caught a glimpse of the person she was behind everything she had become.

He visualised her standing on the beach in his bath robe, her back to the low sun, gazing at the waves’ shining foam. Or at home by the window, pausing with the hot iron raised over a flat blouse sleeve with sharp folds, looking at something outside. That was how he remembered her, halted in her movement on her way through the days, self-forgetful, as if he had suddenly become invisible and free to spy. He had almost had to sneak up on her at unguarded moments to track down what had originally aroused his feelings.

He also watched her when they were with other people. Her laughter or attentive gaze suddenly showed him a different Monica, one he imagined as truer than the woman he knew, whether it was her laughter that sounded more inviting, or her expression that was warmer than he was used to. It made him jealous, but it was not so much the man she happened to be talking to who aroused his jealousy. It was the unknown, non-existent person he himself should have been to call out this bold, almost frivolous smile which he did not seem to have seen before. This moist, lingering glance he could not remember she had ever bestowed on him.

At other times he felt he saw her in a more authentic, genuine form, rather as she must have been when a child. He recalled one summer morning when he awoke in her parents’ house in the country. It was early, but she was not lying beside him. Lea was still asleep in her cot at the foot of the bed. He opened the window to let in fresh air and heard her subdued voice down in the garden. She was sitting with her father at the table where they had their meals when the weather was fine. They did not sit opposite each other as usual, she was beside him pouring out tea. Robert could not hear what they said.

The barrister was wearing only shorts. He sat with head bent, looking down in his tea cup as he spoke, resting his elbows on his knees with hands folded in front of him. Although the skin of his torso hung flabbily around his chest and stomach there was something youthful in the way he sat. Now and then he stopped talking and screwed up his eyes as if pondering over his own narrative. Monica sat in the same pose, bent forward with her elbows on her knees, supporting her cheeks in her hands and glancing at him. Suddenly he looked at her and laughed, jerking his chin slightly upwards, as Robert had so often seen her do.

It was the same movement, a cheerful, arrogant little salute to the irony of fate, as if to put himself on eye level with the unpredictability of life. She laughed too, and as they laughed they leaned against each other. Her eyes turned into two narrowed cracks and her face arranged itself into rays of smile lines. For a moment Robert saw precisely how she must have looked when she was a little girl. He felt like going down and joining them to hear what they were laughing at, but he didn’t. Most probably he would not have understood what was so funny.

He felt that Monica was the one he had known best of all. She had told him things about herself she had not told anyone before. Now he did not know her any more, now it was Jan she confided in. When they talked on the phone or occasionally met he could not understand they had once been nearest and dearest to each other. So fleeting was closeness, vanishing without trace, he thought, going on between the calm sea and the pine trees of the plantation. He turned towards land, the windswept trees were replaced by scrub and marram grass. On the other side the beach gave way to a flat expanse of lakes and strips of ground.

When she had let him into her confidence, her words had been like telegrams from a distant place, about remote events he had to try and picture to himself at random. There she lay in bed before him talking about her childhood and the men she had known, about the times she had been in despair or happy, what she feared and what she hoped for, but he could not get at the story itself, just as he could not see behind her face. She had probably not told him everything. She must have deliberately withheld some things, while other things just didn’t sit with her words, and he did not know what questions to ask. In time they stopped asking most questions.

The sky grew lighter above the rushes and the inundated meadowland. The grass blades resembled hatchings thinning out where the hand had tired of drawing, the last strokes of the pen resembled hesitant commas in the void of air and reflections. The ground squelched beneath his feet as he went out on to the isthmus between the meadows and the lake. Out there the beach was merely a narrow sand bank fronting the sea. Only the tall reeds rose above the surface as he approached the wooden shed and its tarred planks with cracks the light shone through.

When he came to the reeds he caught sight of something blue among the pale yellow stems, a small flat piece of light blue cardboard. He went closer and recognised the silhouette of the mettlesome gypsy dancer with her raised tambourine. Had Andreas thrown away his empty cigarette pack? There couldn’t be many people in the small town, or among the visiting ornithologists, who smoked Gitanes. Perhaps he had taken the same route as Robert before he packed his suitcase one day, took his little boy’s hand and went to Stockholm to try his luck with the black-haired production designer’s astonishing blue eyes. The wisps of smoke around the gypsy girl’s curvaceous waist had blended with the blue colour, faded by sun and rain so there was no longer twilight around her but broad daylight. She had gone on dancing all night with undiminished fervour, long after the invisible guitars had been put away in the invisible guitar cases and the invisible chairs piled up on the invisible tables. She had danced till dawn, long after the invisible cigarette smokers had gone home, hoarse with fatigue, tobacco and unrequited desire.

He seated himself on his usual worm-eaten post among the reeds, hidden from the world, he thought and again visualised Jacob. Now he must be waiting with his racket on the tennis court, rocking impatiently on his feet because he had to hold back all the erotic titbits he had intended Robert to drag out of him one by one. He studied the faded Gitanes pack. A voluptuous female silhouette like that probably danced in the mind’s eye of every man, without the light ever falling on her face. You might call her anything that appealed, but there would always be the same provocative hand on her hip, the same sway of the waist, the same dizzy swishing of skirt and hair and the same jingling tambourine above her head.

It was banal, of course, but all the more effective. The darker the silhouette was, the more it came to resemble a key-hole in the shape of a woman, which made the observer believe he was the key to her mystery and she the door that would eventually open on to an unknown world. But the black outline of the dancing beauty did not indicate a particular woman. The artist had omitted individual features and all that was left were the titillating basic forms of femininity, the wasp waist, swelling skirt and billowing hair. The silhouette of the beautiful gypsy lass was a darkened hole, carefully cut out, into which any attractive woman might fit, lay a hand on her hip, bang the tambourine and play the role of a dream on the verge of fulfilment.

That was how the gym teacher twirled around in Jacob’s thoughts, how she showed off her fabulous breasts in the dark corners of his daily life as husband and father. That was how Sonia, scented with summer rain, showed herself to him in the empty apartment smelling of paint. And that was how the Jewish designer lured Andreas to puncture the idyllic soap bubble that had surrounded the refurbished house by the wood. Robert dropped the cigarette pack among the reeds. There she would lie, the unknown gypsy, among the birds’ nests and rustling stems, until she rotted away in the brackish water. An increasingly blurred silhouette dancing bravely on day and night, forgotten by all, with upheld tambourine and swaying hips.

She too probably had her dreams as she danced for everyone and no one. Like the other lonely dancers she must dream that someone would catch sight of her. A strange guest in the smoky tavern, who would come in one evening and direct his gaze on her like a sudden projector lighting up her face. For each dancing silhouette there would be a masculine silhouette in the doorway of the tavern, and just as she danced in men’s thoughts, so the figure on the threshold lingered in her thoughts as she shook her hair and called to him with her tambourine. Had he finally come?

Perhaps she had already visualised his outline, sure that she would be able to recognise it through the rolling fog of cigarette smoke, for it was the outline of someone she had once known. And maybe the stranger in the doorway felt the same way. Maybe he had been going from tavern to tavern all night, standing in the doorway watching one gypsy after another in the hope of finally recognising the contours of his first love, or the genesis of his love, which perhaps, perhaps not, was one and the same thing.

16

The radio was made of dark wood, shining with varnish, and the subdued light of the lamps was reflected in its rounded corners. The switch buttons were shiny too, yellowish white, and one of them clicked when the girl’s hand reached out lazily to push at it with the ends of two fingers. It was a long hand, pale, almost white, but a different, cooler white than the buttons and the smaller press buttons between them, in a row like the flat, rounded teeth in the lower jaw of a herbivore. A coppery light shone from the dark green glass plate around a dull pupil, and Robert could remember how the bright narrow eye had reminded him of the air bubble in a spirit level, blinking just as restlessly as the girl’s hand moved the red needle past the names of towns printed in slanting columns. There was a boiling, rushing sound behind the woven panel covering the loudspeaker, and disconnected words and sounds escaped the storm and the close-knit covering, but they did not correspond to the town names, Tallinn, Sofia, Berlin, they were Danish and Swedish voices, there were none from further away although the needle traversed quite different distances, now between Warsaw and Leningrad, now between Vienna, Prague and Budapest.

Apart from a suitcase each for their clothes, the radio and her father’s clarinet were all the girl’s parents had brought with them after they left their country the year before her birth. Almost twenty years had passed to make it familiar with the new words and sounds, yet Robert thought everything sounded slightly strange, as if heard from the distant city they had left behind them while they were still young. To start with they must have wondered at the sounds produced by their old radio in the new surroundings where they slowly learned to speak again and like their small daughter mixed up the words from their old language and the new one.

The green pupil stopped flickering, apparently its eye had settled on something. The white hand let go of the button, the red needle stopped midway between Belgrade and Trieste, and a different kind of crackle sounded through the panel, the breakers from a hall full of clapping hands. That too subsided, silence followed and the first notes sounded in a breaking wave of gathered, released and re-accumulated power, Brahms’s third symphony. A sea of clanging tones from instruments that Robert felt flowed together, so he could not distinguish one from another, possibly because the varnished wooden box was too small for all that music, the wooden frame creaked like an old dinghy, but no doubt also because he had only just started to distinguish the surface ripples of music from its under-current.

He was seventeen, she was almost two years older, the girl in the armchair watching the snowflakes in the violet light from the street lamp as if in a trance. From the beginning he had marvelled at her eyes, so far apart. She had pulled her legs up under her in a mermaid pose, and the space between her eyes made her face seem open, but her gaze was remote as she sat opposite him listening to Brahms. Her cheekbones were broad, her hair brown, and the side parting made it fall over one eye. At intervals she pushed it behind her ear with a weary hand.

She wore flesh-coloured nylon stockings, she was the only girl he knew who had that kind, old-fashioned look, just like the armchair she sat on. Everything in the apartment was bleak and shabby, and he had had to remind himself several times that it was only the radio her parents had brought with them and not the other furnishings. When he went to see her in the quiet street with its pompous tenements from the turn of the century, it was almost like visiting her in the distant town they had been obliged to leave. The apartment looked like those he imagined belonged to people in her parents’ home town, and the father had not changed anything in the twenty years that had passed, even after the girl’s mother left them and went back. She had never settled down in the foreign, western city. They had not fled because of her.

The girl had only told him snatches of the story, which he had to piece together himself, at intervals. When her mother decided to go home the idea had been for her daughter to join her later. Robert didn’t understand how the mother could have left without her, she was only six at the time. But the child stayed with her father, and although it was pure guesswork, Robert had the feeling that a promise had been broken. Something in their silence confirmed his assumption. A year or two later they heard the mother had died. She had been ill, the girl had told him, without explaining the cause, and Robert had the impression that it was not the name of the disease she kept to herself. Her silence seemed rather a pact which she and the bald man with horn-rimmed glasses had made, whether it was a secret they guarded, or the mother’s death itself they shielded each other against. There were no pictures of her in the apartment, only some of the girl at various stages of her growth, in silver frames with a leather flap behind so they could stand up on the sideboard. It looked as if the man with horn-rimmed spectacles and his deceased wife had managed to have a whole crowd of children.

Now she sat like a mermaid in flesh-coloured nylons looking into the darkness through the veil of snowflakes. Behind the yellowed panelling her father played his clarinet with its shining silver keys. They could not hear him, they just knew he was there, in evening dress, like an inseparable part of the music, a foaming whirl in its breaking wave. Robert had seen his evening suit hanging on the dining-room door. She brushed it for him before he put it on and straightened the white tie, as he impatiently squirmed at her care, perhaps embarrassed to let Robert see his daughter in the role of deputy for a solicitous wife. She was a head taller than her father, but he was a small man, anyway.

Robert had been embarrassed himself when her father opened the front door for the first time in a smoking jacket and checked slippers. The man gave him a suspicious look through his thick spectacles. Although he felt slightly guilty Robert couldn’t help comparing his stumpy figure with the dismal interior, moss-green and brown, with heavy wine-coloured curtains and table centres askew and antimacassars on the backs of the armchairs. There was no television, only the old radio. He felt like a guest in another time, but he corrected himself later. It was not another time but another world. The girl had been embarrassed too, the first time he sat at the table under the chandelier with unshaded bulbs. She served while her father questioned him in his tortuous accent. She was embarrassed, Robert could see, at having so much of her life suddenly laid bare in the garish glare of the chandelier. She had been embarrassed because her father received him in slippers. She said it in their own language, but Robert guessed what she said. When they sat down to dinner her father had changed his shoes for a pair of black ones. Surprisingly small shoes, impeccably polished and shining.

Ana was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. Later on Robert asked himself if she had really been so beautiful, but in vain, his scepticism failed when he brushed her face clear of oblivion. Nor could he set her young face against a middle-aged woman’s to compare them and observe the results of time’s revenge on the innocent arrogance of any young beauty. For all he knew, age had made her still more beautiful, but he could not be sure. He had not seen her since she graduated. But she had certainly been arrogant, and her haughty manner, with her unfashionable blouses and skirts, made her still more unusual.

At that time most of their contemporaries, boys as well as girls, had started wearing hand-made shoes, flared corduroy trousers and blue Chinese denim shirts. Clumping footwear and denim shirts had even sneaked into the sixth form college they attended, where she was a year ahead of him. It was a private school with a glorious past, teachers in ties and sea-green walls. The spherical lamps and plaster cast of a Greek hero in the vestibule, the nationalistic sentiments and the smell of wax polish held sway while the world outside grew ever more rebellious and shoddy. By an unpredictable coincidence Ana, with her old-fashioned, well-brought-up air, was better suited than many other pupils to the school’s atmosphere of discipline and good manners.

Seen from the street the heavy red-brick façade with its deep window recesses resembled a fortress intended to shield and sound-proof the classrooms from the subversive slogans blaring from megaphones and fluttering from banners above the processions of protesters marching past outside. Robert had bought himself a pair of sloppy shoes and a blue denim shirt and had just finished reading Chairman Mao’s selected works. He had not only read them as an antidote to the head’s admonitions at morning assembly, he had also, it later occurred to him, made himself familiar with the chairman’s ideas in unconscious solidarity with his mother, who slaved in a factory canteen until her hands were rough and cracked. In contrast to the mothers of his school friends whose hands were smooth, cared-for and indolent when they were stretched out to bid the polite plebeian boy into their warmth.

She smiled at him absently, his hard-working mother, when he tried, over the rissoles or fried plaice fillets, to make her understand why the dictatorship of the proletariat was inevitable, or talked about The Long March as if he had walked the whole way himself. She was too tired to follow his train of thought, her feet hurt, and when he made the coffee she was already ensconced on the sofa with Dostoievski or Flaubert. Once he made an attempt at Ana’s dinner table. He depicted the liberation of intellectual resources in the classless society and did not notice until it was too late that she cleared her throat and tried to catch his eye, as the clarinettist just looked at him out of his horn-rimmed spectacles. The thick lenses made his eyes seem smaller, simultaneously defenceless and resigned, as they regarded the young man sitting there eagerly proclaiming. He seemed to be looking at him from some far-off place. Later, when his revolutionary fervour had burned itself out, he always saw that distant look behind the clarinettist’s spectacles when the conversation centred on class war.

For a long time he had watched Ana’s serious face during morning assembly or going up or downstairs past the dusty plaster hero. He thought about her when he lay awake at night. She was often by herself, which made things more difficult for him, because her solitude increased her air of inviolable aloofness. He did not know how to approach her, nor what he would hit on to say. She did not seem to notice him. To her, no doubt, he was merely an overgrown child.

It was Ana who spoke first, one day after school. She caught him up on the pavement and passed him a newspaper. He had dropped it. It was a Trotskyist pamphlet with a red star in the heading. He had walked along with the red star sticking out of his pocket, for the effect. She held it out in front of her between two fingers and he asked if she was afraid it was infectious. It flew out of him, to his own astonishment. Maybe it was to compensate for all the times he had followed her at a distance and thought about her when he was alone, without her knowledge. She smiled. He had never seen her smile before.

They took walks together after school, in the parks, and she lent him books, mostly poetry. She wanted to know what he thought of them. Gradually the poetry collections replaced the subversive material on his shelves, not because he had suddenly exchanged his revolutionary world view for a lyrical one but because he was interested in everything that could tell him something more about her and bring them into closer contact. If she had guessed he was in love with her she made no sign, nor did she apparently notice how others gossiped about the odd couple they made, the fiery agitator and the eastern European loner from their respective forms. He only pretended to be bothered by the gossip. It was to be the two of them against the rest of the world.

She looked at him attentively when he dutifully explained what he had got out of reading some poet or other. He felt stupid, he wanted to kiss her, he suffered and rejoiced at the same time when they sat on a park bench watching the swans and talking about life. She drew him into a serious, intense atmosphere where the shadows were darker and the colours glowed more deeply. If Robert thought he was a fierce social critic, in Ana he found a still more implacable and uncompromising spirit. On the whole, everything that issued from the radio and the television or was shown on cinema screens, in Ana’s opinion was just pop. She could not have hit on a more derogatory expression, and when she pronounced the word she wrinkled her nose which creased the skin around her nose and nostrils into little folds, making her look like a fastidious rabbit.

It looked sweet and Robert couldn’t wait for her to say the word. He provoked her to utter it by talking about films he knew she would hate. But she did not think, like Robert, that everything labelled pop betokened false consciousness, capitalist society’s calculated method of brain-washing the working class and preventing it from developing a necessary class consciousness. Deep down she felt the populace was pop-minded, and she tacitly let him understand that she herself belonged to a persecuted but superior elite of intellectual aristocrats, of artistic people, as she said. That was her favourite word and it signified the absolute opposite of pop. It brought them to the verge of quarrelling, but it was obvious that she enjoyed their discussions, and while he argued in favour of the proletarian view, secretly he dreamed of getting a place in the select circles of artistic people, preferably a place beside hers.

She began to invite him home. He took it as a promising sign, but nothing happened. They sat in the living room, never in her room, sometimes her father was with them. They drank tea. Robert had not imagined there could be people who sat drinking tea in the afternoon like that, talking of poets or composers, as if the world revolution was not smouldering just round the corner, ready to burst into flames any day. He sat there in his denim shirt listening to records with Ana and her father, different recordings of the same pieces, and the father conducted with both hands as the music played. He gave a commentary on how various conductors interpreted the same score. That was how Robert became captured by music, like a detour to Ana, to the moment he was waiting for. He continued to love the great symphonies long after his love for her had died out along with his faith in the permanent revolution. The works of Brahms and Mahler were the inadvertent remains she left behind her when she vanished from his life, but at least that was something. Trotsky left no more in his memory than the unsuccessful attempt to picture what it must be like to have an ice pick in the head.

One afternoon when they were alone his eyes fell on a little gold star of David hanging in a chain around her neck. He had not noticed it before and asked if he could look at it, stretching out his hand so his fingertips almost brushed her collar bone. They had never been so close to touching each other. She took off the chain and let it fall onto his palm with the star uppermost, observing him with her dark eyes as he weighed it in his hand. Was she Jewish? Her paternal grandmother had been. The star of David had belonged to her, so her father was Jewish too, according to tradition at least, although her grandfather had been a Christian and her father was an atheist. She herself must be half Jewish, she said, taking back the star.

She bent forward so her hair hung down in front of her forehead as she fastened the chain round her neck. He recalled the red star on the newspaper she had given back to him when they talked together for the first time. Was the golden star to be the route to their first caress? Her neck was slimmer and more delicate than he had thought, and he was about to bend forward and kiss it when she raised her head again, so her hair flopped freely around her. She smoothed it, pink in the face, and he didn’t know whether it was bending down that had brought the blood to her cheeks or his intention, which must have been written in large letters on his forehead.

Nonplussed, he grabbed at the first subject that came to mind and asked her to tell him about her grandmother. She had disappeared during the war, in one of the camps. Ana paused, looking at him to see the effect of her words on him and judge if he was worthy of hearing the story. Again she made him feel stupid and boorish. There was a sombre tone in her voice as she spoke and he shuddered as tourists do when, in shorts and T-shirts, they come in out of the sun to the cool vaults of a sanctuary, not so much because they feel like it but because they think they should. Her grandmother had left her small son with a farming family in the country. They saved him, but they also became his only family. Several months before he left them her father had decided to join the partisans. No one knew where or when he died, or how. Ana’s grandmother was deported a few weeks after she had kissed her son goodbye and hidden the gold chain with the little star of David under a loose paving stone in the pigsty.

Ana often went back to the story or talked in more general terms about her Jewish background. She had read everything she knew. Apparently her father had repressed his origins or lost any interest in them. He did not like Ana wearing the star of David although he had given it to her himself when she was a little girl. But the more he evaded her questions the more she questioned him and read from the piles of books in her room on Judaism and Jewish history. Robert discovered that she had cultivated her identity as half-Jewish or quarter-Jewish, according to how exact she wanted to be, for a long time. By his interest in the star on her neck he had unintentionally led their conversations onto a track they could not get away from again. When she held her monologues on the cabbalists and the Talmud, on the diaspora and the twelve tribes of Israel and how many great artists had been Jews, he cursed himself because he had not had the courage to kiss her bare neck.

Her passion for everything Jewish was quite different from the passion for music she shared with her father. It did not make him feel any closer to her, on the contrary it made him feel she removed herself to a world from which he was excluded. A world where he had no chance because measured against it he must seem so ordinary and anonymous. He suffered more than ever from his secret love, sure it could not stay hidden any longer, and that in her thoughts she mocked him for his cowardice. He dreamed of assailing her with a sudden embrace, literally pulling her down to earth and waking her to life away from what he came to see as a ghostly passion. When he attentively listened to her stories of the intellectual superiority of the Jews, he tried to suppress the anger that welled up in him and also made him feel ashamed. Sometimes he was about to forget that it was she and not the Jews he was angry with. But he was jealous of her Jews, both living and dead, and when she dwelt on her grandmother’s death yet again, he felt paralysed.

It was not only that he had to stop on the threshold of something neither of them would ever come to comprehend. It was also because he dared not say what he was thinking. For in contrast to him she did not allow herself to be paralysed, she persisted in entering the forbidden darkness of history, as if it was not only the story of her grandparents she told, but her own as well. He felt he began to understand why her father creased his brow every time he saw the little star on her neck. In fact she wore it not as a symbol but as an ornament. She had surfeited on the tragedy of her unknown grandmother, and on her father’s, although she had had no part in them, born as she had been in safety on the right side of the war and the Iron Curtain that separated her father from his homeland, where she had never set foot.

One evening at the beginning of winter he sat in their kitchen while she cooked, and as usual he was the one who listened, bursting with lust as she spoke of the Jewish respect for the written word. She described how it was forbidden to throw away old Torah scrolls, and how the worn-out scrolls were kept in the synagogue attics. Suddenly he interrupted her and asked if she regretted that her mother had not been Jewish so she could regard herself as a valid member of the chosen people. He did not know if it was the sarcasm in his tone or the reference to her mother that made her fall silent. He felt immediately he had broken a tacit agreement, but he had only become aware at the moment he violated it. He tried to continue the conversation and asked, peaceably he thought, how there could be room for all those Torah scrolls in the attics of the synagogues, and how you could stop the mice eating them. She did not reply, merely went on peeling potatoes with unrelenting accuracy.

At the table her father asked her why she was so quiet. It’s nothing, she said, avoiding his glance, painfully distressed at being so directly confronted in the presence of Robert. Her eyes settled on a distant point between them, and she sat like that, withdrawn and unmoving, with her head raised a little, so Robert could see the full length of her throat, that throat he should have kissed long ago. She had taken off the star of David. Robert was sure she had been wearing it when he arrived, but he didn’t feel he could put that down to a victory. She stayed unconquered with her dreaming eyes and her way of holding her face, as if weighed down by the luxuriant hair, absorbed in a secret thought. Her arrogant expression made him forget his remorse in the kitchen when she stood staring silently down at the peel sliding off the yellow potatoes in curved strips and falling into the sink with a soft sound like heavy drops. He felt she obliterated him with her silence and her absent gaze, and he felt the urge to wound her still more.

He thought of an article he had read in the newspaper about the Israeli expropriation of Palestinian property. He started to describe what he had read, and the clarinettist listened, interested. He agreed with Robert, the Jewish treatment of the Palestinians showed that Zionism was not a whit better than any other form of nationalism, on the contrary it was serious treachery against the Jewish people’s experience as a persecuted minority. Robert watched Ana as her father spoke. Her eyes were still distant, but slightly softer and darker, he felt, as if they grew larger. He was surprised at his luck, but was not allowed to enjoy it, before Ana dropped her cutlery with a crash. The clarinettist gave her a surprised look through his horn-rimmed spectacles as she left the dining room. The door of her own room slammed. He put down his napkin on the cloth and rose. Robert stayed at the table, listening to him as he talked quietly to her through the door in their foreign language.

She had glanced at him as she stood up, and it was not anger he read in her shining eyes, nor was it self-pity. She had merely looked at him through her tears as if to make quite sure. She looked at him as if she had known all the time that he would betray her, and had only herself to blame for letting herself be carried away by his sympathetic air. As he sat alone at the table, he felt the treachery burn his cheeks, but many years would pass before he completely understood what had happened. In fact he had not wounded her. That at least would have been a warmer gesture. Instead he had revealed the coldness in his young, fumbling desire. He had held a hard mirror up to her and shown her what she already knew.

He could have shielded her from the sight, but he did not. Without seeing it he had confirmed to her that she was alone. By reminding her that she was not the one she dreamed of being, he had simultaneously come to reveal that he himself had only dreamed about her. You dream the dreams you need to, he thought later. He had been too young to understand why she dreamed as she did. On the other hand, she had immediately realised that he still only needed his dreams. Where she had adorned herself in her Jews, he had adorned himself with his love instead of letting it elicit a scrap of mercy.

She did not speak to him for almost a week, and he dared not approach when he caught a glimpse of her in the corridors or on the way up or down the staircase, past the plaster Greek. He was in despair, he couldn’t concentrate in class, and he felt assaulted by scornful eyes, while his stomach clenched in fear and hope at the thought that they might pass each other in break. One afternoon he rang her doorbell, with shaking knees. Her father opened the door, she was not at home. He invited Robert in. He didn’t like to say no when the clarinettist asked if he would like a cup of tea. Ana might well turn up, he said, smiling in a way that made Robert feel he was made of glass. She was a sensitive girl, but he must have discovered that. No more was said on the subject.

It had snowed all day and Robert’s shoes were soaked. The clarinettist asked if he didn’t want to take them off to get dry. He kept on even though Robert said politely it wasn’t important. Surely he didn’t want to get pneumonia? Ana’s father was about to take off his shoes by force when Robert gave in and shyly watched the bald man crushing up newspaper and stuffing the wet shoes with it. He leaned the shoes against the radiator and stood there looking at Robert for a while before sitting down again. They had not been alone together before. Now he was caught, without shoes and without Ana. Her father put sugar in his cup and stirred it thoroughly. How was the world revolution going, then? Robert’s face flamed. It would take a bit of time… The other looked at him over the edge of his horn-rimmed spectacles and smiled, but not maliciously, almost kindly. It must be nice, he said, to have something to look forward to.

He questioned him about his mother, and Robert said more than he meant to. The clarinettist regarded him attentively. He kept his eyes on him even when he lifted his cup to his mouth, which was a mere slit in his short-sighted face. To his astonishment Robert discovered that he no longer felt shy, and before he could stop himself he was recounting how he had found his father’s telephone number, how strange it had been to call up the gentlemen’s hairdresser in a provincial Jutland town and present himself as his son, and how at the last moment he had changed his mind and left the train on the way to their arranged meeting. He stopped and to avoid the other’s eyes looked around the room. He caught sight of the black suit hanging on the door. You can hear me play this evening, said Ana’s father. Robert looked at him, the clarinettist smiled again. They would be playing Brahms.

They heard the sound of a key in the front door. When Ana came into the room she stopped abruptly before coming over and sitting down with them, then taking a gulp of her father’s tea. They sat in the kitchen eating sandwiches after her father had gone. They didn’t talk about what had happened the last time he came to visit. Nor did they talk about Jews. He told her about his English teacher, who had been furious because hardly anyone had handed in their essays. I have turned a blind eye to a lot, the teacher had said, but now I’ve seen enough of you! Ana laughed. He asked if she skated. She did. Perhaps they could go skating one day. If the cold spell lasted the ice on the lake would soon be thick enough. It had grown dark outside and snow was falling again. He asked when the concert would begin. She looked at him in surprise. Now… Would he like to hear it? They rose and went into the living room. She pulled up her legs in the armchair and he thought she probably always did that when she was alone. She bent over the radio so her hair fell over one eye, and lazily stretched out a hand.

A clattering of flapping wings broke the silence a little way off. A flock of birds rose in concert from the reeds and fell into a triangular formation with an equal distance between each. The triangle of beating wings made a turn in the air, dwindling into the perspective towards the axis where swollen clouds were reflected in the quiet water. Robert rose from his crumbling post and saw the flock and its flapping reflection approach each other. He threw a last glance at the silhouette of the dancing gypsy woman on the cigarette packet’s blue square, no longer twilight blue but pale blue like the sky and the folded surface of the water behind the reed-bed.

He began to walk back, again visualising Ana one winter evening in their early youth, beside the darkly varnished radio where her father was playing among the other musicians, the instruments flowing together in one great movement. He sat in the armchair opposite her, right on the edge, while the waves of music struck the densely woven panel of the wireless set. Ana sat looking out at the falling snowflakes outside. Cautiously he rose and went over to her, squatted down and laid a hand on one of her ankles in the flesh-coloured stockings. She slowly turned her face towards him, not surprised, almost in a kind of dawning recognition, and with a strangely soft, lithe movement slipped down to him on the carpet. Afterwards he couldn’t work out how she had disengaged herself from her folded mermaid position and down into his embrace.

He had not forgotten her face in the warm, slanting light of the lamp, surrounded by her fan of hair on the wine-red and withered green vine leaves. It stayed with him even after it ceased to make him heavy at heart. Her face was still clearer than a photograph after he had grown up and other women had succeeded her. It kept on breathing. He remembered not only her broad cheekbones and the distance between her dark eyes, but also the feeling of being wide open, the second before he bent down and his own shadow covered what he had seen. It was the same feeling many years later when Monica pulled a woollen blanket over her head to guard their first kiss against the cold and the raw winter light and the ugliness of the holiday flat. And perhaps he had just been waiting, it occurred to him that afternoon in the French Alps, for a face with the same almost painful gentleness to sink down over him and wipe out the image of Ana.

But he had been mistaken, his last love had not eclipsed the first one. Instead, his relationship with Monica had made him doubt his capacity to love. If there was a hidden connection between Ana and Monica it seemed more likely that his first delusion had been pregnant with all the succeeding ones. But he did not think like that in the Alps, and later when he was with Sonia in his and Monica’s newly painted home, he sometimes pictured Ana afresh, her expectant face framed in flowing hair, and he felt she signified a promise that had never been fulfilled.

They lay rolling about among the threadbare arabesques of the carpet, their hands under each other’s clothes, tongues enmeshed, until she tore herself free. He looked at her, crestfallen, thinking she did not want it after all. She wiped saliva from her mouth and started to unbutton her blouse. Take off your clothes, she said quietly. He obeyed. Everything suddenly took on a very practical tone. He kissed her neck as her fingers searched for the hooks of her bra. How skinny you are, she said and made him feel like a skeleton. Her breasts were smaller than he had imagined and her hips broader, thighs stronger. This is what I look like, she said, as if she had read a slight hesitation in his eyes, and he kissed her passionately and frenetically like a drunkard afraid of getting sober. She fell backwards and started to laugh. His hands went roving all over her. He didn’t like her laughter. Not so fast, she whispered and showed him how, with a light hold of his wrist. She seemed a little too expert.

He had a condom in his pocket. It had been there a long time. He took it out, bashful, and broke the seal. She didn’t say anything but he could see what she was thinking. He was prepared all right. Licentiously considerate. She watched him roll it on, curious. This was it, then. The smell of rubber made him feel coarse and still more undressed. She guided him and after a couple of attempts he made his way in. She smiled and squeezed up her eyes, her hair stuck to her damp forehead, she groaned. He ejaculated almost at once. He could see that was a disappointment, but she was sweet. They lay close to each other, listening to Brahms. She gave him a far away look and stroked from his forehead down over his nose with one finger. He said he loved her. She made no reply.

For a week or two he really thought they were a couple. He thought of it with ecstasy when he waited for her outside the school. They strolled together in the snow-white parks and went skating when the ice on the lake grew thick enough. He took her home and introduced her to his mother. He wondered nervously what Ana would see in her, and on the way upstairs in the modest block he puffed up his mother’s love of Tolstoy and Dostoievski. Afterwards he felt foolish for having been over-enthusiastic in crediting his mannish mother and her red, cracked hands with a love of the arts. When they were alone in his room Ana said that his mother seemed a fine person. It sounded far too studied. They lay on his bed, he kissed her and pressed a hand between her nylon thighs. She pushed it away.

She seemed to have got over her rapture for Jewishness, and he never saw the star of David again. All that was left was poetry, but she did not talk about it as enthusiastically as before, and he soon grew bored when they adjudicated between what was pop and what was art. He wanted to talk about them. They often just lay on his bed or hers, when they were alone at home, without saying anything as they caressed each other, she slightly absentminded, he insistent and expectant. After they had made love she always covered herself with the duvet. She didn’t like him looking at her body. Sometimes she fell asleep. When he realised they were not sweethearts any longer and maybe never had been, it was not her broad hips and small breasts he visualised when he lay sleepless at night cultivating his broken heart. It was always her face beneath him on the carpet the moment the whole thing began.

It did not end, it ebbed out, until with one blow it became clear to him that it had been over for some time already. She started to have things to do in the afternoon, and when he arrived at her home unexpectedly it was quite often her father who opened the door. He had tea with the clarinettist as the thawing snow slid off the roofs outside. They listened to records and talked about music. Robert learned a lot about music that winter, and in the midst of his unease he discovered that he liked sitting in the gloomy apartment talking to the bald man.

The clarinettist never seemed surprised when Robert rang the doorbell. Nor when he turned up one afternoon even though Ana had said she would not be home until late that night. There was a music stand by the living room window, the clarinet lay on a chair beside it. Robert asked if he was interrupting. Not at all, but now he was there he might as well make himself useful and get them a pot of tea. He went into the kitchen and put the kettle on, and as he waited for it to boil he listened to the cool, melancholy notes from the living room. Ana’s father went on playing when Robert carefully put the tray on the sofa table and sat down in his usual place. The man by the window seemed not to notice him. He played as if he was alone, lightly rocking to and fro in time to the melody with his small, short-sighted eyes glued to the score and his mouth locked in a downward curving, somehow regretful grimace around the mouthpiece of the clarinet.

He continued to play when the front door banged. Robert turned round, and through the half open door he saw Ana in the passage with a man. They had their backs to him and didn’t see him. They hung up their coats on the row of hooks and disappeared out of sight along the corridor to her room. Robert sat on until the clarinettist put his instrument down on his lap and looked at him over his horn-rimmed spectacles. Bartók, he smiled and took off his glasses. He held them up to the window, lowered them again and polished the lenses on his shirt. His eyes were brown like Ana’s and bigger than usual. He put on his glasses and looked out of the window. There was a rubber plant on the window-sill. He stretched out a hand and picked at the outside, withered edge of one of the leathery leaves. Brown dust fell on the sill. Bartók, Béla, he said slowly, looking out at the wintry light.

17

Robert was at the kitchen sink when he heard a car in the drive. The engine stopped, a car door slammed, and soon afterwards the doorbell rang. He hesitated for a moment before going out to open the door. No one was there, but he recognised Jacob’s car behind his own. The telephone rang in the living room. He stopped on the threshold. Jacob was out on the lawn looking in at the panorama window. It was dim in the room, presumably he could only see his reflection and the clouds and trees by the fence at the end of the garden. Robert had forgotten to switch off the answering machine when he came in. The telephone was beside the window. If Robert answered it Jacob would see him. If he ignored it, it would still look as if he had just gone for a walk.

He heard his own voice saying he was not in and asking the caller to leave a message after the tone. The volume was turned up so high that Jacob must be able to hear it. He stayed on the grass. Robert was almost certain he had not seen him, but still it seemed as if their eyes met through the wide window. After the tone there was silence, and in the silence he heard someone breathing. When he recognised Lucca’s voice he could not decide whether he felt a bad conscience or annoyance at the idea of not talking to her. He went over and picked up the receiver, turning his back on the window. When he looked out into the garden a few moments later, Jacob had vanished. He heard the car start and drive away.

Her voice was muted, almost confidential, but maybe she only lowered it because there were other people in the room she was calling from. She had learned to dial for herself. Wasn’t she clever? He apologised for not having been to see her yet, and asked how she was doing. It sounded tame. She replied with a question. Had he spoken to Andreas? Robert thought of Stockholm. No, Andreas had not contacted him. Why didn’t she just call him? Surely she must have an idea where he was. She said nothing. Robert asked if he should try to call Andreas for her and at once felt cross with himself for voluntarily allowing himself to get entangled in their private complications. He had only asked to break her silence. She hesitated. Would he do it? He said yes. She wanted to see Lauritz. Maybe, if it was not asking too much, could he take the boy to see her? On a Saturday or Sunday, when he was not working? He must promise to say no if it didn’t suit him. He smiled at the small hypocrisy.

She gave him the name and address of some friends Andreas used to stay with when he was in Copenhagen. He would have to find out their number, she couldn’t remember it. He got the number from directory enquiries and called. It was engaged. He pushed open the sliding door and went outside. The sun shone through the busy clouds and made the white plastic chairs on the terrace shine so he had to narrow his eyes. He went to stand in the middle of the lawn where Jacob had been. The shining reflections of the chairs swam in the panorama window in front of the dimness of the room and the more distant, indistinct picture of his lone figure on the grass. How had he ended up here? Even if he strained his memory to the utmost, and really succeeded in tracing the order of events down to their smallest links, he had a suspicion that it would not bring him closer to an answer.

The following days were warm, the clouds dispersed, and the high pressure transformed the sky into a pale blue desert stretching all the way into town. The heat made the air quiver over the asphalt of the motorway. The wind blew in through the open windows and pulled at his shirt sleeves, and he felt light and empty-headed as the road signs increased in perspective and abruptly flew over the windscreen. He listened to The Magic Flute and quite forgot why he had set off. It was a long time since he had been in Copenhagen, and when he passed the south harbour he recalled all the times in the past when he had returned after a trip in the country, relieved to see the city towers again, the sparkling water of the harbour and the cranes above the goods trains’ marshalling yard. He could leave his job, sell the house and move back into town. He could do whatever he liked. What was he waiting for?

Noisy pop music issued from behind the door. He knocked loudly. She was as brown as cocoa and unnaturally blonde, the woman in the black slip who opened the door. Her dyed hair was short and stuck out untidily around her pinched, sun-tanned face. She looked at him enquiringly as she squeezed up her eyes to avoid the smoke from the cigarette between her lips. She had a small artificial pearl on one nostril. The apartment was at the rear of a block in the city centre and consisted of one large room with vertical wooden beams in the centre. Piles of clothes were scattered on the furniture and the unmade double bed, and the confusion of fashion garments, empty pizza boxes, used coffee cups and randomly dropped objects seemed to go with the drumming rhythm pumping out of the loudspeakers. She must have been the same age as Lucca. The bangles on her wrists jingled when she removed the cigarette and threw out a hand to show the way. She apologised for the mess and shouted to Lauritz, who was on the sofa watching television. It didn’t occur to her to turn down the music. A sun-tanned man stood at one of the windows wearing nothing but briefs, talking on a mobile. He threw a glance at Robert and nodded curtly before turning his back on them. He was athletically built and absent-mindedly caressed the muscles on one upper arm as he spoke.

Lauritz did not react, totally hypnotised by Tom and Jerry chasing each other across the screen. The woman with dyed hair looked Robert over as she called the boy. On the telephone he had introduced himself as a friend, but he could feel she was wondering if he was something else and more, this respectable substitute uncle from the provinces in his checked shirt and moccasins. He had asked for Andreas when he phoned. The woman had said he was away travelling. At last Lauritz raised his head and caught sight of them. Robert was not sure the boy recognised him, but on the other hand he did not seem shy, rather resigned, as he slid off the sofa and came to shake his hand. The woman with dyed hair walked in front of them back to the door. The man in briefs was still talking with his back turned. Robert said he would bring Lauritz back in the early evening. She turned round in the open doorway. Was it true that Lucca would never see again? How dreadful… She smiled at the boy and ruffled his hair before closing the door after them. Lauritz smoothed his hair as they walked downstairs.

Robert asked him if he could remember the day he and his father had driven home from the supermarket in Robert’s car. The day it rained. Lauritz thought about it. Then he asked where his father was. Hadn’t his father told him where he had gone? He couldn’t remember. As Robert drove north he glanced at the boy now and then in the rear mirror. He could only see his forehead and eyes watching him expectantly. He wished Lea had been there. He remembered how she had led the boy round the garden as if he was her little brother, when Andreas had come to deliver the leg of lamb that had been left in the car.

She had called the previous day. He was mowing the lawn and the noise of the mower almost drowned out the telephone. She laughed at his breathless voice when he answered at last. She was calling from the airport on the way to Lanzarote. He was sweating, his T-shirt stuck to his shoulder blades. Her laugh was the same as the week before when he ran after her on the beach and stumbled. He looked down at his trainers as he listened to her voice. The toes were covered with grass clippings. He wanted to say something to her but couldn’t think what. He asked her to send a postcard. She said she would and kissed the mouthpiece at the other end. It sounded funny.

Lauritz had fallen asleep when they drove into the parking place in front of the orthopaedic hospital. Robert called to him softly until he woke with a start and looked around him, rosy-cheeked and confused. As they walked towards the entrance he let go of Robert’s hand and started gathering pine cones from under the pine trees. Lucca smiled when he gave her the hard, prickly cones. Robert stood where he had stopped at the end of the terrace a nurse had directed them to. She sat in the sun on one of the deckchairs. Seen from a distance she might have been any woman smiling at her son, looking at him through her sunglasses. Lauritz climbed onto her lap and pushed his head under her chin. Robert walked up to them and the sound of his steps on the terrace floor made her lift her face. The boy looked at him watchfully. Thank you, she said. It was kind of you. She was suddenly formal, she had not been like that on the telephone. It was nothing, he said. No, was all she replied. He said he would go for a walk on the beach.

There were a lot of people there, and he felt much too dressed up and conspicuous among the anonymous bodies lying in rows in the sun. He sat down some way up the beach and took off his shoes and socks. The shrill cries of children rang out and then were swallowed by the deep sound of the breakers. The light dazzled him, reflected in the water that ran back before another wave gathered itself and slumped down on the wet sand. Kullen’s low cliffs were blue and misty, and now and again he saw a little flash over the Sound when the sun struck a passing car window in Sweden.

Robert lit a cigarette. He had not been here since Monica and he were divorced. This was the view she had stood gazing at as she smoked, one late afternoon when the other beach visitors had gone home. Yet it seemed quite a different place. There was nothing left but disconnected impressions, and he was not even sure he remembered them precisely, those fleeting moments of closeness, like coming suddenly out of the shade and meeting the sunlight. He had believed you could build on that kind of thing, and now they were in Lanzarote.

He sat there for half an hour. Occasionally he looked at the hospital’s white functionalist building, formerly a fashionable seaside hotel. He recalled the story Monica’s mother had always told when she’d had something to drink, about how the barrister had proposed to her one evening there on the dance floor, between two dances, poised and romantic in his white dinner jacket. Might he have chosen her for her dress? And if so, why not? Just as love had its consequences, so love itself was a consequence of every possible and impossible thing, small or large. He brushed the sand from his feet and stood up, put on his shoes and pushed his socks into his pocket. Small things holding some mysterious transformative power often proved surprisingly influential on one’s imagination. The luxurious way a skirt swung around a girl’s legs in time to the tunes of the age. A modestly blushing smile beneath a woollen blanket in the Alps. A white hand lazily pushing the button on an old radio and a dreamy gaze at the snow under the lamps. No more was needed.

Lucca was still on the terrace. Lauritz lay on the floor rolling his pine cones. Her long face with its high cheek-bones and straight nose seemed both melancholy and arrogant, as if shaped by an old, indomitable yet never satisfied hunger. She sat with her face lifted to the sun and a faint smile around her mouth. He did not know if the heat was making her smile or the sound of his step and the deck chair giving way beneath him.

They were silent, you could hear the sea, but only as a muted soughing beneath the staccato, clicking sound of the bristly scales on the cones Lauritz was rolling over the terrace floor. One of them landed at her feet, she bent forward and picked it up. Her fingertips investigated the hard shells along the edges. What had Andreas had to say? He has gone away, said Robert and paused. I think he is in Stockholm, he went on. Stockholm, she repeated. Yes, he probably was… Lauritz came up to her, she passed him the cone. He asked when she was coming home. She brushed the hair back from her forehead and pushed the unruly lock behind her ear. I don’t know, she said, stretching out her hand. The boy bent his face so her fingers could brush his cheek. He kneeled on the floor again and threw down the pine cones one after the other.

Had he got a cigarette? He offered her one and noticed how surely her hand, after a moment’s fumbling, found the pack and coaxed out a cigarette. She took hold of his wrist when she heard him ignite his lighter and bent her face so her hair fell in front of her forehead again and came dangerously close to the flame. He lifted up the lock with his free hand as she lit her cigarette. She leaned back quickly and blew out smoke, and he noticed her cheeks were slightly flushed, but that might be owing to the sun. It had reached the tops of the pine trees around the parking place, and the shadow of the terrace parapet formed a bluish triangle on the blinding white end wall. The wind made the needles of the pine trees sway in unison and moved the ash from the cigarettes over the floor tiles so it spread and took off in whirls of grey flakes. She didn’t really know where she was, he thought. Lauritz had climbed into a deckchair a little way off. He had a pine cone in his hand and looked out in front of him, it wasn’t clear what he was watching.

You haven’t told me anything about yourself, she said. I am always the one who talks. Always, he thought. Had they spent so much time together already? He brushed ash from his knee. Where should he begin? She turned towards him. Wherever he liked… He looked into her dark lenses, duplicating two identical twins each in his check shirt, both bent forwards, each with a cigarette in his fingers.

He knocked several times, but no one came. He knocked again, harder. There was complete silence from behind the door. Lauritz had sat down on the top step. One by one he let his pine cones tumble down the stairs. Robert tried to remember what he had said to the woman with dyed hair. He was sure he had arranged to bring the boy back in the early evening, but as the minutes went by he began to doubt. He sat down on the step beside Lauritz. Maybe she had forgotten, maybe the music had drowned out his voice. Lauritz dug him in the side with a finger. He said he was hungry. Robert looked at him. The boy’s eyes seemed older than their soft, downy surroundings. They waited patiently to know what he was planning.

They went to an Indian restaurant in the same street. Lauritz only wanted rice. As he ate he gazed around him, fascinated by the gold-painted, oriental arches of the interior, cut out of plywood and lit with mauve bulbs. Did India look like that? More or less, replied Robert and to pass the time began to tell him Kipling’s story about the civet cat. When Lauritz had finished with his rice it looked as if it had snowed on the cloth around his plate. Robert went out to call the woman with dyed hair and the muscle man. A well-educated woman’s voice answered. No contact with the mobile at present. It was nearly half past eight. He thought of what he had told Lucca about himself, about Monica and Lea. He felt he had said too much. He stood gazing blankly at the mosaic of numbers on the telephone, considering what to do with Lauritz. Then he lifted the receiver again and called his mother. She sounded surprised, he had not spoken to her for several weeks. He asked if he might call in and explained the situation to her as briefly as he could. It sounded muddled to him. When they were in the car Lauritz asked where the big girl was. Robert told him she was his daughter. Were there any civet cats in Lanzarote? Robert didn’t think there were.

The boy fell asleep on the sofa where Robert’s mother had lain reading every evening for decades. They sat on her little balcony looking out over the railway lines and the marina further away, beneath the heating station’s red-brick colossus. Did he usually drive his patients’ children around? He smiled wryly. The sky was violet blue over the Sound, and the remains of daylight glowed pale on the rails and the forest of masts and tall thin chimneys. She asked about Lea. When he replied, she fell silent. She had never said what she really thought about the divorce. She had liked Monica, they had had good talks, but she had not been all that sympathetic when he told her Monica wanted a divorce. Nor had she condemned her daughter-in-law when he told her about the morning he arrived back too early from his trip to Oslo and almost surprised her in Jan’s arms. In her opinion the episode belonged to those chance misfortunes which should not in themselves be given too much weight, and she was probably right. But her silence had had the effect of a reproach. Did she think it was all his fault? She couldn’t possibly know about his affair with Sonia. What had she seen? He had never asked her.

She looked old now, her face hung from her cheekbones and her chin in wrinkled bags, and the masculine spectacle frames seemed larger than ever. She picked up her coffee cup with a slow, slightly shaky hand and steadied the edge with her upper lip while she drank. Her eternal coffee. He had made coffee for her every morning from the time he was ten until he left home. On Sunday he had even brought it to her in bed, black as tar with masses of sugar. It was her only extravagance apart from her insatiable consumption of nineteenth-century novels. I don’t feel human until I get a cup of coffee, she would groan when she went into the kitchen in the morning, drunk with sleep she towered in the doorway, rubbing her face with her big red hands. A man’s hands, cracked, with short nails and prominent veins.

He had to make his sandwiches himself, and from early on he learned to do his own washing. She was too tired when she got home from the canteen. They shared the housework on Sunday afternoons when the others were playing football in the courtyard. She frequently sighed but otherwise she did not complain. He did what he could to avoid being a nuisance, and he never complained about the clothes she bought him once or twice a year when the sales were on. She bought summer clothes for him in the autumn and winter clothes when summer was approaching, always the cheapest you could get, they were really ghastly, of course. He was ashamed of his clothes and he was ashamed of her, and he was ashamed of being ashamed.

When he grew tired of lying in bed in the afternoons grieving over the loss of Ana, he gradually began to realise that it was not only love that had made him suffer so, but self-disgust as well. And still later, after he had married Monica, it struck him that there had been an almost tangible connection between the two emotions. With her aristocratic airs and exotic beauty Ana had made him feel a pariah. He who had writhed when he had to go to school wearing the wrong kind of trousers. It had been as clear as it was futile that she was the very one to deliver him from the curse.

But her eastern European home had not only been the gloomy background that emphasised her aristocratic and wonderful pallor when finally, one evening with snow falling outside, he was permitted to hold her face between his hands. He had continued going there long after he should have realised it was hopeless. One afternoon after another he had tea with the clarinettist while he waited for her. He accepted the humiliation merely for the sake of listening to classical records with the kind man with horn-rimmed spectacles and a quaint accent. It had been a more inviting place to be, and he had preferred it to his mother’s two-and-a-half room apartment with its view of the heating station and passing trains.

A train glided through the twilight in an arc. He looked at his mother. Neither of them had said anything for a while. They had never talked to each other a lot, not even when he lived at home. They mostly spoke of practical things and in the evenings both sat reading. Now and then she would laugh and read a snatch aloud to him, which he listened to with only half an ear. Not until he grew up did he realise that she had never really known how to get in touch with him, exhausted and remote from the world as she was. He had misunderstood her awkwardness and taken it as coldness.

The row of lit carriage windows passed across her thick, curved lenses and hid her eyes. She put a hand on the parapet and stroked the painted cement with her palm. It’s still warm, she said, smiling. From the sun… He touched it for himself. She was right, the cement was still quite warm. It left a fine layer of grey dust in his palm. He wiped it off on his trousers. She would have called him one of these days if he hadn’t come. Perhaps it didn’t mean so much to him to hear it, but his father was dead, she had seen the announcement in the newspaper. Again that phrase, your father, as if she herself had had nothing to do with him.

She had never mentioned him in any other way. She had hardly ever mentioned him at all, the gentlemen’s hairdresser in a distant provincial town he had once been on the point of visiting. He didn’t know what to say. He tried to realise it but could not feel anything. She tried to read his silence. She did not feel upset about it, she said, it was all so long ago. Her tone was unusually hard, almost blunt. The death announcement had been signed by the children. So he had had more than one since he left them. The funeral had taken place. She smiled briefly and looked at him as if to catch him feeling moved. Still, it was strange, he finally got out.

The strange thing was that she had ever married the man. But of course, she went on, if I hadn’t, you wouldn’t have been born. He lowered his eyes and lit a cigarette. Now he mustn’t think she had gone around snivelling over his father all these years. It had been a misunderstanding that they had ever got together, and it had only been an instance of the irony of fate that he was the one to take his leave… She stopped and drank the rest of her coffee. For a moment her face was nothing but spectacles and cup. She probably hadn’t ever told him about it. Her voice was different now, softer.

She had been the cloakroom attendant at a restaurant where there was dancing. A musician who played the bass worked there. She’d been secretly in love with him for months, and finally he caught sight of her. One early morning when the restaurant closed he went home with her to her room. The landlady was always asleep when she got home from work, but all the same she asked him to take his shoes off on the stairs. He still had his orchestra dinner jacket on, a sparkly one, and patent shoes. When he took off the shoes she saw he had a hole in one sock. His big toe stuck out. She smiled at the thought and pushed at the handle of her coffee cup so the cup turned half round.

When she saw his pale big toe poking out of the sock and his expression when he realised she had seen it she knew she loved him. She smiled again and looked into the empty cup. If he hadn’t had that hole in his sock she probably wouldn’t have let him. Everything else about him had been perfect. He had been so well groomed it made her frightened, but that morning she was no longer frightened. She had always hated being so tall and broad-shouldered, she had felt like a lighthouse, but he was just as tall and he made her feel they matched each other. He had had such a nice voice, and he had said some nice things to her. No one had spoken to her like that before.

She stopped and looked up. He should have been your father, she said. They had been together for a couple of months, she and the handsome bass player. She had been in seventh heaven until summer arrived and he met someone else. She looked out over the parapet towards the brick mass of the heating station that still kept a faint reddish glow in the midst of all the blue. Then she had come across the gentlemen’s hairdresser. Robert gave her a long look. She felt it and met his eyes. But he was not to sit there feeling sorry for her, it was long ago. She had been so young. Things didn’t always come up to expectations, he knew that himself, it was nothing to snivel over. She rose and piled up the cups to carry them out. Hadn’t he better call those people?

He rang and again heard the well-modulated woman’s voice. Still no contact with the mobile. He had already come to a decision. Carefully he picked Lauritz up and put his pine cones in his pocket. The boy raised his head, half asleep, and then laid it back against Robert’s shoulder. His mother stroked him kindly on the back when they said goodbye in the doorway. She didn’t usually do that, she had never been very demonstrative. On the way downstairs the light went out. He went slowly down the stairs towards the little glowing orange point where the switch was, afraid of stumbling with the sleeping child in his arms.

He laid him on the back seat, covered him with his jacket and drove through the town and southwards along the motorway. As the blue road signs approached and rushed past, he thought of the unknown bass player with the nice voice, who should have been his father. Who would he have been then? Had his mother occasionally put the same question to herself when she sat on her balcony or lay on the sofa and looked up from her book for a moment? Had he been a reminder that just grew and grew all through his childhood, that nothing turned out according to plan? It wasn’t anything to snivel over, she had said, and instead of snivelling she had stuck to her job and sacrificed herself for her son. She had sought flight in novels and, compared with their more dramatic and tragic fates, she had doubtless thought her own was too trivial and average ever to be called a fate. It had just turned out as it had. Nothing to write home about.

There were a lot of lorries on the motorway, German, Italian, Spanish lorries, and Dutch ones. He stayed in the inside lane although that made him slower. He felt like listening to music but did not switch on for fear of waking Lauritz. It was really a kind of kidnapping, but what could he do? It was a real mess. He had stumbled straight into the chaos and confusion of perfect strangers as if they were his concern. He recalled an expression he had often heard his mother use when she commented on something she had witnessed or heard about. As if it was anything special. That was her judgement when someone complained of their troubles or protested at life’s injustice. Only war, natural catastrophes and mortal illness could produce a sympathetic remark. Was it her own privations that had made her so scornful towards others’ woes? He did not believe that, for she had never seemed bitter, only extremely remote. It was more likely that her contempt for her own pain had made her unfeeling about others’, until she stopped distinguishing.

When she sighed it was not because she was sorry for herself. Her nose and throat had just developed into a kind of ventilator from which disappointment, regret and sorrow were ejected now and then, quietly and without fuss. That was all she allowed herself, a minor character, as in her own opinion she was, in the great novel of the world, whose chief action in any case took place somewhere else, far out of range. Her frugality was not only dictated by her scant means, she practised it on principle and maybe it was a way of compensating for her unusual height, which had embarrassed her so when she was young. She apparently thought she took up more space than was right, and so ought to restrict her existence in every way possible. She had never thought of herself and as a whole had spent everything she earned on her son. Once she had bought a bicycle for his birthday, a shining, brand-new blue cycle with white tyres. He had wished for one for a whole year without ever really believing he would get it, but when he woke in the morning and saw it standing beside his bed, his rejoicing was dulled by the thought of what it had cost.

While Robert drove down the motorway with the sleeping Lauritz on the back seat he asked himself whether his mother with her pinching and scraping had actually wanted to punish herself because she had a child with the wrong man, when the right one had thrown her over. It was nothing special, nor did she feel that she herself was, and looking back he suspected that in her heart, with all her frugality she had intended to economise herself into extinction. Her total lack of egoism had not prevented her becoming slightly misanthropic. In her view no human being was anything very special. But she had also found a strange, anonymous freedom when she sat on her balcony and now and then raised her eyes from one of her novels to watch the trains go by.

18

Luckily Lea had left some cornflakes at the bottom of the packet. There were enough for one portion, and the boy looked on approvingly as Robert gave him breakfast on the terrace. He had slept in Lea’s room. When Robert went to wake him in the morning he was lying with an arm around one of her old teddy bears, kept for sentimental reasons. Could he remember being here before? Lauritz looked around and thought. He could remember playing table tennis with Lea and digging in the garden. He asked when he was going home. Later on today, Robert replied without knowing what he was talking about. He went to get Lea’s Tintin books and brought one of the white plastic chairs onto the lawn where the sun was shining. He took off his bath robe, his body was quite white. Lea was right, he ought to do something about those handles. The problem was he couldn’t really be bothered. He sipped his coffee, looking at the strange boy bending over the table, absorbed in interpreting the little pictures where Tintin and Captain Haddock escaped from one scrape after another with a mixture of chance, optimism and adroitness.

He closed his eyes. It was hot already and he enjoyed feeling the grass under his bare feet and the sunrays warming his pale skin. He really should go in and call the woman with dyed hair and the muscle man to tell them where Lauritz was, but he didn’t feel like moving. It was so long since he had sat in the sun, and he defended his laziness by working up some indignation over their irresponsibility and the recklessness Andreas had shown in leaving his son with such superficial friends. He was sure he had told them when he would bring the boy back.

Andreas called later in the morning. He would come and fetch Lauritz. Robert was about to say something about the woman with dyed hair having forgotten their arrangement, but didn’t, amazed the other man apparently took it for granted that he had taken the boy home with him. Andreas would come at once. Where was he calling from? The house, he replied curtly. He had arrived yesterday evening on the last train, he hadn’t wanted to call so late. How considerate, thought Robert, and offered to drive. He had a car, after all.

When they turned off the main road and drove beside the meadow towards the wood they saw the horse in the same place as it had been two months earlier, on the rainy day when Robert took Lauritz and Andreas home. The sun shone on its flanks, which quivered as if from a shock when the flies pestered it. Andreas came out into the yard and squatted down with open arms as Lauritz ran towards him. They sat in the garden on a bench by the house wall. Lauritz was on a swing hanging from a big plum tree. Andreas had set a bowl of plums between them on the bench, violet blue, with a matt skin like dew. The grass had not been mown for a long time and was almost as long as the corn in the field at the end of the garden. The wind made the cobs rock from side to side in snaking tracks, and poppies glowed restlessly, scattered amidst the corn. Andreas offered him a cigarette, they smoked and ate plums. Robert tried to think of something to talk about.

How had the première in Malmö gone? Andreas squinted in the sunshine. It had come off very well, the Swedish reviewers had been quite over the moon. But that didn’t matter now. Pensively, he lowered his eyes and dug his nail into the circle of loose tobacco at the end of his cigarette, then abruptly started to talk. Robert was surprised they seemed to be on such familiar terms. On the telephone Andreas had been very short, almost formal, maybe because he thought Robert might be cross. Look at me! called Lauritz. They looked. He was standing up, his hands on the ropes, swinging high. They waved, the boy laughed.

Andreas had come back from Stockholm the previous day. He was no longer quite sure what he had been thinking on his way up there. When he had read the scenographer’s letters or written to her he had felt that here at last was someone who touched his innermost soul, more than anyone had done before. Now he didn’t know. They had arranged to meet at an outdoor café on Strandvägen. He was surprised she had asked him to meet her there and not at her home in Söder. He was given the explanation when she arrived, twenty minutes late, as beautiful as he remembered, pale, black-haired and with blue eyes. She did not live alone. It sounded complicated. For about six months she had been about to leave the man she lived with, but she had not yet brought herself to do it. They sat silently watching the glinting water and the ferries plying up and down. Neither of them could find anything to say, strangely enough after all the letters, all the confidences and tender words that had gone to his heart so deeply.

When she finally came walking towards him smiling in the sunshine it had seemed as if all his hopes were coming with her, no longer in the form of vague thoughts hard to pin down, about how his life could change and take on a new direction, but in the shape of a living body appearing to hold all possibilities in store for him, stepping lightly among the café tables. She went to his hotel with him, now he had come, after all. That was how it seemed, precisely as dispiriting and dull as that, when they lay side by side on the hotel bed afterwards. It had not been exactly passionate. He was not even sure she had had an orgasm. He called her in the evening. She was not alone, she said, it was difficult to talk properly. He called again the next day in the morning. Her husband had just gone. Were they actually married? She laughed down the telephone. No, not exactly.

She had read the new play he had sent her. She made some comments, and again he felt it was there, the special understanding between them. She had hit on things in the play no one else had understood. He said he was coming round to see her. She didn’t think that was such a good idea. He took a taxi. She seemed different when he saw her in her own surroundings, somehow more ordinary. They drank herb tea and she showed him her sketches for an exhibition she was working on. She resisted when he went to kiss her. He threw her down on a sofa, she twisted free. She couldn’t do it here, she said and asked him to leave.

Maybe there had been something hyped up, something rather too stilted about those letters, both hers and his own. They had been scaffolding for each other’s castles in the air, he said, smiling bitterly, as he sank his teeth into a plum and wiped juice off his chin with the back of his hand. Lauritz was lying in the tall grass, the swing swayed back and forth under the tree. Andreas had kept on phoning her. The more he doubted his precious and all-consuming passion, the more he persisted, until one afternoon a man’s voice answered from the apartment in Söder. He slammed down the receiver. In the morning a letter awaited him at the hotel reception. She had gone to Gotland with her husband. It was no good. She hoped he would understand.

He had not told the scenographer what had happened to Lucca, and he hardly thought of her at all during his stay in Stockholm. When she did cross his mind it was in the guise of an evil spirit who had constantly threatened his attempts to release his innermost self. At first in the form of her all too unconditional, indeed her frankly parasitic love, later with the deadly, bourgeois daily routine and finally his own bad conscience. Robert recalled what Andreas had said when he called on him one evening and drank his Calvados, tortured by guilt and the urge to rebel. How he had long been in doubt about his relationship with Lucca, and how he had felt a lack of challenge when she turned her back on the theatre and had Lauritz, then focused all her energies on the boy and on creating their home. But in the plane from Stockholm he saw it in quite a different light. She was his victim, he thought, as the pine forests and blue lakes passed beneath him, and he had almost killed her. Although she was the most important thing that had ever happened to him. She and the boy. To think it was only now he realised that…

He lit a fresh cigarette and looked at Lauritz, who was trying to make a ladybird crawl up his hand. Robert cleared his throat. What if the scenographer left her husband? Andreas turned to him, apparently floored by the idea. He shook his head, she would never do that. In reality they were too alike, they were equally introspective, it would never work. That was probably why he had once fallen in love with Lucca. Because she was so different from him. No, as he said, he had deceived both himself and the set designer in Stockholm. Besides, she was too young, too immature, the illusion of one of them had nourished the other, it had been a dream that could not stand the light of day. Yes, it seemed rather like waking from a dream. As if he had slept through all those years with Lucca and Lauritz right in front of him, the only people who had ever seriously meant anything. The only ones he might ever mean something to, something real. He owed her that… he owed it to all three of them, he corrected himself. He rose, went over to Lauritz and kneeled beside him in the grass, stroking his cheek. The boy seemed not to notice him, totally absorbed in the ladybird. Andreas walked slowly back to the bench.

When something goes up the spout, we call it a mistake, thought Robert, because it is hard to get your head round the thought that it is not only ourselves but just as much luck and circumstance which form our lives. Then it’s better to admit we were foolish. He thought of his mother and his father, the deceased gentlemen’s hairdresser he had never known. If the barber had stayed with her, wouldn’t he perhaps not have been a mistake? He might even have turned out to be a nice man.

What had Lucca told him? Robert looked at him. Told him? Andreas sat down beside him again. Yes, surely she had said something, given a message or request. He faltered. How was she? Robert said he could not tell. He met Andreas’s eyes. He didn’t know her well enough, he went on, to know, but in the circumstances she seemed to be managing. Andreas sat looking in front of him, either at Lauritz or the poppies in the swaying corn or the swing hanging motionless beneath the plum tree’s crown. Of course it would be different, he said quietly, now she was blind. But it was a question of will. He had realised that. One must exert will on one’s life, it would not live itself. And was there any life other than the one to be lived every day? The intimate things he had despised so much, daily life, the child… you had to take them on, stand up and face them…

Robert asked what he meant. Andreas looked at him in surprise. Lauritz called from inside the house, Robert had not seen him go in. Andreas shouted that he must wait. Lauritz called again. We’re talking! shouted Andreas, half turning towards the open door. Lauritz went on calling. His father rose with an irritated expression and went inside. Robert walked round the house. Andreas caught him up in the drive. If he saw her… well, he didn’t know. Was he going to see her? Robert replied that so far they had not arranged anything. Andreas looked down at his shoes and nudged a small stone with one toe. If he saw her would he tell her what they had talked about? Robert promised he would. He went over to his car. As he got into the driving seat the other man was still standing there. He started the engine and moved off. Andreas raised his hand, but Robert did not manage to wave.

He was in a bad mood when he turned into the suburban road. The sun was high in the sky. It shone whitely on the asphalt and the polished cars in the drives and the leaves of the dense shrubberies along the pavements. He sat on in the car when he had parked in the entrance and switched off the engine. He thought of the picture of Lucca he had seen on the notice-board in their kitchen, sitting at a pavement café in Paris, elegantly dressed in a grey jacket, with her hair in a pony tail. Lucca looking into the camera as if she had just turned round, apparently surprised at being snapped. He visualised the picture clearly, the plane trees in the background, her green eyes, painted lips slightly parted, possibly because she had been about to say something. Her gaze seemed to pierce the shining membrane of the photograph. It reminded him of something, he didn’t know what. Something forgotten, something never quite understood or completed, a missed opportunity perhaps.

It was quiet around him. He could hear the whispering, pinging sound of a sprinkler in one of the adjoining gardens. He looked at the lath fencing alongside the drive. In some places the bark was peeling off the laths and hung in loose slivers. The gate was open. He could see a portion of the newly mown lawn and the terrace with its white plastic chairs and their transparent reflections in the panorama window’s repetition of everything within range. Chairs, grass and small white clouds. He turned the key again, put the car into gear and backed out onto the road. Soon afterwards he reached the outskirts of town. He drove through the industrial district, passed the hospital and came to the viaduct leading to the motorway.

It didn’t matter what he thought about Andreas. They had a son, the fool was still her husband, after all, and it didn’t matter if his newly won and rather tacky insight into life’s true values had been induced by being forced to leave Stockholm with shattered hopes. Something or other had to induce it and one cause could be as good as another. His sudden piety was of course merely an attitude, but he was clearly unable to explain things without sounding pathetic and pompous. You had to ignore that, as you considerately ignore people’s handicap or speech impediment, an embarrassing limp or lisp. His sticky chatter about the important things and standing up for them sounded like another of his splendidly illuminating self-deceits, but in the long run it didn’t make a lot of difference what you thought. Maybe illusions had roughly the same function as your skin. You could breathe through them. If they were stripped off, the contact with reality would doubtless be too raw. They should be allowed to dry and crackle and peel off in their own good time allowing new, fresh layers of illusion to form in their place.

The only thing that mattered was whether you were together or not, whether you were alone or had someone to be with. Whether there was a scrap of kindness and sympathy, a scrap of patience with your weak, unaccomplished sides. Then you could always think your own thoughts, tinker with your self-portrait and dream great or modest dreams. On the whole life lasted longer than your dreams, thought Robert, and when they stopped it ought to be bearable. Lucca would never regain her sight, but maybe some sort of life did await her, even if everything had crashed into darkness and solitude. Perhaps the months and years could do for them what they themselves could not envisage just now, and if he was the one who could give her the chance of considering a future with the repentant Andreas, he might well afford the time to play the role of messenger.

He waited for a long time on the terrace where she had sat with Lauritz, until he heard the slight tick from the point of her thin white stick. It made him think of the sound of Lauritz’s pine cones rolling over the tiles the previous day, the prickly sound of the hard seeds. A nurse led her by the arm. She had been surprised when they told her he had come, not expecting him to visit her again so soon. Actually she had not been sure he would come at all.

She was wearing a long black dress with many little buttons, one of the dresses he had brought her from the empty house. Her hair was combed back and held in a pony tail just as in the picture from Paris, and she had put on lipstick. Someone had helped her. The nurse left them alone. Lucca put a hand on the parapet. Maybe they could go for a walk on the beach, if he felt like it. He took her hand and laid it on his arm, and thus they walked, in an old-fashioned way, he thought. She said it. Now we’re walking like two old people…

The shadows had grown long and gathered in small, bluish puddles on the trodden sand. The foam of the waves shone in the low sunlight. Only a few holiday-makers remained on the beach. Up in one of the dunes he saw a white-haired man putting on his bathing robe. He resembled the barrister, but Robert could not decide whether it was really him. They walked at the edge of the beach where the sand was damp and firm. They walked slowly but he could see she was regaining the use of her limbs. It was the first time she had been down on the beach. Her white stick left little holes in the sand, a wavering track. She breathed in through her nose. Seaweed, she said. It was true. A salty, slightly rotten odour hung over the intertwined belts of dried kelp between the edge of the sea and the dunes. It was better than the smell of cleaning materials… She paused. Her hand slipped from his arm when she stopped. She couldn’t bear being in hospital. She said it quietly, like a statement. No, he said.

They sat down on the sand, close to the sea. She bent her knees and pulled her dress down around her legs. The waves were small, and there was a silence after one had fallen before the next arched itself and collapsed. Fans of water and foam reached right up to the shadows of their heads and shoulders. He told her Andreas was back at the house, and what he had said that afternoon. That he was sorry. That he wanted to try again. He said nothing about what had happened in Stockholm. She picked up a handful of sand, closed her fist and let the sand filter down again in a fine stream like the sand in an hourglass. Was that why he had come? To tell her this? Robert was silent for a moment. Yes, he said.

The last grains sifted out of her hand, and she laid it flat on the sand. He looked at her, waiting for her to say something. She sat with her face directed at the breaking waves. She was no longer the person who could return. Her tone was hard and clear. She was no longer the one who could decide for that, she went on. She said no more. They fell silent. He took his cigarettes from his breast pocket, there were two left. Would she like to smoke? No, thanks. He lit a cigarette and looked across at Kullen. She didn’t know… Now her voice was so low that half the sentence was lost when a wave broke. He asked her to repeat it. She cleared her throat. She didn’t know anything any more. She drew a deep breath and put her head back, and he saw the tears running down under her big sunglasses. She wiped them away with her fingertips so the knuckles pushed up the edge of the sunglasses and he caught a glimpse of her glass eyes. She sniffed and breathed out through her mouth. It was like living in a waiting room, she said. Without knowing what she was waiting for.

He invited her to come and stay. That would make it easier to be with Lauritz while she thought over what to do next. She turned her face to him, and he looked out at the waves to avoid his reflection in her dark glasses. He had not thought of it before, but as soon as he had said it, it seemed the obvious thing. She could have his room, he could sleep in Lea’s. After a week or two she might change her mind. When she had spoken to Andreas. At some point they would need to talk.

She did not reply. Neither of them said anything as they walked back. She stopped in the foyer and let go of his arm. Had he meant it? He sounded more offended than he meant to when he replied. What did she think? She smiled apologetically and reached out for his arm again. It was just… unexpected. They went on across the foyer. Why should he care about all her problems? She directed the dark glasses towards him as if regarding him with an expectant look. Let’s say I am someone with too much room, he went on at last. Too much room? Yes, he said. Too much room, too much time. She stopped again and tapped her stick on the floor, raising it and letting it go. And how did he intend to get her out of here?

He asked her to wait on a sofa in the foyer and went into the office to ask for the doctor on duty. He had gone home. Robert told the secretary he was taking Lucca with him. She looked at him incredulously over her reading glasses. They couldn’t discharge a patient just like that. I am her doctor, said Robert. He took full responsibility. It sounded rash. The secretary pushed her glasses up her nose. It was against the rules. Don’t you worry about that, replied Robert and promised her she could rely on him to witness that she had protested.

He went back to the foyer and took Lucca up to her room. She sat on the bed while he packed her bag. You must be crazy, she said. Not exactly, he replied. The secretary and a nurse came in sight at the door. Was he next of kin? Not really, he said. Lucca turned away, picked up the pillow and lowered her face. The secretary pulled the corners of her mouth down in an offended grimace and handed him a ball pen and a document. Would he kindly sign this? He did so without reading it through. When they had gone, Lucca collapsed over the pillow. It was the first time he had heard her laugh.

The sun had set and the sky was pink and lilac when they came out onto the motorway. He put on a tape, they sat listening to the music. After they had passed Copenhagen she felt hungry. He drove into a lay-by with a McDonalds. They ate in the car. She got ketchup on her chin and one cheek, but he didn’t say anything. In the end she discovered it herself. You must tell me when I mess myself up, for God’s sake, she said, wiping her face with the serviette. There was still some ketchup on her cheek. He took her serviette and removed the red streak, started the car again and glided in to join the column of red rear lights between the pale yellow fields in the twilight.