Lucca

27

One morning in October Robert woke up while it was still dark. He peered at the hands of the alarm clock. It was twenty past five. He sank back on the pillow feeling sleep rising from below again. He pictured the water trickling out of the soil between the grass blades under their boots as they walked along the isthmus towards the reed-bed further out. It had begun to drizzle. He had taken her hand to show her the way along the strip of land between the shallow stretch of sea and the flooded meadows. She put her head back to feel the light prickling of the rain on her forehead and cheeks. The dark glasses were spotted with drops. She had folded up her white stick and put it in her coat pocket.

Lucca had never been out to the headland. She wondered why they had never been there, she and Andreas. They had been able to see the sand bank and the rushes from the beach where they went to swim. Listen, she said, stopping, and now Robert too heard the airy, rhythmical whistling of wing beats. He looked up and turned round, but did not catch sight of the flock before it was far out on the horizon, where the calm water and clouded sky converged along a blurred edge of reflections.

The alarm started to beep. He had been on the point of falling asleep again. Half past five. He must have set it at the wrong time. He did not usually get up before seven. He was about to switch off the alarm when he caught sight of the packed travel bag standing in front of the wardrobe. They had planned to leave at six o’clock to catch an early ferry. He rose, put on his dressing gown and opened the curtains. It had rained all night, the trees were laden with rain. He met Lucca in the corridor. She wore her sunglasses, she never showed herself to him without them. She had heard his alarm even though Lea’s room was at the opposite end of the house. He asked if she would like the bathroom first. She made an evasive, sleepy gesture and went back along the corridor, her hand brushing the wall. She had grown used to the house by now.

She often heard sounds he had not caught. Her hearing had grown sharper as she trained herself for blindness. That was her own expression. He took night duties so he could drive her to the Institute for the Blind once or twice a week. She was a good student, and so far the only impediment was her firm refusal to have anything to do with dogs. She couldn’t stand dogs, particularly Alsatians, she would not dream of making friends with one. But she had started to learn Braille. One morning she sat in the kitchen moving her fingertips over the breadcrumbs on the table. What does it say? he asked. She smiled secretively. I’m not telling!

He went into the bathroom and took off his dressing gown. He leaned against the basin as he brushed his teeth and now and then glanced at himself in the mirror. A solid tousled man in his forties with foam round his mouth. He felt as heavy as the weather, but within the weight of his body he felt a lightness he had not noticed for a long time. It was the prospect of travelling that made him light, the thought of the endless motorways that would take them south, away. If he drove hard they could get through most of Germany before midnight, perhaps right down to the Stuttgart area.

He had scarcely been anywhere abroad since his divorce from Monica, on the contrary he had worked so hard for the past two years that he usually had some holiday due to him. Once only he had taken Lea to the Algarve. It was pretty awful, but she had seemed to enjoy herself. As a rule she went away with Monica and Jan, and he had not felt like going alone. He could not see himself trailing around some picturesque town and going to a restaurant in the evening. A solitary tourist secretly spying on the inhabitants, grateful if anyone smiled at him.

It was his idea for them to go away, and Lucca had agreed at once. He felt the trip might get something in her to loosen its grip. Something that had firmly embedded itself and made her life, during the past months, seem like a closed circle. She had been staying with him since he visited her at the orthopaedic hospital. He had surprised himself by his sudden whim, when he saw how deep her despair was, and invited her to stay with him. He had not known what to say when she asked why he made such an amazing offer. Too much room. That had been his modest reason. That he was someone who had too much room. But it was still the best explanation he could hit on.

Luckily she had not asked him again. He did not think it was because she had started to take him for granted. She behaved more like someone afraid of upsetting the temporary and precarious state of things with too many questions. She often kept to herself in Lea’s room or on the terrace, until it grew too cold to sit outdoors. When it began to get dark early he found her several times sitting out there in her coat or wrapped in a rug. Sometimes he asked her to come inside. He did not like the thought of her staying outside in the dusk so as not to impose on him. At other times he left her alone, relieved that she did not feel obliged to be sociable.

As he rinsed the toothpaste from his mouth his gaze fell on some of her things that had found their place on the bathroom shelves, bottles of perfume and skin lotion, her nail file, hairbrush, shower cap and bag of sanitary towels. There wasn’t a name for their chaste life together. You could say she was his guest. Since the accident he had gradually been drawn into her life, until he discovered he had moved far outside his medical sphere of action. The expression made him smile as he tidied away some used cotton wool sticks she had dropped on the floor beside the waste bin.

She had not seen Andreas or as much as talked to him on the phone since he came back from Paris and confirmed what she already knew. Robert was still playing the part of messenger, and several times he’d had to ask Andreas to be patient and stop ringing. Give it time, he kept saying to the grief-stricken man, but he could feel Andreas growing ever more despondent at the thought that he might have left it too late to repent and show goodwill. Robert himself had no idea what the future would bring. He defended Lucca’s decision to isolate herself from everyone except her son without wholly understanding her fierce resolution, and he did not press her to explain herself. The accident had stopped her in her course, and no one could tell how long her stupor would last. She did not even know that herself.

At times he felt like a living fortress against what she must feel was a siege. Andreas kept on insinuating himself with his eager guilt, impatient for her to relieve him by at least meeting him and hearing how fluently he could talk about his error. She made no comment when Robert passed on what he had been asked to tell her. She never asked what he knew about Andreas’s trip to Stockholm. Nor did she ask him to respond to the messages her mother and Miriam got him to deliver.

Robert had long telephone conversations with Else when she called to hear how things were going, and to ask if Lucca wouldn’t at least come to the phone. He had to smile when this woman with the cultivated voice tried out her mature charm on him in the hope that he might happen to reveal the nature of his relationship with her daughter by his tone of voice or some unconsidered word. He also spoke to Miriam and heard her baby wailing in the background. Still less could she comprehend why her friend had no use for her now that everything in her life had fallen apart. Else hinted darkly that they’d had a kind of row, but that it was of no importance now. He pretended not to know what she was talking about. Robert also concealed his knowledge from Andreas, although he sometimes almost interrupted his grief-stricken monologue when he went out to the house in the woods to fetch Lauritz or take him home again.

They would sit in the kitchen where the pictures of Lucca still hung on the notice-board. The sighted Lucca, building the house or swinging her son around or sitting at a Parisian café and smiling, her eyes surprised and yet aware. Andreas could be so full of remorse and self-pity that Robert found it hard to keep quiet. He remembered the shame he had heard in her voice and read on her face when she told him what had happened on Daniel’s houseboat. He could see and hear that her shame related not merely to Andreas, to whom she had been unfaithful, or Daniel whom she had misused. Something had been shattered that night, a week before she had driven herself into disaster, and Robert was the only one who had any inkling of it. He was relieved each time he drove home without having betrayed her confidence, even though he had seen Andreas in all his misery, sincere but also hollow.

One evening it was Daniel on the phone. He presented himself as an old friend and said he had been given Robert’s number by Else. He asked how she was. He did not say Lucca, but she. His intimate tone surprised Robert, seeing they had never talked to each other before. How many times had he phoned the house in the woods and slammed the receiver down because Andreas answered? Or waited until the connection was broken off because no one answered? Daniel paused. Are you… he asked and interrupted himself before trying again. I mean… you and Lucca… Robert almost sympathised with the irrepressible need for clarity beneath the other man’s heavy-hearted stammer.

Lucca sat in an easy-chair wearing headphones. He went over to her and laid a cautious hand on her shoulder. She was alarmed, for once she had not heard him, she who otherwise heard everything. He could faintly hear the crescendo in the last movement of Brahms’s third symphony. He said it was Daniel, and as he spoke he wondered at himself for not telling the caller as usual that Lucca did not want to speak to anyone. She hesitated a moment before rising and walking over to the telephone, orientating herself as was now her habit by brushing the furniture with her hand en route. He took care not to change the position of anything when he did the housework. She waited to pick up the receiver until he had gone out of the room and closed the door behind him.

He went into the kitchen and started clearing up the dinner things. One of the plates clattered as he put it into the dishwasher, and at the same moment he heard a corresponding clatter from the other end of the house, like an echo. She squatted in the middle of the room surrounded by tulips, water and fragments of glass. She used one hand to search for the pieces and collected them in the other, curving it like a cup. Two of her fingers were bleeding, he led her into the bathroom. She had a deep cut on one fingertip. I’m sorry, she said. I just needed to smash something… When he had bandaged the cut finger and put a plaster on another, she collapsed onto the lid of the lavatory seat. What was I thinking of? she mumbled. What could I have been thinking of? She bent forwards and began to weep. He looked at her for a moment before going into the scullery to get a dustpan and brush.

He stood waking up under the shower for a long time. It felt as if the hot water slowly made his fatigue crackle and fall away from him in invisible flakes. His own life was the same, almost. He went to the hospital every morning and came home in the late afternoon, but whereas previously he had spent his leisure hours vegetating and listening to music, now he helped Lucca get accustomed to her new existence. He had stopped playing tennis, and not only because he had no time. His friendship with Jacob had cooled after he had let him wait in vain at the tennis courts one summer day, and after Jacob had stood in his garden an hour later and seen him through the window talking to Lucca on the telephone. One day when they were together in a queue in the hospital canteen Jacob asked Robert what he was up to with his former patient. Someone must have seen them together in town, although Lucca seldom went out, for fear of meeting Andreas.

To spare her pride he tried to help her as little as possible. He cleared up discreetly after her small accidents and behaved as if he had not noticed them. Now and again, before she was familiar with the house, he took her arm cautiously when she was about to run into a door or crack her head on the open door of a cupboard, and the episode with the flower vase was not the only time he had to put a plaster on her, like a clumsy child. She said that herself. That it was like learning everything over again, just like a child. At first he’d had to help her in the bathroom in the morning. He guided her under the shower and took her hand to show her how to regulate the water. Her nakedness made them shy and very correct.

He turned off the shower and opened the window to let out the steam. It resembled the smoke from a fire as it billowed up and blew away into the cold damp murkiness. It had been dark when they arrived at his house for the first time. He asked her to wait in the hall while he went in and switched on the lights. She asked him to show her the house. He took her arm and led her round. She wanted to know what each room looked like, and he described the furniture, the pictures on the walls and the other things. She smiled when he got to the ping pong table in what should have been the dining room. As he described it in detail, he suddenly felt he was seeing his home like a stranger.

Later in the evening she grew hungry, and he suddenly realised he had not done any shopping. He offered to make an omelette. She insisted on breaking the eggs and beating them. She needed to cook again after months of insipid hospital food. He set a bowl and a tray of eggs on the kitchen table and put a whisk into her hand. When she knocked the first egg on the edge of the bowl, the yolk slid down onto the table, and so it went on. In the end she had broken almost all the eggs in the tray and half the shells lay in the bowl with the yolks that had been lucky enough not to land on the table. She broke down, convulsed with sobbing as she bent forwards, the tips of her hair dipping into the pool of egg yolk on the table top. He cleared up after her, washed the bowl and suggested she start again. This time she succeeded. She whisked the eggs, he fried the omelettes. Don’t worry, he said. I’m not sorry for you. She turned her dark spectacles towards him. That’s good, she said in a muted voice.

He did not know how she passed the time when she was alone in the house. He asked her when he got home one afternoon and found her sitting on the threshold of the terrace. I’m remembering, she said. He taught her to work the stereo, and she sorted his extensive record collection into piles on the floor, which she memorised, as she tried them all out to find the music she liked. She kept returning to Chopin, but one day when he arrived back in the afternoon, the passionate voice and crisp guitar of José Feliciano reached him out in the drive. He had forgotten that one. It was filled with childhood memories, she told him. Her mother had been mad about José Feliciano, and now he had become a kind of colleague as well. When she had played Che serà serà for the fifth time he suggested that she might like to try what it sounded like listening through his earphones for a change.

He sometimes called her when he was on night duty. They did not talk about anything special, but he lowered his voice nevertheless if the night nurse walked past. He asked what she was doing, and said whatever came into his head. Perhaps that was the biggest change. Someone being in the house when he was not there. The fact that he could call home. He mostly thought about the change during their nocturnal telephone conversations. Things had become quite natural by now, when they were in the house together. When they came to an end of their conversation she always thanked him for phoning. Her politeness made him feel sad. As if he had only called because he knew she was sitting there alone.

Every time after he had driven her to the training session at the Institute for the Blind he would walk around the centre of Copenhagen, browse in music shops or sit in a café. Sometimes he went to see his mother, at others he waited for Lea outside her school. She had given him a teasing look when he fetched her from the station for the first time after the summer holidays and explained in the car that he no longer lived on his own. To start with she wouldn’t believe that Lucca wasn’t his new girlfriend. She only began to believe it when she found one of Lucca’s elastic hair-bands on her bedside table. When Lea came, Lucca slept in an empty room previously used as a store-room. He had tidied away the junk, piled the packing cases at one end and made up a mattress at the other.

Lea felt uncertain about Lucca when they were introduced. She had never before been with a blind person and was shy about her dark glasses and searching manner of turning her face in the direction of anyone speaking. She made an effort to seem natural and behave nicely, but it did not help that she was handicapped, this strange woman who had moved in with her father, even though they were not lovers. As if that wasn’t odd enough anyway. Conversation at the dinner table languished. Lea’s replies were only monosyllables, and Lucca withdrew into herself. Robert felt like an unsuccessful clown desperately rushing around the ring trying in vain to elicit a smile from the audience.

It helped when he fetched Lauritz the next day. The boy’s joy over the reunion made an impression on Lea and she began to relax with Lucca. Lea and Lauritz played blind man’s buff with her in the garden. Standing inside he wondered at her cynical ease as he heard them laugh and saw her reeling around after the children. She was touched, he could see, to sense how Lea treated the boy as if he were her little brother. She succeeded in winning Lea’s confidence, he didn’t know how, and when he saw them sitting on the lawn together, he did not disturb them.

It was one of the last warm days of August, and after lunch they went to the beach. Lea took Lucca’s hand and led her out to the other side of the reef where it was deep enough to swim. He stayed on the edge of the sea with Lauritz. While the boy tumbled around in the waves he watched Lucca, standing with her arms crossed, in water up to her waist. Lea kept encouraging her and finally she gave way and stretched out her arms, lifting her feet off the bottom. They swam slowly side by side towards the posts. Robert admired her courage. She laughed, at once nervous and released. He wasn’t sure he would have dared entrust himself to the water without sight.

28

The sky was visible now, but it probably would not get much brighter. An October day with low-lying clouds and sticky withered leaves on the damp asphalt. When Robert had dressed he went into the kitchen and switched on the coffee-maker. Lucca must have fallen asleep again, she liked to sleep late. He put out bread and cheese and went to wake her up. The door of Lea’s room was ajar. He opened it cautiously, without a sound. The grey daylight met the wall and shone on the glazed poster above the bed, blurring all but Michael Jackson’s small, arrogant face in a milky haze. Lucca’s hair was spread out on the pillow-case with its pattern of swallows and cheerful stylised clouds. Her eyelids were closed and her lips lightly parted, she was breathing peacefully.

She had put on a little weight while staying with him, her face was no longer as bony and drawn and still showed a touch of summer colour. It was a long time since he had seen her without her dark glasses. A long, white scar above her left eyebrow seemed to be the only trace left by the accident. Her serious expression reminded him of the photograph Andreas had taken of her at the pavement café in Paris, when she knew their relationship had ended. Her lips were parted in the same way, as if she had been surprised in the middle of a word, not by the photographer but by sleep.

The corners of her mouth curved. I’m not asleep, she said. I woke up when you came in. He protested. He had no shoes on and the door had opened without a sound. It wasn’t you, I heard, she said, it was the coffee-maker. Listen… Now he too could hear the faint snorting and gurgling sound. He went down the drive to fetch the newspaper from the letterbox. When he came in again he heard water splashing on the tiles in the bathroom. He had a cup of coffee and read the paper, but when he put it down he had forgotten what was in it.

She came into the kitchen and sat down opposite him. She had buttoned her blouse crookedly, but he did not remark on it. She let her hand roam over the table until she found the bread basket and the butter dish. She asked when they would be in Italy. Her damp towelled hair fell in front of the dark glasses. Tomorrow afternoon, he replied, and noticed how accurately she scraped up butter with her knife and spread it on the bread. Anyway, we should be in Milan by tomorrow afternoon, he went on. She searched with her hand again, found a slice of cheese, put it on the bread and brushed her hair away from one cheek before taking a bite. Milan, she murmured, chewing.

How about Lucca? she asked as he locked the front door. Maybe late the next morning, he said, carrying their luggage to the boot. Maybe late in the evening… He had suggested going to Lucca merely because it occurred to him and so as not just to suggest a trip into the blue. Perhaps that was why she had acquiesced to his suggestion without hesitation. When he hit on the idea he had thought she might find it easier to reflect on her future if she got away. At least she would not have to use so much energy on defending herself. But he too felt the urge to go, exhausted as he was with shielding her isolation. He explained to Andreas that she needed to get out of his reach before she could think of him without feeling under pressure. Had she said that? No, said Robert. It was something he had thought out for himself. Andreas agreed he was right.

Neither of them said anything when he started the car. He drove through the industrial district, past the hospital and further on to the viaduct with slip-roads down to the motorway’s north- and south-facing lanes. I never saw Lucca, she said finally. She said it in a matter-of-fact way. He replied that they didn’t need to go there if she didn’t want to. She let down her seat so she could lean back. No, she said, I need to know I have been there.

It began to rain again a few kilometres south. The rainwater whistled under the tyres and the red rear lights of the cars glistened on the wet asphalt. I’m not nervous, she said. He smiled. Then why did she say that? She pondered for a while. Because I ought to be, she replied. To drive that far, and to drive for so long with someone I hardly know, in a way. He turned into the fast lane. It’s strange, she said, to know such a lot about someone I have never seen. He replied that he had only told her so much about himself because she couldn’t see him. She nodded. That was why she had dared to talk about herself. Because she couldn’t see him. It precluded her from forming an impression of how he looked at her.

It had occurred to her a little while earlier, when he opened the door of Lea’s room to wake her up. When he stood looking at her because he thought she was asleep. Had she felt spied on? No, it wasn’t that. On the contrary, she had realised that it no longer affected her if she was looked at. Her face had become irrelevant, something separate from herself. That’s probably why I am not nervous, she laughed. Because of that and because you are not in love with me. If I thought you were I would never have told you my story, and if you were, you would certainly not have told me yours. She paused. Stories, she went on, stories give out too much light. You can’t hide from them. He smiled. She often made him smile, and each time it struck him that he was alone with his smile. You’re right, he said, in the end they always catch you up. Yes, she replied after a pause. They have no escape routes… even if my own story is about one long flight.

After she fell silent he sat for a long time thinking over what she had said. They had grown used to keeping silent in each other’s company, when one of them paused in the narrative. It no longer worried them, but there was something significant in the silence between them now, in the car. They were outside everything, sitting here among the other cars on the motorway, where the towns they passed were no more than white names on blue signboards. It was the right place to be, he thought, in a car on a motorway, for they had met the same way, as unknown to each other as the cars on the road, beyond all relationship. Perhaps she was right, perhaps they had no need to feel nervous. Gradually they had immersed themselves more deeply into each other’s life than one normally does, but at the same time he had felt as if they were conversing by satellite, across an enormous distance. They were close to each other and yet apart, and maybe they could only become so close because they were restricted to words alone.

Each knew more about the other than many other people did, but her blindness protected both of them. Particularly when the details grew so intimate that they would never have believed they would tell them to anyone. She was spared seeing how he reacted to her story, and he could speak freely about himself without the surveillance of a searching, sympathetic or reproachful glance. They felt free because they could speak without worrying or having any hopes about the impacts of their narratives. And yet they went on behaving like two people who have just got to know each other, considerate and cautious. She behaved modestly like the guest she was, modestly because she felt he didn’t want her to express her gratitude too fervently. And he restrained his way of helping her, afraid of exaggerating and making her feel indebted.

Their restraint was not lessened by knowing so much about each other. So far they had barely commented on their own story or the other’s, nor had they talked of how unusual it was, revealing so much to a stranger. They were content to listen and ask about specific matters. It was almost as if they had made a rule for it, albeit unspoken. He felt sure she thought about this too, sitting beside him, leaning back against the head-rest. That she had just broken the rule which in the past months had made it possible to speak without fear of being exposed to judgement or pity.

Their evenings had passed with one or the other telling more of their story. She lay on the sofa, he sat in an easy-chair. Sometimes he had not even looked at her. He had gazed out into the summer evening or the first evenings of autumn, listening to her voice or hearing himself speaking. They had been like two strangers who meet in the dimness of a quiet hotel vestibule and fall into conversation. Two strangers who take into account that they have no previous knowledge and therefore need an explanation for everything. Two homesick tourists who have stayed in the hotel instead of going on the excursion to Luxor or the Cheops pyramid, because they prefer to sit listening and noting the congruencies and divergences between their otherwise quite ordinary stories.

Her story had emerged in a gliding progression of events and ideas, people she had known and places where she had been. To begin with he could feel she was embarrassed when she touched on things she had never confided to anyone, and feelings she had never before expressed in words. She could blush in mid-sentence or hesitate before continuing, but at the same time he sensed the pressure of the untold things waking at the sound of her voice and impatiently insisting to be expressed and given a place in her narrative. As it gradually unfolded she quite forgot to distinguish between what was acceptable and what was revealing or directly unattractive. One event or emotion drew another with it, her tone gradually grew calmer and more confidential, and he discovered that he too was no longer too startled or embarrassed to listen to her intimate revelations. Only in the pauses when silence fell between them could he see how she suddenly directed her mind’s eye towards her story, amazed, sad or ironic, as if she were a stranger meditating for a while on its tortuous course, its blind alleys and delusions, the agitation and restless craving of emotions.

Something similar took place in him when he heard his own voice narrating. He did not see himself in his story but another, and he saw that other from behind, unable to fathom his deeper impulses. His secret, intimate feelings became secretive even to himself. And it was as if she read his thoughts. You don’t know why things happen, why they come to be as they are, she said one evening, after he had made a long pause. No, he replied. You can never really know.

An escape… could her story be concentrated into that one word? Was it an attempted flight that had been halted by the Dutch truck that evening in April? As he followed the peaceful rhythm of the traffic he felt it sounded like an answer to something he had said the previous day when they walked out to the headland. They had gone as far as they could get, right out to the end of the reed beds. She asked him to tell her what it looked like, and he described the tall reeds and the tussocks of grass and the rowing boat moored to a post in the inlet, reflected in the quiet water. They had passed the rotten post where he used to sit. She balanced on it, supporting herself with a hand on his shoulder. The faded pack of Gitanes had vanished. He told her about it and said Andreas must have been out there one day.

Apart from the humble and practical messages he passed on he seldom mentioned Andreas, but now and then he asked if it wasn’t time for them to talk. Each time she gave him the same answer. Not yet… he asked again out on the headland. She stopped. Was he tired of having her as a guest? No, he said, but I feel you are running away… It had started to rain in earnest and he suggested turning back. They took shelter from the rain in the shed made of tall, tarred planks, the only break in the flat landscape. The grey light penetrated the gloom through the spaces between the planks, where the inlet and the sand bank stretched horizontally, broken by the dark into vertical bands. He saw a big seagull flying across the strip of sand, disappearing and appearing again in the cracks. Not any more, she said. I am not running away any more. But to go home… that would be a flight.

He glanced at her briefly. What about their trip then? She turned her dark glasses towards him. He switched on the windscreen wipers and concentrated on the road again. The rain was like fog around the wheels of the lorry ahead of him. Wasn’t that an escape too? Her being here with him in the car driving south? She waited a few moments before replying. No, she said. What should they call it then? Going back, she said. All the way back. To the beginning… He overtook the lorry and pulled in again. Yes, he replied. That’s probably the only way to go.

It rained through most of Germany. The countryside was unvarying, woods, fields, factories and woods again, blurred and blue-grey in the misty rain. The names of towns told them how far they had come. He read them aloud to her when they passed yet another signboard. She took a cigarette from the pack under the window and put it between her lips. They had just passed Hanover. On the satellite picture of the weather forecast the night before, a gigantic spiral of cloud was moving in over northern Europe in a slowly ticking movement. So tonight the astronauts couldn’t see the lights of the cities. She smiled with her lips clamped round the cigarette and ignited her lighter. She was always nervous when she lit a cigarette. During the first weeks she had scorched the tips of her hair several times or set light to the filter, but he had accustomed himself not to interfere.

She lit the cigarette, inhaled and slowly blew out smoke. The astronauts? Yes, he said, describing a picture he had once seen in the newspaper. It had been taken on a clear night, from space, and you could clearly distinguish the contours of Europe surrounded by dark blue, with shining spots for each big city on the continent. The picture had illustrated an article on light pollution. He hadn’t understood that word. How could light pollute? She agreed. She had seen that picture too. It was one of the most beautiful pictures she had ever seen. Like a reflection of the firmament, she said. As if each city was a star. Yes, he replied, taking his hand off the gear lever and pulling out the ashtray. And imagine, if one day the lights of cities should reach some distant, inhabited planet, long after the cities and their inhabitants had disappeared. She nodded. Poor things, she said, if they found out the lights were not stars, but cities. Then they would believe they were not alone in the universe.

Robert disagreed. Would we feel sad if we thought the stars were cities? On the contrary, life would feel better for them, he said, with the thought that light years away, fools like themselves had existed who would surely have been just as confused. She smiled. How could he be sure they would be just as confused? He shrugged. He couldn’t imagine life without confusion. Unless you spend your life without knowing it, she replied. But then nothing would matter much, of course. Yes, he said. But it’s worse if you believe you are alive, even though your thoughts are merely the delayed light of a dead star. But, my dear doctor! she exclaimed and tapped out her ash outside the ashtray so the flakes drifted down over her left knee. She didn’t know he could be so philosophical. He didn’t know that either.

He put on a tape of Beethoven’s late string quartets and sank into the music as they passed industrial complexes and the looping junctions to big cities. All those emotions, he thought. The music vibrated with them, rough, smooth, hoarse or trembling, singing in the warm soundboard of the instruments, like slim crystal glasses vibrating from the circling of a damp finger. So many emotions were involved there, but they had lost their faces, they were no longer elicited by something or directed towards anyone, swallowed up by the transforming power of music. Their anonymity was the price of his own feeling, sitting in his car surrounded by strange cars and road signs, factories and cities, and yet being recognised and exposed. They sat silently listening to the music linking the cities as did the endless asphalt. It had different meanings to them, the same music, as it vibrated through their heads, and that could only be because in itself it meant nothing at all.

The ease he had felt in the morning at the prospect of going away had been superseded by a drowsy flatness, but he did not feel heavy as he usually did when he was tired. Nor was it the monotonous driving that exhausted him. His ease had changed into a strange, weightless feeling, and it seemed as if the restless or lingering string instruments echoed inside him as in a cavity surrounded by porous walls. Suddenly it seemed unrealistic to be sitting in his car beside his one-time patient on the way to the town whose name she had been given. In the past few months he had not had time to fall back into vegetating as usual. When he got home from work she was there, whether they talked or she sat by herself on the terrace, and at weekends Lauritz came and filled the house with his toys and his high-pitched babbling. He saw more of her son than of his own daughter, and the boy was becoming dangerously attached to him.

When they returned to the car after tanking up and having coffee at a service station outside Wurzburg, she put on the radio before he could go back to Beethoven. She zapped between programmes until deciding on a station playing pop. He never listened to that, but he thought it was her turn to choose and when they had driven another hundred kilometres the mindless pop music had merged with his strange, at once relaxed and melancholy mood. Now and then they chatted a little. She asked about details of what he had told her, or answered herself when he asked her to say more about some of the men she had known.

As he heard his own voice and listened to hers above the soft, stupefying pop, he recognised the feeling that had struck him when he was on the beach watching Lea swimming alongside the reef, the last Sunday before the summer holidays. It was the same feeling that overwhelmed him a few weeks later when Lauritz had stayed the night with him for the first time. He hadn’t gone into the house when he came back after driving the boy home. He sat in the car thinking of what Andreas had told him about his trip to Stockholm. His abortive attempt at flight from the life he now spoke of so devoutly was almost unbearable. As Robert alternately slipped into the overtaking lane and back into the line of cars driving south through Germany, he again recalled Lucca’s eyes in the photograph from Paris and the vague, intangible recollection her expression had woken. Like a mute reminder of something left undone, but what? Some act of negligence, he had thought, an unredeemed pledge, but of what and to whom?

It wasn’t so much the thought of how Andreas had smoked his cigarettes and gobbled up plums as he untangled himself from one illusion only to get wound up into another. It was not that which had paralysed him so he stayed on in his car listening to the sprinklers in the quiet gardens, staring at his own idiotic plastic chairs reflected in the window by the terrace. Nor was he suddenly struck by paralysis at the melancholy realisation that Lea would soon be a young woman who had no further need of him. That was not why he felt dumped on a siding when he waved to her out there between the poles and later, as the train moved off and he walked along the platform beside it to keep in sight of her face for a second or two longer.

Behind Lea’s face in the train window and Lucca’s at the pavement café, others appeared. He saw Monica’s face again, looking over the water and smoking a cigarette, one late afternoon on the beach a year or two before they were divorced. He saw his mother sitting on her balcony looking out over the railway towards the heating system’s blank red-brick wall concentrating the last sunlight. He saw another Monica blushing as she bent over him beneath a woollen blanket in the Alps, and he caught sight of Sonia’s inflamed young face behind Monica’s, bent over in the same way while she rode him like a mechanical toy horse. And behind them he was looking Ana in the eyes again, her dark gaze watched him through all the others’ as she lay down with loosened hair on the dim patterns of a dark red carpet, that winter evening when they were young and she finally gave him what he had wanted for so long he had forgotten why, and wanted it so frenziedly that she had not been able to quell his insatiable hunger.

He had been too young when he lost Ana, too young to lose something he had wanted so terribly much. He had withdrawn into a cave deep inside himself. It had terrified him to witness his own body amusing itself with anyone who came along. He had not dared come out until Monica pulled a woollen blanket over her head to protect their first kiss from the cruel light of the snow-clad mountains. By then he had learned to be more patient, less basic in his desires, but perhaps his body had grown used to being on its own. At any rate, it had gone off again when Sonia appeared in the barrister’s garden showing off her strong legs and slight breasts and doing her tai chi until he was totally mesmerised.

An incident of no importance had chanced to devour what meant everything, not with the insatiability of desire, but with that of silence. In fact he had not been as greedy as a lot of people, but what had been his had ended by slipping out of his hands again, because he let go, or because he was no longer capable of holding on with his previous conviction. As he watched them, the faces from the story of his life appeared before him and grew thin and transparent, Ana, Monica and Sonia, even his mother and Lea paled in his mind. Finally they fused and disappeared like reflections when a gust of wind whips up the surface of the water into sudden ripples. Again he visualised the flat landscape he had so often walked, the sand banks and reeds, the lonely shed of tarred planks, the birds’ signs on the sky and the tufts of grass on the inlet, their inundated stalks.

After midnight he drove into the car park of a motel between Stuttgart and Tübingen. Lucca had been asleep for the past hour. It was stupid to have driven so far when they were both tired, but he had been caught up into the trance-like monotony of driving and kept succumbing to the temptation to drive another hundred kilometres. As he switched off the engine and stretched out in his seat, fatigue came over him. He sat for a while looking listlessly through the drops on the windscreen, sparkling in the light from the motel’s yellow sign. The restaurant behind the white net curtains was in darkness, with only bluish neon strip lights to relieve it. He spoke her name several times, at first quietly, then with more insistence. Finally he laid a hand on her shoulder and shook it gently. She woke with a start, frightened and confused. He told her where they were. That far… Her voice was thick with sleep. She apologised for having slept instead of entertaining him. He carried their bags in one hand and took her arm as they hurried through the rain.

The motel was furnished in sham romantic style, as if guests were supposed to imagine themselves in a hunting lodge, a casino and a solid Christian home blended into one. While they were signing the register he said she should be glad she couldn’t see how ghastly it was. She did not react, it was not very funny, but it had become a habit with them, these slightly cynical references to her handicap. She stood swaying slightly, on the verge of falling asleep. They had rooms side by side. He showed her the bed and the door into the bathroom before going to his own room and collapsing in his clothes.

He hadn’t even taken off his shoes, he must have fallen asleep at once. At first he had no idea where he was, he lay on his side with his shoes tangled up in the blanket, watching the distant lights of passing trucks. It was a long time since he had remembered a dream. As a rule his dreams faded as soon as he woke up and he only saw a few dissolving, disconnected details. But this dream he remembered absolutely clearly. He pulled the pillow under his ear and sniffed in the scent of washing powder in the cool, smooth pillow-case.

It had been a colourless dream in shades of grey, white and black. He had never been in Africa, but that was where he was, he didn’t know why nor what kind of room he was standing in. He kneeled down in front of a boy with curly, close-cropped hair. A boy of four, perhaps five, not dark brown but grey like everything else in the dream. The boy had no eyes. There was nothing in their place but thin grey skin. Someone spoke to him behind his back, he did not know who. He could not see the person who spoke, nor hear if it was a man or a woman. The voice told him what he was to do. It said he should reach out and rub the skin where the boy’s eyes should have been. He rubbed cautiously with his knuckles and felt the tense membranes breaking at the light touch. As the flaps of skin curled up, two dark boy’s eyes appeared. Then he woke up.

At first he did not know what it was, the clenching feeling in his diaphragm, which made him double up with his forehead against his knees. He could not breathe, and for a few seconds everything in his body locked in a vice-like grip, until the cramp gave way to an overpowering force that chopped through him in hard, rhythmic stabs. Then he felt sobs breaking from his lungs and throat, hollow, deep and impossible to check.

A little later his muscles slackened, the weeping stopped and he was able to sit up. He dried his eyes and looked out at the silhouettes of parked cars. His watch showed the time to be half past two. He found a cigarette and lit it. The door beside the window led out to the car park. He went outside, it had stopped raining. The cold wind went straight through his shirt, but he kept on walking up and down beside the line of trucks and trailers. There was a wood beside the motel. He had not noticed that when they arrived. The tops of the tall pine trees were faintly outlined against the night sky above the dark windows of the building.

He did not wake up until half past nine. Lucca answered at once when he knocked on her door. She sat with her coat on beside the open window. Her bag was on the bed, packed. They were silent in the restaurant. The end wall was decorated with antlers, and a subdued Viennese waltz sounded from the invisible loudspeakers. He fetched their breakfast from the sideboard. There were no other people and the car park was almost empty. He asked if she had slept well. As she turned her face towards him he could see himself and a section of the wood in her dark glasses. I heard you, she said quietly. He directed his gaze through the corridor of pine trees, their dark trunks vanishing into the dimness. Her cup clattered on the saucer, and he felt the warmth of her hand on his. I am your friend, she said. He looked at her. My friend? She nodded. Yes, she said with a wry smile. Your friend in the dark…

When they were in the car he unfolded the map over the steering wheel and traced the road south to the Swiss border and on through Zurich, St Gotthard and Milan. She put on the tape of Beethoven’s string quartets. He asked if they could hear something else. Like what? He searched out the route to Genoa and down the coast through La Spezia to Viareggio, where they would turn inland again. Whatever you like, he said, folding up the map. Tunes of the day, he added, starting up. She moved the red needle along the FM band until she found a station with good reception. He was grateful to her for not saying anything. Her silence was neither awkward nor frightened, she merely let him be. She kept quiet as you do beside someone in a state of deep concentration.

It was not that he concentrated on anything besides driving. Thoughts passed through his head like birds, and he made no attempt to hold on to them, but he was fully awake. An hour later they were on the way through the Alps. The lethargy of the previous day had been replaced by a clear, sharp feeling, like a reflection of the white light that dazzled him when they emerged from yet another tunnel, forcing him to screw up his eyes.

29

They reached Viareggio in late afternoon. The sky was overcast and there was an offshore wind. The blue-grey colour of the water changed into a lighter milky green under the frayed foam as the waves arched themselves and collapsed. She walked in front of him prodding the sand with her white stick. He stopped to tie his shoelace. The wide beach was completely deserted. A black dog ran around wildly with its tongue hanging out of its mouth and bared teeth, as if biting at the wind. Far to the north behind her solitary figure in the fluttering coat he could see the rocky island off La Spezia and the promontory that sloped upwards and merged into the Apennine Alps. The highest peak was white, not of snow but marble. He straightened himself and caught up with her. Minute drops of salt water covered her dark glasses in a fine layer. Like marble dust, he thought. They walked back and along the promenade past the imposing façades of hotels and pavilions between the promenade and the beach. Hardly anyone was about. There was only the dull rumbling of the breakers in the background, the sound of their heels and the tapping noise of her slim stick.

It was somewhere round here, said Lucca, somewhere along this stretch, she saw him for the first time. Robert tried to imagine a young version of the woman with the mature cultivated voice he had been talking to once or twice a week. A young Else in her suit standing at the edge of the curious crowd watching a film being shot featuring Marcello Mastroianni. There must have been spotlights behind the camera even though the sun was shining. They depicted the scene to each other as they walked along the row of wind-blown palms. It developed into a game in which they took turns at elaborating each other’s fancy.

Else must have been fascinated by the blend of sunlight and white spotlights enveloping the actors in a magical sphere impossible to break into, like a dream. And there, carrying a long boom as he adroitly followed the camera’s movements along the rails, she suddenly caught sight of the dark young man, who perhaps, in a pause between two shots, had already observed the elegant, Scandinavian girl on the other side of the white, the magic circle. It was no longer Mastroianni she looked at, it was Giorgio, but she did not know that. She did not yet know his name, nor could she know he would be the father of her daughter. Merely because, during a stroll along the promenade in Viareggio, she had been attracted by the artificial glare around the crowd of spectators.

And up there, said Robert, pointing, as if it would help, up there behind one of the closed shutters she undressed for the first time in front of her lover, while her husband lay vomiting on one of the other floors because he had eaten some oysters he should have left well alone. Yes, said Lucca. In the afternoon, most likely, with the slanting sunrays from the shutters caressing their young, curious bodies just as in a film. And cut! All of a sudden her life was changed, she loved someone else, and no one in their wildest dreams could have imagined that her story would take such a completely different turn. By chance, said Robert. Yes, she responded. I’m an accidental girl!

The light was fading as they left Viareggio and drove east through hills covered with pines and olive groves. One crest appeared behind another in the twilight. The hills resembled the moveable scenery in a puppet theatre with minute silhouettes of wide pine crowns and pointed cypresses. It was dark when they arrived in Lucca. He drove around the town along the city wall and through one of the gateways to the old quarter. They parked in the square in front of a church. The marble façade shone yellow in the light from the street lamps. She was silent. He wondered whether this was the church where Giorgio had sat when he had his photograph taken one day in early youth, happy and unaware while the low-flying swallows threw their whirling shadows on the marble façade. They continued on foot along a narrow street without traffic. People thronged the street, the shops were still open. The walls resounded with steps and voices, and beneath their murmuring he heard the tip of her slim stick when it grazed the cobblestones. He asked if he should describe the town to her. No, she said, slightly irritated. Have I ever asked you to describe yourself?

They went into a café, she ordered espresso and grappa. He was surprised to hear her speaking Italian. He asked for a beer. They had been quiet for a while when she rose to her feet. I’m going for a walk, she said. Should he come with her? She would rather he didn’t. And if she got lost? She shrugged her shoulders. Then he’d have to look for her. As he sat alone watching the inhabitants of the town in their winter coats coming in to sit at the bar, he began to understand why she did not want to know what the place looked like.

He could have described the square tower with trees growing on top of it, or the church façade consisting of columns of which not a single one matched the others, some with animal reliefs or geometric patterns, others twisted or carved to look as if they were tied in knots. He could have described the angel standing atop the gable looking down on passers-by with a teasing smile, and he could have mentioned the narrow staircase on the back of the gable, apparently gratuitous unless it was meant for the angel to climb because he didn’t want to terrify people by flying. But all of this would have been nothing but pictures to her, his own pictures, of which she could only form vague and imprecise ideas.

Why should she be interested in the beauty of the town? After all, she could not see it. He thought about what she had said. It was true, she had never asked him what he looked like. Only when he went to see her the first time without his white coat and she wanted to know what he was wearing. She had no inkling of his face. To her he was a voice and what the voice told her, and the expectant, listening silence in which she herself could speak. Her town must be like that to her. A name and the echo of steps and voices blending with her thoughts among the invisible walls. He remembered how he had stood at the door of Lea’s room the previous day looking at her because he thought she was asleep. Her own face was no longer of any concern to her. She had come to regard it as something outside herself. Like a mask, he thought. You don’t see it when you wear it. Why worry yourself about it if that’s the only one you’ve got?

He pictured her walking around with her tapping stick among the other pedestrians in the narrow old streets, how she noted each street corner and marked it on a plan in her memory. When he had waited half an hour he began to get worried. He paid and went in search of her. The shops were closing, traders let down the shutters in front of the windows and he thought she must be able to hear the same rattling sound perhaps only a few streets away. The moon had come out, almost full, above a medieval tower whose only decoration was a white clock-face of marble. The moon and the clock looked like images of each other. He would have liked to describe the likeness to her, and for a moment felt sad at the thought of her prohibition of pictures.

He had been walking a long time up and down the streets, growing more and more anxious, when he caught sight of her, framed in a gateway with a strangely curved façade. The entrance led to a square surrounded by terraced houses, all painted yellow, with small windows at different heights. She stood perfectly still among the passers-by in the middle of the square, face raised. He stayed at the entrance. He remembered reading about the square in a guide book. Once it had been a Roman arena, and later on houses had been built in a circle following its circumference. There was nothing remarkable about those houses. They were quite ordinary, with washing hanging on lines and shutters open to apartments where people were cooking or watching television. The remarkable thing about the space was its long elliptical curves.

He closed his eyes and listened to the steps approaching or withdrawing in fleeting, contrapuntal figures. The walls behind the open windows resounded with voices, squealing chair legs, domestic machines and churning television sets, and the sounds blended into a complex murmur above his head. It probably sounded like that every evening, when the occupants of the houses had come home. A scooter crossed the square. It was an ordinary evening in Lucca, with nothing particular happening. An evening when they would just be together, the people who lived here, whether they were happy or unhappy or something in between. Robert waited until the scooter had passed before going up to her. She turned towards him and smiled. Well, there you are… He took her hand. I can find my way very well, she said. I know you can, he answered.