Lucca

by Jens Christian Grøndahl

  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 careful
ly 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.

  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.