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.
Part Four
It was snowing again. They had thought winter was finally over. It was late March and there had been cloudless days with bright sunshine when they could sit outside in their coats. Lucca stretched out a hand and switched off the alarm clock. She pressed herself close to Andreas’s back, he was still asleep, and snoring. As a rule that did not bother her, and when it did she just held his nose between two fingers. She snored too now and then, he said, and she barely stirred when he gently turned her onto her side. They knew each other, they were not shy about anything any more. They had even stopped locking the bathroom door. She had never thought she would be so much at ease with anyone that she could leave all the doors open. Only the door of his study was always closed. When he came out at the end of the afternoon the air in there was thick with cigarette smoke. She and Lauritz had grown used to him being in the house and yet miles away behind the closed door, inaccessible until he emerged late in the afternoon, pale and distrait.
He never spoke of what he was writing when he was engaged in it. He couldn’t, he said. He was afraid of losing the scent of what he was trying to pursue with his words. What could not really be said at all. But when he finished a new play he couldn’t wait for her to read it. He felt actually wounded, although he tried to conceal his disappointment, if she did not read it quickly enough and say something about it at once. She had plenty to do with Lauritz and the house, but he would gladly look after everything if she would only sit down and read his script. She dropped everything and took the sheaf of pages to bed. It irritated him, she could feel, but she had always preferred to read in bed, sitting cross-legged, with the duvet around her like a lined nest.
Sometimes she found it hard to understand what he wrote, but perhaps it was not necessary to understand everything. He had said so himself in an interview with a Sunday newspaper. That what was immediately understandable in fact stunted one’s perception, whereas seeming obscurity put one on the track of something only glimpsed. Something silent and more profound that could not be contained and pinned down with simple concepts. He was so clever that people were sometimes quite frightened of him, but he didn’t like her to remind him of that. He had made his mark, he was one of those who counted, and she was proud of him. She was not even ashamed of being proud of her husband when they attended a première. Why should she be?
As a rule she had a few critical comments on his scripts, it might be a dramaturgical ambiguity or something in the development of a character which felt contradictory, and he listened to her even though she only had her intuition as an actor to guide her. It made her happy when she persuaded him to alter or omit something, not because he acknowledged her to be right but because she felt that brought her into contact with what he was doing, with him. The part of him she could not reach because it expressed itself only in writing, and because he had to protect this secret side to be able to write at all.
She had always wanted to play a role in one of his plays, but Lauritz was born soon after they moved back from Rome, and in the years that followed she had only done a few radio plays. She had concentrated on the child and the house. She coped almost single-handedly in the periods when he was working on something new. Miriam scolded her for letting her career run to seed and slouching around like a country housewife in apron and wellingtons. Miriam almost gave her a bad conscience, and she didn’t know what to say in her own defence, but that only lasted until they had put down the receiver or waved goodbye at the station. Afterwards she did wonder why she felt neither frustrated nor unhappy or oppressed, as Miriam obviously felt she should. It was rather the opposite feeling. A leisurely happiness to which she didn’t give much thought, related to the clouds that unnoticeably changed shape on their journey between the edge of the woods and the horizon. In the course of the day, while her hands were busy with all manner of practical things, her thoughts circled on their own like the swallows, now low around the house, now high up among the drifting cloud formations.
Lauritz had changed her. She had been ready, when she met Andreas, without herself being aware of it. He saw it before she did, and he had not been frightened by what he saw. He had gone on unremittingly, further than anyone else had dared. Right into her secret empty core, open to the way things might happen. He had turned out to be the one she had waited for, and so it had been Lauritz and not another man’s child who had grown inside her until there was no longer any room for him. She had screamed so hard she thought she would die. She had felt as if she was being ripped open and turned inside out. Nothing had ever hurt so much, and no one had made her as happy as the small, creased, purple-blue child who was placed on her stomach so she could see his cross face and squinting little eyes and the heart hammering wildly in his frog-like body, covered with foetal grease, still linked to her by the twisted cord. Andreas wept, she had not seen him weep before, and she loved him more than ever, but she herself did not weep. She groaned and trembled and smiled all the time at this brutal, naked, screaming and bloody joy.
To Lauritz it didn’t matter who she was, and yet he had never been in doubt. He could smell and taste who she was long before he learned to focus his eyes on her and recognise her face. People asked if it wasn’t hard having to get up in the middle of the night and adjust her whole life to the boy’s needs. They clearly did not understand it was a relief. She was relieved when she realised she had ceased to care about her own bungled ambitions and egocentric dreams. She forgot time, it was no longer divided into hours and days. The child had become her clock, time did not pass any more, it grew before her eyes.
Else was worried and Miriam almost indignant. They let her understand, each in her own way, that in their opinion she was exaggerating her newly acquired maternal feelings all too willingly, indeed, almost fanatically, subjecting herself to the child and to Andreas. They almost despised her because she allowed him, the great sensitive artist, to withdraw to his study and go to Copenhagen to tend his career or travel about Europe in search of inspiration, while she trotted around with the buggy out there in the country. She did not respond, merely smiled infuriatingly. Miriam did not begin to understand her until she herself became pregnant. She was eight months gone now.
Else had fallen silent on the telephone when Lucca called from Rome and told her mother she was pregnant. Wasn’t it a bit soon? After all, they had only known each other for a few months. She felt hurt at her mother
’s cautious reaction. How long was she to wait? How reluctant and choosy did you have to be when life finally offered the simplest and most basic of all questions? Her entire life had gathered into a single moment when she lay beside Andreas one morning behind the closed shutters and told him she was pregnant. The future had begun just there, when he asked if she wanted a child, and she replied by asking if he did. He said yes without hesitation. Yes, with her.
Else asked if she realised that at best it would put a brake on her career and at worst put a stop to it. Just when she was about to make it. Lucca remembered what her mother had said when Otto dropped her. That there was more to life than love – work, for example. She remembered Else’s bitter mouth and sunken face when she sat, eyes shut, sunning herself. Later on, as her stomach began to expand and her legs and face swelled up, she thought several times of their conversation that time at the cottage. In fact, she resembled a cow, a pale cow who looked questioningly at her in the mirror with her amiable eyes. When Andreas took her heavy breasts in his hands, milk seeped from her nipples, and he kissed them and let her taste the milk on his lips. She would never have believed it, but she felt a secret pleasure in seeing and feeling how the unknown child quietly and laboriously ruined her figure. Men had clutched it so often, but now they no longer looked at her, and soon she too forgot to note whether they did or not.
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