The captain had been right. Harry Wiener never exchanged jovialities with the actors that other directors might at the start of the day’s rehearsals, to warm them up and maybe redress the ghastly old-fashioned authority they still represented. But although he did nothing to ingratiate himself with them or put them at ease, after a week Lucca discovered she felt perfectly safe with this undemonstrative, discreetly attentive man. She lost her fear of appearing foolish. Every bid, every suggestion was permitted, and if they could not be used, they dropped out by themselves, she didn’t know how, for he never directly criticised her way of playing the part, a raised eyebrow was enough. Nor did he praise her, simply smiled now and then with unexpected mildness, almost gratefully, as she felt warmth spreading through her.
He preferred to express himself in simple and very physical images, always based on the current passage. Before and after rehearsing a scene he spoke to the actors separately. He seldom interrupted them when they were acting and if he did, it was with a specific question or a single word that might seem irrelevant or puzzling to the others, like a private code meant only for the one he was addressing, which helped the actor get back on the track. On the track of what? To begin with they didn’t know. They thought they were approaching the unknown core of their character, but little by little they each discovered they were merely following the outlines of something they had known all the time without thinking about it, since it involved hidden aspects of themselves.
Lucca gradually came to respect the diva and the captain. She saw their concentration at work, and they saw her when she felt most vulnerable and naked. She had still not worked long enough to feel it on her own body, but she imagined their affected manner must be a shield. They were obliged to act in their own lives in order for them to be themselves on the stage. In the real world they had to allow themselves to play ironically and without commitment, employing the most grotesque and comical attitudes, because the stage was the only place where they could not allow themselves the least simulation or absent-minded, fashionable convention.
Lucca was completely exhausted after the rehearsals, and when she woke up in the evening having slept for an hour or two, she discovered she had spent yet another day without thinking of Otto. Thinking of him brought no particular feelings. She felt as if she’d had a local anaesthetic, and on the nights she had dinner with Else she hardly listened to what her mother said. Most of the time they left each other in peace, and there were days when they just met in the hall if one was leaving and the other coming home. Miriam called now and then, but if Lucca started to tell her anything she always noticed a shadow of envy beneath her friend’s enthusiasm. For a year Miriam had had nothing but a minor part in a television series for children, disguised as a kangaroo. She had laughed at herself, but nevertheless she tried to present the role in a serious light when she explained how hard it actually was to hop around in a costume like that, legs together. She had been highly praised for it.
When Miriam thought they had talked enough about Strindberg and Harry Wiener she asked if Lucca still thought about Otto and, as if to make the most of it, she announced one day that after all there didn’t seem to have been so much between Otto and the mulatto model he had been seen with. Lucca could sense Miriam didn’t believe her when she said she hardly thought of him any more. She ought to go on suffering when everything else was going so well. Or had she fallen for the Gypsy King, in fact? When Miriam hinted at that for the third time Lucca shut her up. There was really more to life than everlastingly falling in love, she said, surprised to hear herself quoting Else. Work, for instance, she went on. That made Miriam change the subject.
Only at rehearsals did she felt completely alert. She no longer doubted that she had been given the role because Harry Wiener had faith in her talent. She had been reassured when she went to tea with him in his rooftop apartment, and her trust in him increased when he sometimes took her hand or put an arm round her shoulder as they talked. There was nothing in the least suggestive or underhand in his touch, it came as a natural extension of the conversation and his explanations when he went through a scene and showed her how he visualised her entrance and where she should stop.
She never spoke to him about anything but her part, and he left as soon as the day’s rehearsal was finished. Nothing in his professional manner betrayed that she had sat on his sofa one afternoon talking about herself while outside thunder crashed and rain fell. It strengthened her feeling of laying herself bare on the stage, delivered to his eyes down in the semi-darkness of the auditorium. There was a small lamp on his desk, but its light illuminated only his torso, not his face. She wondered whether the other actors had been to tea with him too, and if he knew as much about their lives as he did about hers.
One day she was in the canteen with the captain and the diva, the two of them enjoying a teasing, comradely banter. They must have known each other since youth. Lucca felt an outsider. It was still strange to have lunch with them, although they were her colleagues. She had known their faces since she was a child, and here she was watching the diva pick up shrimps from her plate with her red nails and pop them between her red, red lips. She and the captain couldn’t agree whether Harry Wiener’s present wife was number three or four, and they helped each other count up the names of the women he had married, and those he’d had on the side. They even argued over the order. He changes wives as others change their cars, said the diva. She had been friends with the previous wife, that is, number two or three. Wasn’t there one they had forgotten?
The captain filled up his beer glass. Anyway, Wiener would soon have to look around for a new one. He had foam on his nose when drinking. The diva removed it with an affectionate finger. Well, you are exquisitely sympathetic, she laughed with her moist lips and turned to Lucca. She had better take care or she would be the next! But maybe the crafty old bugger had already tried it on? Lucca felt her cheeks burn. Well, they’d better not go into that now! The captain made a poker face and raised an index finger at his friend. The young weren’t like that – any more! The diva let out a whinny. One-love, she said and gasped for breath with a groan of ecstasy. But what was it he had called Wiener, that time they did A Midsummer Night’s Dream . . . Yes, come on now! She gave his arm a pat of encouragement. The captain scratched his neck and raised his glass. She picked up the remaining shrimps from her plate and sucked mayonnaise from her fingers, looking at him expectantly. We call him the Gypsy King, said Lucca. The captain held out his glass and bent forwards as if his beer was going down the wrong way. They laughed.
As she cycled home she felt irritated with herself for blushing when the diva asked if Harry Wiener had made a pass at her. Had they seen through her? Was that how he tracked down new talent? But why then had she got the part? Was it only because it would be too painful if she put it around town how she had sent off such an old ape? Not because he was ashamed of his approaches, but because he was ashamed at being rejected. Had he given her the part simply to keep her mouth shut? That seemed too complicated, she thought and regretted having angled for such a cheap laugh with the hackneyed nickname. She had slipped that in to assure them she had not been to bed with him. But why was everyone convinced she had, Otto and Miriam and now the diva and the captain as well?
She could not make the image of the notorious womaniser match her impression of the calm, concentrated man with the lined face. Nor could she make her own image of him match the episode in his Mercedes when he had driven her home and quite openly made advances. Probably he had just felt lonely. His wife was incurably ill and he didn’t know how long she had to lie suffering. Was it any wonder that he lost his bearings for a moment? Looking back at it now she felt he had opened a crack into something human in his otherwise controlled and impenetrable façade. Just as when he received her a month later, confused and half asleep in a frail and touching way.
Suddenly she pictured him again clearly, in the car when they stopped at the kerb outside the Egyptian restaurant. T
he vulnerable look in his eyes when he bravely gave himself away and asked for a kiss. He must have known what he was exposing himself to, the gossip and ridicule, but he had not cared. She kept on going back to the mixture of courage and vulnerability there had been in his expression. She couldn’t possibly be just a firm young cunt, yet another in the series, if you were to believe the diva and the captain.
She recalled what he had said. That she was both talented and attractive, and she was wrong if she believed one had nothing to do with the other. When he said that she had thought he was merely trying to manipulate her or overwhelm her with his cynicism. But perhaps there was no difference, with a man like Harry Wiener. Maybe he had wanted to test her and see if she had sufficient substance and ability to resist. He must have seen something more in her that night. He must have seen the same thing he had patiently waited for from the start of rehearsals, down at his desk in the semi-darkness, until she too began to see it in the bright light up on the stage, as she gradually took possession of her part. Another side of herself which so far had remained hidden.
She slowly turned off the hot water until it became icy cold. For a moment her heart seemed to stop beating. She gasped but forced herself to stand still, eyes closed, completely stunned by cold. When she had turned off the water she stepped in front of the wide mirror fitted into the wall between the Moorish tiles. The window behind her was open, the mosquito net reflected the sun and the mountains faded behind a white fog. She had gained a little weight, her hips were rounder and her breasts bigger. For once she was brown all over, without the usual pale strips from her bikini. She lay naked, sunning herself on the terrace in the afternoons. No one could see her except Harry when he sat in the shade reading. The scratching sound of cicadas intensified outside the window, escalating rhythmically. She rubbed her face with her hands and pressed water out of her black hair.
She could still feel surprised when she looked at her black hair in the mirror. One day after rehearsal Harry had taken her aside and, as if in passing, asked if she would consider dyeing her hair black. It would make her look like the captain, her father in the play. When he saw her terrified look, he immediately laughed it off. It was just a thought. She forgot it again, but a week or two later when she was standing in front of the mirror memorising her lines it suddenly struck her that she ought to have black hair. Only when she’d suggested it did she recall it had been his own idea, but he made no comment, not so much as a twitch. He merely gazed at her as he considered it, until he nodded agreement, as if it was something she herself had discovered. She was both fascinated and alarmed. He said nothing when the play had been performed for the last time and she had her hair dyed black again because her own colour had begun to show at the roots. But at that point she knew he liked her with it.
She pretended not to have seen him when he came into the bathroom, at first only a silhouette against the shining mosquito net. He stepped into the light from the lamp above the mirror and embraced her from behind, laying his hands on her cool breasts. He gave a wry smile and met her eyes in the mirror. Beauty and the Beast, he said. She could feel his growing erection against her buttocks, through the linen trousers. She would have to go, she said. If she wanted to be on time . . . They had arranged for her to drive to Almeria and fetch their guest from the airport. He let go of her. She kissed his forehead and pulled the curls at his neck consolingly. Poor beast, she mumbled tenderly.
When she got into the car she realised she had no idea what he looked like, the man she was going to meet at the airport. She went back to the house. Harry looked at her ironically as she tore the lid from a cardboard box and wrote on it with a biro. Andreas Bark, she wrote. He nodded approvingly. Smart . . . She drove down the winding road from the village and out onto the main road. There was hardly any traffic. The landscape was grey and ochre-yellow in the sharp light. She put on her shades, stepped on the speedometer and turned up the volume on the radio.
She was on the stage in The Father. Half-way through the play she dried up. She could not remember a single line, and complete silence fell in the theatre, such silence that she couldn’t even hear the prompter’s whisper. The captain looked at her expectantly in the silence, and she felt her pulse beating softly behind her ear. The diva stood out in the wings gazing at her, dressed up as the white clown with a ruff, conical hat and white, painted face, smiling, with her head on one side. And suddenly a hole opened in her ear drum, that was how it felt when she heard Else’s cultivated radio voice, reverberating like a loudspeaker at a railway station: Take care with your consonants!
The dream left a hollow, crushed feeling in her stomach, but she could not eat anything and managed only to swallow a cup of coffee when she went down to the kitchen. She sat looking out at the neglected garden. It had rained in the night and the sky hung heavy over the stripped tree crowns. The gale tore at their outermost branches and moved the greasy leaves around on the grass. There were two hours left before she had to be at the theatre. She decided to go at once. She did not know what else to do with herself.
The set design had been finished some days previously and she wanted to see what it looked like from the auditorium. She found her way through the labyrinth of corridors and emerged in the dimly lit theatre with its empty seats. There was light on the stage. Harry Wiener sat on a Victorian sofa covered with black chintz, he was dressed in black himself. The set design had the effect of being both realistic and dreamily strange. It was very simple, designed in black and grey except for a single armchair covered with red velvet. He sat deep in thought with one arm resting on the back of the sofa and his hand under his chin, looking down at the shabby stage floor. He had not seen her. She stood there gazing at him from a distance.
Again she remembered the sympathy she had felt between them when she was in his apartment, with rain foaming on the balcony and lightning brightening the sky above the harbour. The warmth of his manner when he spoke to her, and the frailty he exhibited when he greeted her, slightly dazed because he had fallen asleep on the sofa. It had made her forget her nervousness over meeting him. She had forgotten everything else as she sat there high above the city surrounded by his books, captured by the calm gaze resting on her as she told him about herself and listened to what he said about Strindberg in his subdued, hoarse voice. He had opened up to her, not only when he briefly explained that his wife was dying, but also when he talked of the captain in the play. Of man’s unhappy love for woman and of how life belonged to women because they had the ability to pass it on. Of the deserted boy-child, who grew up to fear women and mistrust them because in his heart he cursed the mother who had once rejected him. Afterwards she had realised he hadn’t spoken only of Strindberg and his captain, but of himself.
She had expected him to make some little sign to show her he remembered how they had sat and talked, but he kept her at a distance, as he did with all the others, kind, expectant and deeply concentrated on the work. With each week that passed she felt more defenceless, exposed to his eyes that apparently apprehended everything that stirred within her. He seemed to know her, but she herself knew so infinitesimally little about him. She felt in contact with him only when he occasionally came up to her and cautiously laid a hand on her shoulder as he put a question which took her unawares, anticipating what she felt without being able to express it clearly. But she was not the person he spoke to, it was the cavalry officer’s daughter he had slowly drawn out in her from some forgotten, shadowy corner of her personality.
Perhaps he had invited her for tea to study her at close quarters before he set out to make use of her for his own purposes. Why would Harry Wiener be interested in her as more than a tool for his art? That must have been what he meant when he said she was both talented and attractive, and that one could not be separated from the other. He had been attracted to her as a sculptor might feel towards a lump of clay. He had asked to kiss her simply because he wanted to see what she looked like when being kissed.
He rose f
rom the sofa, pushed it a little so it stood more at an angle, and sat down again. As he leaned back he caught sight of her. He smiled and waved her forward. Sit down, he said and patted the sofa cushion as she walked across the stage. He looked at her attentively. Was she nervous about the première? She said she was. That’s how it should be, he smiled and looked down at his hand, carefully stroking the smooth chintz of the sofa. You’re good, he said, that’s why you’re nervous. It was the first time he had praised her directly. He looked at her again. Still living with her mother? Lucca was amazed. She could not remember telling him where she lived. It had become quite difficult to find an apartment, had it? He had bought a freehold apartment for his daughter in Vanløse. Of course it was a dreary place, but she could afford the regular expenses there. He smiled kindly. What about her? Couldn’t her mother help her with a payment? It was about the only way to get somewhere to live. Buying . . .
He stood up, the audience was over. She followed him into the wings, wondering what all that talk about owning property was for. Did he think the town was full of millionaires? Or had he asked about her accommodation situation because he wanted to be kind or had no idea what else to talk to her about, now she had burst in on him as he sat meditating before the rehearsal? He walked with head bent so she only saw the famous grey curls at his neck. Suddenly he staggered and stretched out a hand as if to find something to support him. She took his hand, just as he seemed about to sink to his knees. He put his arm round her shoulder and hid his face with the other hand. Everything went black, he said and removed the hand. He looked at her and smiled faintly, pale as paper. He wasn’t getting enough sleep at present . . .
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