Actually she felt free, she said, with Harry. Maybe just because he was so much older. Andreas looked at her. How? She talked about Harry’s calm, his lack of illusions, and repeated what he had said. That she would leave him one day. She looked down at her fingers stroking the rough surface of the rock. It might sound strange, but his saying that made her want to stay. He kissed her, and he did it so quickly that she hardly realised what was happening. She smiled in surprise, but when his face approached again she returned his kiss. His mouth tasted of salt and tobacco. She narrowed her eyes and took hold of his chin, which really was very prominent. Wasn’t it about time for that fag?
They chatted about everything under the sun while they dried themselves on the beach and later in the car on the way back. As if it had not happened. She spoke of Ibsen and A Doll’s House and what she thought of the role of Nora. He said it was brave of Wiener to put on that particular play. Women’s liberation had lost its punch now, at least as something open to discussion, and you had to ask yourself if the play was still relevant. She said there was another side to Nora, but hadn’t time to tell him what it was before the village came in sight round a bend. Soon they stopped below the house. The sun had gone down behind the mountains, the first street-lights had come on. Harry was in the kitchen stirring one of his Andalusian casseroles with chick peas and black pudding. She kissed him on the neck and went for her shower.
It was dark when she went up on the terrace. They talked quietly as they ate. Harry chatted to Andreas about Rome and let him describe it without showing off his own knowledge of the city, as she feared for a moment he would. When she was making the coffee in the kitchen Andreas came down with the dishes. He stood for a few seconds beside her but she did not look at him and he went up again. She served their coffee and said she wanted an early night. When Harry came into the room a few hours later she pretended to be asleep.
Andreas caught a bus to Almeria the next day. They had originally planned for him to stay on another day. He said there was an exhibition in Madrid he wanted to see before flying home. Harry drove him to the bus stop. She lay sunbathing on the terrace when he came back. He sat on the parapet beside the sun-bed looking down at the dried up river-bed, scratching his neck. He was in a great hurry . . . had he been too hard on him?
As the weeks went by it seemed more and more unreal to her that she had sat on a rock and kissed Andreas Bark. In her memory it had almost not happened. Everything was exactly the same between her and Harry. Before they went home they spent three days in Granada. He showed her round the Alhambra and described how the Catholic kings had driven out the Moors and the Spanish Jews in turn. That was how she discovered he was Jewish. He had not been circumcised. Thank God, he said, smiling. Think what I would have been like if they had cut my cock! He didn’t care where he came from or what he was called, he said. No one was going to tell him who he was, and in any case, family was just one great crushing mill. They were in a roadside restaurant somewhere between Granada and Malaga. He bent over his plate of pork chops in sherry sauce. ‘I know not how to tell thee who I am: My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself.’ She laughed at his old-fashioned punctilious diction and wiped sauce from his chin with her napkin. She had just finished Romeo and Juliet. When they were back in the car it occurred to her that she might be the only one who allowed him to forget now and then that he was Harry Wiener.
One afternoon a few months later Lucca was sitting at a pavement café on Gammel Strand. She was waiting for Miriam. It had begun to drizzle but she stayed on under the umbrella breathing in the scent of wet asphalt. Harry had driven to Skagen in Jutland, they had arranged for her to join him a fortnight later. She had been planning to visit Else at the holiday cottage. She had not seen her mother since they went to Spain, but put it off every day and didn’t feel like going up there. She enjoyed having the roof apartment to herself and being alone for the first time in six months. As she sat looking out for Miriam she noticed a woman standing on the pavement some distance away looking in her direction. Only after a while did Lucca realise the woman was gazing at her. She turned her head towards Thorvaldsen’s Museum as if she was engaged in observing the frieze of pictures on the side of the building.
After her success in The Father and being photographed with Harry for the gossip columns she had grown used to people recognising her sometimes in the street, but she had never been stared at for so long before. When she turned round again the woman was standing beside her table. They must have been about the same age, but she seemed older. Her face was lined and pale and she looked unhealthy. Her greasy hair stuck to her forehead, carefully set in an unbecoming but very straight parting, and she had a dark moustache. She fixed Lucca with her gaze through the raindrops on her spectacles, digging her hands into the pockets of her woollen coat. It was buttoned right up to the chin although it was early July. Suddenly Lucca realised the woman must be mad.
She sat down opposite Lucca with an artificial smile. I know very well who you are, she said. You are my father’s whore. You are the one who killed my mother . . . A waitress came up to take her order. Lucca waved her away and smiled at the woman. I haven’t killed anybody, she replied calmly. She was reminded of what Harry had told her when they sat on the stage chatting one morning before rehearsal. This must be the woman he had bought an apartment for. He had mentioned his daughter only once, and as far as she knew he had no other children. You’re lying, said the woman. You were fucking him when my mother was admitted to hospital! Lucca bent forward and lowered her voice as she tried to explain it was a misunderstanding, and that she had not started living with her father before her mother died. It felt wrong to say living with.
The tense shoulders in the woollen coat dropped, and Harry’s daughter stared crestfallen. She couldn’t understand it, she had seen them coming out of his building arm in arm. She looked up. It must have been her she had seen coming out the day her mother went to hospital. She had been tall and slim and black-haired . . . Harry’s daughter raised her voice again and struck the table, making Lucca’s cup rattle on its saucer . . . Like you! At that moment Lucca caught sight of Miriam. She stood up so abruptly that the chair fell over, called the waitress, passed her the change she had in her pocket and ran to meet her bewildered friend. Behind her she heard Harry’s daughter call out in a despairing voice. Couldn’t they talk? As she took Miriam’s arm and walked on along the pavement she cursed his idea of having her hair dyed for the part in The Father. At the same time she wondered who she could be, the young black-haired woman Harry’s daughter had seen him with. Was it the strange girl he had thought of when he made the suggestion? Had she been the substitute for an unknown woman?
The telephone rang next morning while she sat in bed reading A Doll’s House, now and then looking over the harbour that appeared and disappeared again every time the wind lifted the curtains in front of the open sliding door. She decided not to answer it, afraid it was Harry’s daughter. It went on ringing and in the end she stood up. It was Andreas. She was taken by surprise at hearing his voice and said Harry was in Skagen. He knew that. He was in Copenhagen, could he come round? Five minutes later the doorbell rang. She had to smile when she saw his silhouette behind the plate glass of the elevator door. She had seen the same silhouette exactly a year before on her way down the stairs after having tea with Harry. He wore his leather jacket and smiled his boyish smile, but he didn’t seem shy.
Harry had called him a few days before, about his play, and during the conversation had told him she was in town. That was why he had come. He had to see her, and the next day he had caught the train, and here he was. She looked at him. You must be crazy, she said. He knew that. But he had thought of her a lot . . . it had been so strange, what happened on the rock that afternoon. Either it was nothing or . . . he had to see her again to find out what it was. If it was anything.
They sat on the balcony looking at the clouds over the harbour and at each other, suddenly shy. He had blurted it al
l out, and now he didn’t know what to say. She wondered at his initiative and courage. She hadn’t thought about him as much as he had about her, and she said what she thought straight out. She said she had not known what to make of what happened on that rock. As they sat there it felt as if she had spent the past six months in a kind of trance. She felt she was being honest as she said that.
They sat in silence for a few minutes. There was quite a strong wind and he could not get his cigarette to light however much he turned this way and that. She suggested they go inside. She went first, and in the middle of the room she turned to face him. It was as if they’d been forced to get up from those chairs out on the balcony. He looked at her expectantly, the man who had come by train all the way from Rome merely because he had been thinking of her and knew she was alone.
It surprised her that she did not feel any guilt towards Harry, and how easy she felt it was to talk to him when he called. She thought the ease was a sign in itself. She felt as if all the muscles in her body had relaxed after a tension that had gone on so long she had confused it with rest. She felt untroubled with Andreas. They did things she would never have done with Harry. One morning they went to Tivoli even though it rained, and rode on the Ferris wheel in the wet, grinning like children. One day they took the hydrofoil over to the island of Hven and hired bicycles. They lay kissing on a grassy slope, from where you could see the towers and power station smoke-stacks of Copenhagen in the distance. The same view she had seen a year before from the bathing jetty, on her last day with Otto. That day seemed as far away now as the city skyline seen from Hven.
Andreas went back to Rome a week later. She asked him to go. She had to be alone, she said, to be able to think. He gave her his telephone number. If she felt like calling him when she had done her thinking. That same day she packed her things and took a taxi to the villa in Frederiksberg. As she drove through town it occurred to her that her things took up no more room than they had done when she left Otto’s apartment the year before. Two suitcases, some zip bags, some plastic bags. She had tried to call Harry, but he did not answer that afternoon. It was a relief. Instead she sent him a letter. Not a long one. He did not reply, and she never heard from him again.
Years later she asked herself if he had wanted it that way. Perhaps he had foreseen it was possible when he invited Andreas to come and visit them in Spain. She pondered on whether he had unconsciously wanted to hasten the inevitable, because he could not make the break abruptly himself. But it was only a thought. She had felt heavy inside when she heard the letter land in the letterbox with a dull thud, but it also made her more sure of her intentions, and she sensed that at last she was taking her life into her own hands. He wasn’t her only sacrifice. She had left the script of A Doll’s House on his desk.
She spent a week at home in the villa without anyone knowing she was there. She was just as alone as she had been the summer before when Otto threw her out and Harry called to invite her for tea. Just as alone, she thought, as when she was on her own in the evenings listening to Else speak to all and sundry over the air while she looked through the black and white pictures of young Giorgio in a square in Lucca, in front of a church wall speckled with the fleeting shadows of swallows. She talked to no one, nor did she give way to her need to hear Andreas’s voice again. She was quite proud of that when she did finally call to tell him when her plane would land in Rome.
He had not shaved for several days, and her scarf caught in his long stubble when they embraced. You’ve still got this, have you? he mumbled, smiling pensively and touching the soft petrol-blue silk. It had been the first present he gave her, shortly after she arrived in Rome, one afternoon as they were walking up the Via Condotti. The stubble scratched her face and made her feel she was waking up. She had been going around like a sleepwalker, alone in the house when Lauritz was at nursery school, left to all the needless worries she had been embroidering because she had nothing better to do. They faded and vanished like the images of a meaningless dream when Andreas picked up her suitcase and they left the airport building to find a taxi. She repeated the funny things Lauritz had said and described how she had repaired the hole in the wall around the stove pipe and arranged the books in alphabetical order. So now Harold Pinter had his place beside Pinocchio! As she gradually ran out of things to report on they contented themselves with exchanging kisses on the back seat of the taxi, a little shy as they usually were when they had been away from each other and were picking up the threads again.
She nestled into his arms and breathed in the scent of his leather jacket as his hand slid up her thigh under the short skirt. He caressed the bare skin between the top of the stocking and her suspender belt. Only the taxi driver’s ironic gaze in the back mirror stopped them throwing themselves at each other. She could see her forehead and her dishevelled auburn hair falling over his leather sleeve beside the driver’s dark African eyes. Beneath the motorway, in an anonymous district of neglected housing blocks, she saw a half-demolished house and a crane with a lead ball swinging against a building where the front wall had been cut away. The multi-coloured squares of wallpaper and paint on the smashed storeys were all that remained of one-time apartments. A second later the wall was pulverised in a grey cascade of dust and broken bricks.
She had lived with him in Trastevere for a month when she woke up one morning to find his fingers running through her hair down to the scalp. He looked at her as if he had caught her in the act. But your hair is fair, he said. Her own hair colour had begun to grow out and displace the black dye she had worn for months. I am not the person you think I am, she smiled mysteriously and told him why it had been a black-haired woman he met in Spain. Was he disappointed? He looked at her teasingly. And he had been dreaming about a fiery gypsy lass . . . he had even travelled all the way from Rome to Copenhagen!
She shook her head so her hair fell down over her eyes. She could easily learn to dance flamenco. He kissed her and said it wasn’t worth the trouble. A few weeks later, when her hair had grown and she really looked skewbald, she went into a barber’s shop in Trastevere and asked to be shorn. At first the barber refused with a pained gesture, but when she left the shop she was as bare-headed as an Arab boy. Never before had she known the feeling of air on the top of her head and her temples, and as she walked along the street enjoying people’s glances she felt as if her head was weightless and at any moment could take off like a balloon over the roofs of Rome.
The apartment was in a quiet, narrow side street to the Rue de Rennes. It was an attic apartment on two floors with one window from floor to ceiling looking out on a cramped courtyard. From the studio a staircase led up to a bedroom with French windows and a balcony with a view over the slanting zinc roofs and rows of chimney pots ranged close together. Everything was in shades of grey, the sky, the roofs and the walls. Behind a sooty party wall you could glimpse the Tour de Montparnasse far away, with lit windows in the evening. That was the only light visible from the balcony, in the middle of that enormous city.
She lay in the dusk listening to the distant sound of traffic. The air was cool on her bare shoulders, but she couldn’t be bothered to get up and close the balcony doors. She wanted to lie feeling the air, listening to the sounds of the city while she waited for him to come back. He had gone shopping, she was too tired to go out to eat. She had got up early to catch the plane, Else had driven her to the station with Lauritz. He had cried on the platform, but Else had said she should just go. The train was about to leave without her, as she kneeled down to the boy and tried to comfort him.
She considered calling home, but decided to wait. It might make him miss her still more, now he most probably had stopped being miserable. The light from Andreas’s laptop computer shone in the semi-darkness of the room. A shining white square floating among the dim outlines of furniture. He had not turned it off when he left for the airport, and as soon as they entered the apartment they fell into bed. But it had not come up to her expectations in the taxi,
sitting with his hand between her thighs while she pressed her palm against the hard bulge in his trousers. She had kept her suspender belt and stockings on in bed, and the shoes with ankle straps, in the way she knew he liked and had maybe imagined her in the weeks he had been alone. When she dressed in the morning she had remembered to put her pants on outside the suspender belt. It seemed a bit comical to her now, when she took off her shoes and stockings and cuddled up to him under the duvet, wondering if he was disappointed.
It had not been as wild and passionate as she had wanted it to be. It had been the way it was when they were both tired and did not make love because they were completely swept away by desire but rather because they desired the idea of being close again instead of just falling asleep. He asked if she had come properly. She smiled at him fondly. It didn’t matter. She was happy just to lie here and feel him beside her. He stroked her hair, she pushed her head under his chin. She asked if he had finished his play. Almost, he said. There was only the end to do now. When she went back to work, she said, she would like to have a part in one of his plays. It wouldn’t need to be a leading part, she would be happy with a small one. She could come in with a letter!
She felt the need of a cigarette and got out of bed. The Tour de Montparnasse had turned into no more than a stack of little, shining cubes in the blue darkness. She switched on the lamp on the writing desk and took the carton of cigarettes out of the plastic bag from the airport. She couldn’t find her lighter and there wasn’t one on the desk either. She walked downstairs with the cigarette hanging from her lips, still naked, and thought that if she had a spotlight on her now she would look like a stripper coming down to ask one of the men in the audience for a light, as part of the show. There must be a lighter somewhere. Distrait as he was, Andreas always kept two or three plastic lighters going at the same time. She caught sight of his tweed jacket on a hanger behind the front door. The one he occasionally wore when he dropped his image of the young rebel. His Arthur Miller jacket, she called it. He did look a bit like Arthur Miller when he wore it, if you left out the horn-rimmed spectacles. It must be the prominent chin they had in common. As she searched through the pockets she heard a rustling sound. An envelope was sticking out of the breast pocket.
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