Читать книгу Lucca - Jens Christian Grondahl - Страница 9

As the train started to move he took a few steps alongside, continuing to wave to Lea through her window. Then she slid away from him, smiling and waving, and her face faded from his sight behind the reflection of the pale evening sky in the glass. He stood there under the station roof watching the train grow smaller and vanish at the end of the track, where the rails met, shining in the dusk. Everything around him seemed to stiffen. The nettles on the other side of the rails swayed slightly in the wind, but their rooted movement only emphasised all the surrounding immobility, the rusty goods wagons with unintelligible numbers and lettering in white, the empty platforms with their islands of bluish neon lights and advertisements for chocolate and life insurance picturing pretty women and resolute men. He walked back into the station, it was like a sleeping castle with its superfluous ornamentation and shining clock face beneath the comical spire on the roof ridge.

The station forecourt was deserted, but there were lights behind the windows of the red-brick apartment blocks dating from the early twentieth century, disappointingly uniform with their ground floors clad in sandstone or cement. A dairy had been replaced by a driving school, and in one corner there was a radio and television shop. The screens in the display window showed identical football players running around. The colours of the grass and the shirts varied slightly from screen to screen, and here and there he saw the blue light of other television screens behind the net curtains and tropical house plants with leathery leaves. The blue spots of light in the windows flickered in time with each other, according to who had the ball.

Maybe he had given in too quickly, too easily. He probably ought to have fought, tried to win Monica back, but he could not help smiling at the idea. He did not really believe you could bend others to your will once they had decided to love a new face or die behind the wheel, crushed beneath a Dutch truck. Moreover he would not have had the genuinely passionate conviction necessary to convince another person. His life had become simpler now he no longer had anyone to remind about unfinished business, and he had actually felt relieved when he left it behind him, all that bartering with meaningful caresses and vague promises. Nevertheless when he saw Lea in the train window, waving and smiling her all too brave, twelve-year-old smile, something seemed to wring his heart, an angry ownerless hand with white knuckles.

When he got home he made an omelette and ate it in the kitchen as usual. Afterwards he stretched out on the sofa and listened to the famous recording of Richard Strauss’s Metamorphoses by Karajan and the Berliners. He closed his eyes and let the wide, vast expanses of the strings overwhelm him as they displaced each other in soft avalanches, brooding and impenetrable like layers of earth and darkness. He felt something hard against his back and felt for it with his hand. It was the table tennis ball Lauritz had been squeezing when he fell asleep there the night before. He went over and switched off the music, then opened the sliding door to the terrace. He sat down on the doorstep with a cigarette. It was chilly, but he stayed there.

They had slept late, he and Lea. In the afternoon they drove out to the beach as usual. She gathered seagull feathers, a whole bunch, and he pulled out his pen-knife and showed her how to cut the ends, on a slant, with a vertical slit from the point, so she could use them as quill pens. She was more talkative than the previous day, the unexpected guests had obviously cheered her up. She spoke of being an actor, and he encouraged her. She had done well as the princess. The sun shone, and although it was still windy the sand was warm to sit on. Lea collected bundles of dried seaweed and snapped the bubbles between her fingers. There was an offshore wind, and the calm surface of the sea sparkled where the little waves swelled up, at first as long lines that slowly grew bigger until they broke into a small comb of foam which made trickling tracks through the pebbles on the shoreline.

How long had he been friends with Andreas? She liked him, and Lauritz was sweet. Robert smiled and watched a gull swooping past. Suddenly it started to flap its wings and the movement was reflected as a white flicker on the water. Not very long . . . Were they separated, Andreas and the woman with the strange name? She asked the question lightly, casually. The parents of half her friends were divorced, that was how it was, and the children adapted themselves. Yes, he said.

They had told her one morning, he and Monica, while they were still in the kitchen over breakfast and the sheaves of Sunday papers. She had merely looked at them, first at one, then the other, before going into her room and closing the door. When he went in she was sitting on her bed drawing on the back of her hand with a felt pen. Sometimes she and her friends drew on each other’s arms, but she was not drawing a flower, it was nothing, a growing, ever more complicated morass of turbulent lines crossing each other on her narrow hand. He sat down beside her and put his arm around her. She leaned away from him, looking down at the colourful duvet cover with an African pattern. He put his arm around her and sat there for a little while, trying to talk to her. Of course they both loved her. He looked at her, turned towards the stuffed animals leaning affectionately against each other. Both of them were still there. They just wouldn’t be together. She asked him to go.

Suddenly they had stopped quarrelling or just snarling at each other, he and Monica. By catching her in the act he had unintentionally and at one blow made every quarrel superfluous. After her new man had sent him the nod of a colleague as he passed the kitchen door and gently closed the front door with a cautious little click, everything between them had been fittingly businesslike. She had slept on the sofa in the living room until she moved. She even took charge of all the paperwork. There was clearly not a lot to discuss, and they both showed goodwill in getting it over as painlessly as possible. For Lea’s sake, as they said, almost conspiratorially, as if they suddenly had something in common.

He had had no suspicions, having assumed ups and downs were normal after ten years of marriage. He had not noticed that the downs had grown longer and longer, until everyday life was a treacherously calm sea in which shark fins shot up when you least expected them. An innocent exchange about cooking the dinner could suddenly end up in hair-raising accusations, and small oversights or chance errors mounted up like evidence in a long drawn-out trial before an imaginary judge. But who should condemn one and acquit the other? Crestfallen, they went back for a while to the everyday rhythm of trivialities until one of them again succumbed to accumulated boredom or despair and struck sparks at the slightest touch.

Afterwards he realised that her hypochondria and irritable outbursts had been a cover for her battered conscience, and he felt sorry for her with a backlash of sympathy. It must have been a nightmare, what for him was merely the numbed monotony of an extinguished cohabitation. When everything had fallen into place and they had adapted to their new reality, he was on the verge of telling her she had not needed to almost tear herself apart with tortures of conscience. He had had a secret as well, but that was an old story, and as he had never told her about it why do so now, when it could not possibly do anything to change things?

They went further along the beach towards the point. The wind sent fugitive cat’s paws over the water. Lea took his hand as they walked, chatting at random. He felt wistful to think they had only now become close, a few hours before she would have to take the train home. For that had become home, the house Jan and Monica had bought, a bit flashy, Robert thought, out in one of the northern suburbs. With him she was only visiting. She said they should do more about that kitchen garden next time, they might plant an apple tree too, looking at him with a smile as if she could read his thoughts.

At the end, where the beach melted into an isthmus and lakes, he saw two figures approaching. A swarm of birds rose from the rushes and turned in the air, the flock spread out. When they came closer he recognised the librarian. She was with a man who looked younger, wearing a baseball cap. She had an old sweater on, and carried her shoes, walking with bare feet at the edge of the sea. She had nice legs. He recalled them beside him on the sofa, in black stockings. It had been completely up to him. He looked at Lea when they passed each other with a brief, formal smile and conventional nods on both parts. Lea asked who she was. Someone from the town, he replied.

When Robert arrived at work on Monday morning, the sister told him that Lucca Montale had suffered another breakdown during Saturday night. They had given her the same sedative as the first time. Robert recalled how Andreas had sat on his sofa interspersing one Calvados after another into the tale of his unfaithfulness. On Sunday she had complained of pain and asked for more Ketogan, but the doctor on duty had refused to increase the dose. She lay in the same position as usual when he visited her, legs raised in the air, shrouded in plaster and bandages. The lower part of her face was still disfigured by swelling and effusions of dark blood. He asked if she was in pain. Yes, she replied dully. He heard she had been distressed during the weekend. Distressed . . . that was some understatement. He didn’t understand shit, was her scornful response.

As he lingered at the foot of the bed studying her battered face, he felt a twinge of guilt over the scraps of knowledge about her life he had unwillingly been made privy to. She was even more distressed than he’d thought, but he had no way of helping her. He sat down cautiously on the edge of the bed and asked if she was sure she did not need to talk to someone. She would have to accept her situation, he said, before she could make any headway. The words sounded meaningless. Make headway. He increased her daily dose of Ketogan as much as he felt was safe. The nurse sent him a brief sceptical glance as she noted it down. As he walked towards the door Lucca turned her face towards him. Thank you, she said. He hurried out.

Later in the day he was surprised not to see Andreas sitting in the foyer smoking his strong cigarettes as he usually did every day when Lauritz was visiting his mother. He asked the sister if she had seen anything of them. She had not, and the patient had asked for her son several times. When Robert was leaving later that afternoon they had still not turned up. He had an hour to spare before his tennis appointment with Jacob and didn’t know what to do with himself. He drove out of town past the industrial district until he reached the gravel road where he had turned off the last time. The horse was grazing in the same place, the sunlight shone on its flank as it raised its head to look at him. He went on to the edge of the woods and parked in front of the house.

There were no toys in the yard and the cement mixer had gone, but the old bicycle with the child’s seat was leaning against the house wall. He knocked several times. While he waited he caught sight of the electricity meter fixed into the wall beside the front door. The hand on the dial was not moving. He went over to the window and shaded it with his hand as he looked in. The kitchen was tidy, a shaft of sunlight shone on the floorboards and the table. The door of the fridge was wide open, the disconnected flex snaked across the floor in the sun, and the shelves were bare.

It had grown warmer, the sunlight sparkled in the green mesh of the net and made the air over the red gravel quiver. After their game Robert and Jacob sat getting their breath back on a bench by the wire fence that separated the tennis courts. Jacob gave him a chummy nudge, he must do something about his backhand. Robert just smiled and screwed up his eyes against the strong light. From behind came the repeated clunk, now to left, now to right, of ball against racket, followed by duller thumps when a ball struck the gravel. Play was in progress on several courts at once so the sounds came unevenly and only sometimes fell into a syncopated sequence that was at once broken again.

What was it then? Jacob looked at him, bewildered. What were they going to talk about? Oh, yes . . . He sat scratching the gravel with his racket for a few moments. It wasn’t so easy. But he felt sure he could rely on it not going any further. Of course he could. He smiled shyly, he envied Robert sometimes. What for? Jacob looked at him. Well, he had his freedom. Oh, that. Robert leaned back against the fence and stretched out his legs. Jacob bent over and looked at his racket. It was different when you had a wife and child, it was a bit . . . well, he knew all about that. Robert smiled. Was it someone he knew? Jacob looked scared, as if Robert had suddenly shown he was clairvoyant. She was his eldest child’s gym teacher.

Robert was reminded of the young man in the baseball cap walking at the edge of the sea beside the librarian, and of the set designer in Stockholm with black hair and blue eyes who had unknowingly changed the course of Lucca Montale’s life. Everyone went around falling in love. But what then, was Jacob going to get divorced? Again the younger man gave him a startled look. He hadn’t thought of doing that. Surely it didn’t have to be either or. Besides, she was married herself, he smiled, it was a real mess. But what could he do? He was mad about her, and she . . . it was the same. It had been instantaneous, the moment they saw each other.

She had just started teaching at the school as stand-in for a teacher on maternity leave. He had met her at a parents’ meeting, he had gone along alone, she had a fantastic body. They had fallen on each other in the car when he drove her home. She had such boobs . . . Jacob gestured their size with his hands, but the word sounded unnatural, boobs, and his hands flopped down as if they were already exhausted by all the density they had tried to show. He got quite weak at the knees when he dropped the children at school. It was like being young again.

Robert looked at him. Jacob still looked very young with his fair hair and rosy cheeks. He reddened, both bashful and proud at the thought of the ungovernable and reckless passion inside him. And what he wanted to ask Robert now was whether he could take his rounds this evening. Her husband was away on a course. Robert hesitated a moment, not to tantalise the other man, rather not to disappoint him by making his willingness seem too trivial. It was no great sacrifice, he wasn’t doing anything. Jacob looked really moved. He knew he could rely on him. Robert thought of his wife, who always smiled at him with her grudging, cool eyes. What was wrong with her attractive face and well-groomed outlines? Surely only their constant availability.

It was many years since as a young doctor he had had fixed duties but, because of staff shortages, Robert and his colleagues were sometimes obliged to take a night shift. He rather liked the nocturnal silence broken by sporadic sounds, when a telephone rang or a nurse walked along the corridor in her clogs. It was a different silence from the one at home, when he had eaten and sat alone in his sitting room, and it did not make him feel isolated in the same way. Alone, yes, but not isolated. When he was on night duty he sometimes let himself imagine he was on the bridge of a great passenger liner. The gigantic oil-burning boiler in the basement was the ship’s engine room, the sleeping patients were passengers in their bunks, and the darkness outside was the darkness over an invisible sea. For some it was a journey to new adventures, for others the last voyage, but that did not alter the speed or the course of the ship.

He sat chatting to the night nurse, a slight woman in her late fifties. She talked about her son, who was travelling across the USA by car with a friend. Last time he called he had been in Las Vegas. She looked worried. She had two watches, one on each wrist. One showed what the time was in America. She had calculated how many miles her son covered every day, and synchronised the time on the American watch, at intervals putting the hour hand back one. She had never been to America, but could describe in detail what her son had experienced on his journey. As a rule he called home in the afternoon, local time, when it was night in Denmark and she was at work. He called collect. The nurse gave Robert a slightly scared look. He wouldn’t tell anyone, would he?

Robert smiled and gave her a friendly caress on the back between the prominent shoulder blades, thinking of Jacob who was no doubt in his car now, heart beating, on the way to his tryst with the gym teacher. They were often on duty together. She had lived alone since her husband died of stomach cancer ten years ago. He had been a builder, she nursed him herself for his last months. It had not been a happy marriage, but she spoke of it without bitterness, as you speak of chance misfortune. She had merely been unlucky in the great lottery. But her children were doing well, her daughter was a doctor in Greenland, and the youngest was a student at the Veterinary and Agricultural High School in Copenhagen, when he was not hurtling across the USA.

When she was young she had worked as a volunteer in a children’s clinic in the Sudan. He sometimes encouraged her to talk of her time in Africa, how she had been on the point of marrying an African when she discovered he had two wives already. She had believed she had met the real thing in the figure of a tall handsome Sudanese. Every time she told the story she smiled the same surprised, self-ironical smile, and Robert could suddenly see what she must have looked like as a young woman. A graceful, surprised young woman in the midst of black Africa. At other times she asked about Lea and gave advice on child-rearing in a slightly lecturing tone, but Robert listened without argument.

When she was called away to a patient he got out his walkman and played a tape of Haydn string quartets. He wound forward to the slow movement, misused as a national anthem long after Haydn’s death. He hummed the introductory bars, Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, and smiled. Once again he had to admire the way the musicians, even as they played the first, lingering bars shrugged off the dead shell of ugly associations and liberated the music. He leaned back as Haydn whispered his civilised commentary through the earphones with the warm, crisp vibrato from instruments almost as old as the composer.

Jacob must have arrived by now. Robert pictured to himself how Jacob the naughty schoolboy with red cheeks lay in a strange house between a strange woman’s legs groping her boobs. The house would no doubt have been a family home like his own, and the woman would not have differed so much from his own well-shaped wife. A woman’s body like any other, in a bedroom probably furnished like most with pine and chipboard furniture covered with white laminate. And yet it was a drama that was nevertheless played out between them, forbidden in a completely irresistible way.

While the gym teacher spread her legs for Jacob, did he perhaps pause for a moment, on his knees as if in a sort of reverence, at the sight of her cunt. No doubt it resembled all other cunts, both the real ones and those in all the porno magazines and coloured diagrams in anatomical textbooks the world over. When he had been no more than a child Robert had felt there was something brutally prosaic about the female sexual organs compared with his vague daydreams of what awaited him when he grew up. On the other hand it was precisely their rather frightening reality that had made them so exciting to think about, the folds of the labia and their colour range of reddish brown and rose.

When he pictured Jacob gazing at the gym teacher’s cunt, lying open to him surrounded by the functional, easy-care furnishings, the organic folds of its form were as anachronistic to think of as an antique would have been, a quaint art décor casket lined with red velvet. Oddly striking in the orderly, mass-produced common sense in low-cost materials of the suburban house. If you lived the regular life of a doctor or gym teacher in a medium-sized provincial town, the female sexual orifice was the last romantic cavern, the last refuge for your debilitated imagination.

Earlier, when Robert had gone to bed with a woman for the first time, he had not only desired her body but also its strangeness. When they lay together, he and a total stranger, it seemed as he touched her that he was fumbling his way into another, different world. Or rather, he found reality at last as his hands explored the warm unknown body beside him. As if he had been living in a dream from which he had finally woken. Until it was over and he sat on the edge of the bed gazing at his affectionate unknown lover asking himself if that was all. If it was the same body he was looking at now reality had resumed a depressing likeness to itself.

In a few hours Jacob would get up and dress in the strange but not in the least exotic bedroom, before the beauty who lay regarding him tenderly, pink and sweaty. Perhaps she had been like a mystery he had tried to solve as he penetrated her, as far in as he could get. But afterwards she was again merely a gym teacher lying there with her big boobs asking when they could meet again. Perhaps Jacob was not the sort to let himself be worried by the fickleness of life, perhaps he would just lean back in his seat with a little smile, his body satisfied, and drive home to his sweet unsuspecting wife. Or would he too, like Robert, trawl through his memory to rediscover the precious reasons for his tension and dizzy expectation as he drove in the opposite direction?

You couldn’t tell, and anyway what did it matter, thought Robert, as Haydn’s emotional strings vibrated through his head. Desire was like music, just as abstract, just as meaningless and just as overwhelming. As soon as the old instruments were played again the music woke anew and made its impact on her. Far away in the darkness he could see a shining yellow ribbon which doubled up and disappeared behind the opposite wing of the hospital. It was the motorway to Copenhagen. The red and white pairs of lights passed each other along the bright curve, just as they did every night and had done on the night when Lucca Montale tried to take her life. Unless, being the worse for drink, she had merely made an error and by pure chance had gone down on to the wrong lane. In that case, where had she thought she was going? He heard the telephone through the graceful intricacies of the strings, switched off Haydn and picked up the receiver.

A woman’s voice asked in English whether he would accept the call. She had an American accent. Robert assented and a moment later he heard a young man at the other end. Robert asked where he was. Arizona. What was it like there? The young man laughed, slightly delayed by the satellite connection. What it was like? He was calling from a truck-stop. There was a petrol station and a cafeteria, and outside were tall cactus and sharp red rock formations and a long straight road. Just like a film! Robert smiled. He could hear voices in the background, sounding as if their mouths were full of potatoes. He caught sight of the slight figure of the night nurse at the end of the corridor. He held up the phone and waved at her with it. She took off her clogs and ran holding them, eager as a girl. He felt a warm sensation in his stomach. Arizona, he said, grabbing one clog as he passed her the phone.

He put it on the floor, she smiled shyly and turned her back. He went out into the foyer and sat down on the sofa Andreas used. He lit a cigarette, and as he knocked his ash into the cement bowl he caught sight of some without filters among the stubs sticking out of the sand, they had dark shreds of tobacco on the ends. Andreas had probably gone to Stockholm to start a new life since his old one was now in ruins.

He glanced at his watch, it was a quarter past two. Jacob was quite likely not going home before night duty was ended as the gym teacher’s husband had so conveniently gone on a course. Maybe they were sleeping in each other’s arms as if in a trial marriage. Maybe he lay awake, maybe she snored. But would he stay in love with the gym teacher for her boobs’ sake or out of sheer enthusiasm at the thought of starting again from the beginning? Robert pictured Jacob announcing the sad news to his wife, one evening on the terrace while the glow of the grill died down, after they had kissed the children goodnight. How he would, weighed down with guilt, but also with enjoyable reverence, bow to the laws of emotion and move from one family home to the other.

It was not very probable, though Jacob did not have the bent for drama of an Andreas, nor did Robert believe that his practical sporty wife had the imagination to drive herself to destruction on the wrong side of the Copenhagen motorway. Perhaps she too had her little secrets. Robert brushed ash from his white coat. The windows at the end of the foyer stretched from floor to ceiling, and a long way into the pallid mirror of the linoleum flooring, along the empty ranks of sofas where he dimly glimpsed his white figure and crossed legs. He could be any doctor on night duty, sitting enjoying a fag. What was that, Jacob had said? It probably didn’t have to be one thing or the other. Again he visualised one particular face. It was a long time ago.