Perhaps it helped to tell her story to a stranger who knew only the ending but had no idea how she had arrived there. He knew what it was she was slowly trying to isolate, this event which wrenched the words out of her mouth with its irresistible force. She approached it day by day, the thing she still could not talk about, but she held back, dwelling on each stage of her story and losing herself in tortuous digressions. Only by detours could she approach what she still did not understand. She took her time. Her words were like her hands, hesitantly reading the objects passed to her. With the words she touched each face that entered her story and traced the physiognomy of events, as if she could find the sudden turn, the unexpected gulf into which she had fallen.
She had just about got to Andreas, although she had not yet met him, when she was discharged and transferred to a rehabilitation centre. Her plaster had been removed a few days before. Robert and a nurse supported her when she attempted her first steps on the floor in front of her bed. Her long legs seemed even longer, thin and white after the lengthy confinement to bed, with protruding kneecaps. She was dizzy and her legs gave way, so he had to carry her back to bed. She wept and asked to be left alone. When he visited her in the afternoon she was asleep with the earphones on. The tape was still playing. He bent down with his head close to hers and heard Chopin’s Nocturne No. 4, the peaceful yet rhythmically changing chords, the strangely reckless melancholy. Twilight blue, he thought and smiled involuntarily as he crept towards the door and closed it carefully so as not to wake her.
When he told her about the rehabilitation centre, she realised she had no clothes to wear. She asked him to go out to the house and fill a suitcase. How could he do that? You’ll have to break in, she said. Was that such a good idea? She smiled as if she could see the worried look on his face. There was a key under a stone on the left of the door. The old lady’s bicycle had fallen over, and little piles of seeds and dust had gathered in the folds of the plastic cover over the pile of cement sacks. He picked up the bicycle and found the key. He still felt like a burglar as he walked through the quiet rooms where a grey transparent film of dust already covered the floors. She had said there was a suitcase on top of the bedroom wardrobe, but there was nothing there. Andreas must have taken it with him. He found a black plastic sack in the kitchen and took it back to the bedroom. He opened the wardrobe. Even though he was alone, and even though she had asked him to do it, he felt as if he was spying on her and pawing her as he began to select garments from the piles of blouses and lace underclothes and hangers with dresses and jackets. He avoided the brighter things without thinking why, and reminded himself she would need shoes as well. Most of her shoes had high heels, it would probably be better to avoid those at first. He chose a pair with moderately high heels and also found some trainers at the bottom of the wardrobe.
He stopped in front of the notice-board in the kitchen and studied the photographs he had kept glancing at when the unhappy Andreas invited him in for a glass of red wine. Lucca in overalls painting window frames with paint on her cheek. Lucca in the drive with the low sun behind her, the little boy hanging horizontally in the air at the end of her outstretched arms and her dress whirling around her brown legs like an open, illuminated fan. Lucca at a pavement café in Paris, under the plane trees, cool and elegant in her grey tailored jacket, hair combed back from her forehead and red lips parted in the middle of a thought or a word as her eyes seemed to meet his gaze, at once confidential and surprised.
They said goodbye in the hospital foyer. She was in a wheelchair. She turned her face towards him, so his white coat was reflected in her dark glasses. I haven’t told you everything, she said, stretching out her hand. He pressed it, after a slight pause because he was not prepared for her formal gesture. But he must be tired of listening to her going on about herself. He said he would be coming to see her. He stood and watched as she was pushed through the glass doors. As the wheelchair stood on the ramp and was lifted up to the level of the minibus rear doors, she was in profile with her red-blonde hair gathered into a pony tail, masked behind the big sun glasses, pale and unmoving as a photograph.
* * *
It rained all evening. Lea had left her wet swimsuit in the car. It was pink, almost cyclamen, but it looked good with her thick dark brown hair. She had inherited his hair, but she had Monica’s prominent chin and energetic way of moving. He hung up the swimsuit to dry on a hanger in the bathroom and stood there looking at the feminine object turning limblessly around itself as it dripped onto the tiles. It struck him as almost incredible that Lea was the only female who had been in the house since that night barely a year before when the librarian had sat on his sofa listening to Mahler. She had looked at him with her dark eyes just waiting for him to lean towards her and place a hand on one of her inviting knees in their black stockings. All too ready. That had probably been the problem. That he could visualise it, all too readily.
His foot hurt every time he walked on it. He cursed and again heard Lea’s teasing laughter when he stumbled on the beach. There was always a rusty nail somewhere when you felt at ease and carefree for a moment. He sat down on the lavatory seat cover and examined the wound. She had looked quite remorseful when she went up to him and saw the blood. As if it was her fault that he couldn’t look where he was going. She stroked his hair consolingly, and he glimpsed in her gesture the young woman she was slowly turning into. The night before she had told him about a boy at school. He was the tallest in her class. He was quite different from the other boys, she said, more mature. The word made him smile. The tall boy wasn’t keen on playing football like the others, and he generally kept to himself. He had brown eyes. They had chatted, one day at the bus stop, but otherwise he did not seem to notice her at all. She had written a letter and slipped it into his bag during the lunch break, but he had not replied. Robert said he was most probably just shy and found himself worrying about everything she would have to go through.
He put a plaster on his heel and limped into the kitchen. A bowl of cornflakes from the morning was still on the table. He did not clear it away. He liked to see the tracks she left behind, a swimsuit here, a plate there, an unmade bed or a comic among the newspapers. The rain pattered on the leaves of the trees outside, and behind the veil of drops on the kitchen window he could see the blurred glow of the lamps in the neighbours’ living room. He made an omelette although he wasn’t really hungry. When he had eaten he switched on the television and sat down. He did not usually watch, he had lost interest when he left Monica, and he had only bought a television set on Lea’s account. The idea of sitting watching television alone had seemed as depressing to him as the idea of drinking alone. He poured himself a double whisky and stretched out his legs in front of him on the sofa. He didn’t feel like listening to music, he only wanted to sit there with the pictures passing before him. News he only caught half of, episodes of serials he had not followed, guessing games whose rules were a mystery to him and pop videos of surly young men in disused factories. Whatever.