Perhaps she had already visualised his outline, sure that she would be able to recognise it through the rolling fog of cigarette smoke, for it was the outline of someone she had once known. And maybe the stranger in the doorway felt the same way. Maybe he had been going from tavern to tavern all night, standing in the doorway watching one gypsy after another in the hope of finally recognising the contours of his first love, or the genesis of his love, which perhaps, perhaps not, was one and the same thing.
16
The radio was made of dark wood, shining with varnish, and the subdued light of the lamps was reflected in its rounded corners. The switch buttons were shiny too, yellowish white, and one of them clicked when the girl’s hand reached out lazily to push at it with the ends of two fingers. It was a long hand, pale, almost white, but a different, cooler white than the buttons and the smaller press buttons between them, in a row like the flat, rounded teeth in the lower jaw of a herbivore. A coppery light shone from the dark green glass plate around a dull pupil, and Robert could remember how the bright narrow eye had reminded him of the air bubble in a spirit level, blinking just as restlessly as the girl’s hand moved the red needle past the names of towns printed in slanting columns. There was a boiling, rushing sound behind the woven panel covering the loudspeaker, and disconnected words and sounds escaped the storm and the close-knit covering, but they did not correspond to the town names, Tallinn, Sofia, Berlin, they were Danish and Swedish voices, there were none from further away although the needle traversed quite different distances, now between Warsaw and Leningrad, now between Vienna, Prague and Budapest.
Apart from a suitcase each for their clothes, the radio and her father’s clarinet were all the girl’s parents had brought with them after they left their country the year before her birth. Almost twenty years had passed to make it familiar with the new words and sounds, yet Robert thought everything sounded slightly strange, as if heard from the distant city they had left behind them while they were still young. To start with they must have wondered at the sounds produced by their old radio in the new surroundings where they slowly learned to speak again and like their small daughter mixed up the words from their old language and the new one.
The green pupil stopped flickering, apparently its eye had settled on something. The white hand let go of the button, the red needle stopped midway between Belgrade and Trieste, and a different kind of crackle sounded through the panel, the breakers from a hall full of clapping hands. That too subsided, silence followed and the first notes sounded in a breaking wave of gathered, released and re-accumulated power, Brahms’s third symphony. A sea of clanging tones from instruments that Robert felt flowed together, so he could not distinguish one from another, possibly because the varnished wooden box was too small for all that music, the wooden frame creaked like an old dinghy, but no doubt also because he had only just started to distinguish the surface ripples of music from its under-current.
He was seventeen, she was almost two years older, the girl in the armchair watching the snowflakes in the violet light from the street lamp as if in a trance. From the beginning he had marvelled at her eyes, so far apart. She had pulled her legs up under her in a mermaid pose, and the space between her eyes made her face seem open, but her gaze was remote as she sat opposite him listening to Brahms. Her cheekbones were broad, her hair brown, and the side parting made it fall over one eye. At intervals she pushed it behind her ear with a weary hand.
She wore flesh-coloured nylon stockings, she was the only girl he knew who had that kind, old-fashioned look, just like the armchair she sat on. Everything in the apartment was bleak and shabby, and he had had to remind himself several times that it was only the radio her parents had brought with them and not the other furnishings. When he went to see her in the quiet street with its pompous tenements from the turn of the century, it was almost like visiting her in the distant town they had been obliged to leave. The apartment looked like those he imagined belonged to people in her parents’ home town, and the father had not changed anything in the twenty years that had passed, even after the girl’s mother left them and went back. She had never settled down in the foreign, western city. They had not fled because of her.
The girl had only told him snatches of the story, which he had to piece together himself, at intervals. When her mother decided to go home the idea had been for her daughter to join her later. Robert didn’t understand how the mother could have left without her, she was only six at the time. But the child stayed with her father, and although it was pure guesswork, Robert had the feeling that a promise had been broken. Something in their silence confirmed his assumption. A year or two later they heard the mother had died. She had been ill, the girl had told him, without explaining the cause, and Robert had the impression that it was not the name of the disease she kept to herself. Her silence seemed rather a pact which she and the bald man with horn-rimmed glasses had made, whether it was a secret they guarded, or the mother’s death itself they shielded each other against. There were no pictures of her in the apartment, only some of the girl at various stages of her growth, in silver frames with a leather flap behind so they could stand up on the sideboard. It looked as if the man with horn-rimmed spectacles and his deceased wife had managed to have a whole crowd of children.
Now she sat like a mermaid in flesh-coloured nylons looking into the darkness through the veil of snowflakes. Behind the yellowed panelling her father played his clarinet with its shining silver keys. They could not hear him, they just knew he was there, in evening dress, like an inseparable part of the music, a foaming whirl in its breaking wave. Robert had seen his evening suit hanging on the dining-room door. She brushed it for him before he put it on and straightened the white tie, as he impatiently squirmed at her care, perhaps embarrassed to let Robert see his daughter in the role of deputy for a solicitous wife. She was a head taller than her father, but he was a small man, anyway.
Robert had been embarrassed himself when her father opened the front door for the first time in a smoking jacket and checked slippers. The man gave him a suspicious look through his thick spectacles. Although he felt slightly guilty Robert couldn’t help comparing his stumpy figure with the dismal interior, moss-green and brown, with heavy wine-coloured curtains and table centres askew and antimacassars on the backs of the armchairs. There was no television, only the old radio. He felt like a guest in another time, but he corrected himself later. It was not another time but another world. The girl had been embarrassed too, the first time he sat at the table under the chandelier with unshaded bulbs. She served while her father questioned him in his tortuous accent. She was embarrassed, Robert could see, at having so much of her life suddenly laid bare in the garish glare of the chandelier. She had been embarrassed because her father received him in slippers. She said it in their own language, but Robert guessed what she said. When they sat down to dinner her father had changed his shoes for a pair of black ones. Surprisingly small shoes, impeccably polished and shining.
Ana was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. Later on Robert asked himself if she had really been so beautiful, but in vain, his scepticism failed when he brushed her face clear of oblivion. Nor could he set her young face against a middle-aged woman’s to compare them and observe the results of time’s revenge on the innocent arrogance of any young beauty. For all he knew, age had made her still more beautiful, but he could not be sure. He had not seen her since she graduated. But she had certainly been arrogant, and her haughty manner, with her unfashionable blouses and skirts, made her still more unusual.