Sometimes she found it hard to understand what he wrote, but perhaps it was not necessary to understand everything. He had said so himself in an interview with a Sunday newspaper. That what was immediately understandable in fact stunted one’s perception, whereas seeming obscurity put one on the track of something only glimpsed. Something silent and more profound that could not be contained and pinned down with simple concepts. He was so clever that people were sometimes quite frightened of him, but he didn’t like her to remind him of that. He had made his mark, he was one of those who counted, and she was proud of him. She was not even ashamed of being proud of her husband when they attended a première. Why should she be?
As a rule she had a few critical comments on his scripts, it might be a dramaturgical ambiguity or something in the development of a character which felt contradictory, and he listened to her even though she only had her intuition as an actor to guide her. It made her happy when she persuaded him to alter or omit something, not because he acknowledged her to be right but because she felt that brought her into contact with what he was doing, with him. The part of him she could not reach because it expressed itself only in writing, and because he had to protect this secret side to be able to write at all.
She had always wanted to play a role in one of his plays, but Lauritz was born soon after they moved back from Rome, and in the years that followed she had only done a few radio plays. She had concentrated on the child and the house. She coped almost single-handedly in the periods when he was working on something new. Miriam scolded her for letting her career run to seed and slouching around like a country housewife in apron and wellingtons. Miriam almost gave her a bad conscience, and she didn’t know what to say in her own defence, but that only lasted until they had put down the receiver or waved goodbye at the station. Afterwards she did wonder why she felt neither frustrated nor unhappy or oppressed, as Miriam obviously felt she should. It was rather the opposite feeling. A leisurely happiness to which she didn’t give much thought, related to the clouds that unnoticeably changed shape on their journey between the edge of the woods and the horizon. In the course of the day, while her hands were busy with all manner of practical things, her thoughts circled on their own like the swallows, now low around the house, now high up among the drifting cloud formations.
Lauritz had changed her. She had been ready, when she met Andreas, without herself being aware of it. He saw it before she did, and he had not been frightened by what he saw. He had gone on unremittingly, further than anyone else had dared. Right into her secret empty core, open to the way things might happen. He had turned out to be the one she had waited for, and so it had been Lauritz and not another man’s child who had grown inside her until there was no longer any room for him. She had screamed so hard she thought she would die. She had felt as if she was being ripped open and turned inside out. Nothing had ever hurt so much, and no one had made her as happy as the small, creased, purple-blue child who was placed on her stomach so she could see his cross face and squinting little eyes and the heart hammering wildly in his frog-like body, covered with foetal grease, still linked to her by the twisted cord. Andreas wept, she had not seen him weep before, and she loved him more than ever, but she herself did not weep. She groaned and trembled and smiled all the time at this brutal, naked, screaming and bloody joy.
To Lauritz it didn’t matter who she was, and yet he had never been in doubt. He could smell and taste who she was long before he learned to focus his eyes on her and recognise her face. People asked if it wasn’t hard having to get up in the middle of the night and adjust her whole life to the boy’s needs. They clearly did not understand it was a relief. She was relieved when she realised she had ceased to care about her own bungled ambitions and egocentric dreams. She forgot time, it was no longer divided into hours and days. The child had become her clock, time did not pass any more, it grew before her eyes.
Else was worried and Miriam almost indignant. They let her understand, each in her own way, that in their opinion she was exaggerating her newly acquired maternal feelings all too willingly, indeed, almost fanatically, subjecting herself to the child and to Andreas. They almost despised her because she allowed him, the great sensitive artist, to withdraw to his study and go to Copenhagen to tend his career or travel about Europe in search of inspiration, while she trotted around with the buggy out there in the country. She did not respond, merely smiled infuriatingly. Miriam did not begin to understand her until she herself became pregnant. She was eight months gone now.
Else had fallen silent on the telephone when Lucca called from Rome and told her mother she was pregnant. Wasn’t it a bit soon? After all, they had only known each other for a few months. She felt hurt at her mother’s cautious reaction. How long was she to wait? How reluctant and choosy did you have to be when life finally offered the simplest and most basic of all questions? Her entire life had gathered into a single moment when she lay beside Andreas one morning behind the closed shutters and told him she was pregnant. The future had begun just there, when he asked if she wanted a child, and she replied by asking if he did. He said yes without hesitation. Yes, with her.
Else asked if she realised that at best it would put a brake on her career and at worst put a stop to it. Just when she was about to make it. Lucca remembered what her mother had said when Otto dropped her. That there was more to life than love — work, for example. She remembered Else’s bitter mouth and sunken face when she sat, eyes shut, sunning herself. Later on, as her stomach began to expand and her legs and face swelled up, she thought several times of their conversation that time at the cottage. In fact, she resembled a cow, a pale cow who looked questioningly at her in the mirror with her amiable eyes. When Andreas took her heavy breasts in his hands, milk seeped from her nipples, and he kissed them and let her taste the milk on his lips. She would never have believed it, but she felt a secret pleasure in seeing and feeling how the unknown child quietly and laboriously ruined her figure. Men had clutched it so often, but now they no longer looked at her, and soon she too forgot to note whether they did or not.
Andreas mumbled in his sleep when she kissed his throat. Your train, she said. He shot up in bed and looked at her in confusion. She stroked his cheek and smiled. He would still be in time if they got up now. He sat for a while on the edge of the bed, looking like a child in the morning, hair on end and narrowed eyes, a sulky child. She put on her bath-robe and looked out of the window. The snow whirled in spirals around the dark branches of the plum tree. It had settled already in white strips along the furrows arching over the roof ridge of the neighbouring barn. The sky was as uniformly white as paper.
Lauritz lay on his stomach, his rump in the air. His cheek was rosy and swollen with sleep, and a little patch of saliva had fallen onto the pillow beneath his soft mouth. His toy elephant stood in place with its trunk stuck between the bars of the bed-head, staring intensely at him out of its button eyes. She called to him softly and took his hand as he woke up. She made the coffee while he ate his porridge, Andreas had a shower, and she read the paper. As she leafed through the film and theatre supplement she recognised Otto. He was kneeling on a railway track, in breeches, check shirt and a sleeveless woollen slipover. His hair was cropped and he had a watchful expression in his eyes, tense as a hunted beast of prey.