She sipped the scalding coffee. The caption said he was playing the lead in a film about a resistance group in World War Two. She had to look at the picture for a long time before she could connect the watchful partisan with the face she had once kissed and the eyes she had once looked into as if they held the answer to every question. She had been so sure he was the one she was to love, and be loved by, and yet he had merely been the latest on the list. She had known there would be others after him when it was over, but had not believed it. She remembered how hard-headed she had been, completely unreceptive to what everyone could see for themselves. Was it just because he had dumped her? Perhaps, but surprisingly soon it had opened up again, that vacant spot within her, her secret openness to whatever might appear, though still not present.
Andreas had time only for half a cup when he finally emerged from the bathroom. They would have to leave at once if he was to catch his train. He stood fidgeting at the door while she struggled to get Lauritz’s coat on. She asked if he had remembered his ticket. He sighed impatiently. When they went into the drive the boy put his head back and opened his mouth to let snowflakes melt on his tongue. She drove. Neither of them said anything much, they were too tired. Andreas drummed on the lid of the glove box. The snow blew across the asphalt and along the ditches and the black fields faded on both sides into the falling snow. He said he had left his address on his desk. He had borrowed an apartment in Paris, he would be there for just over a month. They had arranged for her to join him at Easter. Else had promised to come and look after Lauritz.
The lights of the train were already in sight behind the snow. The rails seemed to end in nothing but whirling drifts. He lifted Lauritz up and kissed him. See you at Easter, she said, looking into his eyes. At Easter, he smiled, picking up his suitcase, as the rows of carriages stopped behind him. He would call when he arrived. They kissed. Doors opened and people got in and out. As he was turning round, I love you, she said. He hesitated and looked at her again. She smiled and he regarded her for a moment as if taking a photograph with his eyes. Perhaps to take the picture with him, of her standing on the platform holding Lauritz by the hand, with snow in her hair. He stroked her cheek. He loved her too, he said, and hurried into the train a second before the doors closed with an automatic slam.
He often went away to work. He needed to be alone when he was finishing something or starting something new. He had been working on his new play for six months and at the same time attending rehearsals of one of his earlier pieces. Since the new year he had been in Malmö several times a week. He had made almost no progress on his script, which he had promised to deliver at the beginning of April.
She was glad he was leaving. He had been withdrawn and irritable for the final weeks before the première in Malmö. He had grumbled about unimportant trifles and generally been impossible to be with. She knew his awkward times and had herself suggested he went away. Else had a woman friend in Paris who was going to Mexico for a month, he was staying at her apartment. He had worked in Paris several times before, in cheap hotel rooms. He liked being alone in a big city where he didn’t know anyone. She looked forward to going down there to disturb his solitude. She visualised how they would surrender to their pent-up hunger for each other, as they usually did when they had been apart for a while.
Lauritz went on waving until the train had disappeared into the snow. When he was sitting on the bench in front of his locker in the nursery-school cloakroom he asked if Andreas would be in Paris now. She kissed him goodbye, and a pretty young woman took him by the hand and led him off. Lucca recalled the time when she had worked at a nursery and lay on her mother’s bed in the afternoons with a grown man who played badminton. The snow melted at once in the streets among the drab houses, but outside the city the landscape was white, and as she drove along the side-road, the dark edge of the woods resembled a cave opening up in the whiteness into a night filled with falling stars.
She switched on the radio and started to tidy the kitchen. Last night’s dishes had not been washed up. She filled the dishwasher, scoured the pots and pans, made coffee and sat down to smoke a cigarette. The noise of the dishwasher blended with the music from the radio. The floor of the living room was covered with piles of books. They’d had a bookcase made to cover one wall, she planned to paint it while Andreas was away. They had agreed on grey, white would be too difficult to maintain. Lauritz left his fingerprints everywhere on the newly painted doors and sills. The door of Andreas’s study was open. She looked at the cleared desk where his portable computer usually stood. She missed him already, although she was used to being alone, whether for a day or a month. Up to now there had always been something in the house that needed finishing off, leaving her something to get going on when he was away. To her surprise she had discovered she was quite competent at do-it-yourself, and she had enjoyed setting the house in order. It had come to interest her more than acting, and it gave her satisfaction in a quite primitive way when she looked at a wall or door panel she had repaired and painted herself.
It had taken longer than expected, and sometimes they had been about to give up, but she was stubborn, and now only details needed seeing to here and there. That might have been why she was already missing Andreas. She had forgotten herself while there was still enough to do, and the days passed like hours whether he was away or at his computer. When she was acting she had forgotten herself too, but only to become someone else. While she slogged away in her dirty overalls with the cement mixer and trowel she was no more than a hard-working body, and that was a release.
To start with it had been a mere dream, finding a house in the country. They had both grown up in the city. They started to talk about it in Rome, during the six months they lived in Andreas’s cramped apartment. She suggested it mostly for fun. It was the kind of thing you cooked up crazy stories about when you had fallen in love, a place in the country. She came out with it one late summer morning when they had stayed in bed because it was too hot to do anything but lie in the shade behind the shutters and caress each other very slowly. He took her at her word just as he did a few months later when she told him she was pregnant. How could he be so sure? He ran his hand lightly over her stomach, which would soon swell up and weigh her down to earth, making her break out in a sweat at the least exertion. Sometimes you must believe your own eyes, he said. Otherwise it would all come to dust and blow away while you looked at it. No one had talked to her before like that.
The apartment in Trastevere had only one room, and when he was working she went out walking. He worked a lot, and after a few months she knew every single street in that part of the city. She admired his gift for concentrating and keeping at it for hours on end. Apparently he could always write if he wanted to. At that time he used a portable typewriter, and when she went upstairs late in the afternoon and heard the keys still tapping on the keyboard she went down to the bar around the corner and waited another half hour. It was almost like sitting in a living room, and she started to talk a bit of Italian. It seemed there was still something left in her of the language she had spoken with her father, hidden away in a fold of her brain or rolled up at the bottom of her spine. Soon she could talk to people in the street, in contrast to Andreas who never learned more than the most necessary phrases and was completely uninterested in talking to anyone but her.