She had lived with him in Trastevere for a month when she woke up one morning to find his fingers running through her hair down to the scalp. He looked at her as if he had caught her in the act. But your hair is fair, he said. Her own hair colour had begun to grow out and displace the black dye she had worn for months. I am not the person you think I am, she smiled mysteriously and told him why it had been a black-haired woman he met in Spain. Was he disappointed? He looked at her teasingly. And he had been dreaming about a fiery gypsy lass… he had even travelled all the way from Rome to Copenhagen!
She shook her head so her hair fell down over her eyes. She could easily learn to dance flamenco. He kissed her and said it wasn’t worth the trouble. A few weeks later, when her hair had grown and she really looked skewbald, she went into a barber’s shop in Trastevere and asked to be shorn. At first the barber refused with a pained gesture, but when she left the shop she was as bare-headed as an Arab boy. Never before had she known the feeling of air on the top of her head and her temples, and as she walked along the street enjoying people’s glances she felt as if her head was weightless and at any moment could take off like a balloon over the roofs of Rome.
The apartment was in a quiet, narrow side street to the Rue de Rennes. It was an attic apartment on two floors with one window from floor to ceiling looking out on a cramped courtyard. From the studio a staircase led up to a bedroom with French windows and a balcony with a view over the slanting zinc roofs and rows of chimney pots ranged close together. Everything was in shades of grey, the sky, the roofs and the walls. Behind a sooty party wall you could glimpse the Tour de Montparnasse far away, with lit windows in the evening. That was the only light visible from the balcony, in the middle of that enormous city.
She lay in the dusk listening to the distant sound of traffic. The air was cool on her bare shoulders, but she couldn’t be bothered to get up and close the balcony doors. She wanted to lie feeling the air, listening to the sounds of the city while she waited for him to come back. He had gone shopping, she was too tired to go out to eat. She had got up early to catch the plane, Else had driven her to the station with Lauritz. He had cried on the platform, but Else had said she should just go. The train was about to leave without her, as she kneeled down to the boy and tried to comfort him.
She considered calling home, but decided to wait. It might make him miss her still more, now he most probably had stopped being miserable. The light from Andreas’s laptop computer shone in the semi-darkness of the room. A shining white square floating among the dim outlines of furniture. He had not turned it off when he left for the airport, and as soon as they entered the apartment they fell into bed. But it had not come up to her expectations in the taxi, sitting with his hand between her thighs while she pressed her palm against the hard bulge in his trousers. She had kept her suspender belt and stockings on in bed, and the shoes with ankle straps, in the way she knew he liked and had maybe imagined her in the weeks he had been alone. When she dressed in the morning she had remembered to put her pants on outside the suspender belt. It seemed a bit comical to her now, when she took off her shoes and stockings and cuddled up to him under the duvet, wondering if he was disappointed.
It had not been as wild and passionate as she had wanted it to be. It had been the way it was when they were both tired and did not make love because they were completely swept away by desire but rather because they desired the idea of being close again instead of just falling asleep. He asked if she had come properly. She smiled at him fondly. It didn’t matter. She was happy just to lie here and feel him beside her. He stroked her hair, she pushed her head under his chin. She asked if he had finished his play. Almost, he said. There was only the end to do now. When she went back to work, she said, she would like to have a part in one of his plays. It wouldn’t need to be a leading part, she would be happy with a small one. She could come in with a letter!
She felt the need of a cigarette and got out of bed. The Tour de Montparnasse had turned into no more than a stack of little, shining cubes in the blue darkness. She switched on the lamp on the writing desk and took the carton of cigarettes out of the plastic bag from the airport. She couldn’t find her lighter and there wasn’t one on the desk either. She walked downstairs with the cigarette hanging from her lips, still naked, and thought that if she had a spotlight on her now she would look like a stripper coming down to ask one of the men in the audience for a light, as part of the show. There must be a lighter somewhere. Distrait as he was, Andreas always kept two or three plastic lighters going at the same time. She caught sight of his tweed jacket on a hanger behind the front door. The one he occasionally wore when he dropped his image of the young rebel. His Arthur Miller jacket, she called it. He did look a bit like Arthur Miller when he wore it, if you left out the horn-rimmed spectacles. It must be the prominent chin they had in common. As she searched through the pockets she heard a rustling sound. An envelope was sticking out of the breast pocket.
She might have just let it go, she thought later. She had never been through his pockets before, and never read his letters. She knew it was wrong, but she did it all the same. Was it intuition that made her take the envelope from his pocket, or was it ordinary, thoughtless curiosity? It was an airmail letter with a Swedish stamp, posted in Stockholm just over a week before. She could still have changed her mind as she held it in her hand. The letter bore no sender’s name, but the writing on the envelope was a woman’s, she could see, a young woman’s. Andreas’s name and address in Paris was written in felt tip and architectural capital letters, regular, very clear and with a weakness for calligraphic curlicues.
After she had read the letter three times she folded it up, put it back in the envelope and stuck it in the breast pocket of the tweed jacket, taking care to see that the stamp bearing Carl Gustav’s puppyish playboy face was on the left side of the pocket, as she had found it. She went into the bathroom, kneeled down in front of the lavatory pan and vomited until she was empty. The cold of the floor and the spasms in her stomach made her shudder. She locked the door, sat in the bath and crouched with her knees under her chin and one foot on top of the other. She turned on the hot water and held the shower against her head until the scalding water made her cry out with pain. Only then did she start to weep. She turned on the cold tap, not too much, and sat sobbing under the hot stream of water that surrounded her like a steaming cloak. She closed her eyes and pictured the house she had seen being torn down on the way into Paris. The remains of a condemned suburban building with gaping window openings, flapping remnants of wallpaper and gnawed-off storey divisions that sank soundlessly in a cloud of pulverised bricks, a grey waterfall of dust.
She was still sitting in the bath weeping when she heard the front door slam and Andreas calling. She stopped sobbing. Soon afterwards he turned the door handle and said through the door that he was going to start cooking. She turned off the water and slowly stood up, stiff from sitting in the same position for so long. The steam had misted up the mirror over the wash basin. She wiped it with her hand and looked at her tear-stained face. Her eyelids were red and swollen. She wrapped herself in a towel and went into the kitchen. He raised his eyes from the steaks frying in the pan and looked at her worriedly. She said she had been sick. It must have been something she ate on the plane. He stroked her cheeks sympathetically, first one, then the other, and concentrated on the steaks again. She opened the window to let out the odour of cooking. He told her about a Japanese chef who had committed hara-kiri when the passengers on a plane had fallen ill because he had cooked with an infected finger. He showed her both his hands, grinning. No infection! She went upstairs to dress.