She sat down on the glass-roofed terrace and ordered coffee. Only a few customers were in the café or on the pavement outside. She looked at the patchy bark of the plane trees, resembling the pattern on camouflage suits. Each breath made her feel she was encased in armour. She wanted to weep but was not sure she would be able to even if she permitted herself. A pantechnicon was parked on the other side of the street. The removal men carried furniture out of the house and into the vehicle. An entire home passed by on the pavement as if assembled at random. So that was how they had chosen to arrange things, the unknown people who had lived on one of the floors over there. Two of the men helped each other carry a large gold-framed mirror, and as they struggled with it, turning it first one way, then another, fragments of clouds, cars, trees and shutters whirled through the gold frame in quickly shifting glimpses. When the mirror caught the sun for a moment a sharp spot of light leapt jerkily over the asphalt and its dazzle forced her to close her eyes.
Twenty-four hours earlier he had been in Charles de Gaulle airport waving and smiling when she came in sight. He must have forgotten his Swedish girlfriend for a moment, it wasn’t possible for anyone to smile with such tender devotion and think of another woman at the same time. She shook the little packet of sugar, tore off the top and watched the lump of sugar settle on the beige-coloured foam of the coffee, then sink slowly through the surface. Maybe he really was able to remember and forget on command, as if he had a television set inside himself and his will was a remote control that could zap back and forth between channels that were separate from each other. Wife and child on one channel, Swedish romance on the other. Could he be the same person on both channels?
Perhaps you could really change yourself as easily as the words changed their meaning according to who said them to whom, and when they were said. You had the same face, the same body, but inside you were a different person, according to whether the woman you were with was black-haired or auburn. Now what was it his exotic princess had written in her letter? That she had lived in a daze without being seen as she was. Just as he had… Until she met him and felt he woke her with his gaze and reminded her of the person she was in her heart. Lucca picked up her teaspoon and stirred the small coffee cup. She went on stirring long after the sugar had dissolved. The words were not only those of his lover and himself, they were also hers, Lucca’s. She had almost said the same words to him when they were getting to know each other.
He had turned up one day as an option, although at first she didn’t see him that way. She had believed Harry was the one she was meant to be with. The Gypsy King, who had opened up a vulnerable crack in his frighteningly self-confident mask, seeing an unknown side of her and liberating it on the stage. She had imagined that what he did with her on the stage could happen in real life as well, and for a few months it did. Recalling her two years with Otto she shook her head over how naïvely she had confused her own dream images with the Otto who hauled her so painlessly into his life and then dumped her again. Harry’s cynical honesty had been a release, and although sometimes his experience and status oppressed her the imbalance was cancelled out as soon as they were alone. In bed she saw in his eyes the insecurity she had seen for the first time in his Mercedes, when he tried to seduce her, and the second time on his balcony, with lightning flashing over the harbour.
Andreas disturbed her settled life with his boyish smile, his sudden kiss on the rock and his rash arrival a few months later. She suddenly realised she must have over-interpreted her enchantment by the legendary Harry Wiener. If Andreas travelled all the way from Rome for the sole purpose of seeing her again, that in itself was a question she had to answer not just with words but with all her being. And two weeks later when she was reckless enough to fly down to join him, she had come to believe that his eyes were the only ones that could net her in after the aimless flutterings of her early youth. Just as she had believed Otto’s eyes were hard and blue enough to make their image of her more solid than a confused reflection from a mirror in the sun, flitting aimlessly around like a firefly in broad daylight.
But she herself had been little more than a mirror. A homeless mirror which two breathless removal men had been at a loss to know how to deal with. They had collected the mirror from a house in the Copenhagen suburbs without any directions for where it was to be taken. A lady had telephoned. Unfortunately she could not be there when they came, she had to make a broadcast. The key was under the mat. The removal men had set off, unsuspecting, and whenever a passer-by threw a vain or worried glance at himself in the mirror they thought they might finally get rid of their heavy, gold-framed burden. But no, each time the stranger walked on in the opposite direction, if he did not simply vanish from sight, because the weight of the mirror caused the removal men to stagger, or because the one in front thought it best to go to right or left. New faces and views constantly skimmed over the shining surface, on which no one and nothing left any lasting trace.
They discovered it was easier to carry it horizontally like a bed, and they got quite a long way like that, while the mirror only reflected the clouds in the sky. White as a sheet, said one removal man to the other. Like snow, said the other, like newly fallen snow. To pass the time they talked about how lovely it was to go out of your house on a winter morning when it had snowed in the night, and how you could hardly bring yourself to tread on the snow no-one had yet walked on. They had stopped to rest and for a moment it seemed really like standing on the threshold of one’s house and watching the virginal snow. But they couldn’t go on standing like that holding the mirror, which resembled both a bed and a snow-covered landscape. The removal men began to lose heart but they did their best to cheer each other on. After all, the mirror was bound to find a home at last. They didn’t really believe that any more, but they kept on saying it.
Lucca…
She looked up from her coffee cup when she heard Andreas calling. He stood among the tables with his camera held up, so she could not see his eyes. Click, it went.
The plane circled in above the tangled web of Copenhagen street lights. In an hour she would be in the train on the way home. Else and Lauritz would be waiting at the station as arranged. She did not know how to get through it without cracking up. She could already hear Else’s words of consolation. Andreas was having an affair, so what? It was bound to happen to one of them sooner or later. Had she really imagined they would live together until their hair turned grey without one or the other having a fling on the side? It was quite predictable, Else would say, after you had lived together for a few years. If she was wise she would keep mum and see it through. He would soon tire of his Swedish fairy-tale.