She had calculated how many miles her son covered every day, and synchronised the time on the American watch, at intervals putting the hour hand back one. She had never been to America, but could describe in detail what her son had experienced on his journey. As a rule he called home in the afternoon, local time, when it was night in Denmark and she was at work. He called collect. The nurse gave Robert a slightly scared look. He wouldn’t tell anyone, would he?
Robert smiled and gave her a friendly caress on the back between the prominent shoulder blades, thinking of Jacob who was no doubt in his car now, heart beating, on the way to his tryst with the gym teacher. They were often on duty together. She had lived alone since her husband died of stomach cancer ten years ago. He had been a builder, she nursed him herself for his last months. It had not been a happy marriage, but she spoke of it without bitterness, as you speak of chance misfortune. She had merely been unlucky in the great lottery. But her children were doing well, her daughter was a doctor in Greenland, and the youngest was a student at the Veterinary and Agricultural High School in Copenhagen, when he was not hurtling across the USA.
When she was young she had worked as a volunteer in a children’s clinic in the Sudan. He sometimes encouraged her to talk of her time in Africa, how she had been on the point of marrying an African when she discovered he had two wives already. She had believed she had met the real thing in the figure of a tall handsome Sudanese. Every time she told the story she smiled the same surprised, self-ironical smile, and Robert could suddenly see what she must have looked like as a young woman. A graceful, surprised young woman in the midst of black Africa. At other times she asked about Lea and gave advice on child-rearing in a slightly lecturing tone, but Robert listened without argument.
When she was called away to a patient he got out his walkman and played a tape of Haydn string quartets. He wound forward to the slow movement, misused as a national anthem long after Haydn’s death. He hummed the introductory bars, Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, and smiled. Once again he had to admire the way the musicians, even as they played the first, lingering bars shrugged off the dead shell of ugly associations and liberated the music. He leaned back as Haydn whispered his civilised commentary through the earphones with the warm, crisp vibrato from instruments almost as old as the composer.
Jacob must have arrived by now. Robert pictured to himself how Jacob the naughty schoolboy with red cheeks lay in a strange house between a strange woman’s legs groping her boobs. The house would no doubt have been a family home like his own, and the woman would not have differed so much from his own well-shaped wife. A woman’s body like any other, in a bedroom probably furnished like most with pine and chipboard furniture covered with white laminate. And yet it was a drama that was nevertheless played out between them, forbidden in a completely irresistible way.
While the gym teacher spread her legs for Jacob, did he perhaps pause for a moment, on his knees as if in a sort of reverence, at the sight of her cunt. No doubt it resembled all other cunts, both the real ones and those in all the porno magazines and coloured diagrams in anatomical textbooks the world over. When he had been no more than a child Robert had felt there was something brutally prosaic about the female sexual organs compared with his vague daydreams of what awaited him when he grew up. On the other hand it was precisely their rather frightening reality that had made them so exciting to think about, the folds of the labia and their colour range of reddish brown and rose.
When he pictured Jacob gazing at the gym teacher’s cunt, lying open to him surrounded by the functional, easy-care furnishings, the organic folds of its form were as anachronistic to think of as an antique would have been, a quaint art décor casket lined with red velvet. Oddly striking in the orderly, mass-produced common sense in low-cost materials of the suburban house. If you lived the regular life of a doctor or gym teacher in a medium-sized provincial town, the female sexual orifice was the last romantic cavern, the last refuge for your debilitated imagination.
Earlier, when Robert had gone to bed with a woman for the first time, he had not only desired her body but also its strangeness. When they lay together, he and a total stranger, it seemed as he touched her that he was fumbling his way into another, different world. Or rather, he found reality at last as his hands explored the warm unknown body beside him. As if he had been living in a dream from which he had finally woken. Until it was over and he sat on the edge of the bed gazing at his affectionate unknown lover asking himself if that was all. If it was the same body he was looking at now reality had resumed a depressing likeness to itself.
In a few hours Jacob would get up and dress in the strange but not in the least exotic bedroom, before the beauty who lay regarding him tenderly, pink and sweaty. Perhaps she had been like a mystery he had tried to solve as he penetrated her, as far in as he could get. But afterwards she was again merely a gym teacher lying there with her big boobs asking when they could meet again. Perhaps Jacob was not the sort to let himself be worried by the fickleness of life, perhaps he would just lean back in his seat with a little smile, his body satisfied, and drive home to his sweet unsuspecting wife. Or would he too, like Robert, trawl through his memory to rediscover the precious reasons for his tension and dizzy expectation as he drove in the opposite direction?
You couldn’t tell, and anyway what did it matter, thought Robert, as Haydn’s emotional strings vibrated through his head. Desire was like music, just as abstract, just as meaningless and just as overwhelming. As soon as the old instruments were played again the music woke anew and made its impact on her. Far away in the darkness he could see a shining yellow ribbon which doubled up and disappeared behind the opposite wing of the hospital. It was the motorway to Copenhagen. The red and white pairs of lights passed each other along the bright curve, just as they did every night and had done on the night when Lucca Montale tried to take her life. Unless, being the worse for drink, she had merely made an error and by pure chance had gone down on to the wrong lane. In that case, where had she thought she was going? He heard the telephone through the graceful intricacies of the strings, switched off Haydn and picked up the receiver.
A woman’s voice asked in English whether he would accept the call. She had an American accent. Robert assented and a moment later he heard a young man at the other end. Robert asked where he was. Arizona. What was it like there? The young man laughed, slightly delayed by the satellite connection. What it was like? He was calling from a truck-stop. There was a petrol station and a cafeteria, and outside were tall cactus and sharp red rock formations and a long straight road. Just like a film! Robert smiled. He could hear voices in the background, sounding as if their mouths were full of potatoes. He caught sight of the slight figure of the night nurse at the end of the corridor. He held up the phone and waved at her with it. She took off her clogs and ran holding them, eager as a girl. He felt a warm sensation in his stomach. Arizona, he said, grabbing one clog as he passed her the phone.
He put it on the floor, she smiled shyly and turned her back. He went out into the foyer and sat down on the sofa Andreas used. He lit a cigarette, and as he knocked his ash into the cement bowl he caught sight of some without filters among the stubs sticking out of the sand, they had dark shreds of tobacco on the ends. Andreas had probably gone to Stockholm to start a new life since his old one was now in ruins.
He glanced at his watch, it was a quarter past two. Jacob was quite likely not going home before night duty was ended as the gym teacher’s husband had so conveniently gone on a course. Maybe they were sleeping in each other’s arms as if in a trial marriage. Maybe he lay awake, maybe she snored. But would he stay in love with the gym teacher for her boobs’ sake or out of sheer enthusiasm at the thought of starting again from the beginning? Robert pictured Jacob announcing the sad news to his wife, one evening on the terrace while the glow of the grill died down, after they had kissed the children goodnight. How he would, weighed down with guilt, but also with enjoyable reverence, bow to the laws of emotion and move from one family home to the other.
It was not very probable, though Jacob did not have the bent for drama of an Andreas, nor did Robert believe that his practical sporty wife had the imagination to drive herself to destruction on the wrong side of the Copenhagen
