flatter, she thought and, putting on her sunglasses, she lay down beside him so his shoulder was against hers. She must have forgotten to.
She had almost forgotten. At least, until Otto reminded her, she had not thought about it for several days. Nothing had happened anyway, not like that. It was one of the last evenings of the run, and the theatre was half empty. The reviews had been positive, and she had been singled out for mention in several of them. But the weather was too good that spring, there were too many evenings when people just wanted to drift around town and sit in the twilight feeling summer was on the way. Only very few would feel like spending such evenings in a dusty cinema converted into an underground theatre, on a gloomy street away from the city centre. Besides, none of them was really well known, certainly not the dramatist, a big-headed Swede of their own age, in his mid-twenties, always in black, of course. They had spent all their time imitating his arrogant Stockholm accent.
She knew she had been good that night, better than ever before. The words had come of their own volition, as if they had formulated themselves, and they had left her mouth with no effort, without need of thought. She had forgotten herself and merely followed the movements of the role, yielded to them, given over to them, totally attentive. He talked about that, Harry Wiener, her presence on stage. She had caught sight of him during the performance, but strangely enough that had not made her nervous. She knew she could not do it any other way, and the feeling of exposing herself was not at all unnerving. It was like admitting something painful, while thinking that now one has nothing more to lose. The same strange calm.
She had never spoken to him before, only seen him in pictures and in the distance at a first night. His grey hair, combed back from his tanned forehead, was long and curly at the neck. There was something resigned about his face with its vertical lines and narrow lips, as if he looked upon the world through the bitter wisdom of a hard-won experience of life. But perhaps this was just how people came to look with the years, whether or not they grew wiser or more stupid. He was always elegant, wearing a camel-hair coat and Italian suit or letting himself be photographed during a rehearsal in a T-shirt and baggy chinos, with his spectacles on a cord round his neck and his narrow eyes on the stage. He was on his fourth marriage, but that did not prevent him from playing the part of seducer left and right. For a few months each year he retired to his house on a mountain in Andalucia, where he was said to be writing his memoirs.
The Gypsy King. It was Otto who had come up with that, and since then he had been called nothing else. It was not kindly meant, but king he certainly was. No one could surpass Harry Wiener. Otto had had a part in one of his Ibsen productions and could raise a laugh with his stories of brutal humiliations and hysterical attacks of weeping when the Gypsy King cracked his invisible whip. The actors feared him and dreamed of nothing else but getting a part with him. To be directed by Harry Wiener was like dipping your toes in eternity.
Otto was not impressed, it seemed as if he was determined not to be. In his opinion the Gypsy King’s productions were no more than mundane theatrical gastronomy for the culturally hungry bourgeois, weighted with psychophile symbolism. That was yet another expression he had coined, psychophile. And why was it, in fact, that the Gypsy King only put on gilt-edged classics? When had he last stuck his neck out with a piece of new drama, where he could not automatically rely on his audience flocking in with reverently folded hands? Otto would much rather make films, he had already won several leading parts and come close to winning a Bodil award.
Lucca wasn’t sure. She could see what he meant, yes, and she had once sprayed a whole mouthful of red wine over him laughing when he parodied the Gypsy King giving a demonstration of how to play Shylock. With all the drawers open at once, juggling with the whole of Judaism, as Otto had said. All the same, she had been gripped, almost secretly, when she and Otto had been to see one of the Gypsy King’s shows. She was thinking of that on the spring evening when, after the performance, she was sitting at her mirror taking off her make-up, and caught sight of Harry Wiener in the dressing-room doorway.
He was different, that was the first thing she had thought, different from the person she had imagined. He seemed almost shy as he stood hesitantly on the threshold. He looked like an apology for himself and his colourful reputation. Might he interrupt? The other actors gaped like shepherds who had caught sight of their guiding star, and it had been Lucca who pulled herself together first, smiling and unconcerned, to offer him a chair. He just wanted to come and tell them how outstanding they had been. The word he used was superb. Lucca’s cheeks burned when he looked at her and said a few things about her interpretation, words of a kind she had never heard anyone use before.
They sat listening in a semi-circle around Harry Wiener while he commented on their performance. Lucca thought it was only now she understood what she had been doing on stage during the past few weeks. He had a good deal of criticism of the text itself, but their production had not merely released the best aspects of it, they had managed to imbue a deeper psychological resonance into it as well. Harry Wiener’s words sounded old-fashioned and stately, like old silver fish knives lying each in their perfectly demarcated space, wrapped in moss green baize. He had not taken off his camel-hair coat, perhaps because no one had asked him to. Underneath it he wore a dark blue T-shirt and black jeans, but he sported real crocodile moccasins. The right mix of elegance and something informal, now he had come to see what the young actors had to offer. She could just hear Otto.
She looked round at her colleagues. They were all ears. They barely managed to keep their mouths shut, and she was glad Otto was not there. He would have derided them for feeling so honoured by a visit from this illustrious guest and being the recipients of his gracious words of praise. Like a cub scout pack given an audience with Baden Powell himself. But what about Otto? How could it be that he was so horrified and sarcastic as soon as the conversation took on an emotional tone? Was he actually a bit ashamed of being an actor? Maybe that was why he always had to make a laughing stock of the old theatre chiefs and their silk scarves and gas lamp diction, which he could mimic to make you fall about with streaming eyes. In his heart he probably dreamed of appearing with a bare torso in some action-packed American gun-slinging film.
At a certain point Harry Wiener caught her eye in one of the mirrors, and she smiled a little ironic smile which was both lightly conspiratorial and sexily challenging in an aloof way. As if she wished to keep a certain distance and yet make herself known. Possibly she noticed a particular interest in his brief glance, which seemed to read her in a flash before he looked away again. Perhaps she was flirting a little. It was too fleeting to reflect on more closely, it was just a glance, and he removed it so quickly. There was something modest about him, and she tightened the belt of her dressing gown, suddenly conscious of having nothing on underneath. She had just come out of the shower when he turned up, but then he must be used to that.
He was downright clumsy, she discovered, when he looked around for an ashtray and happened to upset a box of powder over his elegant coat. He smiled and talked on while brushing it off with the back of his hand. There was not much of the gypsy king about him there in that messy dressing room. He spoke quietly and seriously in his deep, hoarse voice about the stage as a mental space in which we keep a tryst with our inner demons. Lucca took pleasure in listening to his voice and looking at him as he spoke. He sounded like someone who knew what he was talking about, someone who had paid for every single one of his insights.
Now she understood why all the actors he had worked with spoke about him as they did. With the exception of Otto. When Harry Wiener now and then looked at her she felt he saw something she was not aware of herself, as if there was more in her than she realised. He spoke meticulously and hesitantly, searching for words, almost as if he were thinking aloud, while he looked down at the toes of his shoes or the cigarette between his tanned fingers. His hands were surprisingly delicate. He interrupted himself in the middle of a sentence and smiled apologetically as he asked if they were thirsty.
