asked whether Andreas was there. She used his first name, as if assuming Robert would realise who she meant. He told her Andreas would probably come later in the day. It felt odd to mention her husband like that, as if he knew him. He said Andreas had been there several times with their son, while she was unconscious. The boy’s name was Lauritz. She wanted to see him. Then she corrected herself. He must come. Robert suggested she should arrange it with her husband. The next thing she said was very surprising. She did not want Andreas to visit her. Only Lauritz. Could she rely on that being respected?
Robert did not know what to answer. He said yes without thinking. If that was what she wanted. It sounded very formal, almost solemn. He looked at the trees, just coming into leaf. She did not want anything. He looked at her again. Her voice was expressionless, without bitterness or self-pity. He stood up to go, she asked him to stay a little longer. He stayed by the window, waiting for her to say something more. Was it certain? He asked what she meant, feeling foolish. That she would never see again? He hesitated. As good as certain, he replied. He said he was sorry, at once regretting it. She said she would like to be alone.
He relayed Lucca Montale’s wishes to the sister-in-charge and asked her to arrange with the husband to let their son visit her. A few hours later Andreas Bark was sitting in Robert’s office. He was pale and unshaven, his dark hair tousled. He slouched in his chair with exhaustion and asked if he could smoke. Robert assented with a wave of his hand, which he placed on the pile of case notes in front of him. Andreas Bark took a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket, he smoked Gitanes. There was something aggressive about the spicy smell of dark tobacco. Andreas Bark looked out the window. It really was clearing up. Robert gazed at the silhouette of a gypsy woman twirling in a dance with a hand on one hip and a tambourine held above her head, through the sinuous veil of cigarette smoke.
He must apologise. Robert looked up, met the other’s eyes and said there was nothing to apologise for. He understood. It was really the wrong thing to say, but now he had said it, and the other held onto his calm gaze with his tired eyes behind the eddying cigarette smoke. It struck Robert they must be about the same age. There was something in the other’s expression which in a mute, acquiescent way was trying to remind him of it. As if, in some transferred sense, they were old schoolmates, who could rely on each other’s sympathetic insight.
Had she explained why she did not want to see him? Robert cleared his throat and brushed a hair from his white coat. Whether his patient had said anything about it or not, as a doctor he could not permit himself to pass it on. But in fact she had not said anything that could explain her decision. Why should she confide in him, anyway? Robert immediately regretted his question. That was making too much of the point. The other man sank into his chair still further and again looked out the window, where the pale sun created a chiaroscuro of shine and shade, then shine again on the grass and the wings of the hospital as clouds kept passing over it. He pressed down the loose tobacco at the end of his cigarette with his finger. He could bring Lauritz to see her during afternoon visiting hours. Robert said he would have to arrange that with the sister in charge. But would he . . . Silence fell, and he was obliged to look the unhappy man in the face again. Yes? When he spoke to her, wouldn’t he say that . . . Andreas Bark broke off and said it didn’t matter. They shook hands. Then he left.
Robert did not go straight home in the afternoon. Instead he drove out to the beach, as he did occasionally when he needed exercise. He parked in the fir plantation before the road got too sandy, and continued on foot through the dunes. The shore was deserted as usual. The sky was just as grey as the sand between the belts of dried seaweed with little air bubbles that Lea liked to crush between her fingers to make them crackle when they sat together on a Sunday looking out over the sea before he drove her to the station. The water was calm, it had a granulated surface in the offshore wind, and in the smooth, icy blue stretches the fishing stakes stood like trim markings from the coast and outwards towards the sharply defined horizon. Robert walked with long strides, head bent, absent-mindedly observing what passed through his field of vision, battered soaked herring boxes with rusty nails, crumpled starfish, milky jellyfish and empty white plastic bottles. Little waves lapped wearily at the edge of the water and made the silence seem deeper, more intimate.
He walked right out to the point where, in a gentle, indefinable transition, the beach gave way to sand spits, tussocks of grass, reed beds and narrow meadows stretching inland, everything separated by the bluish white mirror of the water. In one place a dinghy was moored to a pole in the midst of the folded calm of the water-mirror, merely a small silhouette against the emptiness of sea and sky. Robert had a definite objective, a rotting spar covered with little holes from ships’ worms, where it was his habit to sit among the tall reeds to think, or just listen to birds’ cries and the rhythmic, faintly whispering rush of wings, as he picked at the rotten wood.
He could well have been more sympathetic to the man in his office with his cigarette and his despair. He had felt really sorry for him. He caught sight of a bird sitting in among the reeds. It jerked its small head from side to side and forward and backwards with a mechanically ticking motion. He didn’t know its name, he was not very good on birds. Several times he had thought of buying a bird book with coloured drawings which he could take on his walks, but the idea did seem a bit comical. Should he also get himself a pair of binoculars and some green wellies and tramp around like a typical enthusiast?
He remembered he was to have Lea the following weekend. If it kept on raining they could always play table tennis and hire some videos. And they had been talking of making a kitchen garden. He had already bought garden tools from the hardware shop and been to the garden centre for seeds. The tools were in the scullery beside the washing machine, painted red, with beechwood handles. He hadn’t even removed their stickers with bar codes. If the weather was reasonable they might get started. He hadn’t wanted to do it on his own even though he had the time. The idea was for them to do it together.
The librarian had questioned him about Lea, he had even shown her some pictures. While he talked about his daughter she had smiled and looked at him with her nice eyes, and he could sense that the small anecdotes raised him in her feminine esteem. That embarrassed him, and he shied away from talking to her like that. Her encouraging gaze and understanding smile made him feel pathetically disarmed.
He lit a cigarette. Andreas Bark’s masculine but painfully vulnerable face came to mind again. He didn’t know what he should have said to him. After all, his wife was not dead. With a bit of luck and a few months’ rehabilitation she would be able to go on, blind but alive. The untold marital drama being acted out behind the man’s tragic mien and her refusal to see him was a far cry from his medical field of action.
Throughout his years as a doctor it had often occurred to him that it was the reverse side of life with which he was occupied, the side with the seam. Just like tailors of old who had only an indirect glimpse of the glittering world of fine ladies, it was the sad moments in people’s lives that he shared with them, when some functional fault or accident prevented them from getting on with their dramatic or uneventful existence.
After he had moved to the provinces and by degrees accustomed himself to his new and quieter lifestyle, he had to admit that Monica had been right when she reproached him for not being more ambitious. Naturally he wanted to be proficient, and he did try to improve, but he never dreamed of being a virtuoso. The appointment at a provincial hospital was anything but progress in his career, and he discovered, to both his surprise and relief, that he didn’t mind. The hospital was the innermost sphere in his world, it was there he spent most of his time, and it was from there that he looked out on the world where other people moved. Now and again they passed through his, but to them that was an unpleasant parenthesis, which they hastened to forget as soon as they escaped.
Their lives were not his concern, only their bodies, and he had grown used to working with the human body as a closed circuit separate from the life it lived. The organism was sufficient to itself and unaffected by the dreams and ideas raging within it. That was an
