A small movie theater called the Lantern is next to the building. And above the entrance there are three lights—white, red, and green—enclosed within a blue lantern. At night there are always a lot of young men smoking outside as well as bareheaded young girls who are eager to laugh. Whenever the picture is over, the attendant with a limp turns off the three lights in the lantern. Then he comes out to lock the double doors and the emergency exit, and then he fastens three large padlocks around the closures of the display case. Lastly, he closes the wrought-iron gate on the street and locks it. Long after the film has ended, the boys and girls are still there. They are loudest and laugh the most right before they leave. In the mornings the display window has been found broken three times already, but no one has ever stolen a photograph. And every morning the ground behind the gate is littered with cigarette butts.
The son goes inside this cinema. The floor slants down toward the box office. A worn red carpet stretches from the box office to the wide doors of the auditorium. He stands still on the carpet and looks around, but the father has disappeared. And no dog is barking. Because he thinks the cashier is looking at him, he buys a ticket to avoid looking silly. He is nervous and forgets a krona on the green rubber mat at the register. When she calls him back, he can scarcely resist looking at her. She smiles at him, and as he picks up the krona, he smiles back at her. Ever since his mother’s death, he thinks all women who smile at him look like her. All assistants, waitresses, and women on stairs. And almost all of them have the same dress as she did. The cashier’s dress is red. And there is a large telephone next to her.
The auditorium smells like a cellar. In fact, it used to be one a long time ago, and the smell has never left. He sits at the very back, even though the usher tells him he can sit wherever he wants. And whenever someone comes in, he covers his face with his hands. But by the time the newsreel begins, the father still hasn’t come. There are eight of them in the theater, excluding him, and they are all sitting in front of him. There is a draft along the floor, and it’s terribly cold. What is more, this is a theater where it always rains in the newsreels, and he has already seen the main feature.
When he leaves the auditorium, he immediately looks back at the cashier to see whether she notices that he is leaving just as the film is starting. But the booth is empty and the light is out. Then he finds the small panel door to the lavatory. He opens it very quietly and looks inside. It’s also empty.
As he hurries up the slanted aisle that smells like a cellar and paint, he realizes that he’s in a hurry. His anxiety has subsided and his desire has returned. In the taxi he thinks about his fiancée’s smooth arms, and when he places his hands on his hips, it is her hips he feels. As the cab drives through an intersection, he sees a girl in a red billowing dress waiting for a streetcar. He has been with a girl before. She had a red coat, but underneath it she had a blue dress and underneath that a white slip. It was in September during his military service. They went into the woods after just one dance and had to search a long time before they found a dry place. Afterward, his knees still got wet, and he ended up with a bad cold. A month later, he saw the girl on the main road in the rain. He saluted her, but she didn’t recognize him.
When he reaches the front of the fiancée’s building, she is already holding the door open for him. She has been waiting by the window for a long time. At first, she is surprised when he arrives in a taxi. Then she starts imagining things. But she almost always imagines things. She has warmed up some tea on the Meta cooker three times, and three times it has turned cold. They sit down in separate chairs in her chilly room. On one side of the room, someone is learning to play the banjo. On the other side, some men are playing cards, and their bids can be heard clearly through the wall. He suddenly falls to his knees before the fiancée’s chair and starts rubbing his brow against her knees. He notices they are harder than he imagined. The fiancée puts her arms around his neck. Then he feels that her arms are hard, too. He has never noticed this before.
After tea, he pulls her over to the sofa with him. It’s an old rented sofa with a tall, carved wooden frame. Hanging over the frame is a blue tapestry with white writing: “A woman is a flower. Pick her gently.” But when he sits on the sofa, the frame falls down on him, hitting his back.
We can’t sit on the sofa, the fiancée whispers, because the back always falls down, and I can’t fix it.
Then he lifts up the frame.
If we can’t be on the sofa, then we can just lie on the floor, he whispers as he pulls his fiancée’s black dress up high above the knee.
He is very aroused and he is breathing very heavily. They knock a chair down as they tumble to the floor. The linoleum creaks beneath the fiancée’s body. He is on his knees and when he shifts his gaze from her breasts to her face, he can see she is afraid. But even though she’s afraid, she still wants it. She has never wanted it before. She is ugly when she is afraid, but this makes her eyes very beautiful. And her fear doesn’t frighten him but it makes him cold—strong and cold. He picks up the fallen chair and sits down on it. When the fiancée gets up, she grabs on to the sofa. Then the frame falls down again. All of a sudden he bursts into laughter. He can’t help it, nor can he check his laughter. He thinks he’s laughing about the sofa, and when he stops laughing, he thinks the fiancée is crying. But she isn’t crying. She is standing in front of his chair and breathing very heavily, as if she had been running. And he is astonished, almost shocked, when she screams.
You can’t! she screams and clenches her fists.
I can’t what? he says calmly. He thinks he isn’t supposed to laugh.
Go, the fiancée whispers.
Then the banjo player stops playing and bangs against the wall. The card players knock, too. Then one of them bids three hearts. And although she is pale, she still walks him out. She tries to kiss him through the crack of the door but only manages to grab his hand, which is cold. Hers is cold, too. Through the window, she watches him as he waits on the street for a taxi. She hopes that a taxi won’t come, but one does. She doesn’t close the window until much later. Then it occurs to her that she could have made up the bed on the sofa.
As the car starts to slow down in front of the gate, he asks the driver to keep going. He doesn’t want the father to see him coming home in a taxi. Whoever is poor is always ashamed to be seen in a taxi. And should he be alone, he will sit in the middle, so that no one will see him. When he finally gets out of the taxi, it is stopped very close to the cinema. Since it’s hardly out of the way, he walks up to it and looks at the posters—just as the lights go out. The red light goes out first, then the green and white lights at the same time. The attendant appears with his padlock. After the gate is closed, he stands around smoking for a while. And since it’s so late, some girls are smoking, too. One of the remaining girls is looking at him. Her coat is unbuttoned, and underneath it she is wearing a red dress. But she’s too young to look like his mother. When she pulls up her sleeve to look at the time, he sees that she has very spindly arms. He flicks his cigarette through the bars of the gate and leaves.