Later that evening they met up with some friends at a bar. Lucca fingered the folded letter in her pocket. She could have told him about it while they were at home, but Otto had been lost in his film. She felt irritated at having hidden it instead of leaving it out so he could find it for himself. As if she felt guilty. The place was packed and the crowd swayed back and forth every time someone pushed over to the bar counter. Standing beside Otto in the din of music and voices it dawned on her that she had been given the chance she had dreamed of ever since she hit on the idea of becoming an actor. Obviously Harry Wiener had meant what he said. She looked round at the clusters of faces. One day they would all know who she was. She felt a bit ashamed at the thought but couldn’t help thinking it.
She caught sight of a tall man standing at the end of the bar bending over a beautiful girl. She was sure she had seen him before but could not remember where. He wore an elegant black jacket and his curly hair was cut short. The girl’s face was thickly powdered and her breasts looked as if at any moment they might burst out of the bulging C cups. She smiled with her red lips and nodded assent to what the man was saying. Lucca recognised his self-effacing smile and awkward gesticulations. He seemed to have overcome the worst of his shyness, but where were his spectacles? Daniel had obviously taken to contact lenses.
She pushed her way over to them. When he caught sight of her she could see how he swallowed before smiling, but otherwise there was not much left of his old uncertainty. He introduced Lucca and the inflated beauty to each other. Her name was Barbara, and she widened her nostrils as she smilingly took Lucca’s measure with her large dramatic eyes. They had just come back from a festival of new music in Munich, where he had conducted one of his works. He had even been interviewed by the Süddeutsche Zeitung. He managed to make quite a story of it. She said it was nice to see him and kissed his cheek before going on to the toilets.
She held her hands under the cold tap for a long time. The water splashed up on the mirror and she met her own eyes behind the trickling drops as she pressed her hands to her sore red cheeks. She shouldn’t have stayed so long in the sun. Did Daniel also read Omar Khayyam’s love poems to Barbara with the big breasts? Did she drink Chinese tea from a cup with romantic dreamers in the moonlight, while he entertained her with his twelve-tone serenades? And if he did? When she forced her way back through the crowd and the fog of cigarette smoke again, Daniel and Barbara had left. Otto followed her with his eyes from the end of the bar. Lucca smiled at him, but he didn’t smile back, merely looked at her as if he had caught sight of something she was not aware of. She said she was tired. He could stay on if he liked.
It was warm, the window was open and she lay naked under a sheet, listening to the sounds of the city, the voices from other apartments, and the hollow rattling from the container in the yard when the chef of the Egyptian restaurant took the rubbish out. An Arabian song came from the restaurant kitchen, a woman’s wailing voice accompanied by abrupt drums and strings. She pondered on Otto’s calculating expression when she returned from the toilet. She lay absolutely still, listening. At last she heard the street door slam downstairs and recognised his quick step as he climbed. She closed her eyes. The sound of steps came closer and stopped suddenly. Then she heard the rattle of his keys, the lock clicked and the door opened. The floorboards in the hall creaked and a moment later she heard him peeing into the lavatory pan and the explosion of water when he flushed it away.
He came into the bedroom. She felt the soft air on her breasts, stomach and thighs when he lifted the edge of the sheet. She imagined his hands, their dry warmth and firm grip. She didn’t move, holding her breath as she waited, tense and excited. Her nipples gathered into two small hard spikes and she felt her pores open wide like so many baby birds’ gaping beaks, stretched in the air, hungrily piping.
Nothing happened. Afterwards she couldn’t tell how long she had been lying there waiting before she felt the mattress give under him as he sat up on the edge of the bed. She heard the metallic click of his lighter and breathed in the smell of cigarette smoke. She opened her eyes. He was still in his jacket. He sat with his back to her looking out into the courtyard. She asked for a drag. He turned and passed her the cigarette. She could not see his face, he was just a dark outline against the open window. He took back the cigarette and knocked off the ash into the ashtray on the floor between his feet. There was something they needed to talk about.
It was quiet down in the courtyard. He inhaled deeply and blew out the smoke in rings that hovered like soft zeroes in front of the lavender blue sky. Yes? She tried to sound relaxed but was unsuccessful. Her stomach contracted. Maybe he had found the letter from the Royal Theatre in her pocket. But after all, it was only an offer of a job. Nothing had happened between her and the Gypsy King. She had told him all there was to tell, and as she spoke he had looked at her in a disinterested way that reassured her. They had even made a joke of it. How had it come to be a problem? Why hadn’t she just shown him the letter?
She cleared her throat. What was it? Her voice was faint and dry. She propped herself on an elbow and looked at his dim silhouette. It was no good, he was sorry. She sat up in bed and pulled the sheet around her. What was no good? He turned towards the window. It would be best if they stopped here. The bluish light from outside fell on one side of his face. She could hardly recognise him. Was there someone else? He stubbed out his cigarette and stood up. If she really wanted to know… She looked up at him. Was it someone she knew? He went over to the door. He would spend the night somewhere else. It would probably be best if she moved out tomorrow.
8
The knife point had barely touched the white belly of the fish before it opened out in a long slit around the red and mauve entrails that gushed out onto the marble counter. She remembered how the sight had made her press her face against her father’s stomach in the soft checked shirt he always wore when they were in the country. She hadn’t seen him for years and sometimes was afraid of forgetting what he looked like, just as she had been when he went away. She lay in bed at night with a pocket torch, frightened of her mother surprising her with the faded black and white photograph she had eased out of the album from the desk in his study without her discovering. In the picture Giorgio was young, about her age. It had been taken on a square in his home town, the town she was named after. She had never been there. He had black hair and a smooth chin, he sat rocking on a café chair in front of a church wall where low-flying swallows cast their shadows.
Fascinated, she watched the fishmonger’s knife severing the head of the fish, then discarding it, gaping with astonishment, among the blue veins of the counter. The knife scraped the slimy scales from the green and brown body covered with black freckles. She thought of the red neon sign in Otto’s window. She had always hated fish. Outside she could hear the hollow thumping sound of a cutter’s motor and the cars driving ashore from the little ferry with varnished wooden rails. She had leaned her cheek against them so as to feel the vibrations through the hull as she saw the fishing village disappear behind the fan of wake, as if they were sailing far away and never coming back. She’s shot up all right, said the fishmonger, smiling knowingly. He said that every summer. His short nails were bloody at the roots.
They cycled through the plantation as usual. Lucca rode behind her mother on Giorgio’s old bicycle. The plastic bag of fish dangled from the rusty handlebars, it kept almost sticking between the spokes of the front wheel. Else was still slim, but each summer the veins behind her knees stood out more, and her hair had gradually turned completely grey. You could hear the distant roar of the sea behind the rows of dark pine trees. The house, built of tarred planks, was the last one on a path with wooden fences around the small gardens of fir and birch. The sun only reached down for a few hours in late afternoon. For the rest of the day their garden was a shadowy morass of tree trunks, tall grass and raspberry bushes completely hid the stone wall dividing the garden from the woods.