out to see his mother, she lived in a small flat in a block from the Thirties with a balcony where she could sit and look out over the harbour, the local heating station’s row of slim chimneys and the railway lines with the express trains’ shunting track.
His father had left her shortly after Robert was born and he had not seen him since; he had moved to Jutland and probably started another family there. He was a barber, thinking of him seemed quite abstract. He might already be dead. When Robert was fifteen he had decided to go in search of him. He succeeded in finding the address and telephone number. He could still remember the silence from the other end when he had told the strange man who he was. They arranged to meet in Århus, on neutral ground, as his father said in a tired voice that was hoarse and short of breath. He must be a chain-smoker. But when he was in the ferry crossing the Great Belt Robert began to lose heart, and he got off the train at Odense. What was the point of this?
Robert’s mother did not marry again. She looked after him on her own, at first by cleaning, later by working in the canteen of a large firm, where in time she was promoted to catering officer. The best time for her had been when she worked in a home for children with behavioural problems. She rarely went out. When she retired, she resorted to the world of novels. Robert was not sure how clearly she could distinguish between their fictional life and the life going on around her. She herself was a spectator, terribly modest, content to be a witness of the world seen from the humble corner she allowed herself to occupy.
She loved Dickens and the Russians, Tolstoy and Dostoievski, and she had a weakness for Mark Twain, but her favourite book was Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. When Robert saw the familiar volume open on the arm of the shabby easy chair beside the balcony door where she liked to sit, he always asked if it wasn’t too sad. She smiled mysteriously, of course it was sad, but it was so entertaining too, and she said it as if in some secret way the one thing was a prerequisite for the other.
As a rule she hid her faded hair under a scarf. Time had made her stoop and she was very thin, but taller than most women of her generation, as tall as a man, and as long as he could remember she had worn the same kind of strong, mannish spectacle frames. She smoked about forty cigarettes a day, just as presumably her ex-husband had, thought Robert. That was the only thing they had in common apart from him. But they had come to a silent agreement that he should not comment on her smoking. He had almost come to the conclusion that she survived on a diet of cigarettes and novels.
She had always kept to a monotonous routine. The biggest event in her life had been the day he was admitted to university. Not when he finished but when he started, as the first one in the family. As far as he knew she had not been with a man since his father left her. But that couldn’t be true, he thought, and one day he asked her. She did not reply, merely smiled her mysterious smile in a way that prevented him from seeing whether she smiled to protect her feminine pride or to shield him from stories he did not want to hear anyway.
Now and then she looked after Lea. Then she made her all the fatty and unhealthy dishes with thick gravy which Lea loved and Monica and Robert refused to make, and afterwards she read aloud to her from Huckleberry Finn, always that and nothing else. When Robert came alone she asked him worriedly how things were. He was not just her only child, he was also her only contact with the outside world, and for over forty years he had been the one who imparted deepest meaning to her life.
Her ceaseless questioning made him impatient and irritable and as a rule he snapped out brief answers, at the same time feeling guilty at being so grudging. But at other times she did not ask questions when he came, on the contrary she seemed distracted, as if he disturbed her reading. Not until he was on his way down the staircase with its terrazzo flooring and marble-patterned walls did it occur to him that she might only question him out of politeness and old habit. As someone trying to hide the fact that in reality she had lost interest in the noise and bother of daily life in order to devote herself to her daydreams at long last.
On Lea’s twelfth birthday he was waiting in front of her school when she came out. She was surprised, it had not been arranged, he had gone into town on a sudden impulse. She stood there surrounded by her friends, who glanced at him shyly. She herself felt self-conscious. Her friends were going home with her, Monica was expecting them. He had bought her a pair of roller skates, and she tried them out at once there on the pavement, chiefly to please him, it seemed. He stood and waved as she went off to the bus stop with her friends, even though he was going the same way. He didn’t want to embarrass them more than was strictly necessary, so he waited until their bus had left and took the next one. Twelve years. At that time they had really believed it was possible, he and Monica. They had both been tired of mucking around. They had more or less tried what there was to try, they thought. When she found herself pregnant they had already known each other a long time. They had jumped into it with their eyes open.
That was how they had put it to each other. Eyes open. But it was already hard to recall what he had thought then. Monica had become a stranger again. She was friendly, there was no longer anything to quarrel about, and her new husband was equally friendly. That was how it could turn out. As simply as that. She had stopped loving him and started to love someone else, and Robert had long ago stopped pondering over whether the one thing was the cause of the other or vice versa.
If he sometimes thought to himself that love was like music, it was not because he was feeling poetic. But love was just as invisible and hard to understand, perhaps because there was nothing to understand. An impersonal, transforming force, which found the way by itself according to its own interior laws, uncaring of who and what it pulled with it or left behind in its calm or restless flow. Music cared just as little about who played, the notes could not help it if they were played beautifully or clumsily, on finely tuned instruments or a miserable broken-down honky-tonk in which half the strings were missing.
He did not think in this vein every day. There was no one he could confide such thoughts to. When he was alone he could almost fall into a kind of trance, in which the thoughts landed and took off as randomly as the irresolute sparrows on the terrace. In the evening he read his professional journals, when he was not too tired. There was always a pile of them he had not got through. He merely riffled through the newspaper, and when he let it fall on the floor he had already forgotten the details of what he had read.
The only person outside the hospital he talked to regularly was Jacob, a young colleague who lived with his wife and their two small children in a house matching his own not far away. They played tennis once or twice a week, and sometimes Jacob invited him over on a Saturday. Jacob was very popular on account of his frank, uncomplicated manner. He was one of the doctors the young nurses flirted with, boyish in appearance, well-trained, with hair like yellow corn. Robert could feel Jacob looked up to him because he was older and came from a big hospital in Copenhagen, and this status compensated for the irritation at his heavier body and poor condition when Jacob beat him on the tennis court yet again.
Jacob’s wife was dark-haired and had brown eyes, she was always well turned out in a relaxed way. She had an excellent figure, but there was something far too practical about her impeccable appearance which prevented Robert finding her attractive. Maybe that was why she did not like him, perhaps because as a divorced, single man he was a constant reminder of all the dangers threatening their domestic idyll. But it might also be that she had detected Robert’s suppressed distaste for sitting in their garden chatting about everything and nothing, while the children rushed around and clambered all over their father. Or was it quite simply because he smoked? As a rule she asked him to stay and eat with them, and Robert did his best to seem house-trained, remembered to pick his stubs off the lawn and tried to keep up the flow of talk with her when Jacob in his apron was grilling steaks.
Jacob treated him as a friend, and the slight twinges of conscience Robert felt over his trusting openness made him behave as if they really were close friends. When Jacob confided in him, he responded with some confidential story about himself as an example for recognition, letting the younger man mirror himself in his experiences and see in them what he found useful to see. He had gradually developed a sincere liking for Jacob, although he never quite got over the feeling that Jacob’s apparently uncomplicated and hygienic happiness was something separate from his own life. The games of tennis and the Saturdays in their garden became part