Free Lucca by Jens Christian Grøndahl Page B

He could hear voices in the background, sounding as iftheir mouths were full of potatoes. He caught sight of the slight figure of the night nurse at the end of the corridor. He held up the phone and waved at her with it. She took off her clogs and ran holding them, eager as a girl. He felt a warm sensation in his stomach. Arizona, he said, grabbing one clog as he passed her the phone.
    He put it on the floor, she smiled shyly and turned her back. He went out into the foyer and sat down on the sofa Andreas used. He lit a cigarette, and as he knocked his ash into the cement bowl he caught sight of some without filters among the stubs sticking out of the sand, they had dark shreds of tobacco on the ends. Andreas had probably gone to Stockholm to start a new life since his old one was now in ruins.
    He glanced at his watch, it was a quarter past two. Jacob was quite likely not going home before night duty was ended as the gym teacher’s husband had so conveniently gone on a course. Maybe they were sleeping in each other’s arms as if in a trial marriage. Maybe he lay awake, maybe she snored. But would he stay in love with the gym teacher for her boobs’ sake or out of sheer enthusiasm at the thought of starting again from the beginning? Robert pictured Jacob announcing the sad news to his wife, one evening on the terrace while the glow of the grill died down, after they had kissed the children goodnight. How he would, weighed down with guilt, but also with enjoyable reverence, bow to the laws of emotion and move from one family home to the other.
    It was not very probable, though Jacob did not have the bent for drama of an Andreas, nor did Robert believe that his practical sporty wife had the imagination to drive herself to destruction on the wrong side of the Copenhagen motorway. Perhaps she too had her little secrets. Robert brushed ash from his white coat. The windows at the end of the foyer stretched from floor to ceiling, and a long way into the pallid mirror of the linoleum flooring, along the empty ranks of sofas where he dimly glimpsed his white figure and crossed legs. He could be any doctor on night duty, sitting enjoying a fag. What was that, Jacob had said? It probably didn’t have to be one thing or the other. Again he visualised one particular face. It was a long time ago.

T hey had just bought a bigger apartment, where they lived until that winter day three years later when he came home too early. It had actually been somewhat beyond their means. It was large and needed a lot of decorating, but they could not afford to get it done professionally. It was in an old property just outside the city centre, near the harbour. There was a playground in the courtyard where some space had been made. Monica took Lea for a holiday with her parents while he did the painting. He joined them at weekends. Lea was to start in the first class at school after the summer holidays. He had installed himself in what was to be her room, with her mattress, a lamp, the stereo and a selection of tapes. The furniture and crates had been packed into one of the other rooms under plastic sheeting.
    Monica called him every day. She had a bad conscience about lying in the sun while he was left in town slogging away, but in fact he enjoyed being alone. Most of the neighbouring flat dwellers were out travelling, and he could play music as loudly as he liked. He forgot the time, absorbed in the monotonous work while Verdi’s Requiem blew through the empty rooms. Lying on Lea’s mattress in the evenings reading the paper he felt like a nomad who had temporarily pitched camp in a chance spot. The feeling of a state of emergency had a cheering effect on him, and there were moments when he even wished it could go on, this pause between the daily life that had been packed up, and the one that would begin when he had finished painting.
    Sometimes he said jokingly to Monica that when Lea had grown up they could leave the flat to her