Lucca (23 page)

T
he radio was made of dark wood, shining with varnish, and the subdued light of the lamps was reflected in its rounded corners. The switch buttons were shiny too, yellowish white, and one of them clicked when the girl's hand reached out lazily to push at it with the ends of two fingers. It was a long hand, pale, almost white, but a different, cooler white than the buttons and the smaller press buttons between them, in a row like the flat, rounded teeth in the lower jaw of a herbivore. A coppery light shone from the dark green glass plate around a dull pupil, and Robert could remember how the bright narrow eye had reminded him of the air bubble in a spirit level, blinking just as restlessly as the girl's hand moved the red needle past the names of towns printed in slanting columns. There was a boiling, rushing sound behind the woven panel covering the loudspeaker, and disconnected words and sounds escaped the storm and the close-knit covering, but they did not correspond to the town names, Tallinn, Sofia, Berlin, they were Danish and Swedish voices, there were none from further away although the needle traversed quite different distances, now between Warsaw and Leningrad, now between Vienna, Prague and Budapest.

Apart from a suitcase each for their clothes, the radio and her father's clarinet were all the girl's parents had brought with them after they left their country the year before her birth. Almost twenty years had passed to make it familiar with the new words and sounds, yet Robert thought everything sounded slightly strange, as if heard from the distant city they had left behind them while they were still young. To start with they must have wondered at the sounds produced by their old radio in the new surroundings where they slowly learned to speak again and like their small daughter
mixed up the words from their old language and the new one.

The green pupil stopped flickering, apparently its eye had settled on something. The white hand let go of the button, the red needle stopped midway between Belgrade and Trieste, and a different kind of crackle sounded through the panel, the breakers from a hall full of clapping hands. That too subsided, silence followed and the first notes sounded in a breaking wave of gathered, released and re-accumulated power, Brahms's third symphony. A sea of clanging tones from instruments that Robert felt flowed together, so he could not distinguish one from another, possibly because the varnished wooden box was too small for all that music, the wooden frame creaked like an old dinghy, but no doubt also because he had only just started to distinguish the surface ripples of music from its under-current.

He was seventeen, she was almost two years older, the girl in the armchair watching the snowflakes in the violet light from the street lamp as if in a trance. From the beginning he had marvelled at her eyes, so far apart. She had pulled her legs up under her in a mermaid pose, and the space between her eyes made her face seem open, but her gaze was remote as she sat opposite him listening to Brahms. Her cheekbones were broad, her hair brown, and the side parting made it fall over one eye. At intervals she pushed it behind her ear with a weary hand.

She wore flesh-coloured nylon stockings, she was the only girl he knew who had that kind, old-fashioned look, just like the armchair she sat on. Everything in the apartment was bleak and shabby, and he had had to remind himself several times that it was only the radio her parents had brought with them and not the other furnishings. When he went to see her in the quiet street with its pompous tenements from the turn of the century, it was almost like visiting her in the distant town they had been obliged to leave. The apartment looked like those he imagined belonged to people in her parents' home town, and the father had not changed anything in the twenty years that had passed, even after the girl's mother left them and went back. She had never settled down
in the foreign, western city. They had not fled because of her.

The girl had only told him snatches of the story, which he had to piece together himself, at intervals. When her mother decided to go home the idea had been for her daughter to join her later. Robert didn't understand how the mother could have left without her, she was only six at the time. But the child stayed with her father, and although it was pure guesswork, Robert had the feeling that a promise had been broken. Something in their silence confirmed his assumption. A year or two later they heard the mother had died. She had been ill, the girl had told him, without explaining the cause, and Robert had the impression that it was not the name of the disease she kept to herself. Her silence seemed rather a pact which she and the bald man with horn-rimmed glasses had made, whether it was a secret they guarded, or the mother's death itself they shielded each other against. There were no pictures of her in the apartment, only some of the girl at various stages of her growth, in silver frames with a leather flap behind so they could stand up on the sideboard. It looked as if the man with horn-rimmed spectacles and his deceased wife had managed to have a whole crowd of children.

Now she sat like a mermaid in flesh-coloured nylons looking into the darkness through the veil of snowflakes. Behind the yellowed panelling her father played his clarinet with its shining silver keys. They could not hear him, they just knew he was there, in evening dress, like an inseparable part of the music, a foaming whirl in its breaking wave. Robert had seen his evening suit hanging on the dining-room door. She brushed it for him before he put it on and straightened the white tie, as he impatiently squirmed at her care, perhaps embarrassed to let Robert see his daughter in the role of deputy for a solicitous wife. She was a head taller than her father, but he was a small man, anyway.

Robert had been embarrassed himself when her father opened the front door for the first time in a smoking jacket and checked slippers. The man gave him a suspicious look through his thick spectacles. Although he felt slightly guilty Robert couldn't help
comparing his stumpy figure with the dismal interior, moss-green and brown, with heavy wine-coloured curtains and table centres askew and antimacassars on the backs of the armchairs. There was no television, only the old radio. He felt like a guest in another time, but he corrected himself later. It was not another time but another world. The girl had been embarrassed too, the first time he sat at the table under the chandelier with unshaded bulbs. She served while her father questioned him in his tortuous accent. She was embarrassed, Robert could see, at having so much of her life suddenly laid bare in the garish glare of the chandelier. She had been embarrassed because her father received him in slippers. She said it in their own language, but Robert guessed what she said. When they sat down to dinner her father had changed his shoes for a pair of black ones. Surprisingly small shoes, impeccably polished and shining.

Ana was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. Later on Robert asked himself if she had really been so beautiful, but in vain, his scepticism failed when he brushed her face clear of oblivion. Nor could he set her young face against a middle-aged woman's to compare them and observe the results of time's revenge on the innocent arrogance of any young beauty. For all he knew, age had made her still more beautiful, but he could not be sure. He had not seen her since she graduated. But she had certainly been arrogant, and her haughty manner, with her unfashionable blouses and skirts, made her still more unusual.

At that time most of their contemporaries, boys as well as girls, had started wearing hand-made shoes, flared corduroy trousers and blue Chinese denim shirts. Clumping footwear and denim shirts had even sneaked into the sixth form college they attended, where she was a year ahead of him. It was a private school with a glorious past, teachers in ties and sea-green walls. The spherical lamps and plaster cast of a Greek hero in the vestibule, the nationalistic sentiments and the smell of wax polish held sway while the world outside grew ever more rebellious and shoddy. By an unpredictable coincidence Ana, with her old-fashioned, well-brought-up air, was better suited
than many other pupils to the school's atmosphere of discipline and good manners.

Seen from the street the heavy red-brick façade with its deep window recesses resembled a fortress intended to shield and sound-proof the classrooms from the subversive slogans blaring from megaphones and fluttering from banners above the processions of protesters marching past outside. Robert had bought himself a pair of sloppy shoes and a blue denim shirt and had just finished reading Chairman Mao's selected works. He had not only read them as an antidote to the head's admonitions at morning assembly, he had also, it later occurred to him, made himself familiar with the chairman's ideas in unconscious solidarity with his mother, who slaved in a factory canteen until her hands were rough and cracked. In contrast to the mothers of his school friends whose hands were smooth, cared-for and indolent when they were stretched out to bid the polite plebeian boy into their warmth.

She smiled at him absently, his hard-working mother, when he tried, over the rissoles or fried plaice fillets, to make her understand why the dictatorship of the proletariat was inevitable, or talked about The Long March as if he had walked the whole way himself. She was too tired to follow his train of thought, her feet hurt, and when he made the coffee she was already ensconced on the sofa with Dostoievski or Flaubert. Once he made an attempt at Ana's dinner table. He depicted the liberation of intellectual resources in the classless society and did not notice until it was too late that she cleared her throat and tried to catch his eye, as the clarinettist just looked at him out of his horn-rimmed spectacles. The thick lenses made his eyes seem smaller, simultaneously defenceless and resigned, as they regarded the young man sitting there eagerly proclaiming. He seemed to be looking at him from some far-off place. Later, when his revolutionary fervour had burned itself out, he always saw that distant look behind the clarinettist's spectacles when the conversation centred on class war.

For a long time he had watched Ana's serious face during morning assembly or going up or downstairs past the dusty
plaster hero. He thought about her when he lay awake at night. She was often by herself, which made things more difficult for him, because her solitude increased her air of inviolable aloofness. He did not know how to approach her, nor what he would hit on to say. She did not seem to notice him. To her, no doubt, he was merely an overgrown child.

It was Ana who spoke first, one day after school. She caught him up on the pavement and passed him a newspaper. He had dropped it. It was a Trotskyist pamphlet with a red star in the heading. He had walked along with the red star sticking out of his pocket, for the effect. She held it out in front of her between two fingers and he asked if she was afraid it was infectious. It flew out of him, to his own astonishment. Maybe it was to compensate for all the times he had followed her at a distance and thought about her when he was alone, without her knowledge. She smiled. He had never seen her smile before.

They took walks together after school, in the parks, and she lent him books, mostly poetry. She wanted to know what he thought of them. Gradually the poetry collections replaced the subversive material on his shelves, not because he had suddenly exchanged his revolutionary world view for a lyrical one but because he was interested in everything that could tell him something more about her and bring them into closer contact. If she had guessed he was in love with her she made no sign, nor did she apparently notice how others gossiped about the odd couple they made, the fiery agitator and the eastern European loner from their respective forms. He only pretended to be bothered by the gossip. It was to be the two of them against the rest of the world.

She looked at him attentively when he dutifully explained what he had got out of reading some poet or other. He felt stupid, he wanted to kiss her, he suffered and rejoiced at the same time when they sat on a park bench watching the swans and talking about life. She drew him into a serious, intense atmosphere where the shadows were darker and the colours glowed more deeply. If Robert thought he was a fierce social critic, in Ana he found a still more implacable and uncompromising spirit. On the whole,
everything that issued from the radio and the television or was shown on cinema screens, in Ana's opinion was just pop. She could not have hit on a more derogatory expression, and when she pronounced the word she wrinkled her nose which creased the skin around her nose and nostrils into little folds, making her look like a fastidious rabbit.

It looked sweet and Robert couldn't wait for her to say the word. He provoked her to utter it by talking about films he knew she would hate. But she did not think, like Robert, that everything labelled pop betokened false consciousness, capitalist society's calculated method of brain-washing the working class and preventing it from developing a necessary class consciousness. Deep down she felt the populace was pop-minded, and she tacitly let him understand that she herself belonged to a persecuted but superior elite of intellectual aristocrats, of
artistic
people, as she said. That was her favourite word and it signified the absolute opposite of pop. It brought them to the verge of quarrelling, but it was obvious that she enjoyed their discussions, and while he argued in favour of the proletarian view, secretly he dreamed of getting a place in the select circles of artistic people, preferably a place beside hers.

She began to invite him home. He took it as a promising sign, but nothing happened. They sat in the living room, never in her room, sometimes her father was with them. They drank tea. Robert had not imagined there could be people who sat drinking tea in the afternoon like that, talking of poets or composers, as if the world revolution was not smouldering just round the corner, ready to burst into flames any day. He sat there in his denim shirt listening to records with Ana and her father, different recordings of the same pieces, and the father conducted with both hands as the music played. He gave a commentary on how various conductors interpreted the same score. That was how Robert became captured by music, like a detour to Ana, to the moment he was waiting for. He continued to love the great symphonies long after his love for her had died out along with his faith in the permanent revolution. The works of Brahms and Mahler were the inadvertent remains she left behind her when she vanished
from his life, but at least that was something. Trotsky left no more in his memory than the unsuccessful attempt to picture what it must be like to have an ice pick in the head.