Two weeks had passed by the time she went to him, one carefully chosen evening. In the course of those weeks she had thought of nothing else. The fact that he had asked her to drop round to the studio for copies of his early works meant she had the right to seek him out. So as not to seem too eager, she waited for as long as she could bear to.

The door was opened by one of Hugo Rask’s colleagues, wearing paint-spattered work clothes. Ester gave him a long-winded explanation of her visit. She accounted for something nobody was wondering about to hide something nobody could see. When Hugo’s associate finally interpreted her simple request, he told her to wait at the door while he went to get the DVDs. He set off rapidly across the room. Ester had been buoyed up by her yearning for another encounter and the disappointment of missing out on it for such trivial reasons would have been too much for her.

“I was to have a word with him, too,” she announced in an overloud voice, her skin tingling.

There are moments when presence of mind determines the future, freighted instants that are then gone and it is all too late. She had to dare and she had to do it right now. Everything depended on these few seconds. The associate hesitated. As part of the team of assistants, his role was to protect his employer and idol. He probably hoped to become an artist himself one day and had sought out the great man to watch and learn.

He asked her to wait and disappeared into the building and up a flight of stairs.

When he came back he looked smaller. Ester was allowed to step inside.

Upstairs, Hugo Rask was sitting with a friend named Dragan Dragović, known as someone with whom Hugo Rask was prepared to debate the state of the world, someone who influenced his thinking and served as his superego — though of course things that Hugo possibly should not have said and thought came out in uncensored form. Everything they debated, Dragan and Hugo, was global and eternal in its compass. Small, everyday topics were not their concern.

Nor were they Ester Nilsson’s.

Hugo got to his feet and his whole face lit up when he saw her. He embraced her with evident relish and invited her to sit down. Dragan stayed in his seat, one slim leg crossed over the other, and extended a hand in greeting, though not far enough to spare her from having to move toward him. He wore shoes of black leather with a pattern of perforations and was peering through the smoke rising from his cigarette, which made his expression look both superior and indifferent.

“You’re a poet?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Translated?”

“Yes. Not very much. It’s no measure of —”

“What are you trying to achieve in your poetry?”

“To make other people see what I’ve seen.”

Dragan said no more. It was impossible to tell whether her answer had satisfied or dissatisfied him, but in Ester’s judgment the answer had proved better than he was expecting and he did not like the fact.

“It was fabulous, what you did last Saturday,” said Hugo.

He seemed in a flutter by comparison with Dragan’s bad-tempered immobility.

“What was that?” said Ester.

“Your lecture about me.”

She felt the roar of her pounding pulse and looked at Hugo sitting there, big and tall, full of food, drink and years lived. She loved everything she saw, so much that her insides ached.

“I was up in Leksand for the weekend,” he said.

Ester waited for him to continue.

“I’ve a house there. By Lake Siljan.”

There was something peculiar about the statement as if he, too, was accounting for something nobody was wondering about to hide something nobody could see, and Dragan raised one eyebrow accordingly. Ester felt he was talking about Leksand and his house because he wanted to introduce every aspect of himself to her without delay.

She sat on an upright wooden chair but did not take off her down jacket. She had bought it yesterday, when the first cold snap arrived. Her trousers were new as well, dark-blue corduroy; the jacket had matching blue-corduroy detail on the shoulders. It was only when every neurotransmitter in her brain was running in top gear that she could galvanize herself to buy clothes. Otherwise it was far too meaningless an activity, merely stealing time from the self-imposed task of decoding reality and locating language’s most truthful illustration of it. One day she would understand how everything was connected. For now, it came in fragments and pieces.

Hugo Rask nodded appreciatively at the jacket and said how smart it was, not as puffy as other down jackets. She unbuttoned it so as not to get too hot but felt that removing it would be like inviting herself to stay and since that was exactly what she wanted — to stay there forever — she could not take off the jacket.

At that moment she was incapable of perceiving that it would be normal behavior to take off a thick down jacket even if only staying for a short time. Mimicking normality is the hardest thing of all. It has a lack of concern that is impossible to imitate. Exaggerations show up and look like stupidity. But attempts to hide feelings do have the advantage that the observer does not know for sure. Taken to extremes, life is a process of reorientation after shame or glory, and when anxiety sweeps in there is a relief at not having left any definite tracks. Having kept a jacket on, having seemed awkward or nervous, these are not proof in the way utterances are proof. At most they are circumstantial evidence.

Ester Nilsson, who generally dismissed shame and glory because both of them made the individual a slave to the judgments of others, now sat there wondering how much or how little she should take her jacket off to ensure nobody noticed how much she was in love.

They talked about Hugo, his works, his stature and achievements. He asked her a little about herself but she swiftly brought the conversation back to him, referring to a sequence of images he had done of people at a bus stop in the rain, which had recurred over the years.

Why that theme, and why recurring?

Hugo got up, stretched his arms in the air, took a few steps and tore down a note that was stuck to the wall. She saw his body from behind and wanted to rush over and hold it.

“Because it’s beautiful,” he said, crumpling the slip of paper and throwing it into a wastepaper basket.

She felt weak in every joint at seeing these physical movements and at the sensuality that must reside in anyone who sees that people in the rain can be beautiful. Was this not exactly what she had been seeking all her life?

But she had to go home to a man who was waiting for her, a man so afraid of the answer that he no longer asked where she had been and why she had stopped talking to him.