6

It was cold and windy the day after my arrival. The air was clear between the square grey buildings that cut their way into the uniform blue surface of the sky, themselves cut through by the sharply outlined shadows of other buildings and the water tanks on the flat roofs. In the afternoon I went for a walk in the side-streets of old warehouses between Greenwich Street and the Hudson. There was nobody to be seen, only the endless stream of cars on West Side Highway, beside the river. The neglected industrial façades reminded me of Edward Hopper’s towns. A few hours earlier I had been in the Whitney Museum in front of one of his solitary women. She sits in a room with pale green walls, she has sat down on the edge of the bed. She looks out of the window at the water tanks of sooty wood similar to those on the roofs above my head, between the grey and dark red walls’ faded, peeling names painted in capital letters. She is blonde, she is still young, and she sits looking out of the open window in the pale sunlight falling in on her equally pale face, torso and thighs. Her face is expressionless and her body is presented without the slightest suspicion of desire, almost a little clumsy, as Hopper painted them, a little stiff in the joints, which only serves to strengthen the immobility of the picture, the impression of a long moment’s completely unmoving stance in the flight of minutes and hours. I might say her gaze is absent, but at the same time it is fully and completely there, resting on the edged outline of the buildings and the conical zinc roofs of the round water tanks or perhaps on a distant point between them, outside the picture, at the end of the view from the window where an invisible barrier prevents her calm gaze from reaching further. There it stops while she sits on, perfectly still, halted in a pause on her way through the day, where nothing is to happen, where she is alone, where there is nothing to say nor anyone to say anything to. Perhaps she is listening to the deep note of the distant traffic, perhaps she hears neither the muffled noise of the cars nor the horns and occasional shouts that probably reach her through the open window. She looks neither particularly unhappy nor the opposite, she just sits on the bed in the silent, pale green room, in the transilluminated silence of the picture which is also her silence, the silence of her body and her thoughts. She may have fallen into a reverie, as if she has fallen out of time, alone with herself, but no longer than is quite ordinary and unremarkable. In a little while she will get up from the bed and dress and go out into the day, out into town and on through life, but not yet, not just now. She will sit on for a little while and allow her thoughts to open out and widen and extend, until they can no longer be thought. It is not that the world is empty. The world is full of houses and things, and emptiness is just the arbitrary yet necessary distance between houses and things. The special thing in such a pause in the day’s course is not emptiness. What makes her sit on, what makes me stay in front of her, is not that the pause is empty, neither are the pale green walls empty, or the sky in the window above the roofs. They are there, we know, the walls and the sky, they just happen to be there. What for a moment makes us hold our breath, she on her bed, I in a gallery at the Whitney Museum, is rather the totally banal, but still only in the pauses, and only slowly dawning, observation, that the houses and the things and the bodies and the light and shadows look as they do. That the world is what is present, at any time, at any place. That there is nothing more to it.

I walked along the wide pavement beside the Hudson in the direction of the World Trade Center. Runners in jogging gear overtook me at regular intervals or came towards me, breathing hard and red in the face. On the left cars streamed towards me on their way up to Holland Tunnel, a ceaseless river of lacquered sheet metal, like a noisy, moving reflection of the river on my right side, peaceful, grey-blue and very wide at this point. On the other side of the river I could see the Colgate clock, an enormous white face that seemed to float on the water, quite small at a distance, rather the size of a watch face. It was about four o’ clock, so it was ten at night in Copenhagen and nine in Portugal. I did not know then that at that point Astrid had arrived in Oporto, she might have been in her room at the Infante de Sagres or walking beside the dark river and under the steel bridge towards the Cais da Ribeira, as I went on down Chambers Street and turned up by West Broadway back to Soho. The bank statement showed she paid her hotel bill with her Mastercard the next day and continued on south. It was not like her to choose the most expensive hotel in town, but we had stayed there together seven years before. Perhaps that was why, perhaps it was because she had driven from Santiago de Compostela to Oporto in one stretch and needed a comfortable night. The statement helps me not only to reconstruct her movements, I also use it to remember what I was doing myself at the same time, constantly subtracting five hours or adding them. We were displaced in our relative movements, each in our own time zone, our own continent, both of us far from the town where we had lived together. Later that afternoon I was in the cinema on the corner of West Houston and Mercer Street, for some reason I still have the ticket. I did not attend to the film, but it suited me well to sit in the dark and watch faces and places succeed each other. As long as the film lasted I did not need to walk restlessly through street after street without knowing what to do with myself. As I sat in the darkness of the cinema she may have been sitting on her five-star bed looking out of the open window, out into the tree tops of Filipa de Lencastre. I can’t remember if they were planes or fig trees. I expect she had a bath before going out to eat. She came out of the bathroom in the hotel bath-robe, with a towel tied like a turban around her wet hair. She opened the window and lit a cigarette and sat on the edge of the bed in front of the view of the square, motionless with fatigue. She listened to the invisible cars and the voices of the invisible people down in the square, while her gaze sank into the darkness among the dark green, dry leaves of the trees, faintly illuminated from below by the street lamps. She sat on there for a while, with her arms stretched out behind her and her palms resting on the bedspread, as the glow ate its way through the cigarette between her lips. Perhaps. It is just something I imagine, but perhaps she knew I would try to visualise her in the places we once visited together. Perhaps it was on purpose and not only for convenience that she used her Mastercard all the way to Lisbon instead of cashing money on the way. Perhaps she did not merely want to show me she was taking the same route we had followed seven years before. Perhaps she also wanted me to see those places again and visualise her alone in those places, where we had been together. As if something particular had happened on that journey, something decisive. As if en route, without noticing, we had passed a decisive point.

It had rained the whole way to Santiago de Compostela. I have a picture of Astrid standing on the square in front of the cathedral lifting her face to the drizzle. The lacy Gothic of the granite façade seemed to dissolve in the fine rain, flickering like a distorted vision in the white light, and in my memory it is as if the denticulation and her features touch each other through the rain. I put her wet shoes on the radiator in the hotel room and held her chilly feet in my hands until she fell asleep. The next day we crossed the Rio Minho on a small ferry rather like a barge, and continued southwards through the desolate mountains. We could drive for a long time without saying anything. Sometimes she would point through the side window because she had glimpsed an eagle high above or a distant house washed pale blue so it had the same colour as the sky. Now and then one of us switched on the radio and hopped forwards and backwards between channels, but the signal was poor because of the mountains and the music constantly faded into scratching sounds. There was hardly any traffic on the mountain roads. We were far away. At home we were not used to spending so many hours at a time together. We parted in the morning and met again in the evening, and when we were together the children were generally around. It was an unaccustomed feeling to sit motionless beside each other for hours as the mountainsides opened and closed before us in time with the bends of the road. At home we always had something or other to do, either trivial or interesting, in the car there was nothing to be done except to go on, all the time on the way to the next town. As we drove through Trás-os-Montes, I thought yet again how fast the years had gone since the winter she moved into my flat and broke my solitude. The years were like a train in the night that goes so fast that the lighted windows flow together with the speed and you see nothing. I thought about how much of our time had been taken up with doing the same things every day, as the months passed and the children grew and we talked about all that happened. In the evening, when everything had been done and the apartment was quiet and we lay down beside each other, it was sometimes like meeting again after a long separation. Slightly hesitant, slightly fumbling now and then, like seeing each other again after a while and having to search a little before you can take up the thread. Had she been happy? Like myself, she must have been too busy to even ask, happily occupied with everything but herself. Like myself, she was immersed in her work, like myself she let herself be whirled around by the roundabout of family life, so the surroundings faded into a swarm of lights and colours.

Distances grew longer between the villages in Trás-os-Montes, and pauses when neither of us said anything grew longer, until she looked at me again and smiled with her narrow eyes, as if everything was as it had always been. I can remember pulling in to the side because she needed a pee, at a place where the road made a curve through the round, grass-covered mountains. I stayed in the car while she walked in among the mossy projecting rocks and withered grass and the prickly evergreen bushes. She vanished from sight when she squatted down, as if she had been swallowed by the naked knobbly landscape with its meagre growth of brown, grey, grey-green and rust-red under the pale sky. It was perfectly still. There was only the sound of my seat creaking slightly under me, the wind in the grasses and the distant trickling sound from the place where she had disappeared. Perhaps it didn’t matter, my being unable to think of anything to say to her. Words had never been what bound us together. They had merely been the sound of our story when we talked of everything under the sun on our way through the years. We hadn’t needed so many words, we seemed to understand each other without them. A look, a gesture, a sigh or a smile was enough. The story told itself. But at some point I must have lost sight of her, even though she was there the whole time. Because she was always there, and because she was so close. As when she kissed me and her face widened out so I could not make out its outline or proportions and saw only her blurred skin and huge eyes. I had not seen her for a long time. That’s how I was thinking when half a minute later she appeared in the landscape again, as if out of nowhere, and came towards the car through the dry grass. She screwed up her eyes against the sun as she looked down into the shadowed valley behind the thin transparent mist. Her shadow went winding, long and without joints, across the shining grass blades as she walked, as if it lived its own life beside hers. It was an interval in the story, this journey, not a continuation, and we moved through that interval, among the bare, monotonous mountains, without having the story to tell us where we were going. That’s what I was thinking as she came towards the car, while she looked around her one last time, still alone for a moment in the unmoving landscape. That was why I did not know what to say.

When I came home from New York the second time and was waiting for my suitcase among the other passengers at baggage reclaim, I caught sight of her behind the glass fronting the arrival hall. She had not seen me yet. She stood among the others waiting there, neck stretched, with her arms crossed, fidgeting with the car keys as if they were pearls in a rosary, a little impatiently, a little anxiously, as if doubting for a moment whether I had been on the plane. For another few seconds I was only a passenger among others who stood waiting for their particular suitcase to come in sight on the conveyor belt. Then she smiled and waved, and I waved back, from one moment to the next her husband again, hers among all the men in the world. In the seconds as she stood peering through the glass wall, not knowing I was observing her, she was still the woman I had left. The next moment, when her expressionless face broke into a smile, she became the woman I had returned to in order to continue where we had left off, where I had let go of her. A week or two earlier, in the middle of September, I had been in a plane again on the way to New York. I sat looking out at the empty sky above the clouds, wondering as usual what Astrid and the children were doing. No doubt they had already eaten, Rosa would be putting plates in the dishwasher, Simon would be in the living room, completely lost in an opium den in Shanghai with red dragons on the walls where at this moment Tintin stuck his head out of a Chinese vase as tall as a man. Later on Astrid would read another chapter aloud from Huckleberry Finn, maybe one of the chapters about the nights on the great river, about the flickering lights on the shore and the voices rolling across the water to Huck and Jim where they sit on the timber raft smoking a pipe as they drift with the current. She would kiss them goodnight, put out the lights in their rooms and sit down in front of the television’s brief, leaping flakes of everything that was happening at the same time in another place, and if she had not drawn the curtains, she would be able to see herself, in one of the window panes, far away in the darkness, a diffuse, blurred and transparent figure on the sofa, her face merely a yellow patch in the lamplight, with dark shadows where her eyes were. She might light a cigarette and look through the blue-grey swirls of smoke past the screen’s changing, synthetic colour combinations into the darkness behind her reflection, knowing nothing of the cat which rose at the same moment and stretched in the ray of sunlight on the floor beneath a window in the East Village, before running out into the corridor where a tall young woman in her late twenties was coming in through the front door with a brown paper bag full of foodstuffs in her arms and, with the cat at her heels, walked through the apartment, switched on the telephone answering machine and listened to my voice announcing that I would land the same evening soon after eleven.

In the spring I had spent a month and a half in New York to work on my collection of essays on post-war American painters. I stayed in Brooklyn Heights with an acquaintance of my father, a Lebanese cardiac surgeon whose wife had died the previous year. He was at the hospital or with a woman friend on Long Island most of the time, and I had the house pretty well to myself. When I was not in my room watching the grey squirrels in the trees in front of the gloomy and very aristocratic terrace house, I took a train from the station in Clark Street to Manhattan to spend the morning in the archives of the museums and university libraries. They were peaceable, uniform days, and I was happy in my solitude, completely absorbed in my book, which slowly but surely began to take shape. Of course I missed Astrid and the children when I sat eating my lonely pizza in the evenings surrounded by the high oak panels of the cardiac surgeon’s opulent dining room, but not as much as I had expected. The artists of the New York School filled my horizon and ousted Astrid, Simon and Rosa from my field of vision. There was an ocean between us, and in their absence ideas came to me and arranged themselves continuously in one undisturbed, unbroken movement, as ideas do when you begin to write at the proper moment. My friend the museum curator had given me various telephone numbers of people he thought I might like to meet, among them an art dealer who had known both Rothko and Pollock, a distinguished critic and a young Danish artist who had moved to New York after leaving the academy. Very talented, he had said with a little smile and a sly glance behind his steel-rimmed spectacles. But I felt like contacting neither the art dealer nor the critic, either because of my usual shyness and fear of seeming pushy, or because I was getting on so well with pursuing my own ideas that the interpretations and views of others would only have been a disturbance. And as for his talented young painter, his sly recommendation left me only with a vaguely insulted feeling that he was trying to lure me out onto thin ice with one of his discarded conquests from the academy, one of those ambitious and well-equipped fallow deer in overalls adorned with decorative paint spots he romped around with behind his wife’s back. As if he wanted to put me to the test in the hope of proving I was not a mite better than he was. Besides, it was of course American and not Danish art I had flown the Atlantic to write about, and moreover I had come precisely to write, so all in all I could see no reason to seek diversion from my comfortable hermit existence in Brooklyn Heights.

One afternoon I was sitting smoking in the sculpture garden behind the Museum of Modern Art, contemplating the moving reflections of clouds and skyscrapers in the low ornamental pools. I had spent several hours on the collections, guided through the store rooms by an assistant who stood at a respectful distance and looked on as I made notes about some of the pictures I wanted to refer to in my book. As I sat glancing at people and listening to snatches of their conversation, I asked myself what exactly it was in the New York School of painters that was so important to discuss, so many years after their lucent painting had in turn been succeeded by pop art, minimalism and conceptual art in every possible aspect. Wasn’t there something naive and unfashionably romantic in their pathos, their existential notion of the intensity of brush strokes, the strictly personal expression? Hadn’t the world become too self-conscious and ironic in the meantime? Was there any sense any longer in tending the individual and authentic that could not be exchanged or reduced, in a world where everyone drove the same Japanese cars as they played merrily and without commitment with the cultural masks of identity, as if it were fancy-dress time all the year round? I could easily find reasons for smiling wryly at the puritanical conceit of the American painters of the Forties and Fifties, when you listened to Charlie Parker with the same gravity as when you heard Stockhausen, and strutted around Greenwich Village in black polo-neck sweaters with a dog-eared paperback edition of Camus or Sartre in your back pocket. But I had kept going back to their pictures when I grew tired of the ironic airs or dry theorising of more current art. Where Andy Warhol’s sham anonymous cans of soup already seemed outmoded, long past their sell-by date, Jackson Pollock’s and Mark Rothko’s, Franz Kline’s and Clyfford Still’s canvases were still the same. They were the same kind of hermetic fields of paint unfolding themselves in a mediation between the hand and the eye, without the intervention of language or interpretation, a pure and autonomous presence of colours and contours. These canvases were what they were with an integrity that could still move me. You need not know anything to look at them, they could hang anywhere because they did not require an art institution or tradition as a background for ironic or theoretical games of meaning and meaninglessness. I loved looking at them. When I stood before them again I felt that their absolute presence, devoid of references, demanded my own presence, a concentration without thought, resting in the centre of the eye’s gravity, precisely here, exactly now.

I enjoyed sitting lazily and apathetically in the garden’s niche of purling water and lowered voices between the enormous buildings and the restless, crosswise humming of the right-angled streets. I felt a desire to stay as long as possible before getting swallowed up in the traffic outside again, but perhaps too, for the first time in days, I felt like being surrounded by people without having to keep moving the whole time. It suited me well to sit there, a stranger among strangers, at rest among the skyscrapers for a quarter or half an hour in scaled-down alertness. It seemed almost like relaxing one’s guard to sit like that, slackening the rope of one’s watchfulness, dropping off with closed eyes in the middle of Manhattan. At one point, when I opened my eyes after a short nap I caught sight of a woman who had sat down opposite me on the other side of the pool. She could have been in her mid-twenties, perhaps thirty, she had fair, short hair with a side parting, and she was wearing a black tailored suit, and dark sunglasses making her face and the triangle of bare skin in the neck of the jacket seem even paler. Sunglasses were in fact not strictly necessary, since the sun did not reach down into this crevice between the tall buildings, and the dark glass could only make it harder for her to read the book she held up in front of her, unmoving, with crossed legs. Pale and interesting, I thought, but I couldn’t help looking at her, especially not after I had managed to make out the letters on the book jacket. It was The Fall of the King by Johannes V. Jensen, in Danish. I hadn’t read it since school, and the only thing I remembered clearly was the scene where a horse is slaughtered on a snow-covered field, in which the author, with graphic precision, describes the red, violet and brownish innards twisted about in the snow. As I looked at her, my mind’s eye pictured a strange, both beautiful and cruel connection between the sobriety of the brutal image and her discreet, androgynous elegance. I smiled at myself, but all the same I went on playing with the idea that this might be one of those absurd coincidences you are always hearing about and that the elegant young woman might be identical to the talented artist whose name and telephone number the curator had jotted down as he sent me a sly glance. In which case his slyness had been justified, considering how uninhibitedly I was devouring her with my eyes. Ashamed, I buried myself in my notes on Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman and wrote down a couple of supplementary comments with steely earnestness, and when I looked up again, a Hassidic Jew sat smoking a cigar on the chair where the reading beauty had been.

I forgot her in the train back to Brooklyn, engaged in observing the groups of motionless exhausted faces carefully avoiding each other’s eyes in the overfilled compartment, each on their separate way somewhere, and when I happened to look anyone in the eye by mistake I immediately directed my gaze at a fictive point outside the window, where the grey walls of the tunnel rushed past. I did not think of her again until I had written out the notes of the day and sat looking at the grey squirrels in the trees in front of the Lebanese heart surgeon’s house. They moved at the same speed and with the same jumping wave-like movements as the green curves on a screen registering heartbeats. The image of the beautiful stranger was very clear to me, her regular features made even more expressionless and motionless by the sunglasses, her bare skin in the otherwise modest V-neck of her jacket. However naive it might be I could not relinquish the idea of the totally improbable fluke, that I might perhaps have been sitting opposite the curator’s talented lady friend in the afternoon in the sculpture garden. As if in this city of all cities it would be particularly unusual to come across a young woman who understood Danish, for instance, because she was a Dane. It annoyed me to be wasting time on such a futile whim, and I told myself it was just another example of the kind of rubbish that builds up in your head as you go through the day. Of course I had noticed her only because I was alone in a strange city. Could it really be anything else? I looked at my watch, it was six o’ clock. It was midnight at home, Astrid must have gone to bed by now. Perhaps she was lying there thinking of what I might be doing, perhaps she had already fallen asleep. Our lack of synchronism suddenly made me sad, as if it was not only the ocean and the time zones that separated us. I had never been unfaithful to her, and though the idea had now and then tempted me, when a beautiful unknown woman looked at me with an appreciative glance, it had only been in the form of diffuse and fleeting fantasies. The idea of making a pass at a strange woman seemed humiliating. Should I stand with my hat or my cock in my hand soliciting a little adventure? Besides, I would never be able to manage the smoke screen of feints, white lies and strategic suppression of facts that I would be obliged to spread around me in order to meet my fairy-tale princess in secret. But the practical problems of infidelity were not the only things that terrified me. If I deceived Astrid and lied to her, if there was something in my life that she must not know, I would not only reduce her to less than she was, I would also diminish myself until I was nothing but a miserable calculating gnome. That was my reasoning when on rare occasions I was distracted by some woman’s luxurious legs or dreaming eyes, but months could pass where the idea of a digression did not so much as cross my mind. When Astrid teasingly told me that some woman or other had glanced at me with interest, as a rule I had not myself noticed. I didn’t really believe her and took it as a good sign that she actually had to tell me about my inadvertent success with the ladies. If she said something like this at all, it must be because she couldn’t dream of being jealous, and that, of course, was because she had no reason to be.

Was I not happy, perhaps? As I watched the nervy grey squirrels cavorting around in the tree tops out on Orange Street, I recalled the afternoon in Paris some years earlier, when Inès had put the same question to me. The word had seemed so inadequate and at the same time so inquisitorial, ‘happy’, as if by being expressed in the form of a question it already held a silent accusation, because I was not sitting there in the café on the Place de l’Alma overflowing with happiness like an ecstatic porker. It was the kind of question you asked when you were young, because you still had only the words to brace yourself with, all those words you adjured yourself and the world with because you hadn’t yet formed the world and it hadn’t marked your shining, hopeful mug. The fact that Inès had had to ask that question at all must have been because she had neglected to part from her youth and let go of herself. The years had gone by for her just as they had gone by for me, but she obviously still clung to the idea that every possibility was open, even those she had rejected. If she had really believed, even for a moment, that she could make me forget my wife and children and throw myself into her arms just because she happened to turn up one afternoon in the Palais de Tokyo, out of the blue, it could only mean that she had learned nothing. I had sensed the futility beneath her off-hand account of her improvised and uncommitted Parisian life, free as a bird and insidiously lonely. She was still only responsible for her own pretty arse, and even the most passing fluctuations of her mood shadowed, as they always had done, events in the world outside her closed blinds. She was just as intense and quivering as in the past, but the intensity had acquired a slightly mannered touch. She still subscribed to the overwrought idea of ‘living in the present’ and so she had come to a halt. She clung to her precious freedom like a small saver who studies his savings book, shiny with age, every evening. As she gradually grew older she would change into one of the grey subscribers to great and passionate love, sitting on a bench in the shade in a straw hat with her summer coat buttoned up to her chin, gazing after the young couples in love and envying them their enamoured ignorance.

I knew very well I was being unfair. Hadn’t Inès said she would like to have a child? Hadn’t she merely been unlucky? Why couldn’t I just accept that I had escaped unharmed from the most painful defeat of my youth, whereas she regretted, when it was too late, what she had thrown away? Was I nursing an old grievance? Would it have been too ironic if it should suddenly turn out to have been she who had suffered most? Had I been afraid that my old feelings for Inès had merely been in hibernation when I directed my hopes at Astrid’s new, unknown face? Probably it was all of no consequence now. The only thing my reunion with Inès had left me with was her simple and at the same time all-encompassing question in the café on the Place de l’Alma. It was not the recollection of Inès that brought me to think of her question, it was much worse. It was the recollection of a totally strange blonde in a black suit, with whom I had not exchanged a single word and had gazed at for less than a minute all told. She looked like one of the indolent beauties in Astrid’s French fashion magazines, and then she might well be a formidable girl from Ikast with both feet on the ground, and The Fall of the King was merely one of her accessories on a par with the very filmic and mysterious sunglasses. I felt a complete fool as I sat glowering at the innocent, frolicsome squirrels, a fool in my own eyes. Was it possible I had not been happy? Possible, yes. It was so long ago since I had last considered the question, and anyway now I was on my own. I couldn’t reach out to Astrid and test my feelings. But if I wasn’t happy, what then was I? Not the opposite, at least. Perhaps neither. Was that the secret behind my immoderate irritation at the naivety of the question? That I was neither cold nor hot, but lukewarm, and so spat the question out of my mouth instead of answering? Had Inès reminded me of something that afternoon in Paris, something I preferred to forget, or something I had actually forgotten?

It was not so much my old unhappy love she had reminded me of, it was rather the way I had loved her, wildly and ravenously, without restraint, totally exposed and defenceless. Afterwards I had explained to myself it was bound to have gone wrong with Inès and I could not reproach her for having protected herself against my reckless passion. No one could stand being loved like that, and if she had allowed me to I would certainly have loved her to bits and pieces. It had been an immature, self-absorbed love, I told myself. It had not been Inès at all I had loved but my own besotted image of her, a gilded icon that shone mysteriously in my waking dreams. No one was so mysteriously and utterly wonderful. My fanatical adoration was almost insulting because she would never have had a chance of living up to my exaggerated notions about her. And of course she herself had sensed that, which was why she had decided to hasten the time when she had to disappoint me. But why then had she taken my hand in the café on the Place de l’Alma? Why had she reached out to me in such a transparent manner, when I had suddenly turned up again as if dropped from heaven, seven years after she had made off through the snow? Because it was not at all so marvellous to be free and without obligations in a one-room flat in Belleville? Perhaps not only that. Perhaps she had reached out to me without any ulterior motive, merely to touch for a moment the memory of a dream that was too beautiful to be forgotten. It was obvious that my young passion had been an infatuation, that she had never been what I wanted to make her. But all the same she had kept the naïve, faded image of this unknown illusory woman I had invented, she had not been able to relinquish that. Perhaps my illusions about Inès were like those on early Renaissance altar pieces, by Giotto and Cimabue, their chaste visions of the blessed virgin with the pure, defenceless eyes and ivory white cheeks in the Uffizi, the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum, like pieces of wreckage from cancelled time. The cruel princes of the Italian city states were dead, their victims and the victims’ bereaved were dead, their sufferings forgotten and the machinations of power accounted for and relegated to the archives. Only the dreams remained, weightless hallucinations of that foul and bloody life, painted with fine brushes and preserved as a greeting from the dead to an unknown future. Perhaps not even a prayer to be remembered but rather a recollection of interior movements which had disengaged themselves from the flesh of the dead long since turned to dust. The recollection of an imploring glance that had painted the world more beautiful than it was simply to be able to endure it. My besotted fantasies about Inès were very far from the truth of who she was. But they might have been very close to the truth about the person she would have liked to be.

I myself had become the person I was while I had been living with Astrid. The mature, responsible father and husband she occasionally teased about other women who desired him behind his back. As the years passed and he gradually took shape I had no wish to be anyone else. I no longer felt the distance between inside and outside that had made me so melancholy after I had left my self-imposed exile in the ruin and returned to my suburban youth, in which my mother came and went en route between her changing roles and changing lovers. That gap between my interior world and the world outside which I had believed I could cross with my love for Inès, and which had merely opened wider when I reached out for her with my impatient hands. One day I suddenly found myself on the other side of the gap, and I hardly knew how I had crossed it. I had become the man who was married to Astrid, father to both our daughter and her half-brother. Our life together filled me to the brim with all the everyday repetitions and the repeated moments of sudden lightness when I discovered I had forgotten myself, one with the continuous movement that whirled us through the easily flowing, foaming current of days. And the part of me that was not engrossed and pervaded with everything I did with Astrid and the children, was correspondingly absorbed in my scribbling, so there wasn’t a single crack between the two, only the swift unnoticeable transitions which gave me the feeling that my life was unfurling like one continuing gesture. Yes, I was happy, and not least because I just didn’t have the time to ask myself such an odd question. I was happy, but I didn’t dream that Astrid and I would merge into one single four-legged creature of joy. We were two and we went on being two who parted in the morning and met again in the evening in a continuous rhythm of departure and reunion. I was happy, but my happiness was not to be fulfilled in selected scenes, weighty with all the significance I attributed to them. It was not the recollection or expectation of a rapt present, in which Astrid and I were united in the absolutely right light, and in which we ourselves and everything that involved us melted together in one glowing moment of mutual passion. My happiness was not so theatrical, it was more patient, more discreet. It was a joy that could stand daylight, and it didn’t matter if it was a little stained, or slightly creased. It was the movement and direction of the current, not the fleeting ripples and reflections on the surface, it was that which carried us on, we only had to keep afloat, and so we never asked each other where we were actually going. It would have been meaningless to ask. We didn’t have to go anywhere, only further on together, from day to day through the years that came, like nomads who make their home in a different place each night and yet, as soon as they have pitched their tent, can say they are at home again. Only occasionally at night, at intervals of months, I lay in the dark beside the sleeping Astrid and asked myself how it had actually happened that I came to accompany her and whether I really had not left anything at all of myself behind en route. Whether he was all I was in the whole world, and whether he might just as well have been another, this man lying here, who early in the morning Astrid would regard tenderly and sleepily while she waited for him to wake up and emerge once again in her eyes, as he stretched out his hand to her cheek, warm and slightly swollen with sleep. Alone in the dark room beside her invisible sleeping body, in the minutes before my consciousness wrapped itself up in itself and rolled over the edge, I sometimes imagined myself hovering above a delta of tributaries branching out into meandering streams which constantly divided anew the higher up I went. One stream resembled the other so they were hard to distinguish, and yet each flowed in their own winding course, but seen from so high up it seemed to make no difference which one you followed on the way to the endless, monotonous sea. Yet was there something I had forgotten, after all? From my dizzy bird’s-eye perspective I couldn’t catch sight of myself down there, I could not tell if I had lost my way in the ramifications of the delta, whether it made any difference at all, whether in the end it wasn’t just a question of floating with the stream.

As I sat there trying to see if it was the same squirrel or another popping up among the leaves where the first one had vanished, I saw the Lebanese heart surgeon parking his car in front of the house. He was in his early sixties and had a pleasant olive complexion. His curly black hair was smoothed back from his high forehead, and his grey and black moustache completely covered his upper lip, which merely contributed to the unchanging sadness in his Levantine eyes. He jumped out of the car, surprisingly agile, almost eager, and opened the door for a slender little woman with big sunglasses and a yellow scarf tied firmly under her chin. She must have been roughly his own age. When I had had dinner with him after I arrived he told me very frankly how he had met her on a golf course in New Hampshire, precisely a week short of a year since he had buried his wife. The slight lady in the check trouser suit had made him want to live on, that was how he expressed it, the man people queued up for to do their bypass operations. He had insisted on hearing everything about Simon and Rosa, looking attentively at me with his dark, oriental eyes as if everything I told him was of the greatest importance to him. His eldest son lived in Cairo and the youngest had settled in Düsseldorf. He carried his lady friend’s travelling bag for her and gallantly offered her his arm before they went up the steps to the house. Half an hour later a cautious knock sounded on my door. He smiled apologetically as if to excuse himself for intruding in his own house rather than leaving it to me from cellar to attic. They were giving a little cocktail party the next evening, he wanted to introduce his fiancée to his friends, I would be more than welcome. There was something touching about the studied American manner in which he pronounced the word fiancée, his accent was usually unmistakable. But it was even more touching that he used that word at all. Today I could wish I had spent that evening with him and his grey, frail lady friend and not only to show him that I valued his hospitality, but as he stood announcing his invitation, I had not the least desire to appear as the European lodger who had been invited to join in out of politeness, an exotic item of the house’s inventory. I could hear in advance the questions people would ask and visualise how I would answer them yet another time while the person who asked had already turned away to another guest. Off the cuff I fabricated an excuse and said I unfortunately had a dinner date with a Danish artist who lived in Manhattan. He only smiled and withdrew, and as he went downstairs it struck me that I hadn’t needed to explain who I was going to see. Obviously she still haunted me, the black-clad beauty from the sculpture garden behind the Museum of Modern Art. On the spur of the moment I felt caged in my room. I had become accustomed to walking around freely in the large silent house, now I could hear my host and his friend talking and playing music down below. The aggressive sound of a fruit liquidiser drowned out Das wohltemperierte klavier, and just as I had adjusted myself to Bach he was replaced by Ella Fitzgerald. I couldn’t get to grips with my notes but went on sitting by the window because I didn’t know what else to do. The afternoon light was as golden as the street name, Orange Street, it spread in beams and fans along the walls and sidewalk, just as lavish and luxurious as the sedate terraces of brown brick behind the wrought-iron fences, and the air was perfectly clear, with a touch of coolness, sharply outlining the shadows of the lobed leaves against the sun’s hard afterglow on the trees’ bark.

Now that I had made myself homeless for an evening I might as well try to turn my pretence into reality and call the unknown Danish painter. If nothing else I could then confirm or disprove my naive theory that it was she who had been reading The Fall of the King earlier in the day. But at the mere thought of calling I got butterflies in my stomach, and it was not only my inborn reluctance to contact people I don’t know that awoke them. I also had a vague feeling of guilt because, stupid or not, I had established this link in my consciousness between the telephone number the curator had written down and the elegant young woman I had secretly spied on in the sculpture garden. What was happening to me? Had I not after all set my mind at rest with all the good reasons for my never having deceived Astrid with so much as a single affair? And anyhow what was wrong with sitting and looking for a short while at a girl who was obviously aware of her attributes and clearly dressed to be looked at, and who furthermore had planted herself right in my field of vision? The fact that she was probably Danish and that for a single-minded moment I was reminded of the telephone number on the scrap of paper the curator had given me with a raffish glint in his eye, was surely not an association that necessarily came within the sphere of criminal intent. On the contrary I convinced myself that the only right thing to do was to call the girl, make a dinner date and thus prove I had nothing to fear either from her or from my ten-year-old, entirely monogamous desire. When I saw the heart surgeon and his lady friend get into the car, dressed for dinner, I went downstairs to telephone. She answered at once. She sounded neither particularly surprised nor particularly enthusiastic when I introduced myself and made my suggestion. As we were talking I continued to picture the pale woman in black with the boyish hair-cut. She was not from Ikast anyway, I could hear. Her voice was surprisingly deep and she spoke slowly, as if she had to consider even the simplest words and phrases, maybe because her thoughts were elsewhere. It turned out that she had no plans for tomorrow evening. She suggested a Thai restaurant in Spring Street and even offered to reserve a table, perhaps to compensate for her preoccupation. My mood improved as soon as I had put down the phone. I would have dinner with her, I could tell her about my book, she would talk about her painting, we might even exchange gossip about Copenhagen artists, and afterwards I would take a taxi back to Brooklyn. It would have been strange to spend a whole month in the town without meeting anyone except my host. I dialled my own number in Copenhagen. It took a while for Astrid to answer. She had gone to bed, it was after one o’ clock at home, her voice was hoarse with sleep. I apologised and asked how things were, and if anything had happened. Why do we always think something will happen when we are away? She told me Rosa had had her hair cut, and Simon’s football team had won a match on Sunday. I said the book was going well, and we exchanged the usual tender nothings before saying goodbye. I would like to have continued talking to her. That night there was something despondent and bachelor-like about going to bed in my room on Orange Street, where the street lights shone through the leaves of the trees with a synthetic glare.

I worked with concentration all morning and managed to finish writing a section in which I discussed the technical and expressive differences and likenesses between Jackson Pollock’s layered explosions of oil paint and Morris Louis’s vertical, thinly flowing veils of colour. In the afternoon I went over to Manhattan. My dinner date was not for several hours. I spent part of the time at the Metropolitan Museum, although I had already been there once or twice, and afterwards sat in the sun in front of the Loeb Boathouse allowing my thoughts to wander as I observed the angular silhouettes of the tall buildings above the trees in the park, the folded reflections of the sky in the lake and the vibrating image of the water along the grooved cliff of black granite towering on the opposite shore. There was still plenty of time as I strolled southwards along the Avenue of the Americas. The transverse streets between the rows of vertical building blocks opened out against the empty, blue and pink sky above the Hudson. Dusk fell as I walked. Suddenly it seemed somewhat hazardous to be on the way to have dinner with a completely strange woman, and I almost blushed at the thought that she might get the impression I was ‘after something’. But on the other hand she could just have said she was engaged. Unknown as she was, I still visualised, lacking a more precise description, the reading beauty in suit and sunglasses when I finally reached Soho. There were ten minutes left before our appointment when I found the restaurant in Spring Street. I went into a bookshop and took a look round. On the way back I caught myself smoothing my hair, as if it made any difference how I looked. There was a queue out on the sidewalk, and I took my place among the people waiting, gazing round as if I really knew the face I was keeping a lookout for. I observed every single woman who passed along. A hefty girl with red cheeks and a snub nose crossed the street and aimed straight for the queue. She wore a pair of lobster-red tricot trousers which looked as if they were about to split around her broad thighs, which quivered at each stride she took. Was she the one I was waiting for? Was that why the curator had smiled so slyly as he wrote down her phone number? A broad smile lit up her face when she caught sight of a black woman waiting some way in front of me. Why had I actually been so terrified at the thought of it being the cheery girl in lobster-red tricot I was to discuss art with as we ate deep-fried vegetables with chopsticks? What was I actually up to? The next female pedestrian was a tall, leggy girl, walking with long strides at the side of a black man in leather jacket and cap. She herself wore a black leather jacket and shabby jeans, and I concluded they must be a couple. I went on with my spying, still somewhat ashamed at the evaluating glance I had directed at the girl in the red trousers, when the black leather man turned into the bookshop I had just left while the leggy girl walked on hurriedly towards the queue, her searching gaze moving along the line. But she stopped some way off, and when I looked in her direction again she was talking to a stooping young man with unframed spectacles. I looked at my watch. Was the chic beauty from the sculpture garden letting me wait after all? As the queue slowly advanced I listened to the conversations around me and glanced covertly at the speakers, the hefty girl in tricot who was laughing loudly at herself, and the leggy girl in leather, who gesticulated with her long slim hands, telling the stooping man about a film she had seen in her nasal New Yorker accent. You could see she’d just had a shower, her long hair was still wet. Her hair was unusually long, about the same length and colour as Botticelli’s Venus, and her luxuriant golden-brown locks were a strange contrast to the worn leather jacket and her narrow, slightly hard and angular face, pale, almost transparent, it seemed to me, and completely without make-up. The stooping man held up a lighter for her, and as she bent her head a little forwards to light her cigarette she glanced at me briefly with an indifferent expression in her grey eyes. The man lifted his hand in farewell and crossed the street, and the leggy Botticelli girl looked at me again, with her head slightly aslant, smiled a question and came towards me. I wondered why I had not recognised her deep voice.

If the Lebanese heart surgeon had stayed out at his lady friend’s house on Long Island, if he had never held his cocktail party, or if I had accepted his invitation, or gone to the cinema instead, if I had never watched a strange, Danish blonde in the sculpture garden behind the Museum of Modern Art and by a ridiculous association confused her with the unknown woman hiding behind the telephone number given me by the curator with a diabolic expression, if he hadn’t given me the number, if, in brief, everything had gone differently, I would never have met Elisabeth. That would probably have been better, or it might still have gone wrong, only in a different way. It’s useless to speculate on the ramifications of chance, the crazily budding alternatives of eventualities that wither one by one, as events gradually succeed each other, jostle and push each other on until nothing can be changed again. All the same I can’t let go of the idea of how easily, how smoothly, everything could have developed in another direction when I think of the importance I later ascribed to an evening in Soho seven years ago. The events in themselves do not mean anything, they are as weightless as anything that never happens, never unfolds. The story does not take place in New York, in Copenhagen or in Lisbon, it is not about Elisabeth, Astrid or Inès. It is played out in my confused head as I travel in my mind between the cities, to and fro in memory, and the figures moving through it are only shadows of the women I am describing, flickering, indistinct and intangible when they glide across the inner cave walls of my skull. The cities and the women are merely names echoing under the vault of the cave, and it is the echo of my own lonely voice I hear as I attempt to interpret the bewildering shadow play on the wall at the very back of my head. Perhaps I have never known these women, perhaps they, like the cities, are nothing more than the handful of moments I remember, the disconnected and fleeting angles of vision in which the faces and the streets came towards me. I have forgotten so much, and there is so much I have never known, never seen. My story is an interpretation of interpretations, it is nothing but my hesitant, irremediably distorted recollection of the significances I have ascribed to certain places, certain faces, and of how the faces and the places changed their significance on the way.

In the years that have passed since that evening I have asked myself whether Elisabeth was especially beautiful at all. Not in the same way as Inès or Astrid, not in the obvious, I had almost said universal, way in which they had always been regarded as beautiful women. Elisabeth’s flowing, unruly Botticelli hair was beautiful, but she herself was no beauty, and when we finally got to our table and studied the menu, slightly formal and smiling carefully, I was almost relieved that with her appearance she had definitively freed me of the sexy, black-clad daydream from the sculpture garden, which had irritatingly clung to my thoughts during the past few days. There was nothing in her way of speaking or looking at me that so much as hinted that she viewed me as a man other than in the strictly social and clothed sense. She didn’t speak nearly as slowly as she had on the telephone, on the contrary she was rather lively, but she made the same sudden pauses, as if she was searching for words or lost in thoughts of something completely different. She was easy to talk to, and before the first course arrived I had already told her I was married and had children, as if I must quickly transform what had threatened to become an obsession into a totally harmless evening. I even told her about the woman reading in the sculpture garden and about how I had wondered if it might be her. That amused her, and when she had finished laughing she asked why I hadn’t cleared up the mystery on the spot. I said I was far too shy for that, and she looked at me in amusement and said I didn’t seem particularly shy, but still without the least touch of coquettishness. There was something almost boyish about her as she sat there in her shabby T-shirt with the name of a baseball team on it, I don’t remember which one. There were moments when she could look like a slim boy with her narrow pale face, although a boy with hair right down to the hips. She was almost clumsy and several times nearly knocked my glass over. When I looked at her I felt very adult in my tweed jacket and freshly ironed shirt, even if she must be about thirty, and there could only be six or seven years between us. It turned out that we liked the same painters and shared the same aversion to much of the art produced later. She was particularly fond of Mark Rothko and Morris Louis, that was why she had left Copenhagen after the Academy to settle here. Among other reasons, she added, tossing her head and looking distant for a moment. She wanted to be close to the pictures she stole an arm and a leg from, she said and smiled again. It made me think of the curator’s expression when he wrote down her name and phone number, smiling his foxy smile. I found it just as hard to imagine what he saw in her as I would have to understand what she might have seen in him. I asked her how she came to know him. She explained that he had been in charge of a group exhibition of young artists’ work, in which she’d had a picture. She said it casually, without so much as a hint that there was anything I must not know. Later, shortly before I returned to Copenhagen, I asked her straight out if they had been together. No, she replied, brushing the tip of my nose with her index finger in a funny, cheeky gesture, as if she was playing for a moment that I was the one who had been disappointed. But he had tried it on all right, she must say.

That evening I had no idea, no expectation that I would ever have the chance to ask her. Just as I had been comical in my own eyes when I hung back from the heart surgeon’s invitation before finally dialling her number, now I was composed, sitting talking to her while the Thai food made the sweat trickle down our foreheads. She was surprisingly good at eating with chopsticks, considering her boyish awkwardness. I kept on waiting for something to crop up that we disagreed on, an area where we had not developed kindred ideas, and at one point I debated with myself whether she might just be playing up to me, but the seriousness in her subdued deep voice made me reject the idea, her searching gaze absent-mindedly noting the talking and smiling faces in the restaurant when she hesitated in order to find the right word. Not until I had paid the bill and we were walking among the old cast-iron façades of the district, did it emerge that she had read several of my articles and essays. That was why she had agreed to meet me. Did I think she went out to dinner with whoever came along merely to have the opportunity to speak Danish? My text on Giacometti had particularly interested her, the observations on withdrawal, the point of balance between spatiality and absence. The only thing she disagreed with me about was my enthusiasm for Edward Hopper. How could I be so wrong? He was incapable of painting people, his women’s breasts were never of equal size, and he could never get them to stand on their feet so you believed in it. The most she would admit to was that his colour combinations were original, for example when he juxtaposed grass green and mint green, or strawberry red and aubergine. Moreover, his bloody boring fire escapes and fire hoses in slant sunlight adorned just about every other girl’s room in the provincial backwaters, mind you. I enjoyed her pert arrogance and protested just to get her to go on. We sat on the sidewalk in front of a café at the far end of West Broadway. Behind her the World Trade Center towered with all its empty, brightly lit offices glittering in the darkness above the old warehouses. I tried to make her tell me about her own pictures, but she made light of them, and even her modesty seemed sincere. I asked if I could see them, she was evasive, she didn’t know if she dared. What did she mean by that? She smiled and looked away, she was afraid I would like them as little as she did herself. But she found a pen and wrote the heart surgeon’s phone number on the back of her left hand as I was taking her home in a taxi. If she should change her mind and I still felt like seeing them. When we had said goodbye and the taxi was on the way across Brooklyn Bridge, it occurred to me that the evening had gone precisely as I had foreseen. If I’d ever imagined anything else it was probably only because I had become a bit strange, sitting by myself in front of my window in Orange Street, with only the scurrying squirrels for company, and I still think there was no ulterior motive in my hoping she would not wash the back of that hand too thoroughly.

I worked steadily during the days that followed, and only thought briefly of Astrid and even less of my meeting with Elisabeth. It could still have ended like that, before it had ever begun, just an evening among so many others, without any consequences, quickly forgotten. Seven years have passed since I put that story behind me, and it has long been fruitless to ponder on whether the story began because I was ready for it, without knowing that myself, or whether it seized the chance to begin because circumstances offered. Nevertheless I did speculate over it after Astrid had left and I strolled around Soho once again as the autumn wind pulled at my coat and trouser legs. When I looked through the list of exhibitions in The Village Voice I discovered that Elisabeth was showing in a small gallery on the top floor of a former storehouse in Wooster Street. I had not actually thought of going to see it, but as I happened to pass it on the way back from my walk beside the Hudson, I went up, quite tense at the thought that she might be there. As I stood among Elisabeth’s wide, almost monochrome canvases, reaching up from floor to ceiling in the bare, shabby space, Astrid might have been standing on the Cais da Ribeira in Oporto, with her back to the crumbling, old façades tottering on each other’s shoulders across the river. I can’t recall which of us said that the district beside the river resembled an Asiatic lake village with its broken, soot-blackened tiles and lines of heavy dripping washing and blinds rolled down over balcony bars in front of the windows roaring out football transmissions and family feuds, separated only by narrow alleyways with shops as small as broom cupboards lit by a single grease-spotted bulb. The black alleys daylight never reached and where we walked together hand in hand past groups of emaciated drug addicts with lacklustre eyes and the toothless little old women carrying their burdens on their heads. While my eyes slowly separated the faint graduations of colour and by degrees called forth the vague, barely visible contours in Elisabeth’s flat but only apparently empty fogs of colour, Astrid may have been standing on the quay beside the dark river looking up at the traffic passing high above her head on the steel bridge linking the city centre with the southern bank. At that time I did not even know she was in Portugal. Perhaps she thought I must be in New York by now, perhaps she hadn’t given a thought to where I was that evening a week after she had left me. Until she went away I had been absolutely sure she knew nothing about Elisabeth or about what had happened then. She never asked me, but perhaps she did guess after all that something must have taken place. If so she made no sign she knew. Perhaps I had revealed it without realising, not by anything I said but by something in my silence as we drove through Tràs-os-Montes among the solitary villages with grey, decaying stone houses and black, kneaded mud in the alleyways where chickens and cattle were free to roam. Perhaps she had merely considered it as a possibility when late one evening we arrived in Oporto and strolled around the illuminated cathedral. Perhaps the suspicion had grown in her like a little invisible hole in her thoughts that let the cold air in as we stood beside the parapet along the slope above the river and laughed at the boys playing football against the cathedral wall. As we smiled at the names of the port wine houses spelled in high neon letters over on the southern bank, well-known English names which suddenly meant nothing, shining in the night sky.