The knife point had barely touched the white belly of the fish before it opened out in a long slit around the red and mauve entrails that gushed out onto the marble counter. She remembered how the sight had made her press her face against her father’s stomach in the soft checked shirt he always wore when they were in the country. She hadn’t seen him for years and sometimes was afraid of forgetting what he looked like, just as she had been when he went away. She lay in bed at night with a pocket torch, frightened of her mother surprising her with the faded black and white photograph she had eased out of the album from the desk in his study without her discovering. In the picture Giorgio was young, about her age. It had been taken on a square in his home town, the town she was named after. She had never been there. He had black hair and a smooth chin, he sat rocking on a café chair in front of a church wall where low-flying swallows cast their shadows.

Fascinated, she watched the fishmonger’s knife severing the head of the fish, then discarding it, gaping with astonishment, among the blue veins of the counter. The knife scraped the slimy scales from the green and brown body covered with black freckles. She thought of the red neon sign in Otto’s window. She had always hated fish. Outside she could hear the hollow thumping sound of a cutter’s motor and the cars driving ashore from the little ferry with varnished wooden rails. She had leaned her cheek against them so as to feel the vibrations through the hull as she saw the fishing village disappear behind the fan of wake, as if they were sailing far away and never coming back. She’s shot up all right, said the fishmonger, smiling knowingly. He said that every summer. His short nails were bloody at the roots.

They cycled through the plantation as usual. Lucca rode behind her mother on Giorgio’s old bicycle. The plastic bag of fish dangled from the rusty handlebars, it kept almost sticking between the spokes of the front wheel. Else was still slim, but each summer the veins behind her knees stood out more, and her hair had gradually turned completely grey. You could hear the distant roar of the sea behind the rows of dark pine trees. The house, built of tarred planks, was the last one on a path with wooden fences around the small gardens of fir and birch. The sun only reached down for a few hours in late afternoon. For the rest of the day their garden was a shadowy morass of tree trunks, tall grass and raspberry bushes completely hid the stone wall dividing the garden from the woods.

The sun shone almost vertically on the planking wall. They lay in deck chairs, the smell of tar blended with the fusty odour from the damp-stained canvas. There was no telephone in the house, Otto would not be able to call even if he guessed where she was. Else lay with closed eyes, arms outstretched so the sun could shine on their paler undersides. The skin in the low neck of her dress was lobster-red and swollen, with deep lines between her flabby breasts. She did not talk much, perhaps she wanted to seem considerate, it was understandable for Lucca to be quiet. Although she should be glad it had happened now and not later, as Else had said when she met her off the ferry. Imagine if they had actually had a child! Lucca thought of Miriam, dreaming of having her own little baby.

She had called Miriam after Otto had left. Suddenly everything seemed very clear, and half an hour later she had finished packing her clothes and other things. It all went into two suitcases and four plastic bags, that was all she had contributed to Otto’s life. She waited down on the corner to hail a taxi. A prostitute stood smoking, a little round-shouldered as if cold. She held the cigarette away from her body and bent first one leg in tight jeans, then the other. Lucca greeted her, they passed one another every day. Hey, was she off travelling? You could say that. Where? She didn’t know yet. The prostitute nodded sympathetically. She knew all about that.

Miriam looked at her with a tragic face when she opened the door. She was a head shorter than Lucca, who had to bend down to let her friend embrace her. They stood there locked in each other’s arms, rocking from side to side. Lucca began to cry, simultaneously asking herself why she had only begun to cry now. Was it Miriam’s sympathy that had set her off, rather than grief at Otto ditching her? Miriam was alone at home, her boyfriend was a jazz musician and had a gig that night. They sat in the kitchen drinking vodka, turning the glowing ends of their cigarettes around in the ashtray so they grew as sharp as flaming spears. Miriam had always thought Otto was a shit, Lucca wasn’t the first one to be dropped like that. But she couldn’t well have said that while they were together. Incidentally, Miriam’s boyfriend had seen him in town recently with a mulatto, a photographer’s model, as far as she knew. Miriam hadn’t wanted to say anything about that to Lucca, so as not to upset her.

She went on heaping scorn and condemnation over Otto until Lucca interrupted her. Were they going to have a child or what? Lucca was not really interested, but Otto had been slated enough for the time being. She felt battered by her friend’s vicious words. Miriam changed channels promptly and lowered her voice, modest but also flattered at being able to share her dream of happiness with her sorrowing friend. Her beloved couldn’t make up his mind, he had mumbled something about his freedom. What did he want that for? They had had a row. But Miriam herself was ready, it was a feeling in her body, she just wanted to have this child, besides, it would strengthen their relationship. If only he would understand. What else was there to look forward to? A gig and a cabaret here and there, like that comic one. She could actually sing very well, but no better than a lot of others. She was not the one Harry Wiener had invited to supper! She saw the little flicker in Lucca’s eyes and laid a hand on her shoulder. The Royal Theatre, that was quite fantastic! She was really happy for Lucca.

Later they lay in bed with their arms around each other, the jazz man would have to sleep on the sofa, but Lucca could not fall asleep. She cautiously wriggled free of Miriam’s heavy embrace and sat on the edge of the bed. The grey morning light was already penetrating the blind. Plastic baskets full of briefs, underpants and socks sat among the few books on the backless bookcase. Once they had been white but had faded into pale pink or pale blue shades after all the times they had been through the washing machine. The walls were adorned with photographs of sweaty, exhausted jazz musicians fastened with drawing pins, and ranged along the wainscot were Miriam and her boyfriend’s trodden-down shoes in rows amidst the dust. On the bedside table a foot file and a pessary sat beside the alarm clock. It was only just past five.

Miriam turned over on her side, she had a heavy face, in sleep she almost resembled a man. None the less she always wore close-fitting tops that emphasised her full bosom, and leggings despite her hefty thighs. There was something brash about Miriam. When she made a real effort she could look quite good, but she was particularly noisy and coarse if she was in the company of women better looking than herself. As if she was secretly offended by their genes. Several times Lucca had been taken aback by the way she bossed her man about, the tall, skinny guy with a ring in his ear, only to sit the next moment on his lap and start tongue-kissing. She had told Lucca with a grin that she had practically had to rape him the first time they made love. Miriam used her initiative when things did not develop of their own accord. In her opinion to be desired was a simple human right.

Lucca felt a tickling sensation on one foot. A wood ant was on its way along the vein protruding under the thin skin of the arch. The deck chair creaked as she bent down. The mouldy canvas tore underneath her as the ant curled up and fell through her fingers. It was hot, she rose, and everything went black for a moment.

She retreated into the shade at the end of the garden, where the wild growth around the stone wall made a chaotic barrier facing the woods. In some places dusty broken rays of sunlight broke through the thicket and touched a reddish trunk or a tuft of dark green needles, disorientating the eyes in a confused web of golden light surrounded by soft formless shadows. Everything had been in movement, the heavy tree trunks and the shadows and beams of sunlight, when she clamped her legs around his neck. His beard tickled the sides of her knees as he walked over the domed forest floor covered by dead needles with a firm grip of her ankles. He stumbled and almost lost his balance every time she threw out her arms because she caught sight of a squirrel or a pigeon that flew up and flapped against the branches, but then the trees opened out and gave way to the sand dunes covered with marram grass waving smoothly in the wind, and there was the sea, vast and very, very blue.

She turned round and sat down on the grass. Else’s deck chair was empty. She hadn’t seen her get up. Her stomach tied itself into a knot and she lay down on the grass, thinking of Otto’s eyes and his broad hands. The earth was cool and damp through her dress. Maybe he was lying looking at his hands right now as they explored a delicious mulatto girl’s body, infatuated by the difference between his own pale skin and hers. The sizzling of butter in the frying pan blended with the grasshoppers’ song. Lucca got to her feet. The top of the stable door to the kitchen was open. She stood watching Else coat the fish fillets in egg and breadcrumbs before putting them into the pan. She stood with one hand on her side as she turned them. Her grey hair was gathered into a careless, girlish knot and she had tied a pink sash round her waist as a skirt, indomitably feminine, thought Lucca.

There is more to life than love, she said, pouring out white wine. They sat at the garden table in the last golden light. You’ll discover that sooner or later. She looked down into her glass and up again at Lucca. Work, for instance . . . Strindberg, wasn’t it? They drank a toast to that. And children, what about children? Else thought about that as she parted flesh from bone. Children were a trap. Not you, she hastened to add with a reassuring pat on Lucca’s hand. Lucca had been so easy. Else removed a tiny bone from the corner of her mouth and put it on the edge of her plate. But you look like a cow, she said, and you feel like a cow, and you turn into a cow. Lucca thought of Miriam.

What if they had had a child? He would definitely not have wanted that. She thought of the American boy who had been given a red car for his birthday. Otto never spoke of him, apparently he had said all there was to say. The boy existed, but they did not know each other and that’s how it was. Otto didn’t even have a picture of him. A letter from Lester enclosing a drawing had arrived in the autumn. The only sign of the mother’s life was the neat, formal handwriting on the envelope. Lucca fixed the drawing to the fridge door with sticky tape. Otto accepted that, but when it fell down one windy day he left it on the floor. She got him to send the boy an advent calendar. She bought it herself. He looked at her as if he thought she was crazy, but he sent it.

She hadn’t even contemplated the possibility of their having a child. Only now did she calculate how many potential children had spurted out of him every time to no purpose. A whole class, a whole school, a whole city of unborn babies. She had never seriously imagined them walking down the street one day with a buggy, on a Saturday morning shopping trip. Maybe because she hadn’t dared. She visualised Otto’s blue eyes. She didn’t even know what they had seen, those eyes. Probably just a girl among so many others, a face in the line of faces blotting each other out on his sheet like transparencies projected on a screen. Click, and the world changed. But that can’t have been how he saw it. His world was probably always the same, only it was full of girls.

Lucca turned to look at the woods. The shadows had grown thicker among the straight columns of spruce. She tried to recall the men she had been with, either for a night, a few months or longer. There were twenty-four altogether, if she counted her first sweethearts. She recalled the advent calendar she had bought for Otto’s son. It pictured a crowd of children sledging and building snowmen and having snowball fights, all of them rosy-cheeked. She tried to reconstruct the sequence of the men she had known and visualised them with excited red cheeks and a number on their foreheads. When she kissed a new, strange face it had been like opening yet another lid, thrilled as a child with what might be hidden behind it. Had she really believed that Otto’s face was the last one? Was she so naïve? Had she imagined it would be Christmas every night for ever?

It was still light when she went to bed, having told Else she had a headache. She closed the blind to darken the room, light nights had never appealed to her. As a child she had been afraid night would not come, she didn’t know why, and she had been just as scared when Else drew down the black blind. She had insisted on keeping the bedside light on until she fell asleep. Else had draped one of her Indian scarves over the lamp and she had lain looking at the grey woollen petals and stems spreading over the ceiling and walls, where the embroidered flowers on the scarf threw their enlarged shadows. Now she lay open-eyed in the thick darkness of the room.

In the spring of 1965 Else and her first husband toured Italy by car. They were young and had only been married four years. She had married a successful young man, at least his parents were well-off, and Else’s mother and father were more than pleased. She had played with the idea of being an actor and studied with one for a few months, but nothing came of it. In one of the photographs from that trip she sits smiling in a white open-top Aston Martin. She wears sunglasses and a light-coloured silk scarf tied under her chin, and the road snakes behind her through rows of black pines on the Tyrolean mountainsides. Else’s first husband doesn’t appear in any of the pictures. He was the one who took them.

In Lucca’s opinion it was quite appropriate for him not to be in a single one of the snapshots. He was nothing but an eye in the camera he directed towards her mother, who did not yet know she was to be a mother the next year, standing in St Mark’s Square and beneath the arches of the Colosseum, smiling the same delighted smile. Lucca smiled when she looked at those pictures. They made her feel she was the surprise itself in her own person. If Else had had a child with the invisible photographer, Lucca would never have been born.

On the way back from Rome the young couple spent a few days in Viareggio, where one evening the invisible photographer ate some oysters he should not have eaten. Who knows, thought Lucca. If his bourgeois upbringing had not equipped him with this fateful weakness for oysters, the world might have been different. It would have been a world without her, in other words a completely unthinkable world, since she was the one thinking about it. But no less real for that reason.

While Else’s husband was lying ill she went for walks in the town and along the promenade. One afternoon a film was being shot, and she stood at the edge of the crowd of spectators behind the camera and the lamps shining whitely in the sun on a pale beautiful woman in sunglasses and a suit almost the same as Else’s. The lovely woman walked along the promenade again and again with quick steps wearing a contemplative air. Else recognised Marcello Mastroianni as the anxious man in a black suit with a white shirt and tie who followed the woman, trying in vain to persuade her to stop. Only after the fourth or fifth shot did Else notice the young man in a striped sailing shirt walking alongside the camera rails with the boom held high above his sunburned head. He himself had been keeping an eye on the tall Nordic woman among the spectators for some time.

It turned out that the film crew were staying at the same hotel as Else and her husband, and the very next day Else got out of the lift on the wrong floor, astounded and delighted at her own faithlessness, while the invisible photographer sat chained to a lavatory pan on the floor below. She allowed him to recover a bit before she informed him of what she had decided in the meantime. He must drive home without her. She didn’t love him any more, and she was bound to obey her feelings, she told him, and so the white Aston Martin had driven north with its lonely, rejected driver, out of the story. He left no more than a handful of holiday snaps of his lost beloved, which he sent her later without a covering letter, enclosed with the divorce papers so she could ponder whether it was a desperate or aloof, condoning gesture.

After he left, Else moved into the young sound engineer’s room, but she soon grew tired of watching the filming. Instead she lay on the beach all day long, alone for the first time in weeks. For once in her life, she thought rebelliously. Later she went with Giorgio to his home town to be introduced to his mother, a black-clad grey-haired woman who lent them her bedroom and gave them breakfast in bed, secretly crossing herself. There, in a Tuscan widow’s creaking bed, far too short and far too soft, Lucca had been conceived, according to her mother. In Lucca, with a view over the flat, tiled roofs and the hills with their olive groves and cypresses. It was Else’s idea to give her that name, to remember the view from their room each time she uttered it. Giorgio had told her Lucca was a boy’s name. What if it was a girl? Else didn’t care. Boy or girl, the view over the roofs of Lucca was the same.

Later on she said that had been the happiest time of her life. They cavorted around Italy for three months. There was so much he wanted to show her, and in every place there were people he knew. To start with she didn’t understand a word he said, but that didn’t matter. His eyes and his hands and his laughter were expressive enough. It was a never-ending party, one long chain of light, shining hours and endless warm nights of hunting for yet another riotous moment’s surrender to laughter and the craziest whims.

Giorgio went to Copenhagen with her. They were married at the town hall and spent the first year or two living in an attic flat with slanting walls and a loo in the courtyard. That was something Else always had to mention, the loo in the courtyard, as if it had been a special attraction. She gave up her dream of acting and became a presenter on the radio, while Giorgio knocked on the doors of the film studios in vain. But no one could use a sound engineer who did not understand the dialogue he recorded, and Else had to feed the family on her own. Lucca had no memories of that time. The first thing she remembered was the bedroom of the villa in Frederiksberg they moved into when her grandparents died, one soon after the other. The old mahogany bed where she snuggled up between Giorgio and Else in the mornings. She would creep in under his duvet, and he would bend one knee so the duvet made a cave with a narrow opening out to Else’s soft body in the morning light. She curled up in there like a little Eskimo in her igloo, knees up to her chin so she could fit between his thigh and chest, sniffing up the safe smell of his body.

When she woke up one morning he was gone. Else sat on the edge of the bed stroking her hair, speaking calmly to her in the wonderful voice that could say anything to anyone in every radio set in the land. Lucca became accustomed to the strange friends who came to dinner. Sometimes they were still there in the morning when she had to go to school. Her father had been a dreamer, Else told her many years later, a spoiled slacker. But hadn’t they been happy? Her mother fell silent for a long time before replying. Probably you were only happy a few moments at a time.

Lucca recalled the mornings in their bed when she pressed herself close to Giorgio’s warm body, a summer day when she rode on his shoulders through the plantation and a New Year’s Eve when she had been carried around the house by one strange guest after another, dressed as an Indian princess, wrapped up in silk with a red spot of lipstick on her forehead. She remembered Giorgio and Else dancing together, slowly and clasped close in the sweet, sickly smell of the funny pipes with no mouth-pieces that were passed round, and she remembered the music they danced to, Ravi Shankar, Carole King. Of course she had been in love with him, said Else, but they had been so young, it had been a young dream. There came a moment when you woke up.

Lucca thought about the morning she had woken up with Else sitting silently on the edge of the bed stroking her cheek. Lucca was afraid of forgetting Giorgio, and gradually did come to forget him. She saw no more of him during her childhood, but it never occurred to her to reproach him for that, and she did not ask Else why he never visited them. She did not want to hear her speaking ill of him, she would rather know nothing. So he became still more remote and indistinct. When she thought back to the morning when she awoke to the news that he had left, it was as if her father had been no more than a dream.

She found it hard to call up his face. It was his body she remembered, his brown skin and black beard and the soft sound of his voice, not what he had said. She forgot the language they had spoken together. As time went on she pictured him only in isolated images. She could remember him recording sounds for her on his tape recorder. She had to guess what they were. The cooing of a pigeon, wet sheets flapping in the wind, a chamois leather rubbing a window pane or the thin tones of a guitar from an egg slicer.

He had taught her to make spaghetti with butter and grated nutmeg. She recalled the sweet scent of nutmeg and sitting in the kitchen watching him eat while they listened to Else’s cool, precise voice on the radio. Neither of them understood perfectly what she said. It was the voice itself they listened to, both familiar and strange as she spoke to all and sundry. Suddenly he wasn’t there any more. She was in class one. She had her meals by herself in the kitchen, looked after by a nanny, when Else was on the radio at night. When she grew older, she made herself pasta al burro with nutmeg while listening to her mother speaking through the transistor’s vibrating plastic trellis, far away and yet so close she could hear the saliva between the consonants in her mouth.

There had been quarrels behind closed doors, and once while she was listening to them shouting at each other, she stole into his room with its bookcase filled with tapes of the sounds of rain and thunder and crackling fire, of dogs and birds, telephones and slamming doors. She found the album with photographs of him when young, the pictures from the town of her name. Cautiously she picked off the old glue that fixed her favourite pictures to the thick cardboard page, fearful as a thief. As if she were not merely taking what belonged to her. For it was her own story which began with the black and white photographs she was hiding. The one of Else in an open Aston Martin on the way through the Tyrol, unaware that she was on the way to her meeting with Lucca’s father. The one of Giorgio on a square in his home town, rocking a café chair in front of a church wall, brushed by the arrow-shaped shadows of the swallows, waiting for Else without himself being aware of it.