The brakes squealed underneath her, the train stopped abruptly and she was jerked forwards. There was blood all over her thighs. A droning voice from the loudspeakers drowned out her sobs with its list of town names. The sun shone horizontally through the frosted window glass of the toilet, golden like the background to the stiff-necked Virgin Mary and her chubby child on Giorgio’s postcard. In her haste she had forgotten her period was due. She had put down the leaden feeling in her stomach to the shock, the delayed anger and sense of being left completely on her own. She had woken up in a tunnel through the Alps feeling a stickiness in her crotch, and cursed herself when the train emerged into the light and she saw blood trickling down her legs under her skirt. She placed her jacket over the dark patch on the seat and rummaged feverishly in her bag for a pair of clean briefs.

The toilet stank and the floor was soiled around the lavatory pan where male passengers had stood swaying in time to the movements of the train. She threw the blood-soaked briefs in the refuse bin, pulled a handful of tissues from the holder on the wall and stuffed them into the clean briefs, but she bled through them at once. She had sat there bleeding for the best part of an hour when the train stopped. Several times impatient hands had rattled the door handle. For the past twenty-four hours she had eaten nothing but a dry ham sandwich in Munich station, and had thrown half of that away because the bread swelled like a sponge in her mouth. Hunger, pains and loss of blood made her tremble, and her forehead was covered with cold drops of sweat.

The train did not arrive in Milan until the evening. Her legs buckled under her when she tried to stand up. She took off the long-sleeved blouse she wore under her denim jacket, and tied it like a loin cloth under her skirt, buttoned the jacket over her bare torso and looked at herself in the mirror. She resembled a pregnant drug addict, pale and sweating, with red circles round her eyes and a swollen stomach. Her head swam as if she was doped when she climbed down to the platform clutching her bag.

She found the way to the ladies’ cloakroom with a bag from the station pharmacy. A bent old woman in a blue overall was washing the floor with a gigantic mop. Her face was dark and wrinkled and her eyes were big and black beneath the headscarf she had pulled right over her forehead. She looked Lucca up and down and shook her head, smiling. Half her teeth were missing and her cooing voice sounded more like that of an infant than an old woman.

She put down her mop, took Lucca by the wrist and led her out of the door. Her hand was crippled with rheumatism. Maybe she was a real witch, thought Lucca, letting herself be led along a dark passage and further on down a corridor with dirty walls. The witch went on mumbling to herself in her cooing baby’s voice without letting go of Lucca’s wrist for a moment, rocking from side to side like a little tugboat.

The last door along the corridor led into a whitewashed room with a shower and a basin. Lucca started to undress and the witch clapped her small crooked hands. She picked up the bloody clothes and went out. Lucca gasped when the streams of icy water struck her. She turned on the hot tap and closed her eyes as the heat went through her, into her flesh.

She wondered how Else would have reacted if she had told her what had happened. She wasn’t sure her mother would have sided with her as a matter of course, remembering what Else had said the night of the wedding when she found her sitting on the kitchen table in her corset and silk stockings. She was going to try to be happy, and Lucca was not going to stop her. Maybe she would even have looked at her sceptically, in the way she briefly and secretly glanced at her firm, slim body and taut breasts.

She might even have asked whether Lucca had not herself played up to Ivan, possibly without realising it. She was still so young that she probably did not fully understand the extent of the impression she made on an adult man. Lucca recalled the glances Ivan had given her now and then, if he went into the kitchen as she bent over the dishwasher, her breasts visible in the neck of her blouse, or when they met in the corridor on their way to the bathroom, he in a dressing gown, she in briefs and a T-shirt. Veiled glances he felt ashamed to acknowledge. She had not allowed herself to take any notice of those glances, and when she thought of them she felt sticky. She tried to remember whether she had made any wrong moves as they sat in the garden drinking white wine. Whether she had looked into his eyes in an ambiguous way or allowed a smile to stay on her lips a second or two longer than necessary, marvelling as she did that he could talk so sensitively about himself.

She wasn’t ignorant of the impression she made on adult men. She provoked them, she felt that, whether because of her long-limbed slenderness or her courageous eyes that dared to meet and hold a stranger’s gaze. Perhaps it was the contrast between her young fragility and the fearlessness in her eyes that was so provocative. Sometimes it amused her, at others she was alarmed at how little was needed for the sight of her to make cracks in their armour of even-tempered maturity. It might be a chance exchange of glances on the street, it might be the father of a friend or one of Else’s acquaintances she chatted to with a girlish smile, but it was only a game, as when you pick up a knife and feel how sharp it is, with a cautious finger along the edge of the blade. She herself felt a thrill, but also a touch of fright, when mature men opened the door to give a glimpse of their experienced, slightly superior façade. In fact there was something distasteful in their betrayal of themselves as they interviewed her about her future plans, as if that could interest them. She was only attracted to those men who did not allow themselves to be provoked by her youth. Serene men resting confidently in their ageing skins.

When she met the badminton player she knew at once it would not last long. They walked through Frederiksberg Gardens on that Saturday when they met by chance. They passed several newly-weds being photographed by the lake with its swans and the island with the Chinese pavilion. So many couples were coming to the garden, he said, they would have to take care not to get into each other’s pictures. He stopped to tie his shoelace. She held his cycle for him as he bent down, balancing on one leg. There was a big black patch of sweat on his vest between the shoulder blades, and suddenly, without thinking, she laid her hand on his back. Maybe it was only because she wanted to feel the thin damp cotton sticking to his spine. He put his foot back on the ground and looked at her with a sorrowful expression, as if her touch had inflicted him with an unexpected pain. They stood opposite each other, he raised one hand, then stopped and held the hand in front of him as if he was about to change his mind, before cautiously brushing her cheek with the back of his hand. He knew himself it was meaningless, but all the same he did it.

When she had dried herself and put on clean clothes she went out into the corridor again. She found the witch behind a half-open door, sitting at a small table covered with oil-cloth. The walls were filled with metal shelves full of cleaning materials, and an army of mops was deployed in a corner. Her clothes were in a bucket of soapy water. The witch nodded and cooed something, as she poured out coffee in a bowl, put some sugar in it and set it before her on the oil-cloth. Lucca sipped the hot coffee. The witch’s wrinkled mouth worked like a hamster’s as she observed Lucca with her black eyes, that made her haggard face seem still smaller. The coffee was strong and very sweet and Lucca felt the sugar and caffeine spreading through her starved body.

Suddenly the witch struck the table as if seized by an idea, and started rummaging in a shabby mock leather handbag. She put a photograph in front of Lucca, bent at the corners from the numerous times it had been fished out of the worn bag. The three smiling people had red eyes in the flashlight. A hefty, balding man in a loose shirt held a cigar in one hand and had an arm round the shoulders of an equally stout woman with a child in her arms. They stood on a pavement and on the other side of the street behind a basketball court surrounded by wire fencing could be glimpsed a square, brown brick building. A car was on its way out of the picture, only the tailboard was left, and Lucca recognised its yellow colour from films. Mio figlio, cooed the witch, drumming the smiling man in the face with a bent forefinger. America, America, she went on and looked at Lucca encouragingly.

As they sat silently opposite each other she heard someone turning on the tap in the bathroom. Soon afterwards a tall African joined them. He nodded politely and went over to the far end of the room where the mops were ranged. He wore a blue overall like the witch, he was tonsured and very thin, and his bare feet left wet prints on the dusty floor. His feet were very large. He rolled a small carpet out in front of him on the floor and stood facing one of the shelves of scouring powder and chlorine in big plastic cans. The witch looked down at the picture of her son, daughter-in-law and grandchild, lost in her own thoughts while the man in the corner raised his hands to his face and spoke out hoarsely in a subdued, chanting tone. Lucca wanted to leave, but couldn’t raise the energy. The man kneeled on the carpet and rose again, he repeated this several times. He kneeled again and bent over with his forehead to the floor, so she saw only his bent back in the blue overall and the pale skin on the soles of his feet, etched with dark lines.

It was evening when she was in a train again, freshly washed, all in clean clothes with a fresh sanitary towel in her briefs. She watched the dreary tenements beside the railway, where lights had already been lit behind the half-closed blinds, sometimes catching a glimpse of garishly lit rooms or along monotonous side-streets with parked cars and flashing neon lights. A pine tree stood on a little hill in front of the evening sky. The trunk was crooked and bent, and the spidery crown’s ramifications were stretched out under the dense clusters of needles. She leaned her forehead against the dark, vibrating pane, feeling an increasing tension in her body, as if she were a clock being wound up.