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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One afternoon when they were alone his eyes fell on a little gold star of David hanging in a chain around her neck. He had not noticed it before and asked if he could look at it, stretching out his hand so his fingertips almost brushed her collar bone. They had never been so close to touching each other. She took off the chain and let it fall onto his palm with the star uppermost, observing him with her dark eyes as he weighed it in his hand. Was she Jewish? Her paternal grandmother had been. The star of David had belonged to her, so her father was Jewish too, according to tradition at least, although her grandfather had been a Christian and her father was an atheist. She herself must be half Jewish, she said, taking back the star.

She bent forward so her hair hung down in front of her forehead as she fastened the chain round her neck. He recalled the red star on the newspaper she had given back to him when they talked together for the first time. Was the golden star to be the route to their first caress? Her neck was slimmer and more delicate than he had thought, and he was about to bend forward and kiss it when she raised her head again, so her hair flopped freely around her. She smoothed it, pink in the face, and he didn’t know whether it was bending down that had brought the blood to her cheeks or his intention, which must have been written in large letters on his forehead.

Nonplussed, he grabbed at the first subject that came to mind and asked her to tell him about her grandmother. She had disappeared during the war, in one of the camps. Ana paused, looking at him to see the effect of her words on him and judge if he was worthy of hearing the story. Again she made him feel stupid and boorish. There was a sombre tone in her voice as she spoke and he shuddered as tourists do when, in shorts and T-shirts, they come in out of the sun to the cool vaults of a sanctuary, not so much because they feel like it but because they think they should. Her grandmother had left her small son with a farming family in the country. They saved him, but they also became his only family. Several months before he left them her father had decided to join the partisans. No one knew where or when he died, or how. Ana’s grandmother was deported a few weeks after she had kissed her son goodbye and hidden the gold chain with the little star of David under a loose paving stone in the pigsty.

Ana often went back to the story or talked in more general terms about her Jewish background. She had read everything she knew. Apparently her father had repressed his origins or lost any interest in them. He did not like Ana wearing the star of David although he had given it to her himself when she was a little girl. But the more he evaded her questions the more she questioned him and read from the piles of books in her room on Judaism and Jewish history. Robert discovered that she had cultivated her identity as half-Jewish or quarter-Jewish, according to how exact she wanted to be, for a long time. By his interest in the star on her neck he had unintentionally led their conversations onto a track they could not get away from again. When she held her monologues on the cabbalists and the Talmud, on the diaspora and the twelve tribes of Israel and how many great artists had been Jews, he cursed himself because he had not had the courage to kiss her bare neck.

Her passion for everything Jewish was quite different from the passion for music she shared with her father. It did not make him feel any closer to her, on the contrary it made him feel she removed herself to a world from which he was excluded. A world where he had no chance because measured against it he must seem so ordinary and anonymous. He suffered more than ever from his secret love, sure it could not stay hidden any longer, and that in her thoughts she mocked him for his cowardice. He dreamed of assailing her with a sudden embrace, literally pulling her down to earth and waking her to life away from what he came to see as a ghostly passion. When he attentively listened to her stories of the intellectual superiority of the Jews, he tried to suppress the anger that welled up in him and also made him feel ashamed. Sometimes he was about to forget that it was she and not the Jews he was angry with. But he was jealous of her Jews, both living and dead, and when she dwelt on her grandmother’s death yet again, he felt paralysed.

It was not only that he had to stop on the threshold of something neither of them would ever come to comprehend. It was also because he dared not say what he was thinking. For in contrast to him she did not allow herself to be paralysed, she persisted in entering the forbidden darkness of history, as if it was not only the story of her grandparents she told, but her own as well. He felt he began to understand why her father creased his brow every time he saw the little star on her neck. In fact she wore it not as a symbol but as an ornament. She had surfeited on the tragedy of her unknown grandmother, and on her father’s, although she had had no part in them, born as she had been in safety on the right side of the war and the Iron Curtain that separated her father from his homeland, where she had never set foot.

One evening at the beginning of winter he sat in their kitchen while she cooked, and as usual he was the one who listened, bursting with lust as she spoke of the Jewish respect for the written word. She described how it was forbidden to throw away old Torah scrolls, and how the worn-out scrolls were kept in the synagogue attics. Suddenly he interrupted her and asked if she regretted that her mother had not been Jewish so she could regard herself as a valid member of the chosen people. He did not know if it was the sarcasm in his tone or the reference to her mother that made her fall silent. He felt immediately he had broken a tacit agreement, but he had only become aware at the moment he violated it. He tried to continue the conversation and asked, peaceably he thought, how there could be room for all those Torah scrolls in the attics of the synagogues, and how you could stop the mice eating them. She did not reply, merely went on peeling potatoes with unrelenting accuracy.

At the table her father asked her why she was so quiet. It’s nothing, she said, avoiding his glance, painfully distressed at being so directly confronted in the presence of Robert. Her eyes settled on a distant point between them, and she sat like that, withdrawn and unmoving, with her head raised a little, so Robert could see the full length of her throat, that throat he should have kissed long ago. She had taken off the star of David. Robert was sure she had been wearing it when he arrived, but he didn’t feel he could put that down to a victory. She stayed unconquered with her dreaming eyes and her way of holding her face, as if weighed down by the luxuriant hair, absorbed in a secret thought. Her arrogant expression made him forget his remorse in the kitchen when she stood staring silently down at the peel sliding off the yellow potatoes in curved strips and falling into the sink with a soft sound like heavy drops. He felt she obliterated him with her silence and her absent gaze, and he felt the urge to wound her still more.

He thought of an article he had read in the newspaper about the Israeli expropriation of Palestinian property. He started to describe what he had read, and the clarinettist listened, interested. He agreed with Robert, the Jewish treatment of the Palestinians showed that Zionism was not a whit better than any other form of nationalism, on the contrary it was serious treachery against the Jewish people’s experience as a persecuted minority. Robert watched Ana as her father spoke. Her eyes were still distant, but slightly softer and darker, he felt, as if they grew larger. He was surprised at his luck, but was not allowed to enjoy it, before Ana dropped her cutlery with a crash. The clarinettist gave her a surprised look through his horn-rimmed spectacles as she left the dining room. The door of her own room slammed. He put down his napkin on the cloth and rose. Robert stayed at the table, listening to him as he talked quietly to her through the door in their foreign language.

She had glanced at him as she stood up, and it was not anger he read in her shining eyes, nor was it self-pity. She had merely looked at him through her tears as if to make quite sure. She looked at him as if she had known all the time that he would betray her, and had only herself to blame for letting herself be carried away by his sympathetic air. As he sat alone at the table, he felt the treachery burn his cheeks, but many years would pass before he completely understood what had happened. In fact he had not wounded her. That at least would have been a warmer gesture. Instead he had revealed the coldness in his young, fumbling desire. He had held a hard mirror up to her and shown her what she already knew.

He could have shielded her from the sight, but he did not. Without seeing it he had confirmed to her that she was alone. By reminding her that she was not the one she dreamed of being, he had simultaneously come to reveal that he himself had only dreamed about her. You dream the dreams you need to, he thought later. He had been too young to understand why she dreamed as she did. On the other hand, she had immediately realised that he still only needed his dreams. Where she had adorned herself in her Jews, he had adorned himself with his love instead of letting it elicit a scrap of mercy.

She did not speak to him for almost a week, and he dared not approach when he caught a glimpse of her in the corridors or on the way up or down the staircase, past the plaster Greek. He was in despair, he couldn’t concentrate in class, and he felt assaulted by scornful eyes, while his stomach clenched in fear and hope at the thought that they might pass each other in break. One afternoon he rang her doorbell, with shaking knees. Her father opened the door, she was not at home. He invited Robert in. He didn’t like to say no when the clarinettist asked if he would like a cup of tea. Ana might well turn up, he said, smiling in a way that made Robert feel he was made of glass. She was a sensitive girl, but he must have discovered that. No more was said on the subject.

It had snowed all day and Robert’s shoes were soaked. The clarinettist asked if he didn’t want to take them off to get dry. He kept on even though Robert said politely it wasn’t important. Surely he didn’t want to get pneumonia? Ana’s father was about to take off his shoes by force when Robert gave in and shyly watched the bald man crushing up newspaper and stuffing the wet shoes with it. He leaned the shoes against the radiator and stood there looking at Robert for a while before sitting down again. They had not been alone together before. Now he was caught, without shoes and without Ana. Her father put sugar in his cup and stirred it thoroughly. How was the world revolution going, then? Robert’s face flamed. It would take a bit of time . . . The other looked at him over the edge of his horn-rimmed spectacles and smiled, but not maliciously, almost kindly. It must be nice, he said, to have something to look forward to.

He questioned him about his mother, and Robert said more than he meant to. The clarinettist regarded him attentively. He kept his eyes on him even when he lifted his cup to his mouth, which was a mere slit in his short-sighted face. To his astonishment Robert discovered that he no longer felt shy, and before he could stop himself he was recounting how he had found his father’s telephone number, how strange it had been to call up the gentlemen’s hairdresser in a provincial Jutland town and present himself as his son, and how at the last moment he had changed his mind and left the train on the way to their arranged meeting. He stopped and to avoid the other’s eyes looked around the room. He caught sight of the black suit hanging on the door. You can hear me play this evening, said Ana’s father. Robert looked at him, the clarinettist smiled again. They would be playing Brahms.

They heard the sound of a key in the front door. When Ana came into the room she stopped abruptly before coming over and sitting down with them, then taking a gulp of her father’s tea. They sat in the kitchen eating sandwiches after her father had gone. They didn’t talk about what had happened the last time he came to visit. Nor did they talk about Jews. He told her about his English teacher, who had been furious because hardly anyone had handed in their essays. I have turned a blind eye to a lot, the teacher had said, but now I’ve seen enough of you! Ana laughed. He asked if she skated. She did. Perhaps they could go skating one day. If the cold spell lasted the ice on the lake would soon be thick enough. It had grown dark outside and snow was falling again. He asked when the concert would begin. She looked at him in surprise. Now . . . Would he like to hear it? They rose and went into the living room. She pulled up her legs in the armchair and he thought she probably always did that when she was alone. She bent over the radio so her hair fell over one eye, and lazily stretched out a hand.

A clattering of flapping wings broke the silence a little way off. A flock of birds rose in concert from the reeds and fell into a triangular formation with an equal distance between each. The triangle of beating wings made a turn in the air, dwindling into the perspective towards the axis where swollen clouds were reflected in the quiet water. Robert rose from his crumbling post and saw the flock and its flapping reflection approach each other. He threw a last glance at the silhouette of the dancing gypsy woman on the cigarette packet’s blue square, no longer twilight blue but pale blue like the sky and the folded surface of the water behind the reed-bed.

He began to walk back, again visualising Ana one winter evening in their early youth, beside the darkly varnished radio where her father was playing among the other musicians, the instruments flowing together in one great movement. He sat in the armchair opposite her, right on the edge, while the waves of music struck the densely woven panel of the wireless set. Ana sat looking out at the falling snowflakes outside. Cautiously he rose and went over to her, squatted down and laid a hand on one of her ankles in the flesh-coloured stockings. She slowly turned her face towards him, not surprised, almost in a kind of dawning recognition, and with a strangely soft, lithe movement slipped down to him on the carpet. Afterwards he couldn’t work out how she had disengaged herself from her folded mermaid position and down into his embrace.

He had not forgotten her face in the warm, slanting light of the lamp, surrounded by her fan of hair on the wine-red and withered green vine leaves. It stayed with him even after it ceased to make him heavy at heart. Her face was still clearer than a photograph after he had grown up and other women had succeeded her. It kept on breathing. He remembered not only her broad cheekbones and the distance between her dark eyes, but also the feeling of being wide open, the second before he bent down and his own shadow covered what he had seen. It was the same feeling many years later when Monica pulled a woollen blanket over her head to guard their first kiss against the cold and the raw winter light and the ugliness of the holiday flat. And perhaps he had just been waiting, it occurred to him that afternoon in the French Alps, for a face with the same almost painful gentleness to sink down over him and wipe out the image of Ana.

But he had been mistaken, his last love had not eclipsed the first one. Instead, his relationship with Monica had made him doubt his capacity to love. If there was a hidden connection between Ana and Monica it seemed more likely that his first delusion had been pregnant with all the succeeding ones. But he did not think like that in the Alps, and later when he was with Sonia in his and Monica’s newly painted home, he sometimes pictured Ana afresh, her expectant face framed in flowing hair, and he felt she signified a promise that had never been fulfilled.

They lay rolling about among the threadbare arabesques of the carpet, their hands under each other’s clothes, tongues enmeshed, until she tore herself free. He looked at her, crestfallen, thinking she did not want it after all. She wiped saliva from her mouth and started to unbutton her blouse. Take off your clothes, she said quietly. He obeyed. Everything suddenly took on a very practical tone. He kissed her neck as her fingers searched for the hooks of her bra. How skinny you are, she said and made him feel like a skeleton. Her breasts were smaller than he had imagined and her hips broader, thighs stronger. This is what I look like, she said, as if she had read a slight hesitation in his eyes, and he kissed her passionately and frenetically like a drunkard afraid of getting sober. She fell backwards and started to laugh. His hands went roving all over her. He didn’t like her laughter. Not so fast, she whispered and showed him how, with a light hold of his wrist. She seemed a little too expert.

He had a condom in his pocket. It had been there a long time. He took it out, bashful, and broke the seal. She didn’t say anything but he could see what she was thinking. He was prepared all right. Licentiously considerate. She watched him roll it on, curious. This was it, then. The smell of rubber made him feel coarse and still more undressed. She guided him and after a couple of attempts he made his way in. She smiled and squeezed up her eyes, her hair stuck to her damp forehead, she groaned. He ejaculated almost at once. He could see that was a disappointment, but she was sweet. They lay close to each other, listening to Brahms. She gave him a far away look and stroked from his forehead down over his nose with one finger. He said he loved her. She made no reply.

For a week or two he really thought they were a couple. He thought of it with ecstasy when he waited for her outside the school. They strolled together in the snow-white parks and went skating when the ice on the lake grew thick enough. He took her home and introduced her to his mother. He wondered nervously what Ana would see in her, and on the way upstairs in the modest block he puffed up his mother’s love of Tolstoy and Dostoievski. Afterwards he felt foolish for having been over-enthusiastic in crediting his mannish mother and her red, cracked hands with a love of the arts. When they were alone in his room Ana said that his mother seemed a fine person. It sounded far too studied. They lay on his bed, he kissed her and pressed a hand between her nylon thighs. She pushed it away.

She seemed to have got over her rapture for Jewishness, and he never saw the star of David again. All that was left was poetry, but she did not talk about it as enthusiastically as before, and he soon grew bored when they adjudicated between what was pop and what was art. He wanted to talk about them. They often just lay on his bed or hers, when they were alone at home, without saying anything as they caressed each other, she slightly absentminded, he insistent and expectant. After they had made love she always covered herself with the duvet. She didn’t like him looking at her body. Sometimes she fell asleep. When he realised they were not sweethearts any longer and maybe never had been, it was not her broad hips and small breasts he visualised when he lay sleepless at night cultivating his broken heart. It was always her face beneath him on the carpet the moment the whole thing began.

It did not end, it ebbed out, until with one blow it became clear to him that it had been over for some time already. She started to have things to do in the afternoon, and when he arrived at her home unexpectedly it was quite often her father who opened the door. He had tea with the clarinettist as the thawing snow slid off the roofs outside. They listened to records and talked about music. Robert learned a lot about music that winter, and in the midst of his unease he discovered that he liked sitting in the gloomy apartment talking to the bald man.

The clarinettist never seemed surprised when Robert rang the doorbell. Nor when he turned up one afternoon even though Ana had said she would not be home until late that night. There was a music stand by the living room window, the clarinet lay on a chair beside it. Robert asked if he was interrupting. Not at all, but now he was there he might as well make himself useful and get them a pot of tea. He went into the kitchen and put the kettle on, and as he waited for it to boil he listened to the cool, melancholy notes from the living room. Ana’s father went on playing when Robert carefully put the tray on the sofa table and sat down in his usual place. The man by the window seemed not to notice him. He played as if he was alone, lightly rocking to and fro in time to the melody with his small, short-sighted eyes glued to the score and his mouth locked in a downward curving, somehow regretful grimace around the mouthpiece of the clarinet.

He continued to play when the front door banged. Robert turned round, and through the half open door he saw Ana in the passage with a man. They had their backs to him and didn’t see him. They hung up their coats on the row of hooks and disappeared out of sight along the corridor to her room. Robert sat on until the clarinettist put his instrument down on his lap and looked at him over his horn-rimmed spectacles. Bartók, he smiled and took off his glasses. He held them up to the window, lowered them again and polished the lenses on his shirt. His eyes were brown like Ana’s and bigger than usual. He put on his glasses and looked out of the window. There was a rubber plant on the window-sill. He stretched out a hand and picked at the outside, withered edge of one of the leathery leaves. Brown dust fell on the sill. Bartók, Béla, he said slowly, looking out at the wintry light.