Robert also looks down at his feet, he’s sitting in the Winter Garden at the Glyptotek, looking down at his feet; he’s wearing the new shoes that he bought because he felt he needed some new shoes for his trip to Copenhagen with Linnea, and he’s feeling—in the second that he looks down at his shoes, a fifty-one-year-old man sitting under some palms that stretch up for yards under the glass-domed ceiling—a little sad. He doesn’t know why, or, that is to say, he knows perfectly well why, he has the distinct feeling that Linnea actually didn’t want him with her, that she led him eagerly into the Winter Garden and said it was so “utterly delightful to sit here,” bought him a cup of coffee and gave him the brochure she got when they bought the tickets, said there was no point in him coming with her, as she was just going to find the mummy room and she’d be back once she’d had a look around. So when he now looks down at his new shoes, it’s as though they’re a symbol of defeat; black leather shoes, Italian, a bit tight on top, they’re expensive and go perfectly with the suit and blue shirt that he’s wearing, and the expensive watch on his wrist, and Robert of course doesn’t know that there’s always something oddly mismatched about the way he dresses, as though clothing that should go well together somehow collapses on his body, bulging and twisting in the wrong ways, as is the case right now as he sits under the palms in the Winter Garden, with the vague feeling that something isn’t quite as he thinks it is.
* * *
Linnea doesn’t want to go to the Egyptian Collection quite yet, she doesn’t dare, so instead of going left into the Egyptian Collection, she goes right, into the Greek Collection. She wanders through the displays of vases, small fired-clay statues and great marble statues of gods, she wanders through the Greek artists’ pioneering work in portraying the human body (especially the male body) in 700 BC, having been influenced by the Egyptians, who made the first stylized drawings of people a few hundred years earlier, for example on their coffins, and she visualizes Göran’s body, she visualizes Göran’s face, Göran’s hair and beard, Göran’s mouth in the middle of that beard telling her all this, through all the rooms, going on to speak about the Greek city-states and holistic structures and the epoch of harmonious culture; Linnea is so nervous that he might be standing somewhere among the statues, that he might come up behind her, put his arms around her, and say “there you are,” as she’s imagined in her many fantasies about this meeting two years later, which is now, that she feels dizzy. All of a sudden, there’s no way back, he has to be here, it’s now, Linnea thinks, or never. The meaning of “now or never” has never been clearer to her, though the “never” in particular makes her feel sick. There’s a noise behind her, she turns, but all she sees is a group of American tourists in white sneakers coming into the room, she turns back and hurries on, through rooms of Greco-Roman portraits, small black heads that stare at her, through rooms of ancient Oriental art, and before she knows it, she’s there, in the Egyptian Collection.
* * *
In the meantime, Robert has read the brochure and drunk his coffee, and tried to cheer up, but then he starts to think about the scene in the mummy room and the intense but unfulfilled attraction that is sparked there between “her” and “him” in the screenplay, while “he” talks about how the Egyptians divided the soul into five elements, and all “she” can think is that she wants “him” to grab her around the waist and kiss her. And he ponders on how such an intense attraction can arise out of nothing, how a person can come into a room, and someone else is already there, and then these two people for some reason or another feel that they have to interact in some way, physically. And how it is that a person can come into another person’s office, with a manuscript, and the one person immediately feels that he or she is somehow connected to the other, but the other perhaps doesn’t feel that they need to interact with the first person at all. Why doesn’t the same thing happen for everyone, Robert sits and wonders, somewhat vaguely, to be honest, but we feel we should mention it all the same. And that he looks up at the glass dome and sees the palms stretching up far above him, the green against the light coming in through the glass, and that it makes him dizzy.