Jens Grøndahl - Lucca

One evening in April a thirty-two-year-old woman, unconscious and severely injured, was admitted to hospital in a provincial town south of Copenhagen. She had concussion and internal bleeding, her legs and arms were broken in several places, and she had deep lesions in her face. A petrol station attendant in a neighbouring village, beside the bridge over the motorway to Copenhagen, had seen her car take the wrong slip-road onto the carriageway and drive at high speed against the oncoming traffic. The first three approaching cars managed to manoeuvre around her, but about 200 metres after the junction she collided head-on with a truck.

The Dutch driver was admitted for observation but released the next day. According to his statement he started to brake a good 100 metres before the crash, while the car approaching him actually increased speed for the last stretch. The front of the vehicle was totally crushed, part of the radiator was stuck fast between the carriageway and the lorrys cow-catcher, and the woman had to be cut free. The spokesman for the emergency services said it was a miracle she had survived.

On arrival at hospital the woman was pronounced close to death, and it was 24 hours before she was out of danger although still critically ill. Her eyes were so badly damaged that she had lost her sight. Her name was Lucca. Lucca Montale.

Despite the name there was nothing particularly Italian about her appearance, from the photograph on her driving licence. She had auburn hair and green eyes in a narrow face with high cheek-bones. In build she was slim and fairly tall. It turned out she was Danish, born in Copenhagen.

Her husband, Andreas Bark, arrived with their small son while she was still on the operating table. The couples home was an old farmhouse in an isolated woodland setting seven kilometres from the site of the accident. Andreas Bark told the police he had tried to stop his wife from driving. He thought she had just gone out for a breath of air when he heard the car start. When he got outside he saw it disappearing along the road. She had been drinking quite a lot, he could not remember how much. They had had a marital disagreement. Those were the words he used, and he was not questioned further on that point.

Early in the morning, when Lucca Montale was moved from the operating theatre into intensive care, her husband still sat in the foyer with the sleeping boys head on his lap. He was looking out at the sky and the dark trees when Robert sat down beside him. Andreas Bark merely went on staring into the grey morning light with an exhausted, absent gaze. He seemed to be slightly younger than Robert, in his late thirties. He had dark, wavy hair and a prominent chin, his eyes were narrow and deep-set, and he wore a shabby leather jacket.

Robert rested his hands on his knees in the green cotton trousers and looked down at the small perforations in the leather uppers of his white clogs. He realised he had forgotten to take off his plastic cap after the operation. The thin plastic crackled between his hands. The other man looked at him and Robert straightened up to meet his gaze. The boy woke up and asked where he was, bewildered. His father stroked his hair slowly, mechanically, as the doctor spoke.

When he got home Robert had a shower, poured himself a whisky and walked about the house for a while. Apart from a faint twittering, the only sounds were those he made himself, the parquet blocks creaking under his bare feet and the ice cubes clinking in his glass. He never went straight to bed when he came home after a night shift. He sat on the sofa as it grew light outside, listening to the new recording of Brahmss third symphony bought last time he was in Copenhagen. He gave in to fatigue and imagined he was floating on the peaceful, swelling waves of the strings, studied the palings of the fence at the end of the garden, the birch leaves fluttering in the breeze, and the hesitant little hops on both legs of the sparrows on the cement paving stones, between the plastic garden furniture on the terrace outside the wide panorama window.

The house was actually too large. It was intended for a family with two or three children, but it had been going at a favourable price. Moreover, Lea came home every other weekend. He had furnished a room for her with everything she might need. She had gone to buy the furniture with him and chosen the colours herself. He had given her a bicycle too, which awaited her in the car port, and a ping pong table he had set up in what was intended as the dining room. He preferred to eat in the kitchen. Lea was becoming a dab hand at table tennis, she could beat him now every other time. She was just twelve.

He had become used to living alone. It wasnt as hard as he had feared, he worked long hours. He had moved out of Copenhagen two years ago, when he was divorced. At that time he and Leas mother had worked at the same hospital. Six months after the divorce Monica moved in with the mutual colleague she had begun a relationship with while still married to Robert. He didnt like constantly coming across them in the corridors.

He had moved to this particular town by chance, never having envisaged taking a job at a provincial hospital, but he liked his work, and although the town depressed him with its red-brick suburban houses and provincial town properties with small bay windows and absurd zinc spires, after a time he learned to appreciate the qualities of the place. It boasted a white-washed medieval church, where organ recitals were given in summer, flanked by a couple of half-timbered merchants houses, at the end of the main street, and there were the woods, the seashore and a bird reserve at the end of a peninsula past an area of half-flooded meadowland. He liked to take a walk out there, surrounded by the huge vault of sky above the tufts of grass in the smooth calm water reflecting the cloud masses and the wedge formations of migrating birds.

Now and then he would visit one of the couples among his colleagues. They were all married and most had children. As a newly-arrived singleton he was met with friendliness and courtesy, but he always felt like a guest in their world, and he noticed that the women in particular confused his slightly reserved manner with arrogance. One woman had made a pass at him, she was a librarian and a few years younger than he was. He found her attractive and went out with her a few times, but when it came to the point he rebuffed her advances. It was not that he missed Monica. For the last year or two of their marriage they had lived silently side by side like two anonymous passengers, when the silence was not broken by sudden pointless quarrels.

Not that there was anything wrong with the librarian. She had a beautiful figure and a sense of humour. He actually made the initial moves himself when he went up to her one day to ask for a biography of Gustav Mahler. But he ended up by rejecting her. Naturally she was hurt, and since that episode he had stopped going to the library. It left him feeling chagrined, but he had been unable to explain either to her or himself why he had asked her to go, one evening after dinner when they had sat on his sofa listening to the adagio from Mahlers fifth symphony.

She was in a short low-necked dress and black stockings that night. She had taken off her shoes and drawn up her legs beneath her on the sofa, and she looked meaningfully at him out of her large, appealing eyes as they sipped their brandy. It was so obvious, everything seemed to have been arranged without a single word, and he lost the urge to have anything to do with her. After she had gone he told himself he could at least have gone to bed with her, as she had plainly offered, but when he woke up next morning, alone as usual, he was relieved. He ran into her in the street now and again, that was unavoidable in such a small town. They greeted each other politely and, as they passed each other, she tried to catch his eye.