Rudolf laughed. ‘I think there’s a metaphor there, my dear Lena. Let me work on it for a few days.’

Passing over the word ‘metaphor’, Lena said, ‘This group of yours, does it meet here?’

‘God, no. We meet in Vienna.’

‘Does it have a name?’

‘They’ve tried lots of names. Now it’s simply called Rebirth.’

‘So should I vote for your party?’

‘Of course you should. This is a dangerous time. The Heimwehr, the private army of the Right, killed ninety people who were demonstrating. They opened fire in a place called Schattendorf. The Palace of Justice in Vienna was set on fire.’

‘Do you have any candidates?’

‘Not yet. But soon.’

After dinner, Rudolf walked her home, as he had promised. Lena grew anxious when they crossed the river and came into the sawmill district.

‘You don’t have to come any further,’ she said. ‘I can see my house from here. There’s a light, so my mother must be home.’

‘No, that’s all right. It’s no trouble. And I’d like to see where you live.’

They went down a narrow street and into the open area towards the river and the wharf.

‘It looks like a warehouse,’ said Rudolf. ‘It’s … romantic.’

‘It’s damp,’ said Lena. ‘Leave me here, please.’

But Rudolf had already run up the outside wooden steps and was standing at Carina’s door. Lena moved quickly. To soften the abruptness of the farewell, she kissed him on the cheek as she slipped behind him and shut the door after her.

The following week at the Friday art lesson there was a life model, a middle-aged man Lena recognised as a porter in the vegetable market. The dozen students stood behind their easels in a half-circle, while Tomas explained some simple rules with the help of a skeleton, hung by a hook through the skull: the femur is always longer than the tibia, he pointed out; the eyes are lower in the head than you imagine, almost halfway down. Hands he advised them to ignore for the time being.

The model stood holding a long staff of wood. His belly hung low and the veins of his legs stuck out in knots. Lena noticed between his legs the thing Sophia had told her about, though this man seemed to have three of them. Slowly, glancing back and forth from her paper, she worked out it was the third bit, the middle one, that Sophia had been referring to. It seemed insignificant to have been the cause of such excitement. By the end of the hour, however, she was reconciled. She wouldn’t have minded prodding it with her finger, to see how it reacted.

When she looked at Rudolf at dinner, she wondered what his would look like. Not like the market porter’s. But it was impossible to look at his face, his eyes full of thoughts, and think of the other thing at the same time.

‘There is a ladder of perfection that we climb all our lives,’ Rudolf was saying. ‘Through contemplating God, coming closer to Him and allowing his spirit into our thoughts.’