That evening, Helga had no clear premonition that something fateful was happening to her. Even so, she lay awake for a long time, without thinking of anything in particular. When she was half-asleep, a strange desire came drifting into her consciousness: If only I had an umbrella, she thought. It occurred to her suddenly that this item, which for certain people was just a natural necessity, was something she had dreamed of her whole life. As a child she had filled her Christmas wish-lists with sensible, affordable things: a doll, a pair of red mittens, roller skates. And then, when the gifts were lying under the tree on Christmas Eve, she’d been gripped by an ecstasy of expectation. She’d looked at her boxes as if they held the meaning of life itself, and her hands shook as she opened them. Afterward, she’d sat crying over the doll, the mittens, and the roller skates she had asked for. ‘You ungrateful child,’ hissed her mother. ‘You always ruin it for us.’ Which was true, because the next Christmas the scene would repeat itself. Helga never knew what she was expecting to find inside those festive-looking packages. Maybe she had once written ‘umbrella’ on her wish-list and not received one. It would have been ridiculous to give her such a trivial and superfluous thing. Her mother had never owned an umbrella. You took the wind and the weather as it came, without imagining that you could indulgently protect your precious hair and skin from the rain, which spared nothing else.

Helga eventually turned her attention to her role as a fiancée, and, together with her mother, carried out the customary obligations. Yet sometimes she would lie awake next to Egon, or in her bed in the maid’s room in the house where she worked, nursing her peculiar dream of owning an umbrella.

A certain image started to form in her mind, which gave her secret desire a forbidden and irresponsible tinge, and cast a delicate, impalpable veil over her expression throughout the day, causing her fiancé to exclaim, with jealousy and irritation, as if he suspected her of some kind of infidelity, ‘What are you thinking about?’ Once, she answered, ‘I’m thinking about an umbrella.’ And, with convincing seriousness, he said, ‘You’re crazy!’ By then he had already stopped reading poetry, and he never mentioned her ‘dreamy eyes’ anymore, which didn’t mean that he was disappointed in any way. It was just that now she was a permanent part of his life and routine. She sat through countless soccer matches with him, without ever grasping what it was about this particular form of entertainment that made people shout hurray or fall silent as if possessed.