But when he returned to Aarhus in ’88, he discovered her on a couch in Hasle. She had a withdrawn face. It didn’t really occur to him till afterward, but she did. The thick lenses, the black hair, the smallness of her eyes. She was sitting with two girlfriends on a couch. The other two were good-looking, he remembers, yet next to the black-haired one they quickly faded away. Tea was passed round, and cookies, and she sat by the padded armrest in a summer dress and said she was studying to be a social worker. He would be continuing his research in immunology at the university hospital, and he couldn’t stop staring at her. It was the way her mouth moved, the words disconnected from her eyes. Out in the hallway, he asked her how much she could actually see, and then she placed a fist in front of both eyes. She did it to illustrate that there was a small tunnel of clear vision, there where her fingers didn’t close completely. She’d been born that way, she explained; her eyes weren’t properly alive, and it was true. There was something untouched about her, and on the bike ride home it struck him that her face was withdrawn, and that that was why he almost couldn’t sit to pedal.

In the days that followed it was hard to find any peace. Her reserved face haunted him. He masturbated in the bathroom, in bed, in the greenhouse in his parents’ yard during Sunday dinner, while the other family members sat intoxicated with the scent of honeysuckle. They were sitting on the patio, his brother and his brother’s family, Uncle Tyge with his new wife, his mother and father at either end of the table. When he had finished, he came to a standstill. He didn’t feel like leaving​ 77the greenhouse. From inside, through the grapevines and ripe tomatoes, the scene looked like a summer dinner in some carefully tended family. The large salad bowl, the leaves gleaming with oil, the white wine, and just behind it his mother with her face. Because the family had these blood vessels that lay on the surface of their cheeks, his mother’s condition could be discerned from the greenhouse. The edema, and the contrast with his father and all his talk about the hedge trimmer.

Before he left, he got them to stand in the sun with their backs against the south gable. “We never take family photos anymore,” he said. At first his mother didn’t want to be in it. He should at least take it from over by the sundial, she said. So he did that, took up a position there, and then he zoomed in on her and clicked. There she stood, blossoming in the sweet smell.