Annette was studying to be a social worker with help from the Institute for the Blind. She came from Randers. Her hair was black, her face white, and her body present in a slightly provincial way, and he couldn’t ask her to the movies. Instead he took her to concerts in Tangkrogen. A blanket on the grass, white wine, and his hand, which he often rested on hers. As they sat there, she would sing along now and then, or listen as he talked of his family in Risskov. His father was a doctor, he said, and his mother taught in a kindergarten. In his free time his father was an avid gardener, an identity he could imagine himself taking on, he admitted. In any case, he had gone on some lovely walks in Central Park when he was studying immunology in the us. The lilies there were gorgeous, the scent of lavender almost Provençal. Annette loved the smell of flowers too, she said, and while she described the size of the sunflower she’d once grown in Randers, he pictured the Hasidic women. They’d stood on that street corner in their black skirts, far from Aarhus. Not shaved bald yet, not wearing wigs and headscarves. Still with their dark hair tied back. High-neck blouses, long sleeves, ballerina flats. As they stood there, they swished their skirts back and forth, glancing uncertainly about for fathers and brothers, smiling faintly in their modesty. He’d had a similar experience once before, when he’d found himself standing in line behind a veiled woman in the supermarket on Guldsmedgade. He hadn’t wanted her to leave the store, though usually he wasn’t attracted to that type. The faces of most young women with veils seemed to him ambiguous, though on the other hand he’d recorded a documentary about the Amish on vhs. He’d watched that documentary often after he came back from the us (their bonnets, their bonnets, 79those braids, their bonnets), but he couldn’t tell Annette that. Nor could he tell her about the photo of his mother under the honeysuckle. How he’d had it blown up and stuck it up on the fridge in his apartment, the glowing pores, the white wine sheen. When he gazed at the picture, he could recall how she smelled when she kissed him goodnight.