So much can happen in the world. Dreadful things can happen. That knowledge makes you think sad thoughts.
Your mother can die. That is the most dreadful thing of all.
First you fall ill. Then you die.
Mother is ill. She lies there, quite pale and far away. Two women sit by her bed. They sit and wait. One of them is knitting. The other is doing something or other with warm water and linen.
Mother reaches out a clammy hand to you. She smiles, but her eyes are strangely far away. There is a vase of dark red flowers on the chest of drawers. They are roses. They smell sweet and sharp so it catches your nose and makes your eyes smart. There are thorns like cat’s claws on the stems.
“Come on, Amaldus. We’ll go out and buy some lucky dips.”
Aunt Nanna is dressed for winter, in long buttoned boots and with a fur-edged jersey and mittens. She is radiant. You’ve heard someone say that she is radiant. It sounds funny. It is otherwise only light that is radiant. No, red roses can be radiant as well…
The lucky dips are pale blue. There’s a shiny picture on each packet. There are “peppermints” in the packets, and then a thing: perhaps a ring for your finger, perhaps a hat made of lovely crumpled tissue paper, perhaps a piece of black liquorice or a little whistle.
The ring cuts into your finger, the shrill sound of the whistle hurts your ears, and the peppermint taste burns your tongue. You don’t like the blue lucky dips with their rings and whistles. You want to cry at the thought of the red roses and their nasty cat’s claws, and of the silent women and your sick mother.
When you die, you are put in the ground and lie there all on your own in the cemetery.
“But your soul goes up to God in Heaven.”
But that’s a very long way away, high up beyond the highest of those mountains in the distance, or far out beyond the End of the World.
The wind is blowing in from the grey sea. It blows into your mouth and your nose so that you are blown right away in all that wind.
At last there is nothing but this cruel wind, filled with the harsh cries of birds and the flapping of half dry clothes on a clothes line.
And then there’s a song, the saddest of all, although Aunt Nanna is radiant as she sings it:
And fare thee well, my only love,
And fare thee well a while!
And I will come again, my love,
Tho’ it were ten thousand miles!
For then you have to think of the red roses and their over-powering perfume and their bent cat’s claws.
And that terrible word if –
***
You didn’t sleep at home that night, but in Grandmother’s house, Andreasminde, in a deep alcove bed where Aunt Nanna slept along with her two sisters Kaja and Mona. It was a tight squeeze, and you got an elbow in your eye, but that was not why you wept and couldn’t fall asleep. It was the fault of those dreadful roses: you couldn’t get them out of your mind, and neither could you get away from Aunt Nanna’s sweet melody, “Fare thee well…”
When you woke the following morning, you were alone in bed, but soon afterwards Aunt Nanna came in, and she was radiant.
“Amaldus, my dear, you’re not an only child any longer, for you’ve got a little brother.”
Later on, you went home and saw this little brother, but only the back of his neck, for he lay there with a down-covered head burrowed deep in Mother’s breast.
The red roses were still there, but they looked all down in the dumps, for they had been given the company of some pale blue hyacinths that quite overpowered them with their perfume.