Well then there was Uncle Hans, whom Father wanted to “drag up from the morass” and to “make a proper man of him”.
“What’s a banshee?”
Mother sits there staring ahead, and it’s as though she can’t pull herself together to tell you what a banshee is.
“It’s something to do with a ship.”
“What on a ship? Something about the rigging?”
“No.”
“Something about the galley?”
“No.”
“What then?”
Mother shakes her head.
“No, it’s nothing like that. It’s a kind of ship’s ghost, or whatever…”
Banshee. A new word, both to laugh at and be frightened of. You’d like to go on to ask why Uncle Hans is a banshee, but you don’t because you can sense it’s something it hurts your Mother to discuss.
Nor is it just that Uncle Hans is going around as a banshee and a feckless idiot with no “backbone”. He must have done something absolutely awful. But what?
Hannibal knows, but he won’t really say what.
“Cos I never gossip, you know.”
But neither does he keep quiet, so he produces a few enigmatic phrases and leaves you to work out for yourself what he means.
It’s something about Dolly Rose. And then it might be that Fina the Hut has been up to tricks with her magic spells, who knows?
***
Mother (one evening when you had worn yourself out over some sums that you were doing for homework and were leaning forward, tired out and with your forehead down on the table top):
“All this harshness is useless, Johan. You’ll only make him hate you more and more.”
You become wide awake on hearing this word hate. You think at first that it’s about you, but you soon understand that she’s referring to Uncle Hans; you remain motionless, listening.
Father: “You just keep out of it, Else.”
Silence. Father walks up and down the floor.
Mother: “You can see where it’s getting him, Johan.”
Father (stops): “What do you mean?”
Mother silent.
Father: “What do you really mean by that?”
Mother (in a broken voice): “I mean –– Amaldus! You’d better go to bed; you’re just sitting there going to sleep.”
So you went to bed, with a sense of unease and filled with foreboding.
***
Mother (in a letter to her sister Helene in Copenhagen):
“…This question of Hans is getting us all upset, and often making me quite unhappy, for you know how fond I am of him. Since Selimsen and Keil left he has gone around all on his own in some curious way and not had anyone to talk to except Mother. But of course he doesn’t confide in her, and she doesn’t encourage him to, nor has she really ever done, and so they probably only talk about music and ‘the old days’. And as for his sisters, I think he’s a bit embarrassed towards them because of that unfortunate affair with Rosa ( Dolly Rose), Fina the Hut’s daughter. I think you’ll remember her as a little girl – she used to stand at Fina’s garden gate, always beautifully dressed in red and white and with a finger in her mouth. She’s now said to be five months gone, and Johan insists vehemently that Hans must take the consequences of his actions and marry the girl, but Hans won’t.
He’s hardly on speaking terms with Johan any longer. All conversations simply turn into monologues on the part of Johan, and it is pitiful to see how embarrassed Hans is by all the scornful and bitter things he has to hear, however much truth there might be in them. I understand he hardly ever comes to the office any more but hangs around entirely on his own or goes off in his sailing boat – and I’m concerned about that, because he has never been careful enough with that boat, and now he is worse than ever.
And in brief… as for his appearance, he is hardly re-cognisable, and has left his beard untrimmed. You can imagine how uncomfortable I feel when I’m together with him, for I would so much like to be able to help him. But he doesn’t show any confidence in me either, and if I touch on this question of Rosa, he shuts up completely and refuses to say anything.
Then he tends to disappear and stay out all night – and where does he get to? Perhaps (it is to be hoped) he’s together with Rosa, but perhaps not, for one morning our warehouse keeper found him lying on the floor in what is known as ‘Rydberg’s Bedroom’ up in the loft in the green store; he was dead drunk and lay there frozen stiff, for it was during some cold weather. Father was like that occasionally, if you remember. Oh dear, I fear the worst…”