I had to go to Belgrade to give a couple of lectures, and Charles was unable to travel with me. I am a literary figure, but might have preferred to be an architect. I have a strong sense of space, I am touching my heart at this very moment. My hotel was red on the inside, Twin Peaks red; the receptionist was a legal practitioner. His life had not turned out as he had imagined. Unlike mine, he commented, referring to my visit to the institute as evidence. Though his current position, working as a receptionist for his younger brother – this was his brother’s hotel – did give him the opportunity to put his law degree to use on occasion. For instance when he had to communicate with and show around the supervisory health authorities, ‘because it demands an understanding of the law’. I wondered what it might be comparable to. Perhaps, for example, if a qualified house painter only used his qualification to buy paint for his own house, no, consider the opposite instead, how when her daughter lay dying in hospital, the author Joan Didion purchased surgical clothing and walked around the hospital ward wearing it, all the while offering sound advice to the doctors, until finally they told her that if she did not stop interfering with their treatment, they would have nothing more to do with her case, she would have to take over herself. That would be equivalent to a person, while a painter is working on their home, wearing white paint-stained clothes and standing on a ladder next to him. Welcome to my labyrinth.
I had no desire to commit my usual blunder of isolating myself in the hotel room. At one time I enjoyed staying in hotels; staying in a room that was not mine and which I had no responsibility for, where I could quickly make my peace with any possible aesthetic qualms, and where unseen hands swept away the dust. Now I regard them as waiting rooms where it is impossible to sleep, all night long the unfamiliar objects change shape every time I blink; everything solid becomes fluid. During the day I am lightheaded and dizzy, it’s like I’m breathing thin air. My feet are heavy. I drag myself along. The minibar. No, no alcohol. Chocolate. Salted nuts. Lonely, a veritable waste of my life, munching in bed, albeit in safety. And exempt from having to find my way home-out-and-home-again. I mean: find my way around the city and attempt to find my hotel again. My sense of direction is terrible. Non-existent. Better to stay home. (Of course I did not neglect my lectures, that was the entire reason I had come, but I allowed myself to be picked up and dropped off so as not to disappear somewhere in between the two destinations, I’m talking about the rest of the time, my spare time.) But as Eliot has taught us:
We shall not cease from exploration
and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time.
(Which does sound reassuring: as though you can be confident of returning home, automatically, so to speak.)
As a compromise, I spent quite a lot of time in the reception (not out, not entirely in) hovering on a barstool, I drank one espresso after the other. It was a small hotel, with only six rooms. And at one point I was the only guest. The staff, on the other hand – if anything they were overrepresented. I have no idea how many thin, dark chambermaids in red dresses walked aimlessly around, blending in with the walls. They weren’t prostitutes, were they? If that were the case, they might just as well have been leaning against the sunset in a deserted landscape. Nevertheless when breakfast was served in the basement, all six tables were laid. To keep up the illusion. It was called Hotel City Code, a name I was not quite sure how to interpret. Was this hotel the code to the city? When I said the name, code quickly became coat.
Before leaving, I had decided to spend every waking hour exploring the city. I wanted to be a tourist. I wanted to get to know Belgrade. And then I lost my courage. The reception, as mentioned, was my compromise.
But the receptionist talked incessantly. In a rather mumbling and unintelligible English that meant I had to strain every nerve to understand him. He had plenty of time for his only guest. As soon as I stepped out of my room, he moved towards me as though carried by a gust of wind. He was dark, slender, nimble, indefatigable, with surprisingly kind eyes hidden behind his glasses, but he kept going on and on until my mouth went dry, the room blurred and I nearly fainted. I knew the names of his siblings, I knew his cholesterol level and I knew his doctor’s instructions: ‘fifty grams of almonds, four squares of dark chocolate and a glass of red wine every day,’ he said, his small friendly face beaming, ‘and obviously eat plenty of fruit and vegetables and walk at least three kilometres.’ He bent forward and drew a curve in the air to indicate the progress of his blood pressure. I also knew that his grandfather had written an account of his experiences in World War Two, but unfortunately the manuscript had gone missing. I knew more or less what it contained. And I was starting to get the idea that it was hidden in a barn somewhere in Croatia. I was also starting to suspect that he was encouraging me to go in search of it. He considered me to be an unusually kind person – with a lot of spare time. Ear, vagina, a mirror that makes you look twice as big; you little devil, I suddenly thought, not a chance in hell. And with that I grabbed my coat and left the reception with barely a nod. I had chosen a good time to leave. He had just stated that no matter how much money society poured into the Roma community, all they did was spend it on beer and cigarettes, and on chocolate for their many children. That was what drove me out into the world. Though I was afraid of encountering a Roma who behaved like the one I met in St Petersburg. I had given her what corresponds to a hundred kroner, and in gratitude she lay down in the middle of the street and started to kiss my shoe. ‘No, no,’ I said, ‘please get up.’ ‘Not until you give me another hundred,’ she said, and only then did she release my shoe, allowing me to continue walking towards the Spilled Blood Church, the one with the candy-coloured cupolas, which even up close did not look real.
As soon as I walked out the door, a sense of loss swept over me. With absolutely no desire to do so, I took my first steps in Belgrade. Like I was learning to walk. I knew nobody, nobody knew me. I was nobody. I did not understand the language. I understood nothing. I might as well have stopped looking where I was going, because when it came down to finding my way back, maybe I would have a vague recollection of what met my gaze, but I would not be able to remember where on my journey it had occurred. The order of the elements is not arbitrary when it comes to finding your way. Instead of trying to find my way back to the hotel later, I should have checked out and taken my luggage with me. Then, exhausted from exploring and lugging everything about, when I could manage no more, I could have dragged myself to some new, unknown hotel – and then when I absolutely had to, I could set off again. I am not that helpless. I had the address of the hotel in my pocket, and when I grew tired of walking, I hailed a taxi and rode back. An unfortunate experience in my youth had taught me to always carry the address of the hotel or guest house on my person. Greece, half a lifetime ago. Me, young, wearing a gauze Iphigenia dress, light as a feather, so white that I had had to cover my nipples with toothpaste. It was before the time of strapless bras. In any case, I had been out dancing, night-time, the flowers falling from the flowering trees. Alma, my faithless friend, continued to dance with her Greek. I could not find our pension. The longer I searched, the smaller I became. A man had been observing me for some time. In the end he cut across the street and kindly asked me what I was looking for. He had a hard time believing that I could not so much as remember the name of the pension. That which you do not understand, you simply have to accept. So at the first hotel we came across he rented a room for me and promised to return the next morning to help me. He left. He had a moustache, but he was not without some charm. Had he been less chivalrous, it might have led to a slightly lengthier encounter. The next morning he returned, paid the bill, swung onto the saddle of his moped, and with me behind him, headed for the local office of the Tourist Police. There they had a copy of my passport, which the owner of the pension had dutifully submitted upon check-in – with the name and address of my temporary residence attached! Such efficiency, and in Greece, at that. Back at the pension, I found my beloved friend Alma wringing her hands, half-dead from dread, certain that I (my head) was lying somewhere, detached from my body, under a sprinkling of browning flowers, even though we were used to ditching each other whenever some handsome mutt crossed our path. Ah, adolescence, one long mating season, a parade of brilliant memories, an entire repository of bright young passion for tougher times – did I really have a piece of red glass (grenade-like) attached to my navel and did I really display it to my temporary chosen one in a tunnel by simply lifting my dress? Yes, you bet I did! It was me, to give one final little toot. Now I use the word ‘toot’, which is Beckett’s expression for drawing out the text as much as possible, not to tie bows, but to make curls, and earlier today, duly escorted by a lecturer from the institute, on my way back from a lecture, I came across some graffiti. Sprayed on the wall were the words:
Books, brothers, books
Not bells
The lecturer translated for me and said something about bells and Santa Claus – when he arrived in his sleigh.
‘Santa Claus, you know, on a creaking carpet of cotton wool, jingle bells jingle bells, until we all hygge our arses off. Even his beard is creaking.’
Bells probably referred to church bells. So neither church nor kitsch, no thank you. Moral graffiti. Lovely to see graffiti that encourages reading, the lecturer said.
‘Exactly,’ I answered and hoped he would offer to carry my bag. Because it was heavy. With books.
Now, halfway through my fourth decade, grown-up, to put it mildly, I stood near the ruin of a Turkish fort, high above the Sava (I had thought it was the Danube but that was on the other side of Belgrade). A long, black barge was floating past. Oh, the endlessly glittering river and now this long barge. Who doesn’t like river barges, who isn’t reminded of Huckleberry Finn or Venice at the sight and the sound of their gentle gliding. I ought to have been happy. Once upon a time people did not think they owed it to nature to enjoy it; it was simply an infernal nuisance; something that stung you when you stormed through like a savage; when you did not think of nature as a deficiency within yourself if it did not reveal itself to you – and trickled into your soul like sweet, white wheat.
Has my soul grown too fat?
Has it hibernated?
Or the exact opposite – suddenly nature is a music where everything flashes before our eyes before we drown, and faced with this denseness we have to close the shutters?
My friend Edward said to me one sultry summer: ‘At last I sat down on a chair in the garden. But the garden did not speak to me, it was as though my surroundings were dead – and then suddenly it came to nonetheless, and within ten minutes I was enjoying the birds and the wind in the trees.’
The mind as your own worst enemy. Furious monologues, scenarios where everything ends in disaster; catastrophes; attacks against imagined enemies; not to mention demonic fits of doubt, forsaking all that is good – as if you are truly possessed by a demon, and maybe in the midst of everything you think: If God were to look into my soul right now, the punishment would be horrific; but it is not a demon, nor a God, merely a carousel that you cannot get off; the giraffe, the fat pink pig with the blue trousers and the straight back and the team of horses in front of the revolving coach, it mists before the eyes. And you think: Now I am going to die of dizziness. I’ll never get off.
And yet suddenly, mercifully – it slows down, the mechanism groans faintly (something is stuck) but then it goes quiet, and the outside (nature, for example, an irresistible person, for example) is allowed to enter and fill the space.
I ought to have been happy, or at least not quite so lost, standing before the Sava; considering my age. (I find myself in a situation where I constantly have the chance to gauge the temperature of my soul; I have to get out and dig ditches.)
Why does the journey reinforce this existential loneliness – never am I closer to death and the abyss than when I am alone on a journey. I know the answer already. An unknown among unknown faces. And unknown, unmemorized stretches. Kingdom of the dead, glittering, indistinct features, averted eyes, withdrawal, fleeting shadows, bloodlessness. I was all but longing to return to the receptionist. Horrified I think that is how it will be for me one day back home – if I survive everyone I hold dear. You ought to be able to pop your clogs in time, let me keep time.
This city is incredibly ugly; it consists primarily of concrete buildings that are leaning forward or backward, some of the walls have stomachs, sagging in the middle and studded with criss-crossed supporting beams. And the windows are like eyes under too much pressure, bulging. But there are trees too, this rustling green complex, planted for the enlivenment of the citizens and the dogs of the city, and the rivers are likewise enlivening, old Sava, old Danube. Some buildings in the city have survived the many bombardments, first by the Germans, then by Nato, the first floor is wider than the ground floor, perhaps to save on precious land, that was something the lecturer also drew my attention to. The older houses are the ones with stomachs.
Every time I stood by the Sava, I considered taking the bridge across to Novi Beograd. Not to enjoy a glass of the local water, which contains uranium, leaching uranium from the bombing in the nineties, likely featuring on a list of the most polluted water supplies on the globe, but to visit the art museum there. In the end I did just that. I stepped out onto the bridge. There were no other pedestrians on that stretch, but plenty of traffic, so heavy it made the bridge groan. Belgrade has no ring roads. Every car has to drive through the centre. And below me was the blackish-green water. I would probably get hit by a lorry and be sent flying over the railing. Get run over first, then drown. I hurried along. In an attempt to get the trip over and done with.
No sooner was I across than I longed to return to the other side, which had apparently become a kind of home to me.
‘You’re hopeless,’ I told myself, ‘you finally make it across, only to long for a return.’
Even though I was not hungry, I felt like the starving protagonist in Hunger that day. I wonder whether my temperament can be compared to his; in a sense, he is more or less constantly in the dumps; there is something artificial and terrifying about his sudden euphoria. Luckily it seldom lasts long. The head quickly sinks between the shoulders again.
I clambered down a staircase, also concrete, and stood on a seemingly deserted quay. Below the bridge were traces of an abandoned Roma camp. You are always at risk of being robbed. My easily awoken uneasiness was awake. Then another pedestrian appeared. I asked for directions to the museum. The pedestrian pointed towards a public park with trees and said that she would dissuade me from walking through it. It was not safe. I should keep to the water instead. I stared at the desolate park and nodded. The river ran in front of this deserted park. And there were houseboats, and restaurants, also on boats.
Nothing happened. And the museum was under renovation. So I had to go back across the bridge. I sat for a while on a bench and stared at the opposite shore of the river. I am the offspring of Homesickness and Departure sickness, the descendent of Melancholia and the Great joy. Easy now, you’re not Bruno Schulz in the posthumous publication of Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, which consists entirely of poetic extracts and for that reason is largely unreadable, every living creature needs to breathe, don’t go over the top, you have to move. I got up, in an attempt to walk off my thoughts. I left the hysterical poetry on the bench, bent over (fallen into a reverie, staring at a small great object down in the gravel), wearing purple, the messianic colour of the soul, with a soft, effeminate lower body, strong arms and a small but finely-formed head. A head like a thoroughbred with quivering nostrils.
I made it across the bridge in one piece, turned my back on the Sava and strolled towards the town centre. Suddenly something I recognized, I felt a pang in my heart. The art film cinema, Art Bioskop Museum, where the lecturer in 2005 or 2006 had seen a French film where the only other person in the cinema was the academic Mihailo Marković, the SPS ideologue, the party of Slobodan Milošević; there they sat in the darkness, and before the film began, Marković, who was in his eighties, asked the lecturer why, young as he was, he was not with a girl. In those years very few people visited the cinema in Belgrade, and sometimes the cinema staff crossed themselves when the lecturer arrived because he had strayed into the darkness. This expression, ‘strayed into the darkness’, as he described it, made me think of him as a werewolf. (Incidentally his eyebrows had also grown together, the sign of the werewolf par excellence.)
Shortly afterwards, I arrived at a street where the air was as fresh as an early morning. The street had just been hosed down. Trees grew on either side of it, their crowns full and leaning towards one another, so that the street was covered by a green, rustling roof, with the light drizzling down through it; I walked upon a living pavement, light and shadow fluttering about; it was dim beneath the trees. Outside of this oasis, the world was an oven. I turned around and walked back down the street and felt a gleam of pure adventurousness, which must be the opposite of loss. In my mind, there is a connection between adventure and early mornings. Or in any case there was in my childhood, and for that reason I made sure to get up early, and then wandered about, across the golf course, along the beach and through the woods. The sense of adventure was most present at dawn, it gradually wore off as it grew light and people appeared. In all likelihood, the sense of adventure was connected with being alone; alone in a world devoid of people. Because I don’t recall anything special ever happening. Or perhaps what was exceptional about it was that I began to notice myself; the absence of gazes gave me an incipient view of myself. Nobody to look at me with a gaze shaded by some preconceived notion of who I was. And for that reason I could arrive there on my own. In order to discover yourself, you have to be alone. In all probability the opposite also holds true: You do need the gazes of others (in order to discover yourself).
Back then I was never afraid of getting lost outside. And nobody worried about me. I could leave the house at four o’clock in the morning without any form of protest, without getting told off later. On the other hand I did get told off when I refused to go to school later in the morning; and I did that often. The time when I had the best conditions for wandering about as the merry daughter of Mother Nature, when I jostled with nature as soon as I opened the door, was in Year Three. We had moved to Helsingør for a year. We had a rather plain, very basic house in the midst of the great outdoors. The house had brown and ugly doors, like at a school. I had had to change schools, this time the school was yellow. My classmates and I did not have our own form room; we were a so-called wandering class. I never knew where to go when I arrived in the morning. Somewhere in the vast building there was a noticeboard displaying a message about where we were supposed to proceed to. The noticeboard did not change location. A number and possibly a letter indicated a room. But I did not want to (circle around for ages looking for an abstraction such as B29, I did not want to be contracted in that way).
‘If you don’t start attending school soon, I won’t like you any more,’ my mum said.
(‘I could have bit off my tongue,’ she said years later.)
But by and large I stayed home. And spent the day mixing fruit juice powder with a tiny amount of water and eating it with a spoon: pineapple powder, raspberry powder, pineapple powder again. Once in a while a young girl was hired to keep me entertained, she brought me buns and cocoa from another world. The kitchen was so small that we had to edge past each other.
Apparently, hidden in a corner somewhere inside of me is the child who, in the strange school and in the kitchen with the strange young girl, did not really feel like flesh and blood, but like bricks and mortar. A stubborn wall of silence, of enormous inconvenience. I now believe I have studied loss under a magnifying glass. Things (like this) take time, one might object. But I have long thought about this, because who wants to be a helpless idiot; this is obviously a condensed version of a longer, more zig-zagging thought process. I am back to where I started, with the dissolution of pineapple powder and young girls in a cramped kitchen. Facing the walls of Hotel City Code and the minibar with its sweet & salty temptations – like a bullet that has hit its target. More by accident than by design. That should wrap things up with Eliot.
And who was standing around waiting for his dear guest?
Alma has arrived. She could tell from my voice how I was doing. It has always been like that. Friendship is golden.
The last few days I have not really left the hotel, only to cut across the square to a small shop where I buy toasted bagels with tofu or salmon. I then devour them in bed, and afterwards do the same with large pieces of fruit pies while on my computer I watch Serbian films with English subtitles, bought on the cheap from street vendors. When watching Emir Kusturica’s Underground and Black Cat, White Cat (I watch them several times, I brought them with me), I turn down the Balkan music, which normally makes me feel like dancing and drinking, so that the receptionist does not come in and join my party (my opulent meal would send him directly to his grave) or attempt to drag the fox out of the den, for espresso & monologue in the reception. A couple of times I hear him stop outside my door. I recognize his small pointed footsteps. Incidentally, he wears a pedometer on his belt, at the behest of his doctor. Oh yes, and then the lecturer and I went for a melancholy afternoon stroll along the Danube where I reflected my frame of mind on the barges and was at a loss to keep death at bay, while the lecturer observed the mafia ladies.
‘I’m Camilla’s GPS,’ that was how Alma introduced herself at dinner last night, and everyone understood what she meant, as they have all taken turns shepherding me around, picking me up at the hotel reception and dropping me off again like I was a large package – with the string coming loose. Now Alma has taken charge of me for my final days in the city. She did not come exclusively for my sake, but also because she was a little confused with what was going on back home and with herself; but first and foremost she was here because her book has been translated into Serbian and she is taking part in the Belgrade book fair. The dinner took place at the embassy where Alma was the guest of honour, and the lecturer had forgotten to inform them that I do not eat meat. As soon as the individual portions of sliced fillet were brought in for starters, the receptionist’s voice echoed in my head: ‘Almonds, dark chocolate, red wine – every day. And no meat: But who can survive without meat? Nobody! Nobody can survive without meat,’ he yelled. As he yelled, he had cocked his head like an affectionate woman – an attempt to obtain agreement without a struggle. ‘I can,’ I objected, and reached for my room key, but he quickly placed his hand over it and continued talking. I politely swallowed the delicate fillet. The main course consisted of rare roast beef, also individually portioned, which I cut into pieces that were small enough to swallow, barely touching my teeth. All the while I thought of a film about the survivors of a plane that crashed in the Andes in 1972, where the dead ‘lent’ the living their muscles; in the film, the survivors file off infinitely thin slices from the frozen bodies. I had not eaten meat for twenty years, but the rigid ambassador was not the type to cock her head (otherwise she would never have made it that far, unlike the stranded receptionist with his cocked head working at his little brother’s hotel), I preferred not to be an inconvenience, and at long last I managed to clear enough of the red mountain away that the bottom of the plate was visible. Besides the ambassador, the cultural attaché, the lecturer, Alma’s translator, Alma and I, there was a dramatic Serbian poet present. She had brought a selection of her works with her, in English translations, as a gift to the host. I expressed an interest in her books, and the ambassador said that I could keep them, the poet could bring her some more on another occasion. The two were old friends – she could permit herself to speak on her behalf. ‘No, no,’ the Serbian poet and I exclaimed in chorus: they were for the host. When the Serbian poet said no, I hurried to repeat it a number of times, and I got up and put the books down in the middle of the table, demonstratively, out of my reach. Meat-free dessert. Thank you for a lovely dinner, leave the table, the others went into the adjoining room, I reached for the books and looked at them a little more – then I hurried to join the small gathering. I am a little careless in my conduct with my bag. I never zip it shut, meaning someone can just slip their hand in and pull out my wallet. Later, the next morning, I suddenly recalled how both the host and the poet had looked at my bag strangely. Well, instinct or the experience of moving in more exalted circles must have told Alma that since she was the guest of honour, she had to bring the evening to a conclusion. ‘Thank you so much for this evening,’ she said and put down her coffee cup, and as if by command, everyone got up and said their goodbyes. Two minutes later we stood outside. In the hotel room I put my bag down and gave it no more thought until the following morning when I went to find my lipstick. In the bag, oh horror, were the Serbian poet’s books. In a fit of absentmindedness, perhaps confused by all that meat in my stomach, I must have stuffed them into my bag instead of putting them back on the table.
‘Now they’re going to think I’m a kleptomaniac,’ I whimpered to Alma, ‘how did that happen?’
‘The lecturer will sort it out,’ Alma said, ‘he’d be only too happy to help – seeing as you had to eat all that meat.’
And so the lecturer did sort it out. He returned the books personally.
A lot had gone awry in connection with this trip. I had not felt like travelling there in the first place. (Not least, as I mentioned, because I hate travelling alone.) I had convinced myself that my plane would crash, and for that reason I tidied up all my drawers and threw loads of things out before I left – so that Charles would not be left to deal with everything. I had also just about finished spring cleaning the entire place, in an attempt to force myself to calm down.
I had promised Edward to walk his dog the afternoon of my departure. He had told me I could easily take it off the lead, but I almost never got it back on again. I had chased it through all of Fælledparken and had ended up on the square in front of the post office. It was pouring down, the dog and I were the only living creatures outside that Sunday afternoon, and the dog had sought shelter under the roof of the post office. I perched on the statue in the middle of the square, staring at it impotently, drenched and furious. I tried to recall some of the condescending and funny things PH had said about the bombastic post office and its bulging pillars, or where I had read about it, but I could not remember. The dog looked small and lost next to the pillars, but make no mistake – as soon as I moved closer, it leapt down the steps with a crooked grin, nimbly striking them like it was practising the scales on the piano. When I returned to my position in the rain, it went back under cover and looked at me again. ‘Do you want to swap places, you filthy mutt,’ I shouted and considered letting it find its own way home, when a lady holding a massive umbrella fortuitously made contact with it, and it practically leapt into her arms. I sneaked up behind it and grabbed hold of its tail. At home I said my goodbyes to Charles, as though it were for ever, and with a heavy heart I went to Kastrup and with heavy steps I walked to my gate – apparently a group of Chinese tourists and I were the only ones flying to Belgrade that day, and nobody was in a hurry to get us on board. When, according to my ticket, it was time to depart, I asked a short Chinese man if he had heard about any delays to Belgrade. ‘Beijing, Beijing,’ he said. And I realized my mistake. I ran like a madman, and even though my gate (the right one) was already closed, I forced my way through and boarded the aeroplane. ‘Why didn’t you call me – over the loudspeaker?’ I piped up to a stewardess, she gave me the ‘Stick a pipe in it and sit down’ look, ‘but they always call passengers who don’t come to the gate,’ I said, ‘I’ve heard them do it before,’ and with a sense of being completely unwanted, I sat down in my seat.
Alma has another man, and for that reason she buys two of everything when it comes to gifts. Two identical sweaters. And in addition, two identical bottles of aftershave. That way she does not carry different coloured wool from one set of arms to another, or different male scents. It reduces the risk of being found out. What about hair, I ask, you always hear stories about that; but she has a lint roller in her bag that she just runs up and down herself, and close-cropped men do not shed much hair. She flirts with every man we come across; in the department store she approaches three different men to hear their opinions on aftershave before she settles on one for her two men back home.
In reality there is a third person she is thinking of and longing for, but she can’t have him, and not even having two men can make up for that one. When she describes his kiss, I can almost feel it myself: ‘He placed his hands around my mouth – he shielded my lips so that they were the only thing in the world, and then he kissed between his hands; his tongue was slow and light; he used only the tip, and after a moment it was as though I was made of a weightless, floating material.’
But she could not have him; he was a mountain climber and would not leave his Welsh mountains behind. They spent a single night together, in an empty dormitory at the youth hostel. Kristian was lying ill at the other end of the corridor. The door could not be locked, so they dragged a table in front of it and then positioned it so the handle was forced upward and the door could not be opened from outside. They were sitting in their underwear in the barricaded room, drinking wine and smoking cigarettes and listening to music, when suddenly Alma saw herself from the outside and said: ‘You would think we were sitting on a beach.’
Outside there were mountains, it was not even a little bit warm. He replied that physically speaking, she was certainly very beautiful. And it reminded her of how black as coal, how deceitful her insides were.
When she awoke in the morning, lying with him in the upper bunk, the only thing on her mind was that she had to have him one more time. She woke him up so there would be enough time. And she had him once more, and it was so bittersweet because they were to be parted, and because one day we are all going to depart, everything heeled over and capsized and broke and turned into I want and I want, and then I think she said something about pomegranates, or no, he had said that she reminded him of one of those fruits that are soft on the outside and hard on the inside. But then they had to part. She caught a final glimpse of him as she passed through reception where he was huddled over a map with a couple of friends. When she opened the door to Kristian, or rather threw it open, she stood bolt upright like an Olympic rider and had never felt more alive in her entire life. The following day she wrote a letter to him that sounded like it came from For Whom the Bell Tolls or A Farewell to Arms, where she was overrun with love, and later when she had arrived home from the trip, she wrote another letter, before finally receiving a reply. She put his letter down and grew sober and cold. His letter contained a description of a minor incident about him climbing a cliff in darkness, the only good part of the letter; the rest was a plea to abandon any thought of them because of the distance and the different lifestyles, (she had even aired the thought of studying mountain climbing at a school on Bornholm in order to approach his way of life) and then a pale request to write back. She decided to liberate the short passage from his letter and wrote:
We were climbing a cliff that is around one hundred and fifty metres high, when it began to get dark (my watch had stopped, and we had left much later than we had thought). We were around fifty metres from the top when it went completely dark, and we could not go back down because the water had risen and there was no longer a beach beneath us, but a sea.
We climbed the last fifty metres in darkness – but the beam from a lighthouse flashed against the cliff around every seventeen seconds. When the light fell upon the cliff, we searched for the next crevice to place our hands or feet and pulled ourselves up, blinded by the light that washed across us. It went dark again, and over the course of the following few seconds our eyes would grow used to the darkness. Then the light returned. It went on like that until around midnight, when at long last we reached the summit.
She later binned the letter and lay down on a floor that smelled of wood and soap, because then she could not get any lower, and she remained lying there for what must have felt like six months. And later she sent the story about the cliff to a journal, together with a couple of other pieces she had written herself, and had them published in her name. The theft was not revenge for her unrequited love, it was just an excellent, if not unassuming bit of prose that deserved to see the light of day – to be read, Alma thought. And the mountain climber would have had no objections. He had no literary ambitions.
Once in a while she reached out for Ulysses, because as she now felt so terrible, she might as well attempt to finally make it all the way through the book. And now she was here, with me, and was able to say that it would never have worked out.
‘But during those six months on the floor, you still managed to meet someone to buy aftershave for?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you kept Kristian.’
‘For the time being. Yes. I do not have the energy to rid myself of him.’
‘Do you also want to rid yourself of the other one?’
We lay on the bed. It could have been anywhere in the world. Because Alma was there, I felt at home.
‘I wanted a daring life for myself,’ she said, ‘like on the cliff, a life lit up by flashes from a lighthouse.’
‘A life with lighthouses, cliffs, flashes and a sudden and total darkness,’ she sighed.
‘Remember to turn off the heating pad before we leave,’ I said.
‘And hold on tight until your nails turn white,’ I said wearily, because she could not seem to let go of the cliff in her mind.
‘Only the nails, which have been completely abandoned by the blood, illuminate the darkness,’ I continued, ‘but now I need something to eat.’
‘Oh,’ Alma said, ‘then we had better get going’ – and then she reminded me for the God-knows-how-many-times of the night in Venice, half a lifetime ago, when I was so hungry and she couldn’t decide on a restaurant, that in the end I slapped her across the face, but as soon as I had done it, I said: ‘Hurry up and slap me, otherwise I’ll hear about it for the rest of my life.’
And so she did, but she looked as though she had been forced to cross a line, whereas my slap, I am sorry to say, had practically grown out of my hand naturally. Half in shock and with one hand against her cheek she stepped forward and slapped me on the cheek I had turned to her.
Before we set off, Alma looks at the map. A single glance is enough, then she is familiar with it. We are going to the Nikola Tesla Museum. Just who is Nikola Tesla? Nikola Tesla is ostensibly one of the greatest geniuses, physicists, electrical engineers and inventors of the nineteenth century; Serbian, born in Croatia in 1856, emigrated to the USA where he was initially employed by Thomas Edison (proponent of direct current, obstinate opponent of alternating current), later financed by J. P. Morgan, and died, unnoticed and alone, in a small room in the New Yorker Hotel in 1943, considered an eccentric (because he spoke at length about the possibility of transmitting images, among other things), after having presented humanity with the gift of alternating current (think of Tesla when you switch on the lights), the radio (even though Marconi received the credit, Tesla was awarded the patent two years after his own death), the remote control, the robot and more still (he held hundreds of patents) and after, it should be added, many years living the high life, keeping company with the greatest minds of the time, Mark Twain among others. He would go to work like he was attending a banquet, wearing white tie and tails and gloves. He was lean and elegant. He loved pigeons and was often seen pictured with them up and down his arms, like a statue. And that’s all from the bag of myths. Except of course that there was a terrible thunderstorm the day he was born – electricity welcomed its master with the greatest of orchestras.
‘We’re here,’ Alma says and plants a finger on the street the hotel lies on, Dobračina, ‘first we have to cross Aleksandra Nevskog,’ (‘that’s the square with the equestrian statue where a crowd of Serbian nationalists protest every day, and which I have to cross when I buy bagels,’ I say, ‘they want Kosovo back’) ‘down Francuska, continue along Bulevar Despota Stefana, let’s take that one for the name alone, though it might not be the fastest route, down Dečanska and Bulevar Kralja Aleksandra – and yes, then Krunska, where the museum is situated.’
She checks the map again.
‘Should we take it with us just in case?’
Alma shakes her head three times like a circus horse. And then we leave.
This museum is also under renovation. But half of it, the ground floor, is still accessible. I stare at Tesla’s machines but they are beyond my understanding. But this much I can say: there is something resembling a golden egg, standing on the pointy end of something resembling a truncated drum (or a small arena) and it is the same green as an examination desk.
Tesla’s urn stands on a pedestal, round as a globe but with small feet. I doubt it really contains any ashes. And if there are… then is the dust able to rest amongst shrieking Serbian schoolchildren on a tour and surrounded by inventions of ‘the porter of dust’: a button is continually pressed, and a noise follows as the mechanism activates, the machine clicks into gear / but perhaps for the dust it is music to the ear. I could gain access to this world, but it would take time. On the other hand I immediately recognize the description of the mind that created the inventions:
In my boyhood I suffered from a peculiar affliction due to the appearance of images, often accompanied by strong flashes of light, which marred the sight of real objects and interfered with my thought and action. They were pictures of things and scenes which I had really seen, never of those I imagined. When a word was spoken to me, the picture of the object it designated would present itself vividly to my vision and sometimes I was quite unable to distinguish whether what I saw was tangible or not. This caused me great discomfort and anxiety.
This, the tangibility of intangibility that Tesla describes in his autobiography, My Inventions, later made him capable of envisaging his discoveries (they also presented themselves in flashes of lightning) as ready-made, as though they were already on the table in front of him. Then all he would have to do is construct them according to ‘his vision’, so to speak.
In 1926, another genius of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf, wrote in her diary:
Returning Health
This is shown by the power to make images: the suggestive power of every sight and word is enormously increased. Shakespeare must have had this to an extent which makes my normal state the state of a person blind, deaf, dumb, stone-stockish & fish-blooded. And I have it compared with poor Mrs Bartholomew almost to the extent that Shakespeare has it compared with me.
… Is it not conspicuous that two minds, one of a physicist and one of an artist, can be endowed with the same kind of power? That the same power can offer such diverse yields, alternating current and The Waves.
But now to the book fair – to the book fair in Belgrade. We meet the lecturer outside a new, grand exhibition centre, a kind of oversized glass cage. To some extent the lecturer has acted as a middleman between Alma and her publishers, speaking Serbian as he does, and a resident of Belgrade and friendliness incarnate. But the lecturer looks mortified.
‘Why the mortified look, lecturer?’
There are two reasons.
The publisher has not arranged for our passes to the fair. (‘Do I have to pay to attend my own reading?’ Alma asks incredulously. The lecturer can only nod.)
But there is no reading. The publisher did not expect anyone to show up to Alma’s reading (with the lecturer serving as interpreter) or to hear her speak about the book, since she is completely unknown in Serbia. (But that’s the very reason I’ve been flown here, Alma says.) However, a number of interviews have been arranged. ‘Oh,’ Alma says, brightening up.
We buy our tickets and as we go inside we are warned that if we exit, we cannot get back in – without purchasing new tickets. There is a poor indoor climate at the temple of books. Lots and lots of stands. The lecturer leads us through the labyrinth. We reach the stand for Alma’s publisher. Alma’s publishing house was founded by a blind man. Alma’s publisher looks like an intellectual from decades past. Wearing a corduroy jacket et cetera. Charming. Sitting round a table is a group of older men wearing overcoats and dark glasses. ‘Those are the blind people,’ the lecturer says. They are drawn to this place like bees to sugar water, now they sit and drink in the background. I myself am extremely short-sighted. I don’t wear glasses, only sunglasses with lenses, I use them when I watch TV. Charles thinks it is a little sombre when I sit on the sofa on a winter afternoon hiding behind my sunglasses. Alma offers her hand. There is one person who is not blind. She has read Alma’s book. She does not care for it, we can tell. Maybe it has been translated nonchalantly. Suggests the lecturer. In any case Alma has found a name in the translation that she does not recognize. ‘Who is that?’ she asks the translator and points at the name. The translator shrugs.
‘You’ve simply introduced an extra character,’ the lecturer says.
‘It’s post-modernism,’ the translator says.
I feel like I should contradict him, or ask him to expand on it, but the exhibition hall has a sleep-inducing effect on me.
Alma gives six interviews over the course of the next hour. None of the people in attendance have read her book. But the more Alma speaks, the less important that is. ‘And now the author is going to say something funny,’ one of the journalists says, and Alma recites some muddled nonsense about Hamlet, something along the lines that if Hamlet had been Finnish, then… no, it’s impossible to remember. She goes on and on. The publisher hands her a shot, and then she talks even more. Now Serbian TV arrives. She insists on being shown with her publisher, ‘my Serbian publisher,’ and places an arm around him. His shoulders stiffen. A sighted friend of one of the blind people makes a video of her for personal use, ‘she’s quite the character,’ he says, almost to himself, and Alma beams. ‘It’s difficult to stop talking,’ she says during a break. The publisher suggests she get a little fresh air. He wants to lend us some employee passes so we don’t have to pay to re-enter. All we have to do is ring his mobile when we return. So we do that – after a long and liquid lunch – and he comes out of the exhibition centre and drags us around to the car park and gets us to duck down behind some cars so the guards at the entrance (who look like proper skinheads) can’t see us, and then he clips the book fair cards to our clothes. He very nearly breaks out in an innocent whistling when we pass the guards.
So it is done. I have left. (The day after I returned from Belgrade with the journey still lingering inside me.) It was like pulling up an enormous root from of the earth – I fell back with a thud and found myself on the pavement, with a suitcase in each hand. Goodbye windows, and goodbye brick. And goodbye Kristian, I can see you behind the curtains, goodbye dry, dusty life, goodbye rules, goodbye worries, goodbye terrible and devastating quarrels, and goodbye sweetness (by now, you only fell in drops) and goodbye beautiful, practically translucent eyes, but I have to be careful now, otherwise I’ll just walk back up the stairs, goodbye goodbye, because I mean it. This morning I informed him of my decision. It is already afternoon. At first he began to pace around the living room with long, vigorous steps, round the dining room table, over to the sofa. His body was moving so powerfully that it frightened me; like there was a cliff lurking somewhere in the living room where he could drag us both into the abyss. I wrapped my arms around his chest and tried to keep him calm, but he took no notice of my embrace, he tore himself away and stormed round the table again and into the kitchen and back into the living room. But suddenly he went quiet. He lay down on the bed and did not say a word while I packed my clothes. He just followed my movements. When I was finished, he got up, almost mechanically, and strode after me to the door. He closed it immediately after me. For a moment it was like I was pasted to the door.
It is Sunday, there are families out on walks. Frederiksberg is very red and very heavy. The road is as wide as a racing track. I feel a twitching inside me to move fast, I sense it as something equine. Good thing we never managed to have a child and become one of these families behind a heavy red brick wall. Kristian asked me about it once, and as ill luck would have it I replied: ‘You’re like a child yourself. I’m not having another one.’
Seven years and not a moment longer. My man-child. Child because he clung to me. (When we would lie face to face and I turned my head away, towards the room, he grabbed it and turned it back so that I could see him again. He could not get enough contact. He could never get enough. The more he made his demands on me, the more I preferred to write. The more insistently he turned my head towards his, the more defiantly I looked away.) And then he was so afraid of dying if he got a bone caught in his throat or scalded himself on a teaspoon of hot porridge or got stung by a mosquito (Lake Victoria, safely entrenched behind malaria pills). You should be able to surrender your life with a grand gesture. I believe that. At this moment.
I have torn myself free. My heart is pounding something fierce. I am alone. I am heading into the unknown. I am going to live with Alwilda for a few days, on Sankt Peders Stræde, that will be my first stop. But when will I know that I have truly left? That I will not fall back; like when you have thrown something in the rubbish bin and an hour later you regret it and take it out and clean it off. Or a longer period of time will pass, and it will be like opening a house that has been empty all winter long, and the first thing you do is sweep out the cobwebs.
Nobody’s back is straighter than Alwilda’s. She never uses a backrest but still manages to sit ramrod straight. Then I am aware that I am sprawled out, my back is an arch, and I straighten up a little in the chair out of embarrassment. Alwilda has ironclad discipline. Me – I need a broom to sweep myself together. I sleep until noon. I have become dependent on my heating pad. I make a cave out of my duvet. I wrap myself up and disappear inside it; I want to sleep within my duvet like in a snowdrift, burning hot. Then I think that it is lovely to be a person, with breasts, wearing a white nightgown. Alwilda hangs the strangest objects to dry in her bathroom, requisites for exotic sports, are these for the knees, Alwilda, or the elbows? The other way around, it’s the other way around. Such a nice red kayak. What would it feel like if I headed out in one, alone among seals and icebergs or merely a silhouette against Rungsted Havn. Alwilda chose a short, sensible education and lives for her free time. She became an elementary school teacher because of the long holidays. She has no problems with noise in her classroom. She is firm but fair, and her heart is in the right place. My work has no beginning and no end. When Alwilda grew tired of Edward, she made short work of it. I don’t know how many years it took me to leave Kristian. Now I am about to fall asleep again. On Alwilda’s hard chair. I close my eyes and dream about a man I saw in the park. I am alone and searching for someone so I can send my thoughts in their direction. What am I going to do with my longing? Where am I going to send my notions? What am I going to do with myself? I take up too much space, I am overflowing. But now the door opens. Alwilda is back.
‘If you don’t have a boyfriend, you need to get yourself a vibrator,’ she says firmly.
I am caught off guard and let out a laugh. Is that what she has been out shopping for? No, she just happened to think about it on the way up the stairs, which she took in long strides.
‘I’m more the dreamy type,’ I say, ‘thanks all the same.’
What more could I say? I could say: I am romantic, but precise. The ringing of a bell out in the blue yonder. I ring incessantly. Plant me firmly on the table.
And I think about how as soon as Obama was elected, all kinds of objects were produced with his face plastered all over them.
‘Why are you shaking your head?’ Alwilda asks, ‘Why are you sighing? It sounds so melancholic.’
In return, maybe I could ask her where she gets all her energy from, this staunchness and lack of doubt? Tearing along in a canoe, is that life? Are there not all kinds of reasons to sigh? Is life not fundamentally sad, we enter through one door with a scream and soon after we slip away through another (oh, now I sound like Kristian) and someone has taken my tail; I want to lose myself in my work, I am at my best when I do not feel like I am here (maybe only when I have sat in the same position for too long and have to stretch my neck a little). Why do I get so terrified when I see women with infants, the exhaustion spreads through my limbs, I don’t like all the chalky white delicate skin (the children’s) with all the throbbing blue veins that suggest the frailty of life (over, over) and the mothers’ skin when they bend down to pick up yet another fallen object, and their tops slip above the waistband to reveal a patch of skin that is almost blue-white, but then there are also two children in the pram, and maybe one holding her hand, no time for a moment in the sun for the blind handmaidens of broods & breeding. Alwilda is different than the rest of us. She goes to protests and does not shy away from clashes with the police. Myself, protests make me cry, I cannot manage large (or even small) crowds in motion, something works loose within my chest, and the sight of the long lines of police, shield to shield, makes my legs tremble. I am afraid of these black beetles. I hide my face in my hands and sob silently when the megaphones crackle, and the crowd sings and hollers and feels like one great body. I cannot join the crowd; nor do I long to. I long to be free of myself – with just one other person. And now it is June, and the graduating students drive past in open lorries and shout and wave, and people wave back and honk, and my face contorts idiotically so I have to hurry down a side street. The other night Alwilda was nearly run over. She chased the car at breakneck speed, and at the first red light, she dropped her bike and jumped into the front seat and put the driver in a chokehold. That’s Alwilda. Not much talk. Someone who acts. And she does not care much for the idea of part of Nørrebrogade being made car-free, if you don’t want cars side by side with us, move to the country, now I recall a protest to have cars banned from the city, the parents shouting in time: ‘Our young / shouldn’t have black lungs’; a capital city should look like a capital city. She will do everything in her power to ensure that the same does not happen with Vesterbrogade. There are groups for everything; the first Saturday in the month dog owners meet on a hilltop in Østre Anlæg to fight for the right to walk their dogs without leads, Edward told me about that, there was shouting, clenching and shaking of fists, the dogs bay at the red sky, a lot of people wearing Hunter boots and looking like landowners, but apparently landless and reduced to parks; there is one group for the Metro and one against, and so on and so on, every time an issue arises, two groups arise. So much activity, so many leaflets. As for Edward, she says that he needs to sell his house; that he is presiding over a death house, running a death cult, ‘the house is a ghost ship,’ she says and I picture him standing on the bridge of a long black ship with worm-eaten sails.
‘Poor, lonely Edward,’ she says, ‘he feels so sorry for himself.’
‘He does have the dog,’ I interject.
‘Yes, he’s married to that dog,’ Alwilda says, which is also wrong.
She does not believe that he will relinquish the sorrow that is his last link to his parents, if he relinquishes that sorrow, he loses them entirely. It sounds like night school wisdom, but I say nothing. I think she is brutal. I once confused this brutality with honesty. I found her honesty laudable. I imagine her orgasms are like a smack with a fly swatter, swift, hard, and practical. Afterwards she leaps up and tightens her belt. Not much of the sea about it, oceanic movements, I mean, drawn-out Atlantic breakers and then a sweet sleep, no. But she is the only one of us who does not want anything other than what she already has. As far as I know.
Kristian wants a child. Charles wants a new back. I want a life without heating pads, where I write like I played the piano, flip page after page until suddenly I have pumped out an entire book. Camilla wishes her mind did not resemble greasy dishwater, or how does she describe it: like a bag filled with slips of paper, you stick your hand in and pull one out: Guilt, it reads. Defensiveness. Bitterness. The need to blame.
But all of this I am unable to recognize – in Camilla.
I think (with regret) about what has been left at Kristian’s. All the things I could not take with me when I left; things that could not be taken back. And things I would prefer he not preside over. My life story, for example. Intimate confessions. Embarrassing incidents. My idiosyncrasies. My pettiness. All the things he knows ad nauseam; but things which, when we were together, could be smoothed over and placed alongside my more excellent & redeeming qualities.
Is it how he will remember me that concerns me?
I would like to be gone completely, to be able to remove all traces. I am not prepared for him to be wheeling and dealing with ‘me’ when I am not there, where he can add and subtract.
Oh, and then there are my letters; once glorious, now cringeworthy scraps I would like them back, please. And if he refuses? Then I will be forced to break in and collect what is rightfully mine.
Kristian was (is, unless he is suddenly over it) a nudist, not an avowed nudist, but one who is happy to strut about naked, which can be viewed as a protest against the puritanical upbringing he was subjected to, despite being born in the late twentieth century – but isn’t that a tedious way of thinking, third-class thinking, originally stemming from ‘the Viennese quack’, as Nabokov calls him, and then diluted and diluted again into pop psychology, like a sandwich we are all thrashing about inside, enough already – in support of this (his upbringing) his sister Cecilie recalled the time when she was watching a movie with her mother, when two lovers abandoned themselves to a long kiss, the mother clucked and raised and lowered her hands and attempted to distract her and in the end, she suggested they turn it off, because the kiss just went on and on, but ‘no, I would like to watch this,’ and I wonder whether the mother then got up and disappeared into the kitchen, or did she simply cover Cecilie’s eyes? My suggestion is that Kristian regarded nudity as a form of communication, wordless; when we are naked we have something in common, we have nudity, so we do not need to make an effort to reach one another through all these layers of clothing, these inhibitions and reservations. The one who remained clothed was, translated into Kristian’s system, the silent guy of the group. Jack of spades. And wasn’t that also why he became a doctor, to be among the undressed, or partially undressed. Then he was forced to take illness as part and parcel. In any case, every time he threw off his clothes, he became equally sheepish and content at being able to parade his body around freely. No, he did not ‘throw off’ his clothes, because as happy as he was to be naked, he was equally meticulous with his clothes. He had a lot of clothes, expensive clothes, good clothes, and he always hung his clothes neatly over the back of a chair. He got angry if a dog, big or small, in its eagerness to reach his face, placed its paws on his legs, then he brushed off the fabric angrily even though there was nothing to be seen. He had always been good at getting his girlfriends to walk around the house & garden naked, though not me, I am very modest, (maybe as a result of my liberal upbringing) but not as much as Camilla’s well-swathed Indian friend who says: ‘I have never understood why people would want to expose their body when the world is full of so many beautiful materials,’ but I remember seeing Susanne, an old friend of his, trotting briskly around a corner, bare-arsed, wearing a sunhat and red clogs, carrying a trowel, one hot summer’s day when I stepped into the garden unannounced.
Personality cannot be encircled, Camilla says, and then I imagine a sheepdog barking in ever smaller circles as it herds its flock. Or a prisoner tethered to a pole.
‘Tonight I want to present you with an example of fear and an example of greed. When I was in Africa with Edward, we spent a week at a mission in Mozambique. We were given room and board in return for helping out. Edward worked in the fields, and I looked after children. There was a house with orphaned children, and there was a schoolroom. The children immediately grew attached to me, they called me “Sister Alwilda”; they were locked inside an enclosure (when they were not sleeping or receiving tuition) like little goats, but they received clean clothes every morning. It was a dirt pen they walked round in, and a moment after they had been shut inside their clothes were dirty, and their hands and feet embroidered with filth. I don’t think there were any toys. They had their hands and their bare feet.’
(And the dust, Alma thought. And God, flapping above like a big, crumpled-up coat.)
‘During the day, the laundered clothes were laid out to dry on bushes, we, Edward and I, were told to iron our clothes (when they had hung to dry outdoors) in order to kill off the eggs that certain insects lay in moisture, and whose larvae can burrow under the skin (but the children’s clothes were not ironed) and when the children caught a glimpse of me – outside of the enclosure, they crowded together by the fence and called me and enticed me, “Sister Alwilda, Sister Alwilda.” I was enraptured by each and every one, there were probably twelve or fifteen of them, but I was particularly enraptured by two beautiful children, a small boy by the name of John and a little girl named Mary (and now that I think of it she might have learned to adopt the right facial expression a little too early on, I now think of John and Mary as the youngest in a musical) and as I mentioned they were all enraptured by me, their Sister Alwilda. There was one child who was not terribly charming, and she was also listless, her name was Mildred. She was probably five. Mildred reminded me of how happy I had once been to vaccinate my big filthy Dorthe Doll with a potato peeler.
One day in the schoolroom – I was observing the teacher, who was African, attempt to drill the alphabet into children as young as two, (the missionaries personally saw to God’s drilling) imagine an infant holding a pointer and attempting to hit the letters on the board. I sat, without thinking about it, like a lady, with my legs crossed. The teacher’s skirt reached all the way down to the ground, to all intents and purposes she had no legs. Suddenly she smiled at me and pointed at my legs and signalled for me to turn around. Around me sat fifteen miniature versions of myself – legs crossed, faces beaming – yes, fun and games, nobody noticed the alphabet out of delight at seeing my legs. I remember especially how John’s face shone.’
‘The screw is tightening, Alwilda,’ Alma said and pulled herself into a seated position.
‘One day I decided to take the children for a stroll. They all wanted to hold my hand, they pulled and tore at my hands and at one another to get to my hands. Finally we established that they could hold one finger each. I held out my hands behind me, and one child latched onto each of my fingers, what a strangely wild cargo I walked with. The Lilliputians weighed Gulliver down. Fingers like teats, and thus we entered the woods. It was a listless wood, sparsely vegetated. Never before have I seen a forest with such great distance between the trees. What kind of trees were they, I cannot say. I shook my hands free of the children, and they set off and swarmed around a huge stump, they climbed on top of it and jumped down from it. With the exception of Mildred. She wanted to be carried. Fair enough, because there had been no finger for Mildred to hold. I clasped my fingers together to form a kind of chair which I placed under the back of her knees, she wrapped her arms around my neck, and her bum dangled about in the air. She had me all to herself and out of pure satisfaction, she stuck a couple of filthy fingers into her mouth and began to suck. Maybe she also fiddled with my ears. Suddenly the children began to scream – “Snake, snake.” And they cleared away from the stump in one movement, like a school of fish, a flock of birds. And what did I do?’
‘Yes, what did you do, Alwilda?’
‘I tore my hands apart so that Mildred landed on the ground with a heavy thud, and then I ran – fifteen, twenty metres. I noticed two of the children helping Mildred to her feet. It had been a false alarm, or else the snake was gone by now. Because the flock was calm. I walked back and wiped off Mildred’s cheeks and picked her up again. The entire way home she cried mechanically and inconsolably. If it had been little John or little Mary, I would never have let go.’
When Alma said nothing, Alwilda continued: ‘And now I want to talk about greed.’
(Would you like a pointer, Alma thought.)
‘All meals were consumed in a refectory. It was self-service. Next to the stack of plates were bowls and pots. There were a lot of missionaries, a lot of people eating. The first day Edward and I arrived relatively early – I mean, there were not many people in the queue in front of us when we arrived. That day they were serving rice with beans in tomato sauce and a little onion and some avocado slices. Outside, over the fires, the same bean dish was stewing in the pots of the African women. I had seen that on the way to the refectory. I had passed the women earlier that day, when they had been sitting in front of their huts observing everything. Little John had fallen and had sliced open his big toe on a sharp rock. I grabbed him and ran towards the nurse’s domain, in the main building. His foot was bleeding and he was screaming. I looked at the women as I ran past. I sought solidarity, that together we could feel sorry for the child (because he must have been in real pain), but all I found was complete indifference, perhaps outright coldness, or else it was listlessness. They did not move. Their faces reflected nothing.
We were terribly hungry. We were far out in the country, and there was very little food to go round. We took one spoonful, and another. We could not stop. We must have thought that the pots would be filled again, that there was more food, behind the curtain where the kitchen must be. When we sat down at one of the long communal tables, hundreds of eyes sought out our plates and crept all the way around the portion like flies, measuring. We had taken at least twice as much as everyone else. My face contorted like it had blood dripping from it. We could not put the food back. We had to work our way through each of our voluminous portions. I did not know whether to eat quickly – so that my crime disappeared. Or slowly, to show how much I enjoyed the food that I had purloined. Edward leaned as far over his plate as he could. At one point he fenced the plate off with his arms. But it seemed so possessive – that I elbowed him in his side. The last person in the queue got next to nothing. Tiny blobs on big plates and ours were full, oh no. And do you know what, at the next meal, there was someone at the counter to dish up – so everyone got the same amount. To guard against our greed.’
‘Don’t you want to tell me some more?’ Alma asked a little later.
‘Alright. On the trip, Edward obstructed my access to every person we met. I would ask a passer-by for directions, and immediately he leapt in front of me to be the one to receive the answer. Then he displayed all his charm and cleverness – towards a stranger he was going to be separated from a minute later and in all likelihood would never meet again.’
‘More,’ Alma said.
‘The rest of the trip, I remember only in points, such as – you know, I’ve dyed my grey hair since I was eighteen – several times I kneeled by the shore of rivers or lakes and washed the hair dye out, risking being taken by a crocodile.’
‘Fearful, greedy and now vain as well,’
‘Do you want to hear more?’
More honey, more words, she is stuck with me, and just like A. A. Milne’s tough Rabbit I consider whether there is anything I can use her for now that she is here; something hushed, which demands no movement on her part, no mental activity.
I love the sight of her on the sofa in the morning, but by noon I feel like her slave. I think she must have had servants growing up.
‘I’ll let you have a couple more points.’
‘Then I will connect the dots myself, and they will be connected.’
‘When we landed in Cape Town, there was still some of the colossal packed lunch that Edward had made and brought with us from Copenhagen remaining. “First we have to finish with Denmark,” Edward said punctiliously, “then we can get started on Africa,” and it was his punctiliousness that I was so sick and tired of. We found a park and began to eat, the tropical climbers climbed above us, or else they were brown and tired, withered, listless from the heat – I thought something was hanging down over the bench. A woman stopped in front of us and held out her palm. Edward offered her a piece of rye bread. She stared at it and shook her head. “I guess you’re not hungry then,” Edward said and shooed her away. A couple of weeks later. Mozambique. Way out in the country. The bus stopped at a station. Street vendors came running up and displayed their wares to the passengers who were hanging out of the windows (if it was possible to open them.) It turned out that everyone sold the same thing: whole roast mouse, fastened to a kind of frame. Edward shook his head, “I guess you’re not hungry then,” I said – and the stiff little fellows were even the same colour of brown as rye bread. All around the bus people were crunching on the crispy rodents, the tails were tossed onto the floor. I got out to stretch my legs, since there was time. A white coating had fallen over a number of the residents’ eyes (the residents of the bus station); and those for whom the world was not entirely switched off led those who were completely blind, but led them where? Just back and forth a ways, along the row of sheet metal shanties that had been erected by the bus station, then to the right into nothingness and then back again, to the smell of roast mice and overheated tyres and diesel, there was nowhere to go, there was nothing to see, other than cracked earth and dried scrub. But I had them to look at. And it makes me shudder – the whitish eyes directed at the heavens and the click-clacking of canes on the earth. And then the women’s breasts dangled under their dresses and did not seem to end until they reached the waist, children clinging to their apron strings. A large white eye and below it a long breast.’
‘On TV I saw Africans making burgers out of mosquitoes,’ Alma said, ‘the air was dense with mosquitoes, it was a veritable invasion, they caught them in nets around nightfall and received a much welcomed nutritious meal out of it. Black mosquito burgers. Pest turned to protein. Boy, I fancy some prawns now. I don’t think I can stand staying on this princely furniture any more, it makes me feel lordly, should I change to a straight-backed chair?’
‘I’ll look in the freezer. But first, another point …’
‘Paddle out in your kayak and catch us some prawns.’
‘I want to talk more about the poverty in the country, in the African provinces.’
‘But you have to go fishing.’
‘Sit in your straight chair.’
‘Thou who professes knowledge of sport, knows humility – towards godly body. You, Alwilda.’
‘Why do you say that?’
Pale grey at six o’clock, bright red at seven o’clock, light blue at eight o’clock, nine o’clock like a red flash, a warning, this is it! Brown at ten o’clock, yellow at eleven o’clock and black at twelve o’clock. White at one o’clock and white at two o’clock like a ticklish childminder, paid for mildness, three o’clock green and with folds: now the afternoon is drawing to a close. Four o’clock: yellowish as a dough packed with butter: perdition. (If I read magazines, I would reach out for one on the shelf under Alwilda’s round girlish coffee table.) There is nothing to be done but postpone all activity until tomorrow at seven o’clock. Tomorrow is another day, for my part, to pull my finger out. Does anyone want to take charge of me? Where is Camilla? Is she lost?
‘I’ll continue. Now I want to talk about fear.’
‘But you’ve already done that.’
‘Fear II. Location: the African provinces. The heat, the poverty, incessantly we felt the need to bond, inside the car, or up against the car, easy prey for wild animals.’
‘You’re sending me straight into Edward’s arms.’
‘Take him, he’s yours, you won’t be able to put up with him for very long.’
‘I don’t want to hear any more about fear. I want to hear about beauty.’
‘At that wretched place such as the bus station was, a rose suddenly shot up – I was back in the bus when the petrol attendant emerged from the hut. He was beautiful. He was healthy. He was seventeen years old, or eighteen. He looked like he had just stepped out of a Benetton advert, with his beauty and his white teeth. There must have been a small green cap resting on his curls, and it must have been sitting to one side? And he was surrounded by blind people. But he did not realize that he was in the forecourt of hell, because he did nothing other than smile and laugh. He was wearing dungarees, with no T-shirt underneath. The straps were fastened over his bare skin. He had strong arms. He was a boy. I could see how soft his skin must have been, and how taut it was, stretched over hard muscles. I wanted to be a girl again and once again have a boy who smelled of fresh salt and had skin like fine upholstery over rock-hard pecs.’
‘And something-or-other like dashing waves.’
‘Dashing waves! That reminds me of the beach at Dar es Salaam where a Coca-Cola advert had just been filmed…’
‘I have to get up early tomorrow, Alwilda.’
‘The beach was a quagmire of fish guts and rusting ship’s hulls with their noses buried in the sand, big as houses and polluting like blazes, everywhere the beach functioned as a kitchen, with small, crackling orange fires, and as a public toilet, expressed by people squatting & squeezing, one person even folded his hands all the while. And there Coca-Cola had chosen to summon a flock of doughty fishermen, provide them with torn red shirts and toothless mouths, and have them pretend they were dragging a fishing boat out to sea, all the while clinking glasses and drinking.’
‘Good night, Alwilda. No prawns tonight then.’