Other people’s homes have a dreary and engrossing effect on me when I see them from the outside, like flies and flypaper (I am the fly). The thought of having to spend my life there. I would hate to wait out my years in there as the walls squeezed the life out of me.
My own previous homes have had more or less the same effect on me. On occasion I go to Jægersborg and stand outside and look up at the flat I lived in until I left home. I look at the windows in the room that was first called ‘the playroom’ and later simply ‘your room’.
Up there they allowed black material from their heavy hearts to drip on me whilst they gave me the title, Sol.
At this very moment I am sitting on the train (I’ve been to Jægersborg again) racing past a series of superbly built but harsh brown façades – and I begin to feel disheartened and threatened by the walls, completely at their mercy, as though I have unwillingly had a series of lives forced upon me. In the short story ‘The Destructors’ by Graham Greene, a gang systematically destroys a house from within so that only the walls remain; fastened to a lorry the walls too collapse in the end – yes like a house of cards, but with a crash and in a cloud of dust. The reason for this destruction is beauty. The house is old and beautiful. In the hall there is a two-hundred-year-old spiral staircase, and there is tall wood panelling on the walls.
(There are other reasons; one of the boys who came up with the idea is the son of a failed architect, perhaps the attack is directed at what would not come to be in the father’s world: buildings; perhaps his failure weighed on the family like a heavy cloud and has led to quiet embittered family meals.)
OF, the gentleman who was unfortunate enough to set fire to my mum’s wastepaper basket in Vordingborg, was a weekly guest at our dinner table from the time I was fifteen or sixteen, and that continued long after I had left home, in fact maybe until his death. The first time I met him, Alma was also there, we were both wearing her slim, long-legged boyfriend’s worn skinny jeans, written down Alma’s left thigh were the words ‘fuck me, baby’ in felt tip, when my mum saw that, she froze, she covered her mouth with her hand. The rest of the afternoon Alma made sure to cover the spot with her hand, it looked a little awkward when she got up, and in fact, OF had probably noticed it straight away, because the black writing stood out against the pale blue, almost white material, but he was not that prudish. Alma and I sat thigh-to-thigh on the sofa, and sitting across from us in separate armchairs were OF and my mum, we all smoked, OF incessantly so. He had a long melancholy face, dyed-black hair with brilliantine (flat, not like a wave in suspense), wore black-rimmed German glasses, his skin was white, made even whiter by the black frame, and soft, I must have brushed it with my lips when he arrived, and again when he was going home and grabbed me and pressed me against his green polar coat so that my stiff back and neck cracked.
The smoke served as a curtain between him and the world, he sat behind it observing, with a friendly smile and a veiled gaze (veiled by erotic thoughts? veiled by melancholy?), then a vigilant gaze, depending on whether he listened to something within himself or to us, and when he spoke, he leaned forward and slowly poked holes in the smoke with his cigarette. He seemed to exist in constant fear of being attacked (which we did not have the least urge to do, he was sweetness itself), and to disarm us he offered us florid praise and a steady stream of compliments, very distracting, very flattering, eventually very tedious as well. Because are we meant to praise him in return, or can we continue the conversation? No, we cannot, we can only extract these flowers from the bunch and hand them to one another. Everything kept coming to a standstill. We have to placate one another, no matter how placid we might be. When he walked through the living room, he ducked his head. He was tall, but in no danger of banging his head against the ceiling.
He was lean and always wore a suit and sat with his legs crossed and his arms over his chest, only his smoking hand poked up, his overworked right hand. But within this cage of limbs, laughter was not infrequently heard. How old was he? He was a journalist, now on early retirement. Being out of the workforce was not easy for him. It was not easy for him when the war had ended, and the action film had reached ‘The End’, he had liquidated three informers and stashed his wartime weapons, one evening he brought his pistol with him and let us hold it, it felt dangerous in my hand, like having an independent life that could suddenly break out, and I put it down again, after a couple of steps. Naturally it was not loaded. To my mum’s great surprise (and delight I think) one evening he brought it loaded to a nine o’clock showing at the Grand in order to be prepared for the walk to Central Station around midnight. The other day I was stopped in the street by an elderly lady who introduced herself as a childhood friend of my mum from their time as supply teachers in Stege, and she said: ‘Your mum was wild. We were three supply teachers, always together. She was without a doubt the wildest.’
I asked her how the wildness manifested itself. And she mentioned a summerhouse they had rented on Ulvshale, red wine, midnight dips, visits from young men, supply teachers too, perhaps, all either seventeen or eighteen.
When my mum was a young child, her life revolved around a desire for two things – to one day host a literary salon and to accomplish great feats, to be strong and brave, and she passed that on to me, she had swum across the channel (with the ferry surging towards her), she had swum across Grønsund, she had swum with a pack of seals far off the coast of Anholt and had completely forgotten about the distance back to the island, fascinated at being so close to the seals that she could see their eyelashes. She was expecting me. The story inspired Alma to write a mythologically influenced poem in the spirit of (the late) Bjørnvig or of Lundby’s, ‘The Seal Woman’, where she concocted a story about a conception via seal semen during her swim, but she was very young. When she read it out loud to us, for a moment I was scared that my mum would react in the same way as the time I prepared a recorder concert for the family on Christmas Eve, where she and my grandmother cried with laughter because I breathed through the pipe, drew the air in and blew it out again while I (indefatigable) whistled, which had also made my music teacher decide that I should only pretend to play at the school concert since he could not exclude me. I still have the small brush that looks like a pipe cleaner that was used to clean out the recorder, supposedly of saliva, now I use it to clean the small hole in the fridge that keeps getting blocked by bits of food without understanding the function of this hole, but if it is not kept clean, the entire fridge fills with water, and I think of the music teacher, Mr Florian, a light name for a heavy man of thirty, and his wife, also a music teacher, who once saw me, while walking down the corridor to our classroom, pull a girl’s hair (not very hard, really just a friendly little tug on her brown ponytail because it was so thick and enticing) and so she snuck up behind me and grabbed my ponytail (in an iron grip) and pulled my head back so hard that it nearly struck the floor. Music classes took place in the basement, in the same place we collected school milk, and the couple never seemed to leave, but overweight and old before their time, with, respectively, full beards and double chins and pearl necklaces, lived a basement life filled with music. I’m afraid of dark, deep water (what it might contain) and have only managed to conquer that fear whilst intoxicated, I swam across Hald Sø one night, rather tipsy, with a three-man-band (incredibly white against the darkness and Hald’s majestic trees as they pulled off their clothes with their backs turned to me, I still remember the one with the squidgy, slightly too fleshy buttocks), so that I did not shudder at the thought of the thirty-one metres of black water beneath me, incidentally a titbit (the depth) that one of the band offered up, swimming, that this lake with its thirty-one metres of water was the second deepest in the country, but articulating the information frightened him so much that he turned back. And across Peblinge Sø, which is not deep, in the same condition. It was after a wedding (that had featured street vendors who sold jewellery from Helligaandskirken on Strøget, or played guitar, or sold hash), that Tim and I had been to, as Tim went with me back to Copenhagen, and we lived with my mum for a couple of months until we found a sublet with hideous purple and pink walls that I woke up to each morning with a heavy head; I was working as a waiter at Peder Oxe, and when I finished around midnight, the other waiters and the Irish cleaner – ‘Jesus, Mary and the fucking donkey,’ he shouted every time one of us slipped on a kitchen floor that grew gradually more and more slippery and covered with scraps of food as the evening wore on, and dropped a stack of plates – used to go out and spend all our tips on drinks. Here it is necessary to mention Jeanette, also a waitress, a former model, I recall a cover of Vogue, Jeanette wearing a white bathing suit on a beach; when her career was already over, she was no more than twenty, due to drugs, at this point she had just begun to snort heroin with her idle boyfriend Mikael and his idle friends whom I met once in their messy flat in Nyhavn, where Jeanette showed me all her covers and told me about the terrible things from her childhood. She had grown up in a tower block with large glass windows, one wall in the living room might have been made entirely of glass. Her dad perpetually threatened to take his own life by jumping out the window, and once out of desperation Jeanette had said: ‘Just do it, then,’ whereupon her dad had got up from the sofa (which I imagine was made of leather) and threw himself out, he could hardly have thrown himself through the glass, so maybe the wall was not made of glass after all. When she threw her head back in laughter, her breasts made up half the laugh, even René, the head waiter, was amenable. Jeanette and I wanted to sell sandwiches at Roskilde Festival, and she arranged to buy everything for the project through Peder Oxe so the large quantities of cheese sausage ham salad cucumber tomato bread would be far cheaper than if we had purchased them ourselves, and we also used the kitchen and produced an astronomical number of sandwiches and René drove us to Roskilde in a Peder Oxe van. The sandwiches sold like, well like hot bread, even when they got soggy, everything could be sold if it was accompanied by Jeanette’s chortling breast-shaking laugh; when there were no more cheese sandwiches left, and when a male vegetarian wanted to buy something from us, Jeanette opened the soggy wet sandwiches and picked out the sausage or ham with her not particularly clean hands and pressed the wilted salad into the butter, and the vegetarian was happy, the marks from her nails in the butter perhaps even a bonus. Tim was also at the festival, but we were growing apart, he hung out with a group of foreigners who hung out in front of Helligaandskirken, two Americans and an Israeli, all jewellery pedlars (ceaseless guitar playing, ceaseless hash smoking) and married to Danish girls ten years their junior, girls who were about to become anthropologists or sociologists, and there was also this small group of Peruvians from the Andes playing pan pipes in ponchos. The thin man in a suit with the sheepish expression who sold roses, whom Alma said owned a house in Hellerup, stopped holding out a rose whenever he saw me, but nodded instead, figures who had until now only served as points of reference on Strøget for me, but thankfully Tim had not become friends with any of those people who pretend to be a statue, sprayed either bronze or silver or completely white (or had he, all of a sudden I sense a strange rubbery person sneaking around the outskirts of my recollection), I am hypersensitive to them, I cannot stand them, this posing, the arm extended and the leg stretched back ‘look how still I can stand,’ this alleged stillness, in an uncomfortable position to boot, they infuriate me, I consider them malicious, and in fact I was once confirmed in my aversion towards them in Madrid when I passed one and the person in question suddenly leaned forward with a hiss and pinched my arm like I needed to be woken from a dream, and I had needed that, because I had just come from a Goya exhibition; maybe, I thought, he is taking vengeance on behalf of all the living statues because I find them so incredibly revolting. Maybe they remind me of depressives (frozen stiff out of sheer misery) or of corpses. Every time I see one, an imitation statue, I hear the following lines in my head: ‘Tordenskjold, he was roguish / went around and sold fish.’
And Alma was there too, I think I neglected both her and Tim in favour of Jeanette (having new friends has always made me so happy), until I saw two Red Cross workers with Alma between them walking towards the Red Cross tent, and I ran after them. For want of something better, Alma had eaten an entire jar of caffeine pills and was wriggling like an eel out of anxiety. Not long after I lay down next to Alma after a brief but brilliant spell (speed), and Sunday night we went home together, stooped over our racing hearts, taking slow steps, like two old frightened people. I don’t know where Jeanette and Tim were. The last time I ran into Jeanette, some years later, the time at Peder Oxe was long past, it had only been one spring and one summer, she came to see me, her face was covered in inflamed spots and she did not laugh. Someone she owed money to had torched her flat, with her two cats inside, it was impossible to recover from such an atrocity, of course. She was flat broke, and I remember giving her a block of cheese with black rinds when she left, it had been lying in the fridge for a long time and I didn’t like it because it was matured. That was the last I saw of her, I hope she isn’t dead, I can’t remember her surname, maybe I never knew it. But I do remember all her various tops and her eagerness to make money, which led us to try our hand at selling sandwiches. Once, maybe she could not get hold of anyone else, all bridges to that scene burnt, I went with her on a photoshoot for leather clothing, I was a size 10 but not that tall, but she managed to get me teetering on a pair of incredibly high heels and made me up, she was very pleased with my transformation and searched her memory for the name of a French model she thought I looked like, and she encouraged every bit of affectation on my part, like for example my reluctance to wear white, ‘white doesn’t suit me,’ I said, I had heard Alma say that about me, ‘isn’t there something mmm a little more soft,’ I said and flicked through the clothes racks, the photographs were taken, and we got our money, but not as much as Jeanette had expected, and she flew off in a rage at one of the leather guys, who called her attention to, I remember it clearly, her fall from grace (after appearing on the cover of Vogue) and my status as a complete novice, only previously photographed for family albums, which was true enough and not the least bit insulting, but I thought I should show solidarity and support Jeanette and her exasperation. Then we teetered off again, I couldn’t cope with her talk about heroin, and I couldn’t get her to talk sensibly, she kept interjecting my reprimands and pleas with the story about her dad and the window. Around the same time Alma and I took part in a hair show, a promo for our hairdresser, a stocky pockmarked gentleman who had hired Lotte Heise to organize the show at a hotel; with our hair up in a kind of tight whip high on the top of our heads (like the Chinese men you see in martial arts films) and wearing six-inch heels and extremely tight dresses we had to walk up and down a catwalk while playing pink violins (replicas), it was difficult to appear relaxed whilst simultaneously trying to work out what reality this scenario feigned to have stemmed from, maybe we were meant to depict some kind of overgrown geishas. Alma stoops, and the heels made it even worse, it made her appear furtive, her shoulders hunched up by her chin and her head protruding and bent over the violin, I could not reconcile myself with the violin either (even with my previous experience pretending to play an instrument), ‘you’re holding it like a nun holds a sailor’s cock,’ Heise screamed at me with her usual sensitivity, and during the break she told me to only eat one sandwich, ‘more won’t do you any good,’ not two, like the others, a strangely hollow sound escaped me and I took a second one anyway. Several years later on a TV show, after she was unable to spell Nietzsche when asked to, she buried her face in her hands and broke down over his name as though it were a flogged horse, and I nodded in satisfaction. Nietzsche went up to join violin and sandwich number two.
Tim (in that period) was a dishwasher at a restaurant in Kongelunden. My mum was worried that I worshipped and submitted to him, she said that she had looked out the window one day when we left her flat, and that I had walked a couple of metres behind him ‘like a squaw’, maybe my skirt had been of a Native American cut, ‘so, have you found yourself a new guru,’ she said, but for her part, she delighted in making his favourite dish, lamb with mint sauce, just for him, and moreover she was the one who had a guru who had assigned her a mantra, and she sat meditating in the evening when the house was quiet, the mantra was secret, but after she had (long since) stopped meditating because it became too intense for her, she revealed the mantra to me, one time she had had an orgasm while meditating, sitting bolt upright staring straight ahead, with her palms facing up in a receptive gesture, and another time a black goat, apparently the Devil, had exploded before her eyes, and I had expected some wonderful word, one that I had never heard before, but then the mantra turned out to be ‘Jesus’. I was disappointed in the same way as when you are given an object you already have, a duplicate.
Back to the wedding, to round off the talk about water and swimming. I was nineteen, I stripped down and quickly made it to the opposite side of Peblinge Sø. When I climbed ashore, a water rat poked its head up, depriving me of the pleasure of swimming back. So I had to run across Dronning Louises Bro in my knickers and collect my clothes where I had left them. On the bridge a police car had stopped at a red light. I kept my right arm over my breasts and kept my balance with my left.
Tim. He was not my first love, my first love was a receptionist (Crete), maybe I’ll come back to him.
No, now.
For the first time a melted soul in a melted body, in his room, in the basement, beneath the reception where he worked. He called me glicka (sweet) and offered me eucalyptus pastilles (from his lips), and we walked together in the darkness outside the hotel. How did this first walk come about? It was the very first evening, my dad and I had arrived at the hotel, we were spending the half-term break in Crete, and we went for a stroll. I was fifteen and did not wear make-up, only lip balm, all the time. He was eighteen or twenty-one, I don’t remember, and his eyebrows were joined. Brown pageboy haircut. His face slightly triangular, like a goat, or maybe I am confusing it with the peculiar sight of a goat in a tree viewed from the bus on a trip somewhere in Crete where ice-cold retsina was served at the restaurant where we ate lunch, long pieces of cucumber and bowls of runny honey that we dipped the cucumber in. I (the child of fifteen) had generally stopped eating. Every night my dad and I walked down to a long narrow restaurant at the harbour. When I moved through the restaurant, the guests turned their heads, they could see I had become someone else. I thought so. What did we talk about, the father and the child who was no longer a child? That I could eat nothing? Beautiful dishes were placed in front of me, souvlaki on a skewer, blackened meat with lemon, tomato salad with feta, moussaka, stuffed peppers, fried potato wedges, yoghurt with honey and a drizzle of sesame seeds, but it was all too heavy for my pollenous body. I considered the food to be elements of the senses, part of the storm that blew through me, not potential nourishment. All it took was his name. Ni-cho-las (three syllables like in Lolita, and like in Lolita the tip of the tongue makes three small steps – and ends in the bed in the basement). My hands shook. I shook. I went out to the harbour and photographed the waves. My dad told me about Hokusai. And I have an entire series of waves captured directly before they turn. It’s windy. There are black cliffs, a yellowish-grey sea and the Second World War rears its ugly head: a concrete fortification.
I have a photograph of myself sitting on a donkey, in shorts, the owner of the donkey, an old man, rests his hand on my bare thigh, he looks sly, I am far too big for the donkey, and it looks like he is holding everything together, the donkey and me, with his hand and proprietorial air. I had been taught to be very polite, almost submissive, with people who clearly had less than I did (money, opportunities, education), that must be why I agreed to climb up on the donkey and why I found myself in this man’s hands. My mind had long since been set with the idea that people or entire groups of people who have been victims could not exercise bad behaviour or malice. I thought (still at the age of fifteen) that all Native Americans were good, all Jews, all black Americans and all poor, old, donkey-owning farmers in Crete.
Endlessly tiring pent-up wet hard stiff, we did not sleep together. Nor do I think we removed much clothing. I think we must have touched each other beneath our clothes and kissed for hours. But maybe that’s not right. Now I suddenly remember his bare legs. And that he had a shower afterwards and blow-dried his hair whilst I lay on the bed watching. Every moment he did not have to work, we sought out his bed. My dad had to see the labyrinth in Knossos alone. He had to see all of Crete alone. I only wanted to go with Nicholas, down to the basement, down to his bed. Then the bus arrived to drive us to the airport. I dissolved into tears at our departure, the very core of life snatched away, I had pressed my face against infinity and now sat alone, buried in my father’s handkerchief. And the grown-ups on the bus, probably well meaning, probably considerate, my loud sniffling heard throughout the silent bus until the guide found his voice, on the microphone. I had to believe that what I was going through at that moment, they had all been through it, that it was a kind of childhood sorrow. I had to believe that love and goodbyes were something they used to get on prescription, in measured doses.
We never saw each other again, but we wrote to each other for seven years, spanning new loves, and for him, marriage and children, and each year around Christmas he went to the photographer and sent me a photograph of himself, always well groomed, with the upturned (using a hairdryer) ends resting on the edge of his top or shoulders, all depending on what fashion (in Crete) dictated that year. (When Charles was going to move in, I threw out all the photographs and love letters I had, his too, but I remember these photographs particularly well, even his pullovers, a new one each year, the pattern on the patch of pullover that was included in the photograph.)
Alma and I met Tim in Amsterdam where he worked at the bar of our hotel, actually it was a youth hostel, he looked like a contented angel, long reddish-blond hair, freckles, scout knife. His black T-shirt was a washed-out whitish-grey, and there was a faint odour when you got right up close to him, not really unpleasant, just a whiff of sweat. Nothing more happened than him asking for our address; his address book, it turned out, was his bible because he was travelling the world and was happy to have some destinations. A few days after Alma and I had returned to Copenhagen, he rang at our door – we lived together. That same night the door to my room opened. He later told me that he had been in doubt as to which door to choose, mine or Alma’s. It turned out to be mine, because he said ‘Alma is big, big with a capital B,’ he was fairly slim and no more than five foot six. Alma is tall. And it’s true that Alma was a little overweight at that time, but I was too, I worked as a cleaning assistant at Gentofte Hospital as a part of the emergency response team, we appeared when an operation had finished and quickly readied the operating room, the floor often strewn with pools of blood and unidentifiable organic material, for the next operation. During the operations I killed time by drinking fruit cordial and eating tea biscuits, leant over my mop or my little handy cart (handy if the wheels had worked properly and did not drive to one side so that we had to zigzag across the corridor when the surgeon opened the door to the operating room, taking long strides as he pulled the mask from his stone face and removed his gloves… then it was our turn, me and the mop.) A lot of students at my secondary school (from which I had graduated with terrible results, and now worked as a cleaner) worked as cleaners at the hospital on the weekends, and white hospital vests with blue-striped sleeves (the name of a commercial laundry imprinted on a blue patch on the stomach) were the fashion at school, making us look like escaped patients – and white hospital bathrobes for use at home, this white terrycloth had a touch of Hollywood to it. At parties we drank a strange sweet nectar made with medical alcohol, it sent several people to the hospital, to have their stomachs pumped, whereby it (the medical alcohol) returned from whence it came, home, you might say. I too had smuggled a bathrobe out of the hospital. When my mum discovered that I had appropriated something from an institution, she was beside herself, and I had to hop on my bike straight away and smuggle it back in, to the scrub room, in the laundry basket.
OF also owned a cannon, he kept it in a storage unit on Amager. But we never saw it. He did not arrive with his cannon in tow every Friday night, only his shopping trolley, the Mercedes of pensioners (he loved expressions like that; just as he loved jingles and took part in jingle contests and was happy when he won, his favourite was used by the Traffic Safety Commission, or so he claimed, ‘Why save a second, if it’s going to be your last’). But the shopping trolley worked against the appearance of youth his black hair was meant to present, it made him into an elderly man who could not manage the weight of his belongings. He had barely stepped inside the door when he began to take presents out of the trolley (in that way disarming us before he had even crossed the threshold), a tube of pea soup from Irma, a dark chocolate Guldbarre, newspaper and magazine clippings covering topics we had touched upon the last time we were together (when my mum got breast cancer he sent her, with the best intentions, an article containing gloomy statistics about survival and recovery rates that completely took the wind out of her sails, on this occasion there were also stickers of Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang stuck to the envelope since they have a line for every situation in life. When she received the diagnosis, she rented a house where she was far from any neighbours, on the island of Nyord. A house where she could scream.
She rented a house where she could scream.
But she did not use it in the end and terminated the lease after a couple of months. I don’t think she ever did any screaming. Maybe she screamed into a pillow. I could not make it to the substance of the sentence when she told me about the house where she could scream; as if the words themselves and the act (the lease) stifled the desperation behind it.)
And he brought sleeping pills if anyone had complained of not being able to sleep – he would also send sleeping pills by post, unsolicited, swathed in cotton wool and placed in yellow Läkerol boxes, with rubber bands around them. The rubber bands always surprised me, because the boxes were closed, the pills were packed in cotton wool, there was no risk of them rolling out of the envelope, the rubber bands became the very picture of the pills’ strength, that they had to be stopped from breaking out of the box. They were old school sleeping pills, so to speak, Rohypnol, which his doctor let him accrue in a seemingly endless stream or maybe he bought them at his local, Polar Bodega, where according to him you could buy a little of everything, passports weapons pills, and ten minutes after you had swallowed a Rohypnol, it felt like you had been struck on the forehead, and if you dared to get out of bed and stand on your feet, it was like sailing on the high seas during a storm, the walls came crashing towards you, you raced towards them with outstretched arms. Or you went out like a light, deprived of the inconvenience of slipping off to sleep, and that was probably when my love of sleeping pills was established, but my doctor keeps me on a short leash, I receive a quota of ten sleeping pills per annum, altogether mild pills with the effect lasting only three to four hours. You can walk around unaffected after taking one. If you change your mind and don’t want to sleep after all – I often get the feeling that I don’t actually want to sleep, but think that I should, as though simultaneously acting as my own reluctant child and my own parent – you can simply stop yourself. Nabokov believed that humanity can be divided into two groups: those who can sleep and those who can’t. His father believed that humanity can be grouped depending on whether or not they appear attractive to others – as that which determines how life will take form. But if you stumble around in a haze of sleeplessness, you can scarcely notice your effect on others, or you misjudge it, like you misjudge so many other things.
‘He bent down with a grunt, cursing his knee, to fix his skis, in the driving snow, on the brink of the slope, but the skis had vanished, the bindings were shoelaces, and the slope, a staircase.’
— Vladimir Nabokov, Ada
The character in the novel Ada does not suffer from sleeplessness, but is in a highly emotional state because of a romantic betrayal, when he mistakes indoors with outdoors. I often mistake occurrences in the physical world. And I ask myself how differently from other people you can experience things that ought to be a given, that is to say where there is consensus, without being considered completely wide of the mark. What degree of subjectivity in the perception is permissible or excusable, how far can you deviate from consensus if you want to be deemed sane? If you are willing to correct yourself (well no of course that’s not the sound of water falling, but the sound of electricity, obviously there’s no waterfall here, how could I make such a terrible mistake), the people with normal perception would still allow you to squeeze in with their group, it is only when you insist on the rightness of your perception that the group closes before you like a wall. Now I think of something slightly different. My mum had a fever. I was visiting her. Suddenly she straightened up in bed and waved in delight at a blackbird on a branch outside the window; as if it was essential that the bird saw her greet it, now that it had at long last appeared.
Back to the subject of sleep… nonetheless, in the care of another doctor, or lack thereof, I grew addicted to these seemingly innocent oval pills that are so difficult to divide into two. When I shut up shop and declined to take any more because I got so dizzy during the day that I staggered like a drunk and several times sat next to a chair instead of on it, it cost me five sleepless nights, every sound cut me, and I had no skin, the atmosphere squeaked like cotton wool and scraped at my bones and nerves.
Rohypnol meant obliteration from the surface of the earth for the following ten hours. My mum must not have known that OF supplied me with these pills. Or else she trusted that I would use them sensibly, which I did seeing as their effect was horrifying, more or less like – first a shadow (of heaviness) fell upon me, and the next moment a bird grabbed me with its claws and flew me off to its nest, far from the world, giving me a foretaste of death. The other day when I was out for a stroll with Edward, he had an errand at the pet shop, and I went in with him. The staff had let four or five small birds out of their cages so they could fly around the shop, and I prayed that none of them would land on my head, or get anywhere near my face. Both of those things happened. I felt an intense loathing, I cannot stand the whirring of wings, and the darting movements. The fact that I am short-sighted and my eyes are different, the left is more short-sighted than the right, (‘remember “lousy leftie”’: my optician) makes it difficult for me to judge distances, and often I think that a pigeon or a gull is about to land on me when I am down by Sortedams Sø or on Rådhuspladsen so I duck and shield my face, while in reality, apparently, it keeps to a safe distance. In Orlando a loving touch is praised as being light as the wings of birds. It is the Russian princess Sasha who touches Orlando in that way, like the stirring of plumage. When I read that passage, I pictured something I could not bear: a bird brushing its wings against my naked body, and stop thinking of birds as genitals like in Catullus’s poem about the sparrow: ‘My girl’s sparrow is dead … It would not leave her lap, but hopped around now here now there … He chirped constantly to his mistress alone.’
Here, with me, bird means bird. Once I discussed the frequent occurrence of dogs in one of Alma’s books with a teacher. He mentioned symbols. I said that the detailed description of each dog meant that it was not a symbol; that the details made it specific, something in itself, the dog, on each occasion one dog in particular.
‘I don’t buy that,’ he said (that is one of the expressions I care least for, perhaps only surpassed by ‘that’ll teach him’), ‘we’re talking about text here, not life.’
‘Then what do the dogs symbolize?’ I asked, ‘Do they symbolize wolves?’
‘Precisely,’ he replied, ‘they symbolize something lurking, something uneasy, something subservient, some kind of lone killer.’
‘But they are retrievers,’ I said, ‘gentle retrievers.’
Again he said that he did not buy it, and asked whether I knew that a dog can tear a leather wallet to pieces in less than a minute.
Incidentally, one time in Greifswald, the only thing I recall of my weekend stay there, a raven at the zoo had caught my attention, and I sat down right by the wire cage, and it came right up to me, and we stared into each other’s eyes for a long time (a little too long to be strictly healthy, on my part), the bird with its head cocked, me gradually ascribing this to the fact that its eyes shone with intelligence, and was in quite a state that this creature with such an ability to connect had to remain locked up.
OF had been a patient of my mum, now he was healthy, and things proceeded like they sometimes did between her and her patients, they became friends (but he had wanted more, he had chased her round the desk in her office, and I picture her holding up her arms to ward him off and putting her full authority behind her refusal), which had the advantage that she could continue to keep tabs on her former patients and intervene if their illness recurred.
At times the patients drove me crazy. She almost always came home from work late, nearing seven, in a taxi because she was tired, and at long last when we sat down to dinner the telephone started to ring, and it was one of them. I had no siblings. I had the patients, the persistent, those who had permission because they were ill. Because (maybe) it was a matter of life or death. And since her soothing voice could save the ill, or if the matter was less serious, merely relieve the pain, soothe, (her voice as a hand) then it should be able to do so.
Every month she had to fill out a form to record her overtime, but often she was too tired to do it and missed out on being paid for it. Just as she was too tired to get public transport to and from work. She did not have a driving licence. Several times she purchased a theory guide with the intention of engaging in some kind of self-study, but she never managed to book a lesson. Her weekends she spent in bed, reading, exhausted.
Every time Charles and I try to track down a doctor through the hospital system, usually in vain, to get help for his wretched back, I think of how my mum overworked herself and how I often had to act as a buffer between her and the patients, in her own home. The most annoying one of all was Birthe, a dull woman with a voice like a foghorn; my mum had given her permission to ring every Sunday, and for that reason we called her Sunday Birthe, which she also adopted.
(But it’s not Sunday, it is Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.)
She wanted me to call her Auntie.
She wanted me to say I loved my Auntie Birthe. And I agreed, begrudgingly.
It was difficult for her to make her extremely nasal voice sound inviting, it sounded like she stood above it and pressed down. After an ingratiating introduction (I was Saint Peter, my mum heaven) she asked to speak to my mum. If my mum waved her hands in protest, I had to come up with an excuse. Only if Birthe was in one of her rare good moods was she able to accept no for an answer. Usually she insisted until her voice reached its natural pitch – foghorn – and she became truly angry and told me that I was mean and that I should be ashamed of myself and I would be to blame if she had an attack. She suffered from epilepsy. Then I had to hang up, and if my mum was not on call and it was possible to pull the plug out of the socket, I did so. Otherwise we had to come to terms with her calling as many as eight or ten times, growing increasingly angry and crude. I met her only once, on a Sunday, where she came to visit with her husband, Svend. Her appearance was much like her voice, big and powerful, a bear under the guise of a lady, and she held out her arms and drew me in. Her husband was small and wretched, he had been exploited as a child, forced to work as unpaid labour on a number of farms. He was run down and broken. He laughed nervously at everything Birthe said. Once in a while she stroked him on the shoulder and said ‘isn’t that right, Svend,’ and he sunk under the weight of her hand. Svend wanted to get away from her (her violent temper wore on his nerves), but she would not allow it. In the end some government authority must have taken mercy on him and got him into a nursing home. Without her. To her great despair. On the Sunday they visited us, they had brought a jewel box for each of us, cigar boxes decorated with glazed tiles that weighed down the lid, dark blue, light blue and pink tiles (the glue applied generously, bubbling up between the tiles, first whitish, later almost brown) and overloaded the veneer where the small hinges rested, so they ended up sagging after opening them only a few times.
We had had a drug addict stay with us, on methadone, she suffered from a heart that was too big – literally, she seemed out of breath. Being forced to turn away drug addicts due to lack of beds at the hospital was one of the things that made my mum most unhappy and angry with the system (a word seldom heard today) – so she brought this woman home with her companion, Peter, thrown in for good measure; the two of them, Anne and Peter, who had just met in the admission ward, perhaps he came along to help her with the methadone, my memory is inadequate – he came with her, and they both settled in on mattresses, one in each of our two living rooms. Anne was a Marxist, and she supplied me with a long list of books (political theory) for me to pick up from the library where at the time I worked as a shelver (a monotonous job; even the librarians were properly bored, in any case they drank a good deal, apart from re-shelving books it was my task to supply the lunch room with food for their meals, I purchased delicacies of every kind, some of them were rather stout not to mention fat, and wine in great quantities, they had a predilection for plump bottles in straw baskets) so I knew where everything was, of course the entire set of Das Kapital, she could not do without that, Lenin Mao and biographies about the anarchists Kropotkin and Goldman and several works that I do not remember (on the other hand I do remember my mum saying something along the lines of it being lucky we did not live in a country where your lending history was monitored, the books were borrowed on her card), and when I stacked them by the head of Anne’s mattress, I realized that her stay with us was going to be a long one if she was going to read all these books. She moved slowly through the rooms. And when she was going to read, she placed a pair of glasses on her long nose. She was only twenty-six. But I did not think of her as young. How could I, I was seventeen. She preferred tight velour tops and had a long sloping bosom. She was hollow-backed, and it did something to her bosom, extended it perhaps, or thrust it out. She wore a chain with a gold heart round her neck, and she pulled it, the heart, over the collar, letting it dangle over her tight velour top. And under her top worked her large overstrained heart.
She had been a ‘streetwalker’. It made me nervous that she had been through so much, she brought the streets with her – slowly and breathlessly through the rooms, her bosom that I could not stop staring at, the books I kept tabs on as to whether she read them – places I would never have access to, would only get a sense of from the few words my mum occasionally let slip, casually and intimately, like this ‘streetwalker’, ‘how else do you think she made money’. No. I would have tipped my hat (to her), if I wore one, when she drifted past me in the entrance.
I only treated her as a normal person on one occasion. She opened the door to my room while I was dancing in front of the mirror, without knocking – and I said harshly, exposed and embarrassed: ‘you can’t just barge in without knocking.’ Then she beat a hasty retreat in her slippers with trampled heels, which also seemed deliberate. A detail (I can remember exactly how she closed the door, the embarrassment at being exposed and me putting her in her place has left contours of the door closure in my memory), she looked down at her hand on the door handle and bent over the hand as if it was the guilty party, and she now had to monitor its actions, as she overcautiously (ironically) closed the door.
Peter was a centre of restlessness. He was in a manic phase, he followed several TV programmes simultaneously, he changed the channel every thirty seconds, confusing for the rest of us, but no problem for him. At the same time he talked incessantly, and soon his goal was to seduce me and my friends, Alma was the only one he was successful with, in the rocking chair, during a maths lesson after he had been chosen as our tutor, not a particularly pedagogical one, the explanations lost in associations. And my mum arrived home from work, perhaps a little curious as to whether her menagerie had made it through the day, whether I had bunked off again, always late, just before the shops closed, holding shopping bags, friendly and tired. Peter was a member of the Mad Movement and introduced us to their magazine, Amalie. Alma wrote a colourful poem (sobbing owls, midnight, full moon, delirium) about him, ‘Mania’, it was called, and it was published in Amalie. He was a bitter opponent of the psychiatric establishment; he viewed my mum as an exception or as some kind of ‘good cop’. Being a psychiatrist was not popular in those years, the seventies and eighties, when anti-psychiatry raged. The left wing, which she ascribed to, considered psychiatrists to be some kind of lackeys based on the Laingian notion that madness is a healthy reaction to an ill society.
As for the rest of the medical profession, psychiatrists (incidentally) were considered, according to her, to be at the very bottom, the binmen of society; whereas surgeons were at the top. If Charles ever runs into the surgeon who poked around in his back and failed to notice (even though he spent several hours in there) that his bones were brittle, he would push him as hard as his back allowed. And a surgeon from Stege Hospital, where my mum and I lived for a couple of years in a hospital flat, whose name resonated like Glasgow and who had a habit of greeting his patients with the words: ‘Yes, so we’ve sharpened the knives, Mrs Xxxxxxxxxx.’ Something similar could possibly be said about opticians – unpleasant memory in the queue for later use, all the same it slipped through: We’ll get that sty with a knife ‘now you lie down, and I’ll get up and you’ll be in my power’ (direct quote, accompanied by a flourishing scalpel, straddling legs); ‘Snip there we go do you want to look at your eye in the mirror on the wall up you go yes that is quite the bloody snip.’ Neck hits the deck blackout wake up on the floor with two opticians over me alarm bells fight hard to believe anything other than I have been raped after the talk of power. Ashamed of not sharing the perception of reality with two against one. Slinking home.
Folkets Hus, the communal house on Stengade, was Peter’s second home, and he said of his activities there: ‘First I made tea, then I seized power.’
He sat on the floor with his legs crossed and brightly coloured crocheted items. He had an overbite and protruding brown eyes and thick glasses (when he took his glasses off in order to clean them or rub his eyes, there was direct access to his mind, it seemed restrained and expectant, the small slightly red-rimmed eyes looked outright cute. I could almost kiss those eyelids. But his hair was so greasy. When the glasses were back in place, the covetous staring returned, and I felt like teasing him. His hair was black; I realize that all the people I am deploying here are dark-haired: OF, my mum, Peter, myself, Anne’s Czechoslovakian boyfriend: ‘dark and intense,’ my mum’s expression. But Alma is blonde, my GPS, my light in the darkness) and he wore a Peru hat and red corduroy trousers that stopped a good ways above the winter desert boots, the summer sandals, and crocheted waistcoat. He was quick-witted, fast and hungry for love. He had a hard time keeping away from his maths pupils, which he got more and more of from my secondary school class. Exclusively girls. The teaching took place at ours. He must have kept his lust in check when my mum was present.
Anne and Peter’s different tempos obviously did not harmonize very well. Peter annoyed her beyond all reason, and one day she decided to move. I returned the books to the library.
When Peter eventually moved out – it could only have happened in a way reminiscent of how a swirling bee changes course, thrust by a sudden movement in the air. But him we just about kept in touch with. Whereas Anne disappeared forever when she went out the front door with her dissident boyfriend, a member of VS, a Danish Marxist Party and ‘terribly brilliant’, that was how he was introduced to me; I assumed it was because of him that Anne had wanted to read all those books. We saw him only a couple of times. Once during a visit when he sat holding her hand with our blue painted Mormon clock (sold to us by a Mormon) in the background, while with her toiling and hoarse voice she breathlessly explained something or other, maybe that Emma Goldman had once decided to sell herself too and went out and bought salmon-coloured underwear, but changed her mind and threw them in the river, probably the Spree. And then another time when he came home to pick her up and help carry her belongings.
Peter continued trying to hammer mathematics into us, mania was replaced by depression, and so on. Alma and I visited him once when he was in one of the heavy phases. He had barricaded himself in a bedsit on Fælledvej, in a loft, all the way up on the top floor, and the floor beneath him was almost invisible because of various piles, clutter and rubbish. It smelled like being in a cage, afflicted and ill, with no future.
There were the more peripheral patients whom I never saw, but only heard about or talked on the phone with. Kaj, who always wore black gloves, and whom my mum was afraid to run into when she crossed the grounds between two wards. He had once slapped her so hard that her ears sang. He was a schizophrenic and could not tolerate eye contact. Maybe she had been injured for meeting his gaze. There was an opera singer with a handsomely wavy beard (one day his business card had mistakenly ended up in my school bag and then on the floor of the classroom, I was teased about him, the business card was passed around) and a tremendously deep voice. There was the signwriter Else from Vienna who painted a nameplate for our door, green with gold lettering. And a handsome old Jew with a cracked voice who gave my mum silverware, five short knives and five short forks for eating fruit, strangely short, as if your hands had grown smaller by the time you reached dessert. Charles and I got them later as a wedding present.
Several years earlier that which must not happen happened, something completely inexcusable. My mum had fallen in love with one of her patients and had started a relationship with him. I was eleven. She was forty-two. He was twenty-six. In my mind the relationship is in triple slo-mo; on three separate occasions my body reacted seemingly independent of my will – or of any planning – and it felt as though I found some distance from it (the body) and saw it act (how each of its movements appeared slow, and at once far too clear and dispersed). Each experience is connected with objects (which are all red or reddish). A red bag, a reddish beard, an orange and a burgundy sweater. When my mum told me that she had met him, and that he was moving in with us, I got so furious that my body sent me through the living room with a roar of anger, ‘not you too,’ I roared and I meant that she now, like my father (the previous year), had found someone else; the anger culminated in me stomping around, jumping up and down on her red bag so that everything inside must have been damaged. Now I have a red leather bag like that. (Nobody has trampled on it yet.) I managed to prevent him from moving in. He came and went with us. I grew fond of him, and one day when he was about to leave, I followed him to the front door, my body shot over to him, and I placed my arm around his neck and pressed my cheek against his. He glided out the door, deprived of all reality. Afterwards I was only aware that it had happened because I could still feel his beard against my chin. He was healthy when he began to stay with us. He got ill. He began to air his thoughts to me; that my mum was out to poison him. I replied that I most definitely did not believe that to be the case. When my mum found out about it, I had asked her one day if it was true, she demanded that he no longer visit us. (So his thoughts would not harm me.) There was a scene. All the while I sat at the dining table spinning an orange in my hands and hating him and supporting my mum. I wanted to throw the orange at him. It developed into him grabbing her by the shoulders. I flew up and elbowed my way between them and shoved his chest (he was wearing his burgundy coloured roll-neck sweater) and rammed my head into it. He left. In the time that followed I imagined that when I was home alone an unseen person wanted to poison me, and so I transported food or drinks with me from room to room. I dared not leave a glass of milk or a cup of tea unguarded in a room. It was a great love. They could meet during his good periods. He had moved to Jutland, and my mum visited him there, on a holiday, on a couple of weekends. He had long since stopped being her patient. When they started the relationship, he must have been taken on by another doctor. She was good for him; and he her. His sisters later told her that; that they were grateful for the happiness that had flowed to him, through her. He had sworn that if he did not get healthy by the time he turned thirty, he would kill himself. And he did not get healthy. When my mum told me about his death (I had just come home from a bike trip on Fyn with Alma), she looked down and banged the edge of her cigarette pack on the table, this tapping and her lowered gaze stated the finality – and how difficult it was to accept.
Around this triple slo-mo there is almost no recollection of him; his coat on the hook and a visit with his friendly sisters, one light and one dark, their toilet seat was sprayed with gold paint. And then the intensity between the two of them, almost tangible, and a pair of wine glasses on the bedside table one morning I went into their bedroom; the two plump glasses leaning against each other was the new love in the house. A love mixed with the thought of poisoning. A love that tore at everything, and that I wanted to conceal. I wanted them to stay inside the flat, not walk arm in arm outside in the world. Not because he had been her patient, I knew nothing about that back then. Because I wanted everything to be the way it normally was. That is what I wanted ‘the others’ (a word I always used about my classmates) to think. I could not be left on my own with a shattered nuclear family. But I was, and for that reason I stayed home from school for long periods. Until suddenly a liberator entered the picture; Alwilda joined my class and cheerfully dragged a trail of stepmothers and stepfathers behind her. Now there were two of us.
We lived with the secret that my mum herself had taken ill, twice after I was born and several times as a young woman. One morning when I woke up, she was not there; I hit my dad when he told me that she had been taken to the hospital. I was five or six. She later told me that the mania had given her a fever. The first night of her hospitalization, because of a lack of beds, she had been placed in a bathroom. The tap dripped, and she said something to me about the sound, maybe that it mixed with her thoughts, her feverish mind, and that she was thirsty, but did not get a glass of water. Maybe she said that each time it felt like the drop hit her forehead. Then I imagine a stone slowly being hollowed out.
I was too young to have realized that she was getting ill. Later I understood that there was something wrong when she started to reorganize the flat – the start of the belongings’ cruise which later in life, when she had been diagnosed with cancer and got ill one time after another like she sat on a see-saw and flew up in the air and fell down again heavily (fear of death made it impossible to keep the illness in check), expressed itself wholeheartedly. She sent furniture and small belongings from one place to the next as if this movement guaranteed life.
How I watched over her.
Maybe once in a moment of weakness she had asked me to do it, to keep watch over her. And if I saw signs of either sadness or heightened activity, I asked her (in a very quiet voice so as not to rouse her anger since I found myself in dangerous territory), ‘do you think you might be getting ill?’
It was never chaotic. (And it was always immensely clean, it smelled of Ajax, vinegar and floor wax, and in my mind the smell in the bathroom is dense with moisture and the smell of wet linen, because for a long time she washed everything by hand, in the bath.) Only new forms of order. She took precautions against clutter, the clinging of belongings to one another. She gave things away, including things she thought I had grown out of. It made me beside myself with bitterness. She acquired nothing, made no frivolous purchases, she disposed of things. She talked too much, went way too far in her talking and grew short-tempered – she could not stand being contradicted or interrupted – as though her long chain of thoughts could snap if someone so much as cleared their throat. The usual, patient, gentle and attentive person was replaced by an irritable and headstrong monster.
From that point onward (while I was a child) she managed to keep the mania in check, with the help of medicine and rest.
The second time was depression. Or was it simply complete exhaustion. She was faced with divorce. It was January. She had made it through Christmas (which she had held for the entire family) and had attempted to grin and bear it (my father, the infidelity, his impending move), so that Christmas was not ruined for me. In January she could not take it any longer. The Christmas tree was still standing. A few friends of the family (particularly my dad’s), one of whom was a doctor, came by one Saturday afternoon and persuaded her to have herself admitted. They must have come unannounced, in any case she had not managed to put the shopping away, the bulging shopping bags were leaned up against a chair during the entire conversation. She consented to have herself admitted. I experienced it as if she was being taken away. I was given an aquarium in an attempt to console me. I thought that (again) something had happened that at all costs should be kept hidden. I told my friends she was on a holiday. But I came close to revealing it. When I showed one of them the aquarium, I said: ‘How annoying that you can’t take aquariums with you to the hospi…’ I wanted to show my mum the fish immediately. She came home after ten days, and I heard her tell my godmother that she had thrown a slipper at my dad during one of his visits; my godmother pointed me out (pointed in my direction, said my name) to get her to keep quiet, not reveal any more information. My mum might have shrugged, her anger surpassed consideration for me, her anger was volcanic.
After the two hospitalizations she always feared running into a colleague who knew that she had taken ill, one who had treated her or who had simply heard about it. She was afraid it would be held against her if she sought a new position; that it would undermine her authority, that she would be considered incompetent. And she was afraid of getting ill again. She was afraid of coming down in the world after she had become a sole provider.
Maybe the fact that she herself had been ill made her more empathetic, a better doctor.
In my mind, when I look into the house in Jægersborg, I have the impression of destruction, as though I am using a screwdriver against the internal components of existence, against the glass wall that surrounds these secrets. Not that the secrets are subversive now. But they were back then, both for my mother and for me. Well, I am a worm in my own apple.
My mum is the one who has taught me to take notice of nature. But I cannot remember the names of the flowers, in any case not very many at a time. She quizzes me on them – stops and bends down and asks me the name of a flower. And I cannot remember it, or I mistake it for another flower. Not even her favourite flower, periwinkle, do I recognize all the time. It looks far too much like another bluish-purple flower.
It must have been some sort of magic, the time she put a handful of dried hazelnuts in milk and they swelled up and tasted like they had been freshly picked – viewed from my height at the time, that of a five-year-old. And this: by the Neretva in Mostar, long before the bridge over the river was bombed, a small group of children approached us and held out their hands. My mum searched her pockets and her bag for change, to no avail. The children were my age, nursery school children. Then she pulled a perfume bottle out of her bag and indicated to the children that they should hold out their wrists, and then each of them got a puff of Madame Rochas on their thin arms. I have a sense that you could feel the water from the river in the air, and that the perfume arrived like a dark heavy gust.
The other day when I saw a painting by Kiefer, a painting of an enormous sunflower at the foot of which, a man is keeled over, (the title of the painting is Sol Invictus) I thought, that was how it was to be a child of hers. The sunflower head looked like a shower head. One moment warmth, the next in danger of drowning. I am the one who is keeled over at the foot of the flower. I have died the sun death, I have died the flower death.
My mum is very clear. She wants so much for me, ‘I will fight for you like a lion, to my last drop of blood.’ To help me. She gives me books by the stack. An entire bookcase. Sound advice. Furniture when I left home. I was given the sofa on which we followed conversations through to their countless ramifications, unfortunately as impossible to relate as music, she’d had it reupholstered. I had chosen the colour. A subdued green, green with cream. Support me. Understand me, refuse me (causing a death-like sensation), (‘I’m no longer your grandma,’ my grandmother said because I had spent the money she gave me, on a suede jacket from Flip Machine with holes in it. She interpreted the holes as an insult. I could just as well have let the money disappear down a drain.) They (the women) demand, they command (the first time Alma met my grandmother she commanded me to look under the bed for her glasses, I crawled underneath and banged my head on the bottom of the bed. In the end the bow-wow emerged with the glasses in its mouth.) They attempt to shape me, and they are so angry at the men because of their negligence that they (the men) only remain visible as objects for these enormous waves of anger, weaklings foundering on anger’s beach. Maybe my dad will only become visible in his own right when my mum dies.
(I am not going to go to that place where I regard her as almost Christ-like, accompanied by a harlot – though the harlot went away again – and a handful of lesser lunatics.) Good thing I have Alma, she preserves the equilibrium the common sense the grounding. She is The Voice of Reason, usually, when it doesn’t completely abandon her, as with Kristian.
When I was a child, living in the flat below us was a mother and daughter who to me seemed more or less the same age; they dressed the same, in black clothes, and always looked so unhappy, a kind of eternal mourning. I don’t know if the daughter never left home, or if she had moved back home, maybe after a rocky marriage. Never a sound was heard from their flat. It was a grave. On occasion one of them would stick their nose out, holding a bin bag or a net bag. One day one of them died. Shortly after the other one killed herself. Unable to live without each other. The alarming coalescence. Unable to break free of one another. The two of them an example of the worst possible way things can turn out – between mother and daughter.
When my mum was thirteen, at her island’s library, she started with A and worked her way through to Z. She ingested everything that could be read. Some things she understood, others she did not. She dreamed of hosting a salon, of becoming a Madame de Staël. And then she ended up with her cabinet of patients. A few close friends. And us: me, Alma and now Charles. I have always wanted her to have the best conversation partners; that her thinking, her knowledge would come into its own. And been unhappy that it does not always do that, that it is stranded within her. She spends her spare time in bed, in her bathrobe and on her heating pad, reading. I often have to stop myself from writing ‘book’ in a sentence where I should have written ‘mum’, ‘mum’ where I should have written ‘book’. The two words are more than inextricably bound; they are substitutions for each other.
Sometimes I am unable to take in what she tells me; my thoughts drift somewhere else while she talks, or I just sit staring at her face. Then I strain every nerve, I revise it, like exam material; it could be Golda Meir’s biography, European revolutions; I latch onto the material – so that her efforts have significance, and because I am curious.
Her boyfriend when I was twenty, Mogens, was an (out and out) anti-intellectual. It would have made sense for him and OF to get on well with each other considering they had both been active in the resistance movement and neither of them had ever really got over it, but they did not. They were jealous of each other’s exploits, the former resistance fighters approached each other suspiciously. OF had his three murdered informers, Mogens had done something heroic at an improbable young age (and then the enervating period afterwards, to have to spend three or four years in a camp in Sweden just waiting), and they were jealous of each other’s relationship with my mum. She had fallen in love with Mogens at school where he was a couple of years above her. They had once shared a kiss, at a school party, where incidentally she had also asked Torry Gredsted, the author of Paw, to dance, thereby winning a bet (he was a former student at the boarding school on Bogø and present for that reason). The boarding school is an imposing red building with jagged towers, like a small fortress (historicism), and with large chestnut trees in front of the main building. I have walked past countless times, but have never been inside or so much as crossed the gravel drive. And I have never been able to connect the building with my mum’s childhood, only with my own, where at first the building (quite simply) signified that I was halfway up the hill, and later it seemed to me to be a tad ridiculous – borrowing its power and authority from the fortress. On the other hand… now that I am speaking condescendingly of it, I notice that I simultaneously experienced it as a dear old sweater, immensely familiar, and just like the church and the old lighthouse a point that was visible from Grønsund when arriving by boat.
Mogens (surprisingly) went to visit her during a hospitalization when they were at school. But suddenly he disappeared from the boarding school on the island – the resistance movement, the camp in Sweden. Hero was a word associated with him. He looked like Morten Nielsen, with a large mouth, ‘still too lowly to die’ and ‘I am the glow of the cigarette,’ she did not forget him. Then one day, after she had turned fifty, he called her and invited her to dinner. She went out and bought a new dressing gown and stood sipping a glass of wine in his kitchen when he suddenly fell to his knees in front of her and wrapped his arms around her hips and buried his head in her bosom. She patted his shaved head, slightly embarrassed, but did not return home until a few days later. He was a telegraph operator on various ships, and she thought that it was ideal having a man who was away the majority of the time. In the beginning she cheerfully gave herself to his way of life, she wore motorcycle gear and sat on the back of his Nimbus, or in the sidecar. (When he insisted on driving her to work, she wriggled out of the leather gear behind a bush, on the grounds, before she set foot in her ward.) She even went to a couple of meetings at the motorcycle club. Mogens believed in the importance of sharing each other’s interests and doing everything together. (She quickly began to feel that her long evenings and weekends in bed with books were under threat.) She dutifully ate the rich food he made according to an old fashioned cookbook, until her figure began to bulge, something he (incidentally) had nothing against. He was athletic to behold when after a shower he jumped from bathroom to bedroom in his underpants. I imagined a faun, but a faun stripped of all poetry, not one from Afternoon of a Faun. He had a white, well-groomed goatee. Things became different in the flat. A blue haze of cigar smoke hovered below the ceiling, there was always an open bottle of red wine, the one with the bull on it, on the kitchen counter. When he laughed, there was no sound, he leaned forward and fell victim to a silent breakdown, straightened up and continued sucking on his cigar. Like other men with average talents, because it has to be said that was the case with him, he had ‘matters’ he defended and argued endlessly in relation to. While I rolled my eyes. The traffic, I seem to recall vaguely, was something he had a hard time letting go of. I wonder what he might have thought about that? In all likelihood he made sarcastic comments about cyclists. Himself a motorcyclist. The dinner table where OF, Alma and I were regular Friday guests, became an agitated and tedious place. It normally ended with OF folding in his long arms and legs and smoking within his shell. Mogens read the same two books over and over again. The Long Ships volume I and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. His face was ruddy and worn by weather and wind. His eyes were blue. The stubble on his head was straw or sand coloured. My mum persuaded him to let his hair grow. She associated his practically bald head with violence. So he grew it. But it made him look older and more haggard, like a crofter. He distanced himself from Information, the newspaper she had read for the better part of thirty years. He would only watch films with happy endings. He was straight-laced. At the sculpture museum, the sight of The Water Mother surrounded by her many children made him spin on his heels and exit Glyptoteket.
A quick detour now that we are on the topic of children, the other day Clea (who is pregnant) told me the following: ‘…Stockholm. I was about to go on stage. I was nervous and had a terrible craving for a cigarette, just half a cigarette. Let me hasten to add that until now, during the pregnancy, I have smoked at most ten cigarettes in total. My mum on the contrary smoked up to a hundred a day because she was preparing for her exams while expecting me. I did not grow to be very tall, but that’s all right. Naturally smoking is not allowed at the theatre. I went into the ladies’ room. There was a queue. I felt the ladies in the queue casting suspicious glances at me. (I always feel as though I am on trial.) It was my turn, and I locked myself in the cubicle. I pulled a perfume bottle out of my bag and kneeled down in front of the toilet and stuck my head halfway down before daring to light the cigarette. It was by no means disgusting, you could have operated inside that toilet, it was antiseptic. While I smoked, I continually sprayed perfume into the air, with the other hand I flushed again and again smoking with no hands and blowing into the cistern. After five or six drags I dared not continue and let the cigarette drop into the water. Now I had obviously flushed so many times that there was no more water. I covered the cigarette with toilet paper and pleasantly dizzy, stepped out into the common area, onto the scaffold. They (the ladies) said nothing, they just looked at me with disappointment and shook their heads. I had not made them angry, I had made them sad. They thought about the little child in my belly. “Sorry,” I said. But they could not accept it, they were not the ones who had been harmed. I could beg and plead, I would never be forgiven. Only, perhaps, if I gave birth to a very tall child. I looked at the ladies and said: “The last scan showed that the child is extremely long, it practically has to lie folded over. It was recommended that I smoke a little to stifle its growth.” Now one of the ladies stepped forward: “No, no,” she said, “That’s not it at all. Do you not want there to be any water left for your child, the way you waste it…” and she grabbed my hand and pulled me into the stall (the obvious smell of smoke) above which there was a sign that I had overlooked.’
My mum had not been with Mogens for very long before she wanted to be rid of him again. She told us that we should guard ourselves against the might of unfinished business, by which she meant that if she had formed a relationship with Mogens when they had been young, this would never have happened. And he wanted to get married. He had already been married six times (though with the same woman twice), but that did not deter him. They shared no social norms; he appropriated small objects from institutions, an ashtray from a hospital cafeteria, shirts from one of the shipping companies he sailed with as a telegraph operator. He liked to pretend he was an officer and wore a uniform at festive occasions; where did these uniforms come from…? It boggled her mind. And once when they were out for dinner, he spat in the food because it had garlic in it, and stormed out of the restaurant. He laughingly told her about a ship’s cook who left children at every port, and when my mum objected to such irresponsible behaviour, he said shortly that it was the girls’ own fault (The Water Mother again). But did he not have a single redeeming feature… yes, in the beginning; wearing a red shirt and with this straw-like hair, the faun bent over the jug of rich sauce; he was interesting to us, first and foremost because he was new. Interesting in the same way as a merry insect. (But how he could sulk.) And because he arrived full of energy and dragged my mum out into the world. I have a holiday photo of them from Madeira where they appear slightly drunk and glistening. One time he drove me home on his motorcycle. I sat on the back and tried to hold onto him almost without touching him. He reached back and made me hold on properly while he laughed at me in his silent manner (shoulders shaking). It made me think of one of his ‘matters’, that he did not understand how mature men could be interested in little girls (that was how he viewed us) who did not share the same experiences, who had not lived in the same era and did not understand your references; in other words: who were far too young to have experienced the war.
Gradually all of our conversation revolved around how she wanted to be rid of him. They were about to buy a house together. Her need for isolation was seriously under threat. She pictured herself Saturday mornings forced to drink coffee at some random abominable centre. He had told her that if I continued to contradict him, I would not be welcome in their new home. (That did the trick. The lion rose to its feet.) He had already parted with his house on Amager and had moved in with her. His moving boxes were in my old room. In the end she decided that the escape from him would have to take place while he was off sailing. She applied for a job in Vordingborg that included a flat at the hospital and got it. She put up her flat for exchange, it worked out in my favour as I received a colossal flat. I was twenty-five and had long since moved away from home. Still it was difficult to say goodbye to the old place. I had known it my entire life. I lay down on her bed and dissolved into tears. She was doing a final clean-up and did not have time to deal with me. She had all of Mogens’ furniture and boxes put into storage. OF came by and disconnected the washing machine. Her own moving van arrived. The flat in Jægersborg became a mirage. In the gap between moving out and moving in she and I went to Portugal.
She sent Alma a postcard of an avalanche and wrote: ‘The load we loosen from each other’s minds.’
I saw it when I placed the card in the postbox.
OF wrote a rhyme: ‘Margrethe the luscious larva has travelled to Algarve.’ She sent a telegraph to the telegraph operator. He rang me (when we had returned home), shaken, and said that my mum’s conduct both as a normal human being and as a doctor had to be considered irresponsible. I replied that he had not been her patient.
She is old, now. She seldom dresses up. Maybe a pearl necklace at Christmas, a hint of lipstick. To make me happy. Because it shows a certain energy. I look at her mouth, and she says: ‘I knew it would make you happy.’ I fetch her a pillow, an ashtray, a glass of water, a cup of coffee, the newspaper, and am surprised how strong her shoulders feel. When I embrace her, I see that she has also put her red suede sandals on. They are (by now) the only thing we cannot agree on.
‘What do you actually have against them?’ she asks, stretching her legs and lifting them up so that she can better see the shoes from the sofa (which has been mine for so long that it needs reupholstering again), at home with Charles and I where she comes to dinner every Friday. And I feel terribly petty, terribly conventional, why can I not just leave her and her red shoes in peace. I ask to be allowed not to like them. I tilt my head and ask whether that is alright. I remind her of some of the worst outfits I have appeared in, which she did not care for.
‘The worst one though,’ she says to Charles, ‘was the time she was going to a party, I ran into her in the stairwell, I was on my way up and she was on the way down – I mention it because if I had been home while she was getting dressed, I would never have let her go out like that – and she was wearing a delightful black velour dress with pink fabric roses sewn on and had bare shoulders, and with that she wore tan tights and brown walking shoes, and then she had rolled a pair of white sports socks down over her shoes. It made me shudder, and I thought: oh no, she’ll be teased. But what happened was that one of her friends got drunk and tore off the roses.’
‘It was to accentuate the legs,’ I tell Charles, ‘that’s why we rolled our socks over our shoes.’
He contributes by telling us that as a child he could not stay away from his sister’s dress-up dolls. He loved them. Then I tell them about a boy I know, who spends all his time cutting bridal dresses out of magazines. Charles says he could have been that boy.
But back to the shoes.
Until my mum got too busy and too tired, she was elegant and always wore powder, rouge, lipstick, had pencilled eyebrows, mascara and eyeshadow. I seem to remember her saying ‘the idea of being poor and forced to wear dresses made of cheap synthetic material in ugly patterns is an outrage’ on more than one occasion (but at least once when we left the department store Illums Bolighus with a rustle of shopping bags, I had ten new dresses, one for each day of the trip to the Black Sea), ‘the idea of being poor and forced to wear dresses of cheap synthetic material from Daells Varehus is an outrage’.
The demand for beauty. The beauty of clothes. The beauty of the home. Perhaps the beauty of the face and the body too. The absence of beauty – a pit of self-loathing. She herself had impressed the demand for beauty on me. And she herself abided by it until she grew too tired and abandoned it, and why should she continue to be subjugated to the convention of being a ‘lady’… personally it makes me think of how bored I get at the hairdresser’s, how beauty care and painting my toenails in the summer bore me something fierce, still I take vanity for what vanity is – but it gradually demands less of me. Incidentally the longing to win back her beauty has not entirely released its grip on her, the other day she said to me: ‘It’s ridiculous, but I still think that if I can just lose some weight, I will be very attractive again.’
I recall an evening many years earlier, in the kitchen at her parents’ place, late at night; we had left the loft bedroom we were sharing, and had gone down to the kitchen to grab a snack and take it up to the room. She bent over a piece of bread and spread a quintuple thick layer of butter on top, ‘This will give the Heart Foundation something to think about,’ she said.
The summer I met Charles, I went to visit my mum at her summerhouse by bike, and when I was going to cycle home, my chain fell off. My mum stood ready to wave, at the garden gate. I did not want my dress to get covered in oil so I pulled it off and fiddled with the chain in my knickers and bra. For me there is nothing worse than objects that are meant to fit together, I can still hear my dad’s voice (from my childhood) ‘Now try to look after it,’ and back then I went all empty inside or was filled with rage, and it’s still like that. On my knees on the lawn with the oily chain in my hands, I remembered an issue of Playboy that a man from the United Arab Emirates – who during mine and Alma’s trip to Turkey followed us halfway across the country by bus, and along the way a large taciturn character in a yellow sweater joined him, then there were two who disembarked when we disembarked, and checked in at the same hotel or guest house as us and each morning sat waiting for us in the reception without knowing where the day and we would take them, a journey, you might say, in the spirit of Sophie Calle – showed us (sniggering), featuring Le Pen’s former wife, Pierrette Le Pen, pictured in a series of cleaning scenarios, undressed, naturally, I remember in particular one image where she was scrubbing the toilet, kneeled down in front of it, with her arm down the toilet bowl and, it seemed to me, her head halfway down as well, in the toilet, from where she sent the beholder a flirtatious-lusty gaze, her breasts pressed against the toilet bowl, embodying the fantasy: the crawling maid, everything, that is the entire photo session, because Le Pen in an interview with Playboy had stated that if Pierrette could not manage on her own, then she should live off her lover or take on a cleaning job, and subsequently she and a camera crew from Playboy staged these photos.
Then the neighbour came over to gossip. The two women stood looking at my work on the chain, I apologized for my attire to the neighbour, sweating and beside myself, even though it was not my fault that she had barged her way into our garden. And my mum said something along the lines of we were after all women. The neighbour must have left when (glancing at me) she said: ‘Now that you’ve found yourself an older man, you no longer have to be so perfect either.’
She had said something similar once… I had been ill, my skin was spotty, and my hair was flat and lifeless, and maybe it was meant as a comfort when she (laconically) said that it was better to have been beautiful once than to never have been. A despondent remark in a despondent past participle from someone extolling thirsting for demanding beauty. From someone who always found comfort in beauty.
‘And that time Alma showed up in a pair of jeans that had fuck me, baby written on them. I had a former patient over for coffee for the first time, and I very nearly fell out of my chair.’
Charles nods. He is lying on the floor. She is lying on the sofa. My two fallen warriors. They both have bad backs, they have brittle bones, they are heavy smokers, and her back has collapsed because of bone metastasis whose development has temporarily been halted with the aid of Tamoxifen. In addition she also has degenerative joint disease. And sciatica. But she takes nothing stronger than paracetamol for the pain. She does not want to grow listless and lose clarity and the ability to read. Her greatest horror is that something will happen to her eyes so that she can no longer read. Charles has two unsuccessful back operations behind him. And in addition two failed attempts at regulating his heart rhythm with the help of a couple of proper electric shocks. Next to the two lying here I feel like a kind of floating fairy, very light, pain-free. Quite simply very young, even though I am not. (As if I am their child.) But I am also in the possession of, for the time being, a physical form that is not under attack, and my pulse is regular. Status report complete. Sometimes it is completely exhausting to be around them. One Christmas Eve, we had made it through dinner and presents, the two of them lying down as always, myself sitting, and we were now watching a film, Delicatessen. I did not find it interesting, I was quite simply exhausted, so I excused myself and climbed into bed with The Alexandria Quartet (to travel somewhere where everything is saturated with meaning, friendships, love affairs, the view of the world, the language. That saturation has contributed to my idea of how everything should be. I think so. I have been reading The Alexandria Quartet for the past thirty years, often only a couple of random pages, I know the books so well that I immediately know where I have landed, Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea. And Pursewarden and Darley and Nessim and Narouz. And Melissa – with the flat scissor-shaped thighs.
Justine looks in the mirror and says: ‘Tiresome pretentious hysterical Jewess that you are!’
And Pursewarden (author): ‘I want style, consort. Not the little mental squirts as if through the ticker-tape of the mind.’
The duck hunt. The masquerade ball. The intelligence officers. The fast rides through the desert. The secret lodge. The alchemist Capodistria who is successful in creating four homunculi, a king, a queen and a red and blue spirit in bottles. The king breaks free and attempts to get in with the queen, his small nails clawing at the bottle. Capodistria gets some ugly scratches that will not heal when he attempts to capture him. I once launched myself into a comprehensive study of the alchemists due to this scene alone.
And here Darley is speaking: ‘Like the dead Pursewarden I hoped I might soon be truthfully able to say: I do not write for those who have never asked themselves this question: at what point does real life begin?’
And finally, Darley on his relationship to Justine: ‘Possession is on the other hand too strong: we were human beings not Brontë cartoons.’
Lawrence Durrell, the author of The Alexandria Quartet, did not get in to Cambridge, he applied several times, but was rejected, reportedly because he was terrible at maths. The composition of the tetralogy is based on Einstein, it is an attempt to convert a mathematical theory, the theory of relativity, into language, three of the works are an expression of space, and one of time, ‘the soup-mix recipe of continuum’.
The existence of an absolute unique frame of references is rejected; all depending on where the events in the books are seen from, they appear different.
But that is not what makes one’s hair curl – that happens when Balthazar drops Narouz’s harpoon gun in the water and the harpoon goes off just as Clea has dived down to the wreck, and her hand is riveted to the spot in the depths so Darley has to get a knife from the cabin and dive down and cut off her hand – in order to bring her back alive from the bottom of the sea. And when Amaril tears off Semira’s mask and sees that she has no nose, it has been eaten away, and proposes to her on the spot and decides to create a new nose for her, he is a doctor, in fact a gynaecologist, but he launches into a complex plastic surgery, Clea has designed the nose, and the following year it grows on Semira’s face, and she is ready to stand before Alexandria after spending most of her life hidden in a dark room because of the darkness of her face, it might be said, and the majority of Alexandria’s high society are present when she dances into the hall with her doctor) and left them to each other, I could not manage for a moment longer to be the one they both knew best, with both of them at the same time; it felt as though they each had to be given extra consideration, even more than when I had them on their own.
It can be difficult to manage, both taking care of the practical matters and sitting down with them and listening and talking – without thinking of what I have to do for them afterwards. At times my mum complains of me being distracted, that I am not really present. It is difficult to concentrate on a conversation – sitting across from a face writhed in pain, a person attempting to find a slightly better body position, at the same time as she and he, because they both do it, insist on conversing, to think of something other than the pain. At the same time – I don’t know what word to use – I admire (but that sounds too distanced) them for it while my-heart-bleeds.
Charles seemed to have the idea that I could manage everything. Gradually as my mum lost her grip on things, Charles and I took responsibility for the care of her summerhouse, yes I make it sound like an estate, though it is very small. But the large shady trees and white benches transformed the garden into a park.
Charles had arranged to have a couple of the mighty huge trees felled in order to create more light. As per his request, the gardeners had chipped the trees and left the wood chips behind. There must have been ten to fifteen tonnes. Charles envisaged that the chips would be used to fill the craters left by the trees. The previously wild and soughing location looked like a lunar landscape. I dragged my garden chair up onto a mound of chips and burst into tears. Charles put his hand on my shoulder and told me he envisioned that I would take a shovel and start to level the large property – and fill it up with wood chips. That might take years. I had other things to do.
But he took pity on me. Or I refused to grasp the shovel – or live with the sight of the barren brown parcel of land. The gardeners returned riding a huge machine. And it was levelled. And grass was sown. And then we had a big green plot of lawn, as flat as a pancake. My mum thinks it is boring.
‘Men love felling trees,’ I say; I am standing with my neighbour on the shiny coin that the garden now is.
‘Yes,’ she says brightening up, ‘I was always disagreeing with my husband about that too. He loved chopping down trees. But I preferred to keep them.’
She looks at me with an expression of superior knowledge, and we allow ourselves a moment of unfathomable oversimplification and share a brief Freudian moment in the garden. A rare moment of agreement. She, the neighbour, often comes running to meet us when we arrive at the summerhouse and follows us into the garden and points at places of decline: ‘Such a pity,’ she says, ‘look, such a pity.’
One day when my mum sat in her flat in the city centre, she had begun to long for the sea. She walked down to Nørreport Station and caught the train to Hillerød, and from there she continued to Hundested. (Several years earlier Mogens had been aboard his icebreaker in Hundested Havn, and she had visited him on this icebreaker.) There is an estate agency next to Hundested Station, a Dan Bolig, and displayed in the window was a small thatched house with a vast garden. It reminded her of the (thatched) home of her childhood. Instead of going to the sea she opened the door to the agency and drove out to the summerhouse with the estate agent. It was close to the fjord. She took me with her a couple of days later so I could see it before she made up her mind.
She had made up her mind. She told the estate agent about the seamen in her family. She said that she thought only sailors were real men.
The estate agent nodded. He concurred. I squirmed like an eel because she talked too much, made wild associations, like I was ten years old again, and pouted like I was ten years old, and said grumpily that the house was far too small. They did not hear me. They talked about men as they signed. The estate agent’s partner was an able seaman.
‘This is a paradise,’ I have said that to her countless times later (and been happy that I failed as a guardian that day; so that she got her house).
The red shoes make me think that my mum has joined ‘the cheap synthetic materials’ camp, so to speak, even though the sandals are made of suede. And even though she has not become poor. On the contrary she receives a good pension. But she has been close to dying, and ‘when you have been licked by the Crab, a lot of things stop being important. Can’t you understand that?’
She had almost given up, she has moved countless times (that is, seven), scattered her furniture to the four winds, given almost everything away, ‘so you’re not left with all that,’ for my sake at that, even though I protested madly at these disposals and wished she had abided by the convention of ‘a beautiful home’ and not replaced the beautiful heavy furniture with wicker ‘because it is easier to manage’, but then she placed beautiful little objects, knick-knacks rocks candles flowers within her field of vision and let her gaze be drawn by them.
How many times have I thought that if she hadn’t moved out of the flat in Jægersborg she’d lived in for twenty-five years all of this relocating might never have started?