It was difficult to tear Camilla away from her animals, she has long talked about how she ought to be English, she has become so fond of dogs and horses, I am dog-horse-lady, she says of herself, but I waved the tickets in front of her nose, and along she came. And look how lucky she is, because now an incredibly handsome man is sitting on the chair next to her. I am here because I have had a short story included in an American anthology, I am on a panel with the publisher and another author, soon I have to read. I am only allowed three minutes, the publisher does not care for readings, he thinks you get to know more about the author by hearing the person in question speak. We have met twice, and both times he has asked me if I like cooking. I could see that there was a right and a wrong answer. I guessed ‘like,’ ‘but I do not swear by any particular cuisine,’ I said, ‘I take a little from everyone.’ They, it was him and his assistant, thought that Camilla and I ought to try a proper deli now that we were in New York, so I sat with a bagel with cream cheese and smoked salmon and pickles, it was no great experience, first and foremost chewy, difficult to deal with when talking, and add to that a peculiar drink recommended by the assistant, a so-called Egg Cream Soda (even though there is no egg, only milk, chocolate syrup and seltzer, mixed, it’s foaming). While we ate, we talked about food, I told them about the Icelandic dish called the Black Death (maybe I am confusing it with a schnapps) which consists of flesh that has been buried in the ground for a long time thereby making it tender. It induced a certain response. So I continued with the Icelandic and also told them about shark with fried onion and gravy – again, reaction. Then I thought I could rest a little, and sawed off a couple of bites. I thought that if we ran out of material, I would tell them about grindadráp on the Faroe Islands, it took place when I was there once. Then the publisher told me that he never cooked just for himself, and looked sad. And I said that I wouldn’t do that either, and looked down and made my face heavy. Camilla said nothing, she was in constant phone contact with the veterinarian, it was to do with scans of the horse’s legs. Actually, she said one thing. She said: ‘I have started to make budgets again, all the time, it is because I am nervous, and just before when I sat calculating, I saw a black wall in front of me, and it felt like I hit my head against it. Everything stopped there.’ ‘I have brought Camilla with me because she needs to relax,’ I said to the publisher and his assistant, there was also a Croatian translator present, ‘she has bought a horse, it is very expensive, in fact it is close to giving her a nervous breakdown. She is afraid to check the post because the vet bills are pouring in.’ ‘That’s not true, she emails them,’ Camilla said. Then they started to talk about the horse meat scandal, and Camilla got up, ‘easy now,’ I said, ‘you have said so yourself, it has been given so much medication that it cannot be used for consumption,’ but she had to go outside to smoke. I am sitting now wondering whether Jews eat horses (galloping koshers, sorry.)
Then Camilla returned and said: ‘I recently saw a profile about an American war correspondent, she was a contemporary of Hemingway, but was much older before she finally took her own life, I can’t remember what her name was. But when her mum who she was really close to died, she wrote in a letter to a friend that she felt like a compass that had lost North. She felt aimless, and that’s what it’s like for me. The thought of having to live another twenty-five to thirty years,’ she sat down.
‘Camilla,’ I said.
‘It has to be Martha Gellhorn, right?’ the publisher said to the assistant.
‘There were two things she was sorry not to have experienced, to write a bestseller and have had a lasting romance.’
‘I would only be sad about the latter,’ I said.
‘I don’t believe that.’
Alas. I have read from the translation, it went well, the beautiful man next to Camilla laughed. It’s not a big audience, probably thirty people. We are in a library at Columbia. But now comes the baptism of fire, the conversation. The publisher turns to me to talk to me about my short story: ‘Is it normal for women in Denmark to try to sell their husbands to prostitutes at strip bars?’ he asks. ‘No,’ I say, ‘it also takes place in Berlin.’
‘There are three Chinese characters in the story,’ he says, ‘why does it say three little Chinamen?’
(I think: If there are Chinese people in the audience, I will die. I hardly dare look up. But luckily there is only one mixed-race person. It was a good thing I didn’t read about the mixed-race stripper.)
‘I’m not a racist,’ I say. If there had been a bible, I would have placed my hand on it. Now I’ve finally made it to Columbia with my literature, and I have to sit and say I’m not a racist.
‘Of course we know that the Chinese are little (he says Chinese, not Chinamen), there’s no reason to write that,’ the publisher says.
‘No,’ I say, ‘but actually it is a quote from an old Danish song.’
‘Then there ought to have been a footnote,’ the publisher says, ‘so how does it go?’
‘It’s a nonsensical song,’ I say and look at Camilla.
Now help arrives, deus ex machina gets up from the chair next to Camilla and says: ‘I lived in Denmark until I was seven. It sounds like this,’ and then he makes like he is playing a mouth harp: ‘Tri smi kinsiri pi Hibri Plids stid i spillidid pi kintribis, si kim in bitjint spirt hvi dir vir hindt tri smi kinisiri pi Hibri Plids,’ he sat down again.
‘Fantastic,’ Camilla said.
‘Thank you,’ the beautiful man said, ‘the system is,’ he said to the gathering, ‘that you can vary the song with different vowel sounds and pretend you are playing different musical instruments.’
‘Mhm,’ a researcher said, ‘we are familiar with that in Mali.’
‘Don’t you feel like trying it with o?’ Camilla asked.
‘Mhm,’ the publisher said, ‘but what does it mean?’
‘You have to remember,’ I said, ‘that Denmark is not a multicultural society like yours, Chinese people were once, for a long time actually, rare in Denmark.’
‘Yes,’ the beautiful man said, ‘you did not see a Chinese person every day.’
‘How old are you?’ Camilla asked.
‘51,’ he said, ‘how old are you?’
‘46,’ she said.
‘5 years’ difference,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Camilla said.
‘What does the song mean?’ the publisher asked, patiently, with his hand on the axe.
Three little Chinamen at Astor Place
stood there playing on a double bass.
Along came an officer.
What the hell is this?
Three little Chinamen at Astor Place.
‘Thank you,’ the publisher said and turned to the next author, he was finished with me, I had lost.
‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘but since there are also tall Chinese people, there was good reason to mention that they are little.’
(Afterwards I thought that I could also have talked about the possible power in the image of small men buying sex from tall people or in any case taller women.)
‘We can ascribe that to translation issues,’ the publisher repeated, ‘there ought to have been a footnote.’
‘A footnote for the translation,’ I mimed to Camilla, but she was whispering with her neighbour.
Afterwards there was a reception with red wine and cheese and biscuits, each time a new person from the audience came up to me, I thought I had to repeat that I was not a racist, but they didn’t believe that I was, they understood the spirit of what I had said. I walked over to Camilla who did not retreat from the beautiful man’s side, ‘isn’t he beautiful,’ she whispered to me, ‘I’m in love,’ ‘that’s nice and quick,’ I said. Then we can get those beep animals sent to beep.
Well. Then there was no more wine and we had to leave. We were going out for dinner, but before we could leave, the assistant had to help the organizers pack up the biscuits and cheese, even though almost everything had been eaten. It was incredible how long it took, but it was the kind of biscuit from a box where each type belongs to a hole shaped like its shape. ‘Shouldn’t we just go back to our hotel and drink,’ I asked, ‘I’m completely wiped.’ Camilla turned to the beautiful man, now it was about getting him to come along. He wasn’t sure, he was telling the publisher about his relationship to Denmark. ‘Let’s grab a taxi,’ I said. He wasn’t sure, ‘we have loads of duty-free alcohol,’ I said, ‘let’s drink it in our hotel room,’ ‘we’re going to have to take them all with us,’ I said to Camilla, ‘otherwise he won’t go,’ ‘yes,’ Camilla said, ‘I can’t be a dog-horse-lady for the rest of my life, can I?’, ‘no,’ I said, ‘time for a change.’
When we finally made it out of Columbia and stood on the street together, he still wasn’t sure, the publisher stopped a taxi and crawled in and then the assistant, but he remained standing, ‘then I guess you don’t love Denmark that much,’ I said and crawled in, and he sat down in the front seat. Camilla sat on my lap.
He sat down on the chair next to mine, and after only a moment it was almost impossible not to reach out and touch his hands. When he got up and recited the stupid song, I thought, I would like to spend the rest of my life with him, that’s how quickly it happened. And I know I know.
When the others had left, and we were alone, I reached out my hand towards him and said ‘come,’ he said ‘yes’ and got up, then we finally touched, and he began to pull me towards him and push me away from him again with his arms around me, and all the while he kissed me, with short quite fast movements, it was at most a few centimetres, away from him, towards him, and with that rhythm he drew me out of myself, I stopped thinking I should do something, be someone, I’ll just follow, I thought and allowed myself to be pulled back and forth, and the entire time his face was so close to mine, once in a while I had to see his eyes and pull back a little, they were half enclosed in darkness, two or three times he said ‘oh God’ very quietly, but I heard it and it made me happy. He spoke to me in Danish, but I asked him to speak American, because I wanted him to speak his own language, so I could be sure that he knew what he was saying. Then he did, he said in American, ‘should I speak American? It feels strange to speak American to you,’ then he spoke Danish, and I didn’t try to force him back into his own language. He sounded young when he spoke Danish. The voice became too young for the rest. Otherwise he said almost nothing. I asked him to say his name, because although I was completely captivated by him, I had for a moment forgotten his name. How can I store the strength and rhythm his body possessed, which drew me along? I can’t. I was close to accidentally saying that I loved him, because I knew no other words for the rapture and for no longer being left to myself and my own head.
It was morning, ‘we’ve been making love for hours,’ I said, ‘we’ve been making love for five minutes,’ he said. We sat up to drink some water.
‘Are you married?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he said simply.
‘So that’s why you haven’t said anything to me,’ I said. (I thought about a line by Peter Walsh, a character in a novel, something along the lines of that when you are over fifty, you can no longer be bothered to tell women they are beautiful. The veterinarian’s brother had at least said my skin was soft, and asked if I used herbs.)
‘No,’ he said, ‘I never say very much.’
‘Maybe you should wear a ring.’
‘Do you think that would have helped?’
‘Then why did you do it?’
‘I was unsure about that too. But then the taxi arrived, and she said to me, then I don’t love Denmark enough,’ the notion seemed to make him despair.
‘How can you speak to me in such a horrible way,’ I said and hid my face in my hands, but a little later I looked up, ‘what are you looking at?’, ‘your eyes,’ he said.
We lay down again, but it could not be like before, ‘sorry,’ I said, ‘No, I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘It felt harsh after such an attachment. Do you know what attachment means?’
He did.
We thought we had better get some sleep, but I’m not very good at that, and when he had fallen asleep, I got up and started to empty the ashtrays and throw out the bottles. A little later he also got up.
‘I’m happy. I think it was a lovely night.’
‘You’re sweet,’ he said, ‘yes, I won’t forget it.’
It was raining, I wanted to walk with him to Grand Central Station, he put his arm around me, and there we walked, ‘you look very American,’ I said a little later and took his hand, he did not understand that, he was used to being attributed to various northern European nationalities, and he was also heart-rendingly blond or at least he had been, now he was probably rather grey, but actually it was his coat I was looking at, I had seen a man the previous day on the Upper West Side with an identical one. I thought that now I only needed to hide my despair for a moment longer, because there was the station. We embraced, and I turned and left. While I walked back to the hotel, I remembered how for a short time in my garden a couple of months earlier I had thought that I was just like Thomas Bernhard, that intimacy would kill me, now I was already close to dying without it. And a week later the great wild happiness still rested in my body.
My consciousness is a burning room. I have conversations with him, in there; and show him things. My thoughts are directed at him, you might say. We walk together, we two homunculi, through my brain, he has placed his arm around me and turned up the collar of his coat, we walk away from the station.
He is a straw my thoughts cling to, I know it.
If it were real, he would gradually know a good deal about me, what I love, what I don’t love. But I never tell him the sad things that have passed, because I have had enough of them myself. This is an opportunity to rediscover myself, like every time you meet a new person. I can be the one I am, as a result of this-and-this-and-this instead of that-and-that, it is clearly pure guesswork what has formed someone. Nonetheless there are people who for decades travel in set stories around themselves.
I talk the most. He only offers a few clarifying questions once in a while. I am the one with the wheels. He is like a box that has to be pushed across the floor. And he is a gaze – on me. My idea that he observes me when I walk across the street, is so alive that I nearly dance. There is a ring at the door, and I imagine that it’s him. I talk out loud. I am exhausted. I drink wine in the middle of the day.
It is insufferable, this fever this passion, my longing is great, it has to stop. But what did my mind fiddle with before I met him… it made budgets endlessly and wound its way around death. It had become such that certain thoughts settled across so that nothing else could get past.
The scenario with him is better. One day there will be no more fuel, and the fire will die out.