‘Nearly four weeks later, I still listened to Wicked Game on YouTube, which we had heard that night, and watched Helena Christensen and Chris Isaak’s stupid narcissistic display on a beach,’ Camilla says, ‘like I was a teenager.’
‘You can’t have an empty consciousness, it won’t allow that to happen, it will always be the opposite of a room painted white,’ Edward says.
‘I’m sorry to say this,’ Alma says, ‘but your American reminded me of a camel or maybe a giraffe or an ostrich, yes, one of those animals that carries its rocking head high and deals you one hard unexpected blow.’
‘The fact that he put his arm around me when we came out of the hotel and walked to the station, that meant something too. After doing so much walking alone, it was lovely to walk with his arm around my shoulder.’
‘Yes, that sort of thing is dangerous,’ Alma says, ‘the night I met Kristian, I remember it all started with me saying to him, at a party where we sat next to each other on a sofa: “Try putting your arm around me.” And it felt good and solid. It saddled me with a marriage. It cost me seven years.’
(…)
‘And after all those years of stubborn insistence on acquiring knowledge, then the enormous exertion of deciding to commit suicide – and managing to carry out the act, the act of killing yourself. Which then failed, and then she was back where she started, back in bed with all the books, and leaned up against the bed: the future: black bin bags full of library books, such courage and such bravery, continuing to spend so many hours of the day reading, for so many years,’ Camilla says.
‘I want to go to Syria and fight,’ Kristian says.
‘You’re always interrupting, Kristian,’ Alma says.
(As though not constantly expressing your opinion about one thing or the other would be synonymous with your complete disappearance. He completes people’s sentences. He has an opinion about everything. He puts up fences with his chatter. When we were together, I quickly stopped having any opinions at all, and became rather quiet, Alma thinks.)
‘That’s suicide,’ Edward says.
‘Syria is our Spain.’
‘Fuck all to do with you. Or me.’
‘Wasn’t she meant to get the book delivery this morning?’
‘Maybe she couldn’t manage another stack of books,’ Kristian says.
‘There is a need to reconcile oneself with, to be able to endure (where is the right verb), history (because what else can you do, have you ever heard of anyone setting fire to themselves because of a calamity far in the past, a thousand-year-old bloodletting?), whether it comes to world history or family history, even though for example it might seem impossible to endure the fact that the mathematician Hypatia was skinned alive by a Christian mob in Alexandria, around two thousand years ago, or that excavators shovelled bodies of gassed Jews into mass graves, humanity’s absolute zero reached, where steel grapples human flesh like it was stone, only seventy years ago, only a few hundred kilometres from this garden. As far as my family history is concerned, at the age of fourteen I was introduced to a point that turned everything on its head, just as facts about the Holocaust had done – I assume that I concern myself with all of this, because I have to believe that in some sense I am the result of what I have heard and seen, that trawling through the Holocaust in history books and in one documentary programme after the other has done and continues to do something to me, apart from (over and over again) filling me with pure and utter horror, but precisely what that is I don’t know, perhaps it makes me more distrustful of people as such, and makes me guard against the herd mentality within me at every opportunity, I hope that’s the case.’
‘Yes, well I think so.’
‘I have only once had the opportunity to prove it, and that was not my actual intention. Alwilda, it was back when you took me along as your guest to an AA meeting. It was in a large hall, there were several hundred people, at first we sat listening to a talk by an American pilot who talked about how drunk he would get when he was flying – passenger planes. He also told us that a week went by from the time his wife left house and home until he discovered it …’
‘How did he find out?’ Kristian asks.
‘He found a message from her, dated. Anyway, afterwards someone said something along the lines of, can all the alcoholics please stand up and hold hands. Soon everyone was standing by the walls, hand in hand. Apart from me. I was left alone, with all the empty chairs. Since I’m not an alcoholic, I figured that I should stay seated. Until you, Alwilda hissed “come, come” at me.’
‘Then you got up dutifully and joined us.’
‘C’mon, Camilla, there are a lot of things to say to what you’ve just said. The way you’re muddling things together, what does the Holocaust have to do with your family?’ Kristian asks.
‘Nothing. Only that I heard about my grandmother’s attempt to take the life of her own child around the same time I saw the pictures from the concentration camps for the first time.’
‘Another thing, your eloquence is offensive, you’re turning incomprehensible hell into linguistic artwork,’ Kristian says.
‘Yes, you’ve got to stutter and stammer / the syntax goes to pieces / before you know the thesis,’ Alma says.
‘Your rhymes are hopeless.’
‘A language that mimes inability, makes the spoken authentic, it comes all the way from the gut directly from the screaming soul.’
‘And one more thing, Camilla, there are stories about people who took their own lives long after putting the calamity far in the past, think of all the suicide victims among survivors of the concentration camps,’ Kristian says.
(…)
‘The Second World War has taken up so much space that there are limits to how many other wars I have been able to absorb, yes, I’m reasonably familiar with the Vietnam War as well, and the war in Iraq, but even though I have read about the Balkans wars in the nineties several times, they remain blurred, I have almost given up on letting the war in Syria in…’
‘Kristian will see to Syria.’
‘… instead I’m starting a fresh round, on TV, with World War Two, lately about the French resistance movement, and about the blitz over London and about the American soldiers’ relationship to their dogs during the War in the Pacific and and and World War Two Lost Films.’
‘I dream of flying in a Spitfire,’ Alwilda says, ‘I love watching clips of dogfights between Spitfires and Messerschmitts. Such elegance! Such spirit.’
‘Every time I turn on the television, there is a programme about the Second World War. I lie on my sofa and gorge on all that war.’
‘I suppose you stuff yourself while you watch.’
‘I occasionally grab something from the kitchen. But I finish chewing before I continue watching.’
(…)
‘Last night, in a dream, I heard the words “Camilla and I” spoken inside of me, and then “I” turned out to be a long foot with the heel sunk into the sand, pointing straight into the air. “I” landed (with a hollow thud) in the sand and then began to leave prints around “Camilla”, and it was clear that she was going to be sacrificed,’ Alma says.
‘Trampled alive.’
‘Now I have to tell you something,’ Camilla says, ‘what started out as emptiness after my mum and Charles has slowly turned into peace and quiet.’
‘I could have had the incident removed,’ Camilla’s dad says and taps himself on the chest, somewhere near the heart, ‘I could have had it suppressed. But I never managed to do that.’
‘In the beginning I had felt like showing Charles everything – how big the rhododendron has become, and I think he would have been happy about the horse.’
‘But now we’ve seen it.’
‘It certainly is shiny,’ Alma says.
‘Tell me, do you ever hear from Charles?’
‘He wrote that he had replaced his hard-soled shoes with soft soles, and it couldn’t be helped if it ruined his image, since it was good for his gait, I mean his skeleton.’
‘So no more of those hard clack-clack-clacks.’
‘At night I keep the lights on and the doors open, then the insects come in and slam against the lights.’
‘Clack-clack-clack.’
‘Why do you leave the doors open?’
‘When I am closed in with only myself, there’s too much of me.’
‘So you’re airing yourself out.’
‘The last time my mum was here, she looked around the garden before we left and said: “I don’t think I’ll be coming back.”’
‘You’ll never know whether she slammed the door behind her (her own expression) – or if the door was shut on her.’
‘This cod is delicious.’
‘Yes, it’s difficult being human, Camilla, for me too,’ Kristian says.