“You’re crazy. You do know that, don’t you?”
Rosa was looking at me. She had a disturbing habit of trying to catch my eye when she wanted to say something important. Even if she was driving.
“You can’t get rid of them, no matter where you go. They’ll just send your file after you. That’s how the system works. And now they’ve got it in for you.”
I looked out of the window and didn’t reply. I sincerely wished that Rosa would stop talking to me and concentrate on her driving. Granted, the cars were few and far between out here. But still. There were trees and stones and bends in the road, and only half an hour ago, she’d had to slam on the brakes for a herd of cows to cross the road with their ungainly, dangling udders and sad brown eyes. The June sun shone above, glittering in the blue sky, and Alex had fallen asleep on the back seat. It was piping hot. The air-conditioning had failed by the time we reached Roskilde Fjord, so now all four windows were rolled down, and the wind howled as soon as we drove any faster than fifty miles an hour.
Rosa lit a smoke and stole a glance in my direction, her bleached hair waving wildly.
“And what about all your shit in the apartment? What are you going to do with it?”
“You can take whatever you need,” I said. “Welfare is welcome to the rest.”
“But you don’t have anything that anybody wants.”
I shrugged. Tried to think about something else. Anything at all. The names of rapidly changing climate zones, the impact of the Gulf Stream on the dispersion of heat throughout the oceans of the world. The rate of rotation of the earth and its location in the solar system, the Coriolis effect that deflected eddies of current clockwise in the northern hemisphere, counterclockwise in the southern hemisphere.
“And why the hell does it absolutely have to be on the North Sea coast of Jutland?” Rosa went on. “I mean, it’s fine living there in the summertime, but in winter, we’re talking the ass-end of Denmark, with a capital A. Then there won’t be a soul for miles—just wind and the stench of fish.”
“I know someone up there,” I said, reaching into my pocket. The letter was still there: a folded A-5 sheet of paper with checkered lines. Sent from a nursing home in Thisted almost two years ago; clearly my grandmother was not given to pathos.
“Like who?” grunted Rosa. “Nobody is dumb enough to live out there year-round. Is it that guy from Blockbuster Video? Niels? Has he gotten himself a job pimping porn to fishermen?”
“Shhh.”
I shot a glance over my shoulder. Alex was on the backseat. He’d taken off his T-shirt and this had fortunately spared it from the twin red streaks of melted popsicle on his chest. Rosa had bought the popsicle for him at the gas station in Thisted. She’d also bought some supplies: cigarettes, coffee, soup, pasta, breakfast cereal, and preserves, and she’d withdrawn whatever cash she had left in her bank account. 752 kroner, to be exact.
The trees on the boundaries of the fields were gnarly and frail, bent towards the east. I closed my eyes and inhaled my new environment; the dusty cornfields, something tart and spicy, a wind borne over thousands of miles of sea. You couldn’t smell the sea just yet, but the air already had a hint of something wild.
“It’s a poor municipal district,” I said. “It will take a long time before we pop up on someone’s screen at Thisted social services. Their resources are limited.”
“Are you sure this is a good idea? Are you sure you’ll manage? You’ll be all on your own, for Christ’s sake. What if you have another fit? In the good ol’ days, folk moved out to the country when their nerves were shot. Now it’s the other way round.”
I could feel her eyes on me, but I didn’t open mine. Didn’t answer. I needed to concentrate on keeping calm as my childhood filtered through. One picture in particular pressed to the fore. Or rather a strip of a picture, like one of those tattered film clips without sound, a little jerky with dark scratches on a red-gold background. Me, my body, a belly in a bathing suit, bare feet. I am running over the dunes; sand and cockleshells, bits of Styrofoam, crab’s claws, seaweed, and that prickly lyme grass that leaves red itchy stripes on your feet and ankles. My mother’s voice carried by the thundering, wild, wild wind. The sky above is white, bigger than the entire world.
I recognized the house at once, even though it was smaller, greyer than I had remembered. I would not have been able to recall its exact shape before, but once I was there, right in front of it, the image merged with a memory from the mire in my mind.
The springtime rains had cut deep furrows into the gravel path leading to the house and the dunes had filtered through the grey—not white—picket fence and hip rose bushes, but apart from that, everything was exactly the same as before.
Rosa bumped the Volvo over the sand, braking sharply in front of the low steps leading up to the house.
“Are you sure this is it?” she asked, looking skeptically at me. The GPS had long since given up.
“Positive,” I said, opening the car door. I could hear the sea like a hushed rumble behind the grey-green dunes. I remembered not only the house, but all of it. The sky, the light, the smell, the sounds.
Alex shifted on the back seat, not quite awake yet. I stepped out of the car and walked over to the minuscule shed. The door was sagging on its hinges, the paint stripped down to the raw, weather-beaten planks. In the near darkness of the shed I felt my way along the wall till my fingertips found the baby dolls’ chest. I opened the top drawer. The key still lay there, as it always had. It felt cold and rusty in the palm of my hand.
“The ass-end of the world,” said Rosa, as she hauled our bags and bedding out of the trunk. “The owner has taken you for a ride. No one has lived here in years.”
She had a point.
The house was a small, squat construction, its white-washed walls making it look like an animal that would gratefully sink to its knees had it not been held upright by force. The edge of the roof was only a few inches above my head and its outer dimensions were barely more than that of a doll’s house. It had low walls with timbered windows and was built over an area that covered less floor space than my apartment in Hvidovre. The northern wall abutted an old stable that was literally hanging on its hinges. Someone had tried to reinforce it with a couple of thick rafters from the outside, but the masonry still gaped in several places.
Alex crawled out of the car, blinked into the bright light, and gazed through the grey-green haze of lyme grass. The wind was warm and dry and salty, and both the car and Alex seemed to be whirled in a waving, green sea below the fleeting sky. The dunes towered up around us, long-bearded and moss-grey with a bed of purple heather.
“Where are we?”
He was looking at me.
“This is our new house.”
“It doesn’t look very new to me.” He turned once around himself. “There’s fuck-all out here.”
“Watch your language.”
I trudged over to the front door and stuck the key in a lock that was rusty and unwilling, but finally it relented with a groaning oath of its own. I had to lean hard on the door to get it open, ducking instinctively on my way in so I didn’t bang my head on the frame.
“It stinks in here. It stinks of old, dead people.”
Alex pushed past me into the narrow entrance, demonstrably pinching his nose with one hand. He was right. The air was thick with dust and earth and mold and a hundred years’ worth of stale cooking vapors. A cane, a pair of worn galoshes and a pair of black shoes in size dwarf were lined up under a naked row of hooks.
I edged a little further into the narrow entrance that separated the house from the old stable. The walls were covered in floral-print wallpaper, but apart from that, no one had bothered with the decor. The floor was grey concrete, uneven, and ice-cold, despite the bright sunshine outside. To the left, a cold pantry with shelves from floor to ceiling lined with an indescribable number of dusty jars and glass containers. Pickled cucumbers and cooked pears that looked like the fetuses of small animals conserved in glass jars in a natural history museum. An odor that was at once sweet and sour.
Leading off to the right, there was a narrow washing room that consisted of a scratched counter with a large sink under a single cold-water tap. There was no warm water. Neither in the kitchen nor in the house as a whole. Water for dishes had to be fetched from the bathroom that was located at the far end of the kitchen. The bathroom had turquoise tiles, a bathtub, and a sink. A dried strip of fly-paper dangled above the greasy stove.
I pulled the letter out of my pocket and studied the high, angular handwriting. There were instructions for turning on the heat in the bathroom and the electricity in the house. Everything still works, it said. She had someone who came by to see to the place once in a while.
In all the other rooms—including the kitchen—a grey threadbare wall-to-wall carpet spotted with large, greasy stains covered the floors. The sand had penetrated all the way into the lounge, crunching under your feet when you walked over the thin piling. The living room was located between the kitchen and an additional room that could possibly be fixed up for Alex. Two of the panes in the timbered windows were cracked, but that could be sorted with a little cardboard and a couple of garbage bags. I was pretty creative with that kind of thing. After ten years on the dole, I knew that wonders could be worked with duct tape and various odds and sods to be found on dumpsters. But just then, I had difficulty believing that we’d still be there when the winter came around.
“Up here!”
Alex had run ahead up the stairs to the first floor. Judging from the rhythmical squeak of springs, he’d apparently found a real bed to jump on, and Rosa reluctantly followed me upstairs to the first floor. Here there were two rooms with leaning walls covered in the same floral wallpaper as in the entrance and an attic storage room crouched under the bare ceiling. Mountains of old magazines were stuffed in between the roof and the crumbling plates of plaster. Family Journal and Donald Duck. An unwelcome and most inappropriate image of myself, aged six, lying on a mattress in one of the mirage-warm, dusty rooms, masturbating frenetically with a pillow wedged between my knees. My grandmother had insisted I take afternoon naps, but I was too old for that kind of thing and came up with my own way of passing the time.
“Did someone really live here once?” said Alex, jumping off the old bed. “It’s not like a real house at all.”
“Define ‘real house,’” I said. “It’s got walls and doors and windows and a roof. What more do you want?”
All at once he looked very unhappy, standing there with his arms hanging listlessly by his sides. He hadn’t said much on the drive over, by turns sleeping or staring out of the window with a look on his face that made me wish I could put a glass to his skull, like kids put a glass against the wall to eavesdrop, and listen to his thoughts. Just like Hanne and I used to do at the Bakkegården Institute, when we were thirteen and wanted to hear if anybody was getting laid next door.
“It will grow on you,” I said, trying to infuse a little girl-scout optimism into my voice. “A new school, new friends . . . And then there’s the forest, and the sea . . .”
“There’s fuck-all out here, Mom.” He went back down the stairs and into the bathroom, slamming the door so hard behind him that the floor boards shook. When I came downstairs I could hear the running water through the closed door. He was washing his hands, I knew, and although the door blocked my view, I could picture him clearly. The lanky body bent over the sink, the slightly rounded shoulders, the dark, wispy fringe falling into his eyes. When he was through, he would get out his toothbrush. OCD, said the child psychologist. A number of things had gone wrong for Alex and me.
•••
I emptied the dust and dead flies out of the kettle and washed a couple of plates in the sink in the washing room. I made some instant coffee for Rosa and me and some packet soup for Alex. The cups smelled like mold and dish soap even though I’d rinsed them thoroughly, and it felt like having a tea party at a plastic table in a doll’s house that had been overrun by rain and spiders.
“You’ve got an admirer,” said Rosa, nodding towards the window. At the end of the garage a thin, bent figure stood staring at us through the window. He looked haggard. His head was bare, his movements shaky and unsure. When he realized we were staring at him, he turned abruptly and walked down the gravel path, his walking stick swinging in his hand.
“Creepy,” said Rosa. “You can still come back with me.” She was warm and more ruddy-faced than usual after having carried our bags and the bedding up to the first floor.
“It’s gonna be fine,” I said. “We’ll manage.”
She shook her head, got up, and started gathering her smokes, lighter, and phone. She looked tired, but then she hadn’t had the time to bring her pills. She’d made more than the average number of sacrifices that day.
We walked back to the car through the billowing grass.
“Yes, well, I guess this place also has its plus points,” said Rosa, blinking rapidly. “And I’ll bet there isn’t a single foreigner in town.”
Rosa had a thing about immigrants. The women took up too much space in the laundry room and they were arrogant as hell to boot. Especially the ones with the headscarves, she said.
“They say I’m a drunken old whore,” she liked to gripe. “They don’t say it in words. If they did, I’d sock it right back at them. No, they say it with their fucking headscarves. They say: we’re better and prettier than you are. And the men are a bunch of chauvinists, the children are cockeyed, each and every one. Inbred. Nieces and nephews and uncles. And we are the ones who have to pay for their handicap.”
Of course Rosa chose to ignore the fact that she herself never paid a cent for anything on behalf of anyone else and that, technically speaking, Alex himself was multiracial, the son of the Pakistani vanishing artist Amir; now you see him, now you don’t. All this was lost on Rosa in context. With her habitual, self-assured lack of consistency, she had loved Alex fiercely from the moment she met him while still continuing to hate all other ‘more Pakistani’ Pakistanis with a passion. The same went for Social Democrats and all people working for the social welfare services.
“You can always call . . . ” she said, rummaging for something in her pocket. An extra twenty-kroner coin. “Let us know how you are getting on.”
“Yes, of course . . . thank you.”
She shrugged, mumbled something under her breath and slammed the trunk shut. There wasn’t much else to say. I watched the Volvo disappearing down the gravel road.
I pulled the letter from my grandmother out of my pocket again and stared at it. She was old now. At least ninety, if I remembered correctly, but I was sure somebody would have let me know if she’d died.
I know things have been hard for you because of what happened back then, but it is time you came back. Living without your past is like swimming on dry land, awkwardly, meaninglessly . . .
I refolded the letter and stood looking out over the dunes for a long time, trying to orient myself. The town and the harbor lay to the north, and, some place in between, was the house that used to belong to my parents. I could see the spine of the red roof and the chimney towering up over the hills of sand, and I knew that you could breach the distance in less than five minutes, if you cut through the dunes instead of taking the road.
I knew more than I had known two days previously, and I didn’t like what I’d learned. Once, a long time ago, I made a conscious decision to move forward without ever looking back, and I stuck to it. The decision had worked for me, so I wondered what I was doing there at all. I read the last lines of the letter again:
Living without your past is like swimming on dry land, awkwardly, meaninglessly . . .
She stood by him. She had always stood by him.