“I can imagine him being able to bring a girl to the point where he was sure she would sacrifice all.”
SØREN KIERKEGAARD
Regina and Søren walked shoulder to shoulder along the ramparts—the planked walkway above the crumbling defenses of the old city. “And now that you have submitted your thesis, Søren, what happens next?”
The question Regina really wanted to ask was, “What happened to my Wednesday letters?” But her stomach clenched every time she imagined accusing him. She kept picturing his face creasing in anger. She imagined him blaming her for being needy, and so she shut the words inside, curled them up in a little ball, and rocked them quietly to sleep.
It was the hour before dusk. The shadows fell, long and elegant, from the trees and windmills that lined this stretch of water. The yellow light, with its almost palpable thickness, caught the leaves of the trees in the midst of their rustlings, creating a symphony of greens. An incoming breeze held a sweetness and a hint of mellow summer warmth. Birds cried out. A barely visible moon hung low in the sky.
Regina felt the long skirt of her gown shimmer and rustle as she walked. Her dangling gold earrings swung under her ear lobes. An energy cast itself around her legs and arms. She felt herself rise and fall, graceful and sure, as she kept pace with her fiancé. This was the way to meet him—with attention, not angry words. There were certain truths she couldn’t communicate to him directly.
They walked so slowly that couple after couple passed them. As she waited for Søren to answer her, she noticed with a feeling of elation that their strides matched each other’s. Her legs copied his legs; her feet landed heel to toe just like his feet; her weight shifted from her knees to her thighs to her hips just as his did. Did he have any idea that she was capable of this mimicry? She wondered if, after they’d been married a long time, she would begin to copy his speech and perhaps finish his sentences for him. She wondered if they would reach a place where words would be irrelevant and they’d communicate through looks and touch—the prints of his fingers passing her messages like a scrimshaw map engraved on the ivory tusk of a whale.
“Now that I have finished my thesis,” Søren said, speaking slowly as if he, too, had entered a trancelike state, “I am through with irony.”
“Do you expect me to believe an ironist who says he is through with irony?”
He roared with laughter. But his laugh sounded too loud, like a child copying the laugh of an adult when he hasn’t really understood the joke. An elderly woman turned from the arm of her husband and stared.
“Absolutely not! Believe nothing I say or … ,” and he hopped, missing a beat in his stride as he added, “more to the point, nothing I do.”
Regina regretted that she’d given in to her own desire for irony. She sighed. The elderly woman turned back to her husband and led him off the ramparts.
“Can’t you just speak openly sometimes, Søren? Without having to be so clever? It’s only me here.”
“I speak to you the way I speak to everyone. What I have to say can’t be communicated directly.”
What an excuse, she thought. The intensity with which he spoke made her nervous. They no longer walked in unison, and as she looked at how his leg now kicked out to the right while she stumbled against her left hip bone, the image rose in her mind of his crabbed, jerky handwriting.
“But what is it you want to say, Søren?”
He put one finger to the side of his nose. “Oh! So you want me to tell you directly what every man has to learn for himself? You want to cheat? Avoid the deep dark night of the soul? Avoid swimming alone sixty thousand fathoms out at sea? Avoid the howling of wolves, the eternal power appearing, the I choosing itself?”
“Definitely.”
“Too bad,” he said, looking down the stretch of packed dirt on top of the ramparts.
“You should help me, Søren. We’re engaged.”
“But why would you want me to tell you, when I just told you that you should believe nothing I say.”
Her legs suddenly felt heavy. “Could we sit down?”
“I have that effect on most people. An hour in my presence and they’re exhausted.” His lips turned upward.
He picked up speed. They had to veer at sharp angles to pass the other couples. She gripped his arm as he sped her along. She felt as if he was dragging her. This would never do.
She pushed past her fatigue and matched his quick stride. Now, as they hurried past the rampart strollers, they were walking in unison again—like yoked oxen whose shoulders rubbed together as they moved.
The wind lifted and ruffled the folds of his white cravat. He smiled. “I expect all my thesis readers to react like you just did. With outrage.”
“So why do it?”
“The only way to be popular in this world is to tell people that God is within them, that if they stare at their navels long enough, they’ll see God.” He punctured the air with one fist. “But I refuse to tell the crowd what it wants to hear. I refuse to be a bellows pumper.”
“If you go around telling people they’re as sick as you are, you will be very unpopular.”
“That’s too bad. I was raised by my father to tell the truth, no matter what. And everyone is as sick as I am. I’m like the person who brings an emetic at the end of a banquet—giving people what they require.”
“Søren! That’s disgusting.”
“Sorry.” He ducked his head. “I forgot my audience. But I’m serious. Everyone else is all caught up in marrying and being married.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
He swiped the air like a swooning opera singer. “It is weakness to need to unite to another human.”
“Weakness?” She raised both eyebrows. She forced a smile. Don’t let him know you’re hurt. Don’t let him see your weakness.
Regina looked ahead as they neared a tall couple. Dark blue broadcloth stretched tight across the man’s tall, strong shoulders. The woman had glittering blue eyes. They were not speaking to each other. Regina’s stomach clenched. Why did Fritz have to look so attractive today, at this particular second? And with Thrine?
I don’t care, she told herself. It doesn’t matter.
Does Fritz think she’s prettier than me?
Just as Søren and Regina came abreast of them, Fritz’s back stiffened. He turned and nodded to Søren, his eyes avoiding Regina. It was an awkward, injured nod. Even now, after almost a year.
Regina’s heart tugged at her.
“A handsome couple,” Søren said after a few moments. He watched Regina closely.
She nodded.
“You look sad. It’s true—don’t shake your head. Perhaps its not too late for you. Schlegel would take you back in an instant, you know he would.”
Regina felt anxiety attack her, an anxiety so strong it forced words to gush out of her mouth—uncensored words. “Fritz?” She laughed a high-pitched, mocking laugh. “I wouldn’t marry him for all the rixdollars in the bank of Denmark.”
“You should marry him,” Søren’s lips jutted out, goading her. “He’s a wonderful man, a gentleman. And his star is rising fast in the colonial office. He’s well-liked, perfectly respectable, perfectly dependable, perfectly—”
“Ordinary.” Regina interrupted. One word. One word that made her heart stop with its betrayal.
“Tsk. Tsk. For a little miss to be so proud—it isn’t good.”
“Stop it. Just stop talking about it, would you? Please.”
“At last, your oasis,” he said, pointing to a vacant wooden bench set back at the edge of the ramparts. They settled themselves a discreet distance apart, but something in her ached at that distance, and with the tips of her finger she lifted up one of his hands from his knee so that their palms touched each other. After a few moments, Thrine and Fritz caught up to and walked past them again. Regina examined a distant windmill. She wished she hadn’t taken Søren’s hand, but it was too late.
“Do you think that there is room for a wife in the life of this impassioned writer?” she asked him.
He didn’t remove his hand from the place in the air where she had lifted it, but he held it still. In order for their palms to keep touching, she had to do all the pushing, make all the adjustments. The effort strained the muscles in her arm. It embarrassed her. She dropped her hand into her lap. He placed his hand back on his knee.
“Ah,” he said as if in response to her question, “the good wife.”
She heard mockery and even condemnation in his tone. Another couple walked past them, arm in arm. The woman wore red pointed shoes beneath her red and black gown. An image rose in Regina’s mind of Søren standing at the music stand in his study, writing while she knelt at his feet. He held up one foot without looking down, and she eased off his shoe and slid on a slipper. He continued to write as she repeated the same procedure with the other foot, and then she slipped out of the room as unobtrusively as possible.
“No,” he said. “Now that you mention it, there may not be room for you.”
She froze. This was why the Wednesday letters had stopped. This was why she’d been afraid to ask him, to speak directly. She forced herself to smile and shake her head. “That’s just your depression talking, Søren.”
“How do you know?” He looked away.
“I know all about it, Søren.”
“You couldn’t.”
“I do.”
He looked disdainful, almost mocking, as if depression were a special gift only a few could experience.
“Søren, you need me. You’d be so lonely without me. You’d regret it.”
She pictured herself sitting at her window, looking for a cloaked figure who never came, and she felt the window begin to crack all along the seams of her heart. Words burst out of her, like a tiny child waking up crying, screaming for her father. “Søren, I’ll do anything to keep you—anything!”
“Anything?” He gripped her arm so tightly it hurt.
“Anything,” she said in a small voice as the last shred of her dignity, her self, slipped away from her. “I’d be happy to— to—to live in a cabinet in your house as long as I could live with you.”
Where had the words come from? The idea? How could she so lower herself? She turned her head away and looked out at the water. It was a uniform dark blue, almost a gray. The sun had lowered in the sky, easing itself onto the horizon. She tightened her green cape around her shoulders with a savage yank.
“It would be very dark,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“In a cabinet. It would be very dark in a cabinet in my house.”
She stared at him. He seemed to be joking. Why did she let her mouth speak before she could think? Why?
“I’d come out only when it looked safe,” she said, trying to lift her shoulders and pretend she’d been joking.
“At night, I hope,” he said.
“Søren!” She blushed.
“Wait,” he said. His face quivered with delight. “Listen!”
She stared at him.
“There are two men behind us having a conversation. They are from the poor house. One of them has just said that he does not believe in God. And the other has responded that he would believe in God if a blue one would descend from the sky at this very minute.” Søren pulled a rixdollar from his pocket. “And I happen to have a blue one right here.” His eyes gleamed. “I’ll be right back.” He leapt from the bench and dashed behind some shrubbery.
She hadn’t even noticed those men. Had Søren been listening to a word she’d said? Regina wanted to crumple, to sink down low. It took every ounce of training, every whalebone in her tightly laced corset, to keep her upright. She longed to slink away and wander along the ramparts by herself. But what if she saw Thrine and Fritz again?
She waited for her fiancé. Through the gaps in the shrubbery, she saw Søren hand the bill to one of the men and tip his hat. Then he returned to her side, grinning broadly.
“So,” she said, coldly. “Have you just restored somebody’s faith in God?”
“Without a doubt,” he grinned. “Now what were you saying about a cabinet?”
“Nothing,” she said. She pictured a huge, blue rixdollar descending from the sky, and as she pictured it, it seemed that it became reality. As the dusk fell, the dark haze of blue all around her lowered itself like a curtain.