Lone Star

by Mathilde Walter Clark

  But I still have the butterfly brooch.

  It came in the post in a small cardboard box lined with cotton wool that made the envelope bulge with promise. I opened it in my room, we had moved again, this time to a detached single-story house in a Copenhagen suburb, and there, inside the box, nestled in the cotton wool, was a silver butterfly with a turquoise eye on each wing. My mother translated the accompanying card, which said he had bought the brooch for me on a trip to Mexico.

  The butterfly effect, the phenomenon whereby a butterfly, by flapping its wings in Mexico, for instance, can send a hurricane through an ordinary Danish residential area. Not that I ever wore the brooch, it simply never occurred to me to use it as a piece of jewelry, to display to others. It wasn’t at all like Paul Auster with his father’s watch or sweater, the brooch did not enter into the sum of things, did not become an object like other objects. It was not an object at all in that sense, more a kind of religious relic, a precious fragment of some greater and not entirely fathomable connection, like a meteorite falling from the sky and telling us we’re not alone, that something is out there.

  The object as a reference: the night sky is not a picture, what twinkles in the distance exists.

  When we saw each other it was at home, in the changing apartments in which my mother and I lived, or else around and about in Copenhagen, at the Niels Bohr Institute, Hotel Østerport, various restaurants, the Tivoli Gardens. It was a rule that on his annual visit he would take us to dinner at the upstairs Chinese restaurant on the corner of Gammeltorv and Strøget, where most of the customers were tourists.

  The restaurant is still there, and when occasionally I happen to stand at the crosswalk on the square waiting for the light to change, my eyes will look up at the restaurant’s name in green and red neon lettering, Restaurant Shanghai, though to my mother and me it was never known as anything but the Chinese restaurant.

  When I got older, I formed the impression that my mother found it a rather miserly choice, that she thought perhaps my dad should forget about the cost that one time in the year, but she never once criticized the arrangement or made my dad look cheap in my eyes. On the contrary. Going into the city to meet my dad at the Chinese restaurant was always an occasion, a wild adventure as if to some foreign land, where all the dishes were displayed behind glass and Chinese waiters in stumpy pants and quilted jackets went among the noisy tables collecting the used plates in gray plastic buckets with handles on them.

  I always had the same thing, a spring roll served on a thick plate of unbreakable china, slit down the middle by my mother and drizzled with soy sauce.

  At the other side of the table, my dad sat with his dark, wavy hair and his horn-rimmed glasses, in his brown or pale yellow or beige polo-neck sweater, clearing his throat. When we had finished the meal, he would get the camera out. It was protected by a caramel- colored leather case which, when it was undone, dangled underneath. Taking a picture required some considerable preparation. Glasses off, he would first peer through the viewfinder with one eye and discover that the lens cap was still on. After that, he would need to measure the light with a separate mechanism the size of a matchbox.

  As he prepared, I would watch him. His face, his kind brown eyes glancing across at me. As the years passed, the horn-rimmed glasses would be replaced by metal-rimmed glasses, but his gaze remained the same, mild and affectionate. The way he became flustered, the longer it took (time, forever passing), his fingers that busied so much that often they would twist the wrong knobs, as if they feared the motif would vanish if they failed to act with the utmost urgency.

  It feels strange to be writing some of these things down, and part of the reason for that is the word dad itself. For most people, certainly those with a father who speaks the same language as them, the word has two aspects, one universal (everyone has a dad) and one personal (my dad). But to me the word for dad is entirely abstract in my own language, a title, as magistrate or vice-consul are titles, a word without a semblance of personal significance or association. Would it help to use my private name for him, my mother’s and mine, and call him Daddy in writing? It’s been a long time since I’ve called him that, or even spoken the name out loud. At one point, I stopped referring to him in that way when I was with my friends. I’d reached an age when I could no longer allow myself such solipsism, sensing it came across as rather comical, like when the sons of the Danish queen publicly referred to their French father, Prince Henrik, as Papa—as if their Papa were the world’s Papa too. So with my friends I gradually began to refer to him as “my dad”— in Danish: min far— though I would always take great care never to call him that if my mother could hear me. I knew she would see right through me. By placing the innocent possessive pronoun my in front of the universal noun dad, I achieved an effect that was by no means innocent at all. My dad became all the Danish dads I knew. I translated him into my friends’ dads. He became somebody who knew the name of the school you went to, who mowed the lawn and taught you to ride a bike, a person you’d seen put on his raincoat or set the table or shave in the mornings. At once I made all of that mine, the mere wording smuggling in with it training wheels being mounted on bikes and later taken off again, card games played on rainy days stuck in summer houses, a family dancing around the tree on Christmas Eve. It felt like a shady black-market exchange whereby I’d secured myself a more valuable currency and bartered my way into a community I didn’t quite belong to.

  I knew I was cheating, that it was a lie, but if min far allowed me access into a more conventional discourse with fewer questions of the kind I had no answers to, then lying just a teeny bit was permitted, or so I reasoned, or hoped, because what other options did the language give me?

  What other options does it give me now? Writing things down, employing language, is a never-ending negotiation between what everyone has in common and what belongs only to me. That’s the way it has to be.

  And yet I sense the liar inside me, niggling every time I utter the words min far, my dad.

  Not until after my eleventh birthday, after six months of English at school, did we speak the same language, though I was in no doubt that we’d conversed before that, in no doubt at all. I’d stood holding his hand on Copenhagen’s long pedestrian thoroughfare, Strøget, in front of a shop window close to Kongens Nytorv. We were on our own, which was unusual (normally my mother would be there to translate), and were looking at the window display, electronic gadgets perhaps, or cameras and photographic equipment, and I had a very clear recollection that we were talking about the items on display, and quite without difficulty.

  That very distinct moment in front of the shop window in my memory bears all the marks of having been cherished and nurtured and recounted many times, cultivated even. Rolled out at the slightest occasion in a voice to suggest that the whole idea of a shared language being a necessary basis for conversation was of course idiotic and utterly superfluous, far too narrow a way of looking at communication, too crude to be taken seriously.

  Thereby I would seek to muzzle anyone who might venture to delve. My sliver of a recollection told me that we had communicated so seamlessly with each other that neither of us had need of anything more.

  A few years ago I asked him what it had been like for him, our speaking different languages. His expression suggested he’d never given it a thought.

  I spoke a little bit of Danish back then, he said.

  Seeing the look on my face, he added: Enough to talk to small children.

  •

  He puts his arms around me and gives me a kiss with the words, I love you, Sweetie Pie. He says the same thing every time we part, even if we’re going to be seeing each other the next day. But inevitably the day comes when we have to part for longer than that, when we say goodbye at the airport and won’t be seeing each other tomorrow. When we’re going to be apart indefinitely. The words come quietly then and with emphasis, as if he’s speaking them as much for his own sake as for mine. I love you, Swee
tie Pie. As if he wants to say: There are so few opportunities, so now it must be said.

  And then he walks away with his carry-on suitcase into the throng of other people with other suitcases. He goes up the escalator, vanishes from sight, into the fleecy writing paper with the university watermark.

  I cry my eyes out. I have no idea when I’ll see him again. It feels as if he dies every time.

  A writer friend of mine once said that we are never free until our parents are dead. Only when they’re gone, she reasoned, can we write without holding back for fear of hurting them, and put things into words exactly as we see them.

  But in that sense, my dad has always been dead. Right from the start, I’ve been free to say and write what I want. When it concerns him, my language is at once frightful and lonely, but also secret and comforting. It’s a black box, a confessional without a priest. No one’s listening on the other side of the grille.

  Because now there is only this: to ensure that he is committed to paper, to make him tangible, to bring him out of the darkness. No consideration needs to be shown. This is my revenge on the Atlantic: that I’m free of it. I remain on my own shore, there is nothing and no one I need to get to on the other side, a disconsolate triumph.

  ◊

  Separation was painful and hard to understand. It knotted my stomach, a heavy and, at the same time, hollow feeling. It felt like a black hole that could explain all my despondency. Sometimes it was like it came from outside, pressing almost unbearably on the solar plexus, the same feeling as when you tell a lie or steal something, a tunnel- like, bottomless feeling. A nameless ache, as if one were being sucked through a funnel to a place completely without shape or outline. My mother took me to see Dr. Gamborg. We sat there all three of us at a desktop that was fastened to the wall, and Dr. Gamborg put the cold mouth of his stethoscope to my chest. I breathed deeply, he shone his penlight into my eyes, held my tongue down with a wooden tongue depressor, and peered down my throat.

  There’s nothing wrong with you, he said.

  There was a certain clarification, a certain relief.

  I think she just misses her daddy, my mother said. I sat down in the waiting room, and my mother and Dr. Gamborg had what she later referred to as a good chat.

  I knew hardly anything about my dad. It didn’t occur to me that he lived in a house and slept in a bed under some other ceiling, nor did it occur to me to ask if he was married and had children. When he went away, he simply vanished into that black hole, into a dark and infinite void. I knew he was a nuclear physicist and that it had to do with something both infinitely great and infinitely small. With his rare intelligence and the breast pocket of his shirt crammed with writing implements, he stuck out so brilliantly from the ranks of the ordinary that I imagined him to be some sort of astronaut. When he was not coming in through doors with me or looking at electronic gadgets in shop windows, it meant he was traveling in space. There he floated, and there he floats still in a way, out on his own in the great darkness of the firmament, not in an astronaut suit, but in a checked shirt and pleated pants, brown laced shoes with rubber soles, in the borderlands of what it is possible for a human being to know, hunched over the riddle of the universe, glasses in hand, in a place beyond waves and particles.

  Without looking, and with the same sureness of putting your finger to your nose with your eyes closed, he reaches into his breast pocket and amongst all that resides there and makes it sag with weight, he picks out his mechanical pencil. The eraser on the end is gray and smoothed like a pebble. Putting the point to the paper he begins to produce his tiny, meticulous symbols and characters from out of the darkness, figures, lines, formulas. At any given moment he exists only seconds away from a phone call from Stockholm. He’s humble and self-effacing, with no time to waste. The darkness that surrounds him stretches out so infinitely, his shirt is dusted with chalk, his coffee cold, and the feet in his shoes have no socks on.

  He looks up in the darkness—or else looks out into it, it makes no difference here, where darkness is all around. What does he see? I have the feeling that the door is out there somewhere, or in there somewhere, the door I so fiercely want to go through. I so wish I could go through it with him and see what he sees, the way I once saw the hall in our apartment.

  in writing courses all over the world they warn against the word suddenly. Stay away from exclamation marks, be sparing with adverbs, and for goodness’ sake, never say that something happens suddenly. Does anything happen at all that does not happen suddenly? A plate drops to the floor, a gun goes off. Someone gets an idea, gets to their feet, lightning strikes. It’s a basic circumstance of the world that nothing is static. In life’s eternal flux, suddenly points right back at the writer. Suddenly breaks an illusion, making the writer appear comical. Suddenly the sun goes down behind the ancient mountains. Suddenly the sky is full of stars. Suddenly the writer is standing there with blood-red hands.

  I am eight or nine years old and seated in a pub in the old part of the city, Hviids Vinstue, perhaps, or Skindbuksen, between my mother and father at a table by the window. My dad is showing us photographs, my mother translates. In the photo we’re looking at now, there’s a baby, my dad’s new son. What has happened since last time we saw each other, I realize, is that I now have a brother. The information is dizzying, a huge surprise, a wish come true in the most unexpected way. Like so many other only children, I have dreamed of having a brother or a sister, so this is a bit like winning the lottery, only without being able to cash in the prize. A baby brother! He was born in April and now it’s summer, and there, at that dark-stained table, next to a beer mat on which stands a celebratory glass of Jolly Cola, he is born again. I’ve seen a number of babies and have reached the conclusion that basically they all look the same, small bodies, big heads, as thin-haired as old men, and yet I sense that somehow I would be able to recognize him, that there is something about him that would make him pop out of the photo’s two-dimensional flatness and make it clear that he is my baby brother.

  I study the photos one by one, several show a tall, thin woman with a blond hairdo of the kind you see in old movies. She’s holding the baby, and there are some other people too, some dark-haired girls who capture my interest, taking turns to hold the baby too. At school, I’m surrounded by blond-haired, blue-eyed Scandinavian children who, if they happen to be in that kind of mood, will refer to me, the only dark-haired child there, as a mongrel, and this is the first time I see children who exactly like me are as thin as a pipe cleaner, with long, smooth, dark brown, almost black hair. Not only do they look like me, they look like me to such an extent that I’m confused.

  Who are those girls?

  I cannot remember the reply, only that I had to ask. My mother translates. They are my sisters. Technically my half sisters. The tall lady with the hairdo, I am to understand, is their mother, my dad’s wife.

  So, besides the baby brother bestowed on me only seconds before, I now have three younger sisters too, the oldest of them, the one who looks like my twin, only slightly more than two years younger. We are nearly the same age! I follow her through the photographs, passing in and out of them through their shiny surfaces, two places at once, here and there. These new faces before me. My dad is new too, suddenly he extends back in time. He has a past. In the time it takes to place a pile of photographs on a table, my dad has gotten married and had four children.

  The term half-sibling. A dreadful term.

  They’re not half, I hiss when my friends at school want to know what it means, they’re whole.

  I had never met them, but there could be no doubt that they were indeed whole. I’d seen the photos.

  That afternoon at Skindbuksen, or wherever it was, it was decided that I was to spend a summer holiday with them in St. Louis. My mother didn’t want to send me over there before I could speak the language. She wanted me to be able to tell someone if I was upset or wanted a glass of milk. Children needed three glasses of milk a day, especial
ly her child, who would seize the slightest opportunity to wangle her way out.

  Two or three years passed during which I kept the memory of the children I’d seen in the photos intact. After I had been learning English for a year at school, my mother took a big brown leatherette suitcase from the loft and tied a broad pink ribbon of silk around the handle, the same ribbon I’d worn in my plait in the school play. So you can tell your suitcase apart from all the others, she said.

  It was packed with white bermuda shorts and striped polo shirts my mother had ironed and folded. She tried to stay calm, but the only time I’d ever been anywhere on my own was with the scouts to Bornholm, and on that occasion there had been adults there to look after us. Before taking me to the airport she took a picture of me in the driveway, I’m standing next to the suitcase, smiling expectantly in shorts and sneakers, my black hair in braids, but the picture is slightly blurred.

  At last I was on my way across the great ocean in my little cereal packet! That was how I thought of it, a tiny mouse furiously paddling toward America’s shore in a packet of Ota Solgryn oatmeal. I had to change flights at Heathrow and jfk. Each time I sat in a new plane, the Danish voices became fewer and farther between. On the final leg, the language existed only in my thoughts. I was far into the country, high up in the sky. The plane with its dimmed interior, the Midwest twang of the hostesses over the loudspeakers. And then the city appeared below, a carpet of twinkling lights, St. Louis, my dad’s city, which so far I had only studied on maps. A dot, a belly button in America’s middle. Now it was there, below me and alive, its lights concentrating inwards from dark and distant hinterland toward the brilliant center. Small shoebox houses, postage stamp fields, cars moving like toys on the roads. Parking lots, illuminated swimming pools, tall buildings, a glittering splendor in the dark. Somewhere down there, among those criss-crossing roads, was my dad’s university, the street where he lived with my siblings and their mother, down there in that organic pile, he was waiting with all the richness of his life around him …