The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency

by Tove Ditlevsen

  – the pitchers are filled with wine,

  the twilight-veiled earth.

  Baudelaire: Les fleurs du mal I read on the title page, and I go over to Mr Krogh and ask him how it’s pronounced. He tells me and says that I can borrow the book if I promise to return it. I promise and sit down again at the table. Only now do I notice that Mr Krogh is in his dressing gown. He has a coughing fit again, during which he turns bright red in the face and, wheezing for air, he asks Ruth to thump him on the back. While she does this, she laughs soundlessly at me, but I don’t laugh back. Between Mr Krogh and me there’s a silent understanding that I don’t remember having experienced with anyone else before. I wish fiercely that he were my father or my uncle. Ruth notices this and frowns, annoyed. ‘I have to go home,’ she says sulkily, ‘I’m going to meet Ejvind.’ When we’re about to leave, Mr Krogh tries to kiss Ruth but she turns her sweet face away, and I feel sorry for him. I wouldn’t have anything against kissing him but he just gives me his hand and says, ‘You can borrow all the books from me that you like, just as long as I get them back. I’m always home this time of the evening.’ When I get home, my mother is sitting at the table with a swollen face and red eyes. She asks me where in heaven’s name I’ve been and where I got that book from. I say that I’ve been over at Edvin’s and that his cough really has gotten better. The book I borrowed from one of the lodgers. When I get into bed, the thought strikes me with terror that Mr Krogh could die like my editor. I desire with all my heart to make contact with a world that seems to consist entirely of sick old men who might keel over at any moment, before I myself have grown old enough to be taken seriously.

  4

  Uncle Carl is dead. ‘He died quietly in his sleep,’ says Aunt Rosalia, and he died with his hand in hers. She is sitting on the edge of a chair, with her hat on and her sewing over her arm like always, even though she doesn’t have anything to go home to now. Her eyes are completely swollen from crying and my mother can’t really find any way to comfort her. My mother has always thought it would be best for Aunt Rosalia if Uncle Carl died, but it doesn’t look like Aunt Rosalia thinks so. At the funeral we’re all present, including Uncle Peter and Aunt Agnete, who didn’t want to have anything to do with Uncle Carl when he was alive. My three cousins are there too. They’re little and fat and pasty-white in the face, and my

  mother says gloatingly that they’ll never get married, and so what do their parents have to be so stuck-up about? She and my father have always put down Aunt Agnete and Uncle Peter, and yet they still play cards with them a couple of times a week. It irritates me when I get home from work, because then I can’t go to bed until they’ve left. While the minister preaches over Uncle Carl, I don’t laugh like at my granny’s funeral, but I think about the fact that no one except Aunt Rosalia has known him or knew what he was really like. First he was a hussar, then he was a blacksmith, then he drank beer, and finally soda pop. That’s all that the rest of us know. We have coffee in a restaurant near the cemetery, and there’s an oppressive mood because Aunt Rosalia refuses to be cheered up by anything whatsoever. Her tears fall into her coffee cup and she has to keep lifting the black veil of her funeral hat to dry them away. ‘He was handsome as a young man,’ she says to my mother, ‘wasn’t he, Alfrida?’ ‘Yes, he was,’ says my mother. ‘He was handsome back then.’ Aunt Rosalia says, ‘I know that none of you liked him because he drank. He suffered a great deal because of that. His own family didn’t like him either.’ It’s embarrassing, and no one answers, because she’s right, of course. ‘Well,’ says Edvin, getting up, ‘I have to go now. I have to meet a friend.’ After he’s gone, I look around at my family, at these faces that have surrounded me my whole childhood, and I find them tired and aged, as if the years that I’ve used to grow up in have exhausted them completely. Even my cousins, who are not much older than me, look worn-out and used up. My father is very quiet and serious, as always when he’s wearing his Sunday suit. It’s as if it’s lined with dark and depressing thoughts that he puts on along with the suit. He’s talking with Uncle Peter in a low voice, mumbling. Even at the funeral they discuss politics, but they don’t get excited about it like they usually do. My father is still working at the H. C. Ørsted Works, and my mother has finally gotten the radio that she wanted me to pay for. She has it on all day long and only turns it off when there’s someone in the living room she wants to talk to. When my father’s home, he’s always lying on the sofa, sleeping. Then when my mother turns off the radio, he wakes up with a start and says, ‘It’s damn near impossible to sleep with that God-awful noise.’ We think that’s really funny. But I’m not really involved with all that goes on at home anymore – not like before. I’m really only alive when I’m at Mr Krogh’s. I visit him as often as I dare, without provoking my mother. I say that I’m visiting Yrsa, but my mother can’t understand why we’re suddenly friends, since I’ve always said that I didn’t like her. I borrow books from Mr Krogh and return them again after I’ve read them. He always greets me in his silk dressing gown, with red slippers on his feet; he pours us coffee from a silver coffeepot. If he doesn’t have any pastry, he gives me fifty øre to go down and buy some. We drink coffee at a low table with an etched brass surface. Mr Krogh has long, white hands that always tremble slightly, and he has a low, pleasant voice that I love to listen to. He does most of the talking when I’m there, because he doesn’t like me to show my curiosity. One evening when I asked him why he wasn’t married, he said, ‘You’re not supposed to know everything about a person – remember that. Then it stops being exciting.’ I don’t know, either, whether Ruth still comes there, whether she’s going to be a chorus girl, or whether Mr Krogh even knows Holger Bjerre at all. Ruth doesn’t think so. Whenever I meet her in the courtyard or on the street, she says, ‘That Krogh is full of lies, and he’s a dirty old man. Hasn’t he made a pass at you yet?’ ‘No,’ I say and think she’s talking about someone completely different than the Mr Krogh I know. ‘Well, I don’t dare go there alone,’ she says. Another day she says that he’s stingy since he never gives me any presents. ‘Why should he?’ I ask. She gives me a look bursting with impatience. ‘Because,’ she says, ‘he’s old and you’re young. He’s completely crazy about young girls, and he has to pay for that – what else?’ One evening when Mr Krogh has lit the candles in a tall silver candleholder that’s standing on the table between us, I gather my courage and say, ‘Mr Krogh, when I was little, I wrote poems.’ He smiles. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘and you want to show them to me?’ I blush because he’s guessed what I want from him, and I ask him how he knows. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘either that or something else. People always want something from each other, and I’ve known all along that you wanted to use me for something.’ When I make a protesting gesture, he says, ‘There’s nothing wrong with that – it’s completely natural. I want something from you, too.’ ‘What?’ I ask. ‘Nothing in particular,’ he says, taking his long thin pipe out of his mouth. ‘I just collect eccentrics – people who are different, special cases. I’d like to see your poems. Thump me on the back.’ The last comes out in gasps, and he gets quite blue in the face. He coughs at each thump I give him and he doubles up so that his arms hang down to the floor. I wonder what kind of illness he suffers from. I don’t dare ask whether it’s fatal, but already the next evening I rush over to his apartment with my poetry album, half convinced that he’s no longer among the living. But he is, and as soon as we’re sitting at the coffee table, I hand him the book, very afraid of disappointing him, accustomed as he is to reading the greatest poetry. He puts his pipe down and pages through the book, while I tensely watch his face. ‘Yes,’ he says, nodding, ‘children’s poems!’ He reads aloud:

  Sleeping girl, I’ll sing a hymn for you.

  No sight has ever brought me joy so true

  as you lying motionless and sweet,

  smiling in your dreams, the white sheet

  barely covering your young breast,

  oh, how that s
ight to me was blest,

  but you were unaware.

  There are four or five verses, and he mumbles them all to himself. Then he looks at me kindly and gravely and says, ‘That’s interesting. Who were you thinking of when you wrote that poem?’ ‘No one,’ I say, ‘well, yes, maybe Ruth.’ He laughs heartily. ‘Life is funny,’ he says then. ‘You realize it first when you’re about to lose it.’ ‘But Mr Krogh,’ I say terrified, ‘you’re not that old – not any older than my father.’ ‘Oh no,’ he says, ‘but even so, I’ve lived a long time.’ He shuts the book and puts it on the table. ‘These poems,’ he says, ‘can’t be used for anything, but it looks like you’re going to be a poet someday.’ A wave of happiness floods through me at these words. I tell him about Editor Brochmann, who said that I should come back in a couple of years, and he says that he knew him well. He also says that someday when I write something good, something that other people will take pleasure in reading, I should show it to him and then he’ll see that it’s published. The candles flicker in the holder and the dark evening sky is full of stars. I’m terribly fond of Mr Krogh, but I don’t dare tell him so. We’re silent for a long time. From the bookshelves there issues a pleasant smell of leather, paper, and dust, and Mr Krogh looks at me with a sorrowful glance, as if what he wants to tell me will never be said, exactly like my father has always looked at me. Then he gets up. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘you’d better go. I have some work to do before I go to bed.’ Out in the hallway he puts his hand under my chin and says, ‘Will you give an old man a kiss on the cheek?’ I kiss him carefully, as if my kiss could bring about his feared death. It’s a soft, old man’s cheek that reminds me of my Granny’s.

  5

  Hitler has come to power in Germany. My father says that it’s the reactionaries who’ve won and that the Germans don’t deserve any better since they voted for him themselves. Mr Krogh calls it a catastrophe for the whole world and is gloomy and depressed as if from some personal sorrow. The ladies at the boarding house cheer and say that if Stauning were like Hitler, we wouldn’t have unemployment, but he’s weak and corrupt and drunken and everything he does in the government is wrong. They listen to the news on the radio instead of taking a nap before dinner, and they come back with shining eyes and say that the Reichstag fire was set by the Communists and now it will certainly be proved at the trial. My father and Mr Krogh say that the Nazis started it themselves, and if I have any opinion at all, it’s to agree with them. But most of all, I’m terrified – as if the swells from the great ocean of the world could capsize my fragile little ship at any moment. I don’t like reading the newspapers anymore, but I can’t avoid them entirely. My father shows me Anton Hansen’s dark, satirical drawings in Social-Demokraten, and they increase my fear. There is an old Jew with a large sign on his back, surrounded by laughing SS-men. On the sign it says in German: ‘I am a Jew, but I don’t want to complain about the Nazis.’ I have to tell my father what it means. Mr Krogh subscribes to Politiken. He shows me a drawing of Van der Lubbe and the caption underneath:

  Tell us what you know

  about Torgler and the fire.

  –

  You know, we want to know, damn it.

  Say that Dimitroff

  and Popoff were waiting by the stairs,

  then you’ll save your neck.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he says, ‘now the German intelligentsia is in for it.’ I ask him what ‘German intelligentsia’ means and he explains it to me. Among other things, it means the artists. A poet is an artist, and Mr Krogh has said that I’ll be a poet someday. The ladies read Berlingske Tidende, and there, they say, the truth is written about Hitler, who may save all of Europe and create a kind of paradise for us all. More than ever I want to get away from the boarding house’s close, filthy kitchen and the people I’m with there every day. My father is always sleeping when I come home and a couple of hours later he leaves for work. One evening when he wakes up, I ask him whether I can look for another job. I say that I hate washing dishes and cleaning and doing any kind of domestic work at all. I would rather work in an office and learn to type. ‘Not yet,’ he says, ‘first you have to learn to take care of a house properly and cook for your husband when he comes home from work.’ ‘She’ll learn that soon enough,’ my mother comes to my aid, ‘when she has use for it one day.’ She also says, ‘You talk like she’s going to get married tomorrow. She’s only just turned fifteen.’ My father presses his lips together and frowns. ‘Is it you or me who decides?’ he says. Then my mother keeps quiet, but she’s insulted too, and the atmosphere in the living room is tense. When my father has left, she puts down her knitting and smiles. ‘We’ll pretend,’ she says, ‘that one of the lodgers has made a pass at you. Then you can look for another job.’ ‘OK,’ I say relieved, astonished that I never thought of that before. A couple of days later, my father is sitting on the sofa when I come home. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘Mother told me what happened. Now you’ve reached the age when you need to watch out for yourself. You’re not to go back there. Mother can go and pick up your paycheck, and then you’ll have to start looking for another job.’ Then I stay home for a while. We buy Berlingske Tidende and I send in replies for many office jobs but get no response. I also go around Vesterbro and apply for those jobs where you’re supposed to appear in person. I talk to fine gentlemen in big, light offices and they all ask me what my father does. When I tell them, they figure that I’ll have to live on my salary and it’s never intended for that. But finally I succeed in getting a job where the director just asks me whether I’m a member of the union. When he hears that I’m not, he hires me immediately for forty kroner a month. It’s in a nursing supply company on Valdemarsgade and I’m to be stock clerk. ‘Scab company,’ says my father when he hears the part about the union, but he gives in anyway, because even for a girl it’s not easy to find a job.