11
The days pass, the weeks pass, the months pass. I’ve started writing short stories, and the veil between myself and reality is solid and secure again. Ebbe has started going to hear lectures, and now I’m not so anxious when he’s out with Hjalmar. To my relief, he’s not as interested in my writing as he once was, so I can create my male characters in peace. But after the episode with Mulvad I’m still careful not to include any obvious similarities to Ebbe. After Helle is in bed in the evening, he reads poems to me from Sophus Claussen or Rilke. Rilke makes a deep impression on me, and I would never have discovered him if it weren’t for Ebbe. He’s also very interested in Viggo Hørup at the moment. Ebbe poses dramatically with his foot up on a stool and his hand on his heart: My hand, he recites in a deep voice, will always be lifted against the politics that I deem the meanest of all – that which attempts to band together the wealthy and set the upper classes against those who have little to prevent them from being crushed into the dust. In the evening when we are lying in one another’s arms, he tells me about his childhood, which is just like every other man’s. There is always something about a garden with some fruit trees, and a slingshot, and a cousin or girlfriend they’re lying with in a hayloft – but then a mother or aunt comes and ruins it. It’s a boring story after you’ve heard it a few times, but they’re so captivated while they tell it. And anyway, what we say to one another doesn’t matter all that much, as long as things are good between us.
We’ve moved to a new apartment on the first floor of the building where Lise and Ole live. It has two and a half rooms, and there’s a little yard out front, where Helle can run and play. She’s two now, and a cascade of blonde curls has suddenly replaced her baldness. She’s so easy that Lise says we don’t really know what it’s like to raise a child. When I’m writing in the morning, I set her to playing with her blocks and dolls, and she has learned not to bother me. Mama’s writing, she says ceremoniously to her doll, and afterwards we will all go for a walk.
She’s already speaking in complete sentences. A couple of days before we were going to move into the new apartment, Mrs Hansen called to me from the kitchen. The HIPOs1 have blocked the street, she says. Look over there, there’s a bonfire. I pull aside the curtain and look down. Across the deserted street HIPOs are tossing pieces of furniture out of the top window of the building facing ours, and burning them in a big bonfire. Down below there’s a woman with her hands up, standing against the building wall with two children. Men shouting commands are holding them there with their machine guns. Mrs Hansen says, Those poor people – but luckily this damned war will soon be over.
Just as I’m about to leave my lookout, a woman comes running at full speed around the corner and I see, to my horror, that it’s Tutti. A HIPO man shouts at her and shoots into the sky, and she disappears into our entry. When I let her in, she falls on me sobbing: Morten is dead, she says, and at first the words don’t quite register. I get her to sit down, and I can see that she’s wearing two different shoes. Dead how? I ask. Is it true? I just saw him two days ago. Tutti tells me between sobs that it was a stray bullet, an accident, completely meaningless, and unbearable. He was sitting across from an officer who was going to show him how to use a pistol with a silencer. Suddenly the gun went off and hit Morten right in the heart. He was only twenty-two, says Tutti, looking at me desperately. I loved him so much. I don’t think I’ll ever get over this.
I can see Morten’s angular honest face before me, and I remember his poem: I have known death since I was a boy. It’s so strange, I say, how he wrote so much about death. I know, says Tutti, calming down a little. It was as if he knew that he wouldn’t be allowed to live.
Later that day, Ester and Halfdan come by, and they’re both shocked. I know that Halfdan was very close with Morten. But what I can’t get out of my mind is that the same thing could happen to Ebbe. Now it feels gravely serious when he goes out to meet Hjalmar, and I feel anxious until I see him again. We move into the new apartment and we visit Lise and Ole during curfew. After a tuberculosis exam, which all students have to go through once a year, Ole is told that he has ‘something in his chest’. If it weren’t for that, he says, he would train to join the resistance too. The doctor decided that Ole has to live for a few months at a college in Holte for students with tuberculosis, and Lise isn’t too upset about their separation. Now she can put off their divorce and see her lawyer in peace.
Then arrives the fifth of May, Liberation Day, with jubilant crowds cheering in the streets, as if they’ve sprouted up from between the paving stones. Strangers embrace one another, bawl out the freedom song and cheer hurray every time a car carrying resistance fighters drives past. Ebbe is in full uniform, and I’m worried what will happen to him, because no one knows if the Germans will pull back without a fight. Upstairs, at Lise and Ole’s, the pullimut bottles are on the table for the last time, and there are lots of people there, and we don’t know them all. We dance, celebrate and enjoy ourselves, but this historic event doesn’t really penetrate my consciousness, because I always experience things after they’ve happened; I’m rarely in the present. We tear down the blackout curtains and stomp them to pieces. We’re acting like we’re happy, but really we’re not. Tutti is still grieving for Morten; Lise and Ole are separating; and Sinne has just left Arne, who is so depressed that he doesn’t get out of bed. Nadja, who is always hunting for a man, but always the wrong one, is trying to get together with Ebbe’s brother Karsten, who she would fit like a ring in his nose. Meanwhile I’m thinking about my abortion and I’m always calculating how old the baby would have been by now. Something has gone wrong for each one of us, and I think that our youth has disappeared along with the occupation. Helle and Kim are sleeping in the nursery, and when they cry so loud that we can hear it over our own noise, Lise goes in and sings them back to sleep. Outside in the sky, the spring night revolves and the elegantly suspended moon observes a drunken and dead-tired crowd, who can’t bear to leave and go home.
A couple of days later, Ebbe comes home pale and agitated. He tells me how the traitors and collaborators are being treated at Dagmarhus, the previous Gestapo headquarters. He takes off his uniform and puts on his civilian clothes. When I take a walk with Helle at Vesterbro Square, I see a group of unarmed German soldiers come shuffling, out of step and with exhausted, hopeless faces. They are quite young, some of them only fifteen or sixteen. When I get home I write a poem about them. It starts:
Tired German soldiers
trudging in a strange city,
not looking at one another,
spring light on their foreheads.
Tired, hesitating, shy,
in the middle of a strange city
they approach defeat.
One day Lise comes down to visit us and tells me that Ole is inviting a lot of young women to a ‘Tubercular Ball’ which they are holding at the Rudershøj dormitory. Ebbe is upset that he can’t go, but there are already more than enough men, so it’s no use. I’m happy to be invited, because my short-story collection is finished, and I don’t know what to do with myself when I’m not writing. Lise says that the dean’s wife’s son will be there to lure his mother to bed early.
When we get there, the party is in full force. People are dancing to a local band, and none of the students look any worse than Ole, who is the picture of health. A big-chested woman comes rushing up to welcome us. She is evidently the dean’s wife. I dance with lots of different men in a large, open room with a parquet floor and high-backed chairs along the walls. The dormitory is located in a large park, which is veiled that evening by a rainy haze, greenish, black and silvery under a misty moon, sailing between the clouds. A bar has been set up in a kind of foyer, with a counter and high chairs and a bartender who is pouring real liquor and not pullimut. For some reason I feel happy and free, and I have a feeling that something special is going to happen before the night is over. I’m drinking whiskey, and I get drunk, jolly and impetuous. On one of th
e barstools, Sinne is sitting on a young man’s lap. I sit next to them and say traitorously, You’re betting on the wrong horse; she’s engaged to a black marketeer. The young man brushes Sinne off as if she were a fleck of dust. I never thought, he says to me, that poets could be so beautiful. Then, from the shade of the lamp, his face emerges, and I find myself observing it with the attention of a painter of miniatures. He has thinning reddish hair, relaxed gray eyes, and teeth so crooked it looks like they are in two rows. It turns out he is the dean’s wife’s son, and has completed his medical degree. I’m surprised to meet a student who has actually finished. He dances with me, and we trip over one another’s feet and have to give up, laughing. Then we take a walk in the park. The night is clearing and the air is like damp silk. He kisses me beneath a silver-gray birch tree, then suddenly his mother comes rushing out to us with her undulating violet silk bust and waving arms. Young people nowadays, she pants. The contents of her mind are expressed primarily in half-intelligible sentimental outbursts. Then her son, whose name is Carl, remembers his promise to the students to take his mother home to bed, and he mutters something to me about us getting together later, and he disappears into the building with her.
Then the party gets wilder. People are dancing, drinking and carrying on. Pair after pair disappear up the stairs and don’t reappear. I’m more drunk than I have been in a long time, and when Carl returns he suggests that we go up to his room so he can get some sleep. I think that sounds like a fine idea. I’ve forgotten about Ebbe, and about my promise to be faithful to him.
In the morning I wake up with a horrible headache. I glance at the man sleeping next to me and realize that he is quite ugly with all those teeth and that underbite which doesn’t hide them. I wake him and say that I’m going home. I’m irritated and sluggish, and I put on my clothes without a word. I decide I never want to see him again, and when he asks if he can walk me home, I say, No thanks, I would rather go alone. When I go down to the messy ballroom, I sit down for a moment on one of the bar chairs. Down the stairs comes Sinne on the heels of a very tall young man, who is holding her bra in one hand. Without taking the least notice of him she walks over to me and asks, Dear God, what did we drink? He was hideous, over six feet tall, and probably only had half a lung. Then she grabs the bra and disappears with a sleepy yawn.
I leave the battlefield and bicycle home to Ebbe, who is furious that I stayed out all night. You probably slept with someone else, he says. I plead my innocence, but actually find it humorous that it should matter so much. There are other forms of loyalty that mean so much more. When I go to bed, I realize that I didn’t have my diaphragm in. Otherwise I have always been so careful since my abortion. Then I think that if something does happen, at least he’s a doctor, so that should make it easier than last time.
12
Good God, I say. He has an underbite and sixty-four teeth in his mouth instead of thirty-two. And I don’t know if it’s his or Ebbe’s. Lise, what should I do?
I pace the floor, and Lise watches me with two deep furrows on her forehead. You get pregnant just walking through a draft, she says with a sigh. But if he’s a doctor he should be able to get rid of it without all the trouble you went through last time. But do I have to see him again? I say. He’s so hideous, and what do I tell Ebbe? Things have never been as good between us as they are now. Lise explains to me patiently that I have to see him again. I have to call his mother and find out where he lives. And I can tell Ebbe anything – that I’m going over to visit Nadja or Ester, or that I’m going to visit my parents; he’s not suspicious. So we have coffee, and Lise tells me that she’s not doing so well either. Her lawyer won’t get a divorce after all, but he still wants to be with her. Isn’t it terrible, she says, these men with two women. Both of them are suffering, and the man won’t choose. She brushes her short brown hair away from her cheek and looks miserable, and it makes me feel bad that I’m always dumping my own problems on her. If I’m not writing, I say, then I’m pregnant. That makes us laugh, and we agree that I have to do something. I’ll have to get Carl’s address and visit him and have him get rid of it.
The next day Carl calls me himself and asks if we can get together soon. I say yes, and I agree to come and visit him the following evening. He lives at the Biochemical Institute, where he also works. He’s a scientist. I tell Ebbe that I’m going to visit Nadja, and I ride my bicycle through the twilight down Nørre Allé, where the trees are as motionless as a drawing. It’s summer, and I’m wearing a white cotton dress that I bought from Sinne. Carl’s room looks like any student’s dorm: a bed, a table, a couple of chairs and some shelves full of books. He’s bought sandwiches, beer and schnapps, but I don’t touch any of it. We sit at the table and I say: I’m pregnant, and I don’t want to have a child when I don’t know who the father is. I see, he says, relaxed, looking at me with his serious gray eyes, which are the only pleasant thing about him. I can help you with that. Come tomorrow evening and I can do a curettage. He says this as if it’s something he does every day, and he seems like the kind of person that nothing in the world could bother. I smile, relieved, and say: Can you give me anesthesia? I’ll give you a shot, he says, so you won’t feel a thing. A shot? I ask. What is it? Morphine or Demerol, he says. Demerol is the best. Morphine makes a lot of people throw up. So I calm down, and I eat and drink with him after all. I’m only eight days late, and my morning sickness hasn’t started yet. Carl has small, thin, quick hands, which remind me a little of Viggo F.’s. He has a nice voice and he’s well spoken. He tells me he went to boarding school at Herlufsholm, that his mother got a divorce when he was two, and that as far back as he can remember, he always wanted her to remarry. He also tells me that his father, as far as he knows, is in a home for alcoholics, but that he’s had no contact with him since he left them. He also tells me that, since we met, he’s been reading everything I’ve written; and he adds, smiling, that we could have a fine child together. He would like to marry me. I already have a very suitable husband, I say, and a lovely daughter, so that will have to wait. Okay, he says, rubbing his chin as if he were checking for stubble. It probably wouldn’t be such a great idea to marry me anyway, he says. I have to tell you that I am a little crazy. He says this in complete seriousness, and I ask what he could possibly mean by that. But he can’t really explain it. It’s just a feeling he has. He says there’s a lot of mental illness on his father’s side, and also that his mother isn’t too bright. I laugh and don’t give it another thought. When I’m leaving, he gives me a gentle kiss, but doesn’t try to get me to go to bed with him. I think I’m in love with you, he says, but it’s probably no use.
When I come home, Ebbe is reading poetry by Thøger Larsen while puffing on his pipe, which he has started doing after reading that cigarettes can cause cancer. He doesn’t want Helle and me to lose him to an early death. He asks how Nadja is doing, and I tell him the truth – that she’s gotten engaged to a student from the University of Copenhagen, and that she spouts the most reactionary opinions, as if she were from before the reign of Frederik VI. He chuckles and says that she should get married and have children. We’re getting old, he says, tapping out his pipe in the ashtray. He is twenty-seven and I’m twenty-five. When I think about my childhood, he says, I feel just like Thøger Larsen. Listen to this:
Be glad if you meet a withered glimpse
in dreams from the spring of your youth.
A ray of grace. Your father is near.
Your mother is in the kitchen.
My mother, I object, is over fifty, and I don’t think she’s old at all. My mother is sixty-five, he says, and I’ve never thought she was young. It makes a difference. I don’t really follow him when he talks about how old he is, and everything I have to hide from him is also creating distance between us. When we go to bed, I say that I’m exhausted and that I have to go straight to sleep. Tomorrow, I say, I want to visit Ester and Halfdan. When he says he’d like to come, I say that we can’t always have Lise
watching Helle, and his mother doesn’t really like watching her either. But I promise him not to stay too long.
The next evening, while I’m sitting in a streetcar on the way to Carl’s, I tell myself that it’s not definite that I’m pregnant. It could be just a fluctuation in my period; that’s not so uncommon. I say this because I don’t want another shadow to crop up next to Helle, another one whose age I will always have to calculate. I know that some women get scraped out just to clean their inner parts. When I arrive, I see that Carl has obtained a high table for the occasion. It stands in the center of the room, and there’s a white sheet over it. He has also put his pillow on it, so I can be comfortable. He’s wearing a white lab coat, and he washes his hands and scrubs his nails, while he pleasantly asks me to make myself comfortable. There are some shiny instruments on the bookshelf next to the table. When he’s washed his hands, he takes a syringe from the glass shelf over the sink. He fills it with a clear liquid and lays it next to the instruments; then he ties a rubber hose around my upper arm. You’ll feel a little prick, he says calmly. You’ll hardly feel it. He taps lightly on the inner side of my elbow, until a blue blood vessel protrudes. You have good veins, he says. Then he gives me the injection, and a bliss I have never before felt spreads through my entire body. The room expands to a radiant hall, and I feel completely relaxed, lazy and happy as never before. I roll over on my side and close my eyes. Leave me alone, I hear myself say, as if through many layers of cotton. You don’t have to do anything to me.
When I wake up, Carl is standing there washing his hands again. I still have the blissful feeling, and I have the sense that it will disappear if I move. You can get up and put your clothes on, he says, drying his hands. It’s done. I do what he says, slowly, without telling him how happy I feel. He asks if I want a beer, but I shake my head. He says I need some fluids, and he takes out a soda which I force myself to drink. He sits down on the bed next to me and kisses me carefully. Was it painful? he asks. No, I say. What was it you gave me? I ask. Demerol, he says, a painkiller. I take his hand and put it up to my cheek. I’m in love with you, I say. I’ll come back soon. He looks happy, and in that moment I think he is almost handsome. He has a solid, durable face, made to last his whole life. Ebbe’s face is fragile, scarred in many places, and might be used up by the time he’s forty. It’s a strange thought, and I don’t know how to express it. When I come back, I say slowly, can I have another shot of that? He laughs and rubs his protruding chin. Sure, he says, if you think it’s so wonderful. You don’t have the makings of an addict. I wish I could marry you, I say, stroking his soft, thin hair. What about your husband? he says. I’ll just move out, I say, and take Helle with me. While I ride home in the streetcar, the effects of the shot wear off slowly, and it feels as if a gray, slimy veil covers whatever my eyes see. Demerol, I think. The name sounds like birdsong. I decide never to let go of this man who can give me such an indescribable blissful feeling.
The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency Page 26
