Without warning, the stepfather is standing in front of him, a ghost, a shadow of himself. What the hell are you doing here, in the middle of the night? he says in his sickly nasal and bitter voice. Nothing, the young boy mumbles, I just needed a pee. The stepfather snorts derisively and walks past him down the stairs. He stands still in the darkness, listening to the stepfather’s footsteps continuing through the kitchen and out to the scullery. This is it, he thinks, in a moment it’ll be too late, he’s the only other one awake and that’s why he’s here at all, that’s the reason he came into the world at all, this world, in which he actually has no role to play, this isn’t about him or his love affair, it’s about them, this is the moment he should enter the room in which he’s never going to set his bare feet, and wake the mother and get her up, and the two little brothers in the room behind him, silently fetch the girl from the basement and get all of them out into the mother’s rusty-green old crate of a van, which no one in a suburban residential neighborhood would either own or have or be seen in, and, headlights off, trundle along the avenue and away from this accursed place, this “white farmhouse,” which is not only haunted, but will haunt people both in and outside this story. But he does nothing, he stands rooted in the darkness listening for what is to come, the little click from the cocking of the rifle, footsteps from the scullery back through the kitchen and up the stairs. But nothing happens, not a sound, just darkness.
It’s true. He did nothing. Nor did he go down to the basement and join the sleeping girl under the duvet. What happened there? At a stroke, it is daytime, the trees unfold their leaves in the May light, the dandelions in the field open their glistening yellow umbels and are white clouds lifted by the breeze and carried away, the stepfather has gone, never will he see him again in all his life, the girl has already moved all her things up to the smaller of the two rooms, the one facing the yard, and transformed it into her girl’s room with its pink and fairy-dust glow of illusion that is the new epoch, “the endless summer” where time does not exist and space spreads and fills everything, “the white farmhouse” is the whole world, and he is never going to leave it, once a day at a pinch, perhaps every other day, take a few steps out into the yard, this cauldron of quivering light, lean against the whitewashed wall of the stables, close his eyes and feel it burn, occasionally in steaming summer rain along with the other young boy, the girl’s best friend, the handsome Lars, who has long since moved in with his lovely limbs and lazy movements, the dangling arms and the feet he places on the ground as if an invisible hand is lifting it up under him, walk a few more meters in the wet grass toward the woodshed, where they don’t have to chop and split what has to be chopped and split, but just each carry an armful of logs indoors for the woodburner or stove, the location of which he no longer knows and thus will never again know, and another day when he suddenly and simultaneously alone and with the girl has strayed to the other side of the barn . . . but there’s nothing, what could there be out there? a field is a field is a field, the spell breaks and the old world begins, but the old world must not begin, we remain in “the endless summer” which, like Paradise, is the place that has never been and can never be revisited, only in the tale, and each day is the first, the last, and always the same: the mother comes down from the second floor leaving the bedroom door open behind her, the little brothers are playing in passionate disagreement out in the yard, the big one, who as in all archetypical pairs of brothers is the gentle one, slightly timid, weeps, the little one, who looks like his missing father, is silent and sulky, has shorter limbs and a firm and righteous gaze (like a teacher of the old school or the boy who became an adult at too early an age), within the chilly shadow in the iron bed lie the girl and the slender boy, who is more likely a girl, both talking at the same time just to hear their own voices, their life is the life everlasting, and they waste it away recklessly and on nothing at all, while the mother, whose aimlessness has a completely different kind of firmness and form, like the perfect wheel turning its light out of empty space, picks out the stallion’s hooves, grooms it, saddles up and puts on the bridle, mounts, and rides out for the whole day and brings it back in the twilight and feeds it, waters it, and hears it snort in the darkness when she closes the stable door behind her and walks into the kitchen and lights the candle that will burn down while they eat and stay at the table talking into the night, there is music, but no memory of radio or television, no news broadcast, every day is the same day and just as startling, and its time is that of music, whose premise and element is the time it suspends, world history is their movement and the totality they see without looking for anything, nothing will happen, life will be sheer expectancy, an expectancy with no object, expectancy of nothing, the delight of expectancy per se, every movement is an event, late in the evening, when the mother’s rusty-green van with commercial license plates drives up the avenue, the two little brothers, the girl, and the two young boys, handsome Lars and the oh so fine and slender boy, have to draw themselves up from the forbidden trunk space at the back of the van after the long drive along highways and byways across the flat land, and will forever see the cones of light striking the whitewashed gable of the stables and the wire mesh in front of it and above the coughing of the engine will hear the twelve almost newly-hatched chickens, all roosters, crowing powerfully and yet drowsily, as if they were the heralds assigned to announce Peter’s denial but had overslept and woken up abruptly in a tutti to Judgment Day. And where have they been? Places that, just like them, are beyond time, to dinner, perhaps, with the occult “hair artist” at work on the second floor of his father’s old general store out by the coast, in the little town with the set of traffic lights, a full-bearded, fattish manikin who is perhaps, when observed from the other world, in his early thirties, but in this world seems to have been taken from a late self-portrait by Rijn van Rembrandt, his low-ceilinged second-floor dwelling is bathed in that everlasting brownish simmering darkness into which the last drop of light (from a taper we can’t see), with its implication of the last of humankind, is sucked. No daytime here, and the darkness is room after room after room heaving with shelves of books, dust, and occult objects, and, furthest in at the far end, a kitchen—also just dimly lit-up by tapers—recalling the manic Strindberg’s alchemical laboratory in Paris with its simmering and bubbling and reeking flasks, or rather colossal pots and ovens and frying pans over which the bearded manikin is bending, assisted by the handsome youth, who moves in with him every so often as a kind of sorcerer’s apprentice, the subsequent dinners are orgies of heavy wines and dripping juicy joints of beef, browned ducks, pigeons, snails, frogs, and stuffed pheasants, the gnawed bones and carcasses of which are not piled on the plates and carried out to the kitchen, but simply thrown over the shoulder through the always-open window and down through the night to yard and street. The orgies and the alchemical laboratory (experiments in melting down dead animals to a higher matter) are financed by an advance on the inheritance from his father’s general store and royalties from the lyrics he at times, and happily during dinner with a half-gnawed pigeon carcass in the one hand and a grease-dripping ballpoint pen in the other, writes for washed-up or from the outset failed Danish pop singers who perform them in competition with one another (a final dying echo of the conception of European culture at the Athenian competitions for best tragedy in the theater of Ancient Greece) at the annual national heats of the Eurovision Song Contest. And at the furthest reaches of night, when the heavy wines have had their effect, he inveigles them to have large and the longest possible tufts of their hair cut off, which he will then braid together, the slender young boy’s with the girl’s and later also the mother’s with the Portuguese artist’s, in lovely, magical necklaces and bracelets and earrings, which they will each wear as talismans in a sealing of the love that is also a curse (like the war that gives life to history, but is deadly to people). One morning the girl makes another last attempt to catch the bus that will take her into the slightly large
r town in time to see her friends go home from upper secondary school, but of course fails; her best friend, the ideal of a Nordic-handsome youth Lars, can’t even be bothered to try, he stays in the kitchen with his milky coffee or rises in a pleasurable motion for the sake of appearances and sits outside on the red-hot doorstep and closes his eyes against the sun, and if the mother, who is otherwise now free and can live her life unseen by detectives and men who fear (and therefore despise) women, still occasionally drives all the way over to the provincial capital on the mainland in order to take some courses or sit an exam at the university there, well, that’s beyond the grasp of the story. “The endless summer” has started, but the moment at which there is no going back, the point of no return, has yet to occur. But here comes the prelude:
One day the girl must have managed to get to her school anyway, because in the late afternoon she comes back and sits in the kitchen with the others and tells them that the girl she sits next to has been visited by her Portuguese pen pal José and his friend, also called José, who have taken leave of absence from their schools and have hitchhiked all the way up through Europe to see the light over Skagen and stay a few nights with the friend and her parents in their small detached house; but now that they have finally arrived, and the girl’s parents have seen that they are not just innocent postcards but two real, very young men, and not of the reliably lighter type, but the darker and more unreliable sort they have possibly seen while on a vacation package to Majorca or, why not, the Canary Islands, they won’t have them in their house after all, and certainly not at night, and the mother, who just then comes in from the stables, stops in the doorway and loosens her muddy-green hairband and tosses her head, ivory-colored hair sweeping through the light and down over her shoulders, and says that the girl should telephone her friend and say that the two young men or boys can come out here, before midnight, and sleep on the floor in the sitting room, for a night or three, whereupon she turns and walks up the stairs to take a bath. And shortly after midnight, the two Portuguese arrive with their rucksacks, the one, the pen pal, actually not so dark at all, far from it, tall and strong and with golden curls, Peixe, he is called, “The Fish,” but where he comes from they call him “o Vikingo,” the other one is smaller but equally masculine, dark and mysterious, a little shy like a wild cat, the same soundless movements, an abrupt laughter cracking his face in a flash of light that has disappeared before you have seen who he is. They unroll their sleeping bags on the floor in the sitting room, and the mother comes in and says hello, polite and aloof, bids them welcome and vanishes up into her bedroom. And they spend the following nights and days at the farm, fit into its rhythm, don’t get anywhere, don’t see any of the things they had planned to see, just sleep, wake and laze around in the sunlit yard, sit in the kitchen until late at night and dip chunks of bread into the milky coffee, the red wine, laugh at the same nothing as the girl and the two young boys, while the mother, aloof as a queen, lives her life on the periphery of the circle and just occasionally, once the horse has been watered, twilight brought back in, and the little brothers put to bed, sits in the candlelight glow around the table listening to their voices, she is thirty-four, her daughter has just turned seventeen, and the boys at the table are eighteen, nineteen, and twenty. On the morning of the third or fourth day, the two Portuguese roll up their sleeping bags and carry their rucksacks out to the van, and while the five older children exchange hugs and addresses and promise one another all the things young people always promise one another and hardly ever carry through—to write, meet, never forget—the mother starts the van and then drives the two Portuguese to the main road and drops them off so they can hitch across the country and maybe by late evening arrive in time to see the light hanging on into the night over Skagen. She turns the van around and drives back to the farm, and “the endless summer” carries on as if nothing had happened and nothing ever will. At dusk one evening, they all climb into the rusty-green van and, now a couple of hours late—the kind of lateness caused neither by busyness nor disaster, but by nothing and absence of time—drive to another occult dinner with the so-called hair artist in the little town. On the way, they pass the spot where, on a morning that already seems to belong to a completely different life in another world, but happened to be the morning of that same day, the mother had dropped off the two Portuguese, and they’re still standing there. The mother brakes, and reverses the hundred meters to the two young men, who at first just stare vacantly, as if the motorist must have braked because of a puncture and it can’t possibly have anything to do with them, and then finally recognize the van. The girl rolls the window down and they say they’ve been standing there ever since, for nearly twelve hours, and in the course of the day a representative section of the nation’s population and their cars has driven past, but not one has stopped and picked them up. The girl looks at her mother and the mother leans across the elder of the little brothers and opens the door, asks the little brother to climb into the back and tells the two Portuguese to get in. Then she turns the car around and drives back to the farm. And while the two exhausted Portuguese boys sit in the kitchen eating the supper leftovers, bread and the last slices of cheese, she telephones the so-called hair artist and tells him they won’t be making it, something has come up, and they’ll have to come maybe some other day or night. She then walks back into the kitchen and looks at them. She is no longer aloof, she is angry, like a queen disgraced by her people. She says they should unpack their things again, the sitting room and the entire farm is theirs, they can stay as long as they like, a month, the rest of their lives, if need be. And so the die is cast. And perhaps it’s just that the four of them—the slender boy and the handsome youth, the Portuguese “Vikingo” and, not least, the girl—are too young to understand her words as anything other than an expression of hospitality, maybe both she and the younger of the two Portuguese boys, the small, dark, reticently intense one, without yet having so much as looked one another in the eye, hardly exchanged a word, know what has happened and that there is no going back. A moment, seven, twenty years later, he has married again, to a slightly younger compatriot, a dark and melancholy girl who throws herself from their balcony with its view across the old Alfama and the Atlantic Ocean; the mother has withdrawn into solitude in a little townhouse near the coast in northern Sealand, together with the male who has accompanied her as a lover throughout the preceding six lives with six utterly different males, of whom several are long since dead—of bitterness, kidney failure, obesity, self-hatred—the stallion; the ideal of a Nordic-fair youth Lars with the shapely hands and feet has turned to dust, moisture and calcium under a gravestone in a wind-swept, slightly sloping cemetery on the outskirts of a provincial town after a funeral at which the other seven are present but silent, unable to say a word, while a cousin of the same age, making a speech, the final nod, calls the early death the punishment of a righteous god. And the girl? the slender young boy? the two little brothers? o Vikingo? We’ll come back to them.
The Endless Summer Page 5
