A Fairy Tale

by Jonas Bengtsson

  Elsebeth takes out a bottle of cognac.

  “You should never save these things,” she says.

  The bottle is older than I am.

  Elsebeth always concludes by talking about life before the two world wars. About being a little girl in a big apartment filled with people. When they played hide-and-seek, the game could last hours. When our glasses are empty, I ask if it’s all right if I leave.

  She laughs, tells me I’m young and that I quite naturally have better things to do with my time.

  I return to my bed and put on my headphones. More news, more snippets.

  In Stuttgart a man has built a car out of bottle caps. He’s still trying to get permission to fit it with an engine.

  I keep an eye on the clock. When it’s past midnight, I put on my coat and walk down the stairs. I can hear Elsebeth’s snoring through the door. I don’t think she’d be able to shout as loudly as she snores, even if she tried.

  I walk on wet cobblestones, skirting around puddles.

  I pick my bar depending on the weather. I choose from among four or five. If the bartender’s smile is a little too familiar, I give it a couple of weeks before I return. Today the weather is drizzling and I go inside Påfuglen.

  I watch the other guests in the bar. I watch them drink, I watch them talk, I watch the way they hold their glasses and smoke their cigarettes; I draw them in my mind.

  I’m not the only person drinking alone. I draw the lonely people, those who sit at the bar or in a corner with a beer and a newspaper in front of them, pretending they’re enjoying their own company. They stay put until they’ve picked someone in the room they want to mix with. Then they move closer, find a chair at the neighbouring table. They take their newspaper with them, but leave it unopened.

  I draw them in my mind as they slowly turn their chairs. One centimetre at a time. They wait for the right word. The one that lets them join in on the conversation.

  I never seek out company and still it finds me quite often.

  I’m on my second beer when she sits down on the bar stool next to me.

  She’s blonde and very tanned. She looks like she’s in her late twenties but is probably older.

  She places a cigarette between her lips. Finds a lighter in her bag and puts it down on the bar. She looks at it as if she has forgotten how to use it.

  Then she turns to me and asks me to please help. Says she always scratches her thumbnail on it and that she has just had her nails done. She holds up her hands so that I can see them. The nails are long and bright red and quite clearly not her own. She bites hers, she says, and laughs.

  She offers to buy me another beer, pulls a banknote from a wad.

  Tells me she’s a model.

  She buys drinks with umbrellas for us and tells me she makes porn movies.

  When she gets home at night, she has seen so many dicks that she dreams about elephants trumpeting all night.

  “Oi, Turk, I’m going for a slash. Leave my sweets alone, do you hear?” Kasper laughs. “You Turks are worse than the bloody gypsies.”

  A couple of times a week Kasper leaves his place at the booth, but he never walks towards the washrooms. If the supervisor comes by, I tell him Kasper has a stomach bug and the supervisor says that it’s probably the lousy coffee they serve here. We both laugh and the supervisor walks on.

  Kasper comes back ten minutes later, a little flustered. We carry on working, back to back.

  We’re halfway through the shift when the conveyor belt grinds to a halt.

  “Not again,” I hear.

  “For God’s sake.”

  “Overtime, there’s definitely going to be overtime,” says someone a couple of pigeonholes further away.

  People start emerging from their booths.

  “False alarm,” someone calls out from the far end of the hall.

  The conveyor belts start moving again, people breathe a sigh of relief, no need to wait for an engineer.

  Kasper and I swap cassette tapes before we continue sorting letters.

  When there’s only one hour of the shift left to go, I feel Kasper’s hand on my arm. I take off my headphones.

  “Oi, Turk,” he says. “Would you do me a favour?”

  I nod.

  Kasper glances around before pulling out a buff A4 envelope from under his sweater.

  “Take this with you when you leave.”

  I tuck the envelope under my sweater.

  “Don’t you want to know why?”

  I shake my head.

  We line up in front of the exit. The guard sits behind his glass window as usual; he has yet to press the button that lets us out.

  “What the hell are we waiting for?” says someone at the back of the line.

  “Wake up, man.”

  Then we see two guards in dark blue sweaters with radios on their belts. They walk along the long line of postal workers.

  “What the hell’s going on now?”

  They stop in front of Kasper, tell him it’s just a spot check, and ask him to please follow them.

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have the Turk?” Kasper nods in my direction, but they don’t smile.

  Kasper goes with them; shortly afterwards, the lock buzzes.

  I walk down the street; I try not to walk too quickly.

  Kasper’s letter is starting to fill up my whole sweater; the corners of the envelope are pointy and making their way through the stitches in the fabric.

  I go inside Bjørnen. The bar’s real name is Bjørn’s Bodega, but I’ve never heard anyone call it anything other than Bjørnen. Postal workers get a discount at Bjørnen. A schnapps and a beer will take away the dryness in my throat, the smell of paper glue, and help me sleep in a couple of hours.

  It’s the end of the month and the bar is almost empty. One of the regulars is sitting in a corner, leaning over half a bread roll and a shot of Gammel Dansk bitters. He used to be a postal worker.

  I buy a beer and flick through a tabloid newspaper. Roy Orbison is turned down to a low crackling on the speakers. Beer number two is lined up in front of me when Kasper walks through the door.

  “You should’ve seen their faces,” he says. “You wouldn’t believe how disappointed they were.” Kasper laughs and orders beer and schnapps for us. “You should’ve seen their faces.” He raises the shot glass to his lips; his hand is shaking.

  I take out the letter from under my sweater.

  “Open it,” he says.

  There’s no sender on the manila envelope. Inside it are four photocopied sheets. The paper is mottled, as though it has been water damaged; the text is smudged. I read the first couple of lines.

  “Richard the Third,” I say.

  “I didn’t know you Turks could read.”

  He takes a sip of his beer, lights a cigarette.

  “You probably shouldn’t touch those sheets for too long,” he says. “They’ve been dipped in LSD.”

  Kasper puts them back in the envelope.

  “You have them sent here from Amsterdam,” I say. “No sender, and to an address that doesn’t exist. And so they go back to the post office. To the box for dead letters.”

  “You’ve already worked that out,” he says. “Yes, the dead letter box, where I pick them up. Only this time something appears to have gone wrong.”

  Kasper orders more drinks. While the bartender pours them, Kasper puts money in the jukebox.

  “Stop by my place tomorrow,” he says, and drains his shot glass. “I have something for you.”

  He writes down his address on a coaster.

  When I wake up, I can still feel the schnapps at the back of my head.

  I drink a glass of water and eat an apple. Then I do Elsebeth’s shopping.

  Petra is standing in the kiosk. When she sees me she
turns around and takes a packet of the brand of cigarettes I always buy. She asks if there’s anything else.

  I stand there a little too long. Then I shake my head and put the money on the counter.

  I’m holding the coaster with Kasper’s address in my hand. It’s early afternoon. He’s waiting for me in front of a red-brick building. I follow him around the block and into the courtyard.

  “I’ve seen you doodling at work,” he says. We walk down the steps to the basement, he finds some keys. “Every time we’re on a break or when you’re waiting for the next crate, you get your pen out.”

  The basement passage is damp and dark. We walk past peeling wooden doors with numbers daubed on in white paint and end up in front of a door with a big padlock. Again Kasper fumbles with some keys.

  “This isn’t really my own storage space. Mine’s a lot smaller, but I have an arrangement with the caretaker.”

  When he opens the door, all I can see are cardboard boxes piled from floor to ceiling. There are so many of them that I can’t get a sense of the size of the room.

  “If you get lost, hoot like an owl and I’ll try to find you.”

  I follow him through a narrow path with walls of brown cardboard on both sides.

  “One of my friends used to work in the parcel section. What he didn’t sort, he nicked.”

  At the centre of the room Kasper has cleared some space and furnished the place with a worn Afghan rug and an old brown leather armchair.

  He picks up a ceramic ashtray from the floor, tips joint butts into a black garbage bag, then switches on an electric heater and a couple of wonky-looking standard lamps.

  “I don’t live here,” he says, a little too quickly. “I just prefer it to my apartment.”

  He removes a box from the cardboard wall and disappears through the gap.

  “It became a bit of an obsession for my friend.” Kasper’s voice is laboured, as though he’s crawling through several more gaps. “He just had to nick parcels. He no longer cared about opening them. At first he filled up his own apartment. Then he asked if he could put a few of them in the basement. I’m afraid I said yes and then they caught him.”

  The first thing to emerge from the hole is a long, rectangular parcel. It’s followed by several smaller ones. Finally Kasper himself appears. He has cobwebs in his hair and he’s licking a fresh scratch on his hand.

  “Come on, open it.”

  I tear off the paper and find a box of small tubes and five brushes wrapped in cellophane.

  “It’s supposed to be the best paint you can get. Top quality.”

  I tickle my palm with one of the brushes; I can feel the fine animal hairs against my skin.

  “I don’t paint,” I say.

  “Of course you do.”

  Kasper rips the paper off the big parcel and an easel appears. He puts it up on the floor. The next parcel he opens contains rolled-up canvases. He attaches one to a wooden board with a nail gun and places it on the easel.

  Then he disappears back through the gap. When he reappears, he has a piece of chipboard in his hand.

  “Your palette,” he says, and makes himself comfortable in the armchair. “Start painting.”

  He reaches down one side of the armchair and produces a large plastic bag of pot. I’m still standing with the brush in my hand while he rolls a joint.

  “If you can’t think of anything, you can always paint a mournful landscape from the Andalusian plain of your homeland.”

  “Anatolian.”

  “That’s right, the one down in Turkey, with the goats and feta cheese.”

  “What do you have against Turks?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No?”

  “I just don’t believe that you’re Turkish. Now get painting.”

  I open the first tube, breaking the small metal seal with the end of the brush. Vermillion red from China. Red like the inside of your mouth and highly toxic.

  I squeeze out a little blob on the board, then I open the next tube.

  Ebony black, made from bird and animal bones. So black that each line looks like a hole in the canvas. Then a little ultramarine, a smudge of Nepal yellow.

  Kasper passes me the joint, I hesitate, I haven’t smoked for years. Then I fill my lungs, I exhale the smoke slowly. I get red paint on the thin paper. I take another drag.

  Petra brushes the hair away from her face with her very white hands.

  “Anything else?”

  My packet of cigarettes lies on the counter. A small line is starting to form behind me.

  “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?” I ask, and at first I’m not sure if I’ve said it out loud.

  She looks at me. The line behind me is growing.

  She says yes as though I’ve asked if they sell football pools coupons.

  I wait outside the supermarket. When she comes out, she has changed from the supermarket’s golf shirt to a black turtleneck sweater. She hides her hands in her sleeves so only the tips of her fingers stick out.

  We walk beside each other.

  I’ve been to every bar in the neighbourhood, but none of the cafés.

  I pick one at random and we enter. People speak in loud voices, they laugh and eat sandwiches and flick through newspapers. The espresso machine makes as much noise as a small spaceship about to take off.

  Petra looks out at the street. I take the menu from the table; it says they have caffè latte, macchiato, mocha.

  Lemon coffee from Bali. Indian hemp coffee.

  I ask Petra what she’d like. At first I don’t think she’s heard me.

  “Coffee,” she finally replies, without taking her eyes off the cars outside the window.

  Petra sips her coffee delicately, taking care not to spill. She leaves no brown coffee stains on the cup.

  Beside her cup lies a small hard biscuit which she nibbles.

  “Have you worked at the supermarket for long?” I ask, even though I already know the answer; I remember the week she started. In the winter she always looks cold, in the summer she never tans.

  Petra nods and removes biscuit crumbs from the saucer with her index finger.

  “Do you like it there?”

  Again she looks out at the cars.

  “It’s a job,” she shrugs.

  I push my biscuit across the table to her.

  “Thank you,” she says. “It’s nice to sit here.”

  When she speaks she sounds as if she has learned the words phonetically and doesn’t quite understand what they mean.

  We walk across the bridge from the city centre to Christianshavn; we walk along the canal. She takes out her keys.

  “I like my apartment,” she says, letting us in.

  The kitchen floor is covered with chequered linoleum. A cat is sitting on one of the white squares. It follows us with its eyes without otherwise moving.

  “Its name is Kot,” she says. “It means ‘cat’ in Polish.”

  The cat is skinny; its fur is grey with a bald spot at the back of its head.

  “It’s a very sad cat, I don’t know why.”

  She opens a tin of cat food, tips the contents into a bowl. The cat sniffs the food and takes a single bite before losing interest.

  “I give it the most expensive cat food money can buy. But its fur won’t shine. And it refuses to smile.”

  “Do cats smile?”

  “You know when they don’t smile.”

  We smoke cigarettes in the kitchen while the cat looks at us. We stub them out in the sink and I follow her into the bedroom.

  She undresses as if she were at the doctor’s; her movements are stiff and practical. She folds her clothes and puts them on a chair.

  Her body is almost as white as her hands, with visible blue veins right under her skin.

  I can fe
el her heels on my back. Her skin flares up and she gets red blotches on her chest and inner thighs like an allergic reaction.

  Her cat watches us from the doorway. She’s right, it doesn’t smile.

  “Podobasz mi się,” Petra says, when we’re both lying on our backs in the bed. The words and her accent sound Slavic.

  “My dad’s Polish,” she says, in answer to the question I haven’t asked. She lights two cigarettes and hands me one of them.

  “When I was a child I only spoke Polish.” She tries to make a smoke ring, but fails.

  “Last year I met some Polish students. They asked me to show them Copenhagen. Every time I opened my mouth, they laughed and said I spoke like someone in an old movie.” She scratches one breast, the nipple is small and pink. “I miss someone I can speak Polish with.”

  “I can learn Polish,” I say, but I only succeed in making her smile.

  “Podobasz mi się,” she repeats. “I like you.”

  I tie my shoelaces. She asks for my telephone number.

  I tell her that I live with an old lady. It sounds like a lie.

  “I won’t see you again, will I?” she says, when I’m standing in the doorway.

  “I’ll always need cigarettes.”

  She smiles as if her question was merely a joke.

  The cat sits on the same square in the kitchen; it follows me with its eyes as I leave.

  Now when I shop for Elsebeth, I have to walk for another ten minutes, past the supermarket where Petra works. I walk on the opposite side of the street to the next supermarket, where the choice is worse and the prices higher. When I’ve done the shopping, I put an extra ten kroner in the pocket where I keep Elsebeth’s change.

  Kasper is waiting for me in the street. I follow him down to the basement. There’s a fresh white canvas on the easel. When I was here a couple of days ago, the black paint was nearly used up; the tube was the size of a thumbnail. Now a new tube is ready and waiting for me. Kasper doesn’t look up from his bag of pot when I ask about it. He just shakes his head. We’re not going to talk about it. It’s not important.