Karin is a strong person, but she became uneasy, sitting in the bar alone. She rang Lars, but his phone was switched off. So she stood up and left the bar, which was not easy to achieve, as the crowd had become thicker and more lively. She felt hands holding her back, although, she says, she may only have imagined this. She was trying not to allow herself to be afraid.
Out in the street, she turned to the left, having a feeling Lars had turned to the left, and set out to look for him, walking close to the buildings and looking into the bars and food stalls and at the people sitting out on the sidewalk.
Three men coming the other way jostled against her, then paused and spoke to her, and she found she could not interpret their mood—were they mocking or teasing, were they menacing or, as their words suggested, merely being polite, trying to apologize? She looked squarely at them and, without speaking or smiling, went to step round them, but they shifted and her way was blocked. Above the smells of fried food and the smoke of a hundred joints, she smelled sweat, old leather, and the tang of motor oil from the jacket of the man nearest to her.
People were passing by, one or two glancing in their direction, conscious of some uncertainty in the behavior of those forming the group she was unwillingly part of: something that might or might not develop. As Karin moved again, still trying to deny the knowledge that these strangers were, in truth, preventing her from going forward, one of the passersby stopped and spoke her name. He was a man she had met just a few times, at parties, or as one of a group having a drink or a meal. All she knew about him was his nationality, Australian, and his occupation, journalist. She could not remember his name. But she greeted him as if he were an old friend, the very friend she had been walking down this street to meet, and the next moment, the men around her had gone, were already weaving away and turning the corner, careless and cheerful.
The Australian, whose name, he reminded her, was Ben, asked if she was alone, and when she said yes, he waved on the party he was with and stayed with her. He had not seen Lars, but he had seen a flyer advertising an appearance by the band Lars had said he was going to find, and he remembered the venue. They were now in the area where stalls openly sell hash, and there were young people and not-so-young people swaying on their feet or lying down on the road. Ben put an arm round Karin’s shoulder and steered her through the crowd. He was quite a big man, and sober, and he had no difficulty finding a way through. Now that she was no longer alone, Karin also felt more sure of herself—more herself, you might say—and strode forward with her usual sense of entitlement and fearlessness in a public place.
When they reached the venue, an old brick warehouse, it was obvious the concert had finished. The doors were wide open and the lights inside had been turned up full. On the stage, the band’s amplifiers and instruments were being unplugged and packed up. Karin recognized one of the band members and called out to him. He raised his head and stopped, perfectly still. He looked wary. He spoke to the other people working on the stage, quickly, in a low voice, and they all came to a standstill, turned toward her, cables, speakers, guitars, microphones in their hands. In the silence, Karin caught the sound of laughter from a doorway beside the stage, and she sprinted toward it and into a cubicle where the performers changed their clothes. Lars was there. He was stretched out, half undressed, on an old sofa beside the lead vocalist, a girl with almost no clothes on, nibbling Lars’s ear.
Lars lifted his head to look at Karin, then let it fall back on the cushions. He took a pull at the joint he held in the hand that was not holding the lead vocalist’s body tight to his, and offered it to her. The infidelity did not surprise Karin; it was not even serious. His attraction to the lead vocalist was unlikely to be more than physical; Karin doubted he would remember the woman’s name in a month’s time. The boundary Lars had crossed was leaving Karin alone and vulnerable—because however much she tried to be strong, she had felt vulnerable. She had believed that he was prepared to stray only if it was not at her cost.
She walked out into the hall, where clearing up had begun again. The band and their helpers were tossing lines of song back and forth as they worked. She walked quickly to the open doors and out into the chill dark night. When she was in the shadows, clear of the light falling from the concert hall windows, she sat down on a block of concrete decorated in a pink and blue and orange pattern with slogans declaring defiance to authority. She sat down on it and put her head in her hands, angry, disgusted, and ashamed, with Lars, with herself. When she looked up, Ben was leaning on a railing beside her.
“I thought you might need company on the way home,” he said.
All this is not really the point of the story Karin told me. It is, I suppose, an ordinary enough story. It is an explanation, though, of what happened next; justification, perhaps. You may judge for yourself. She told me all this, in this much detail, so I could judge for myself about what happened next.
She went home with Ben. Not to her home, which she shared with Lars, but to the apartment Ben was renting in Christianshavn, the suburb of which Christiania is a part. She stayed there for five days and five nights. She abandoned herself, was the way she described it to me. A release from the tension, a way of dismissing the anger and hurt. It is not the way she would normally behave. She is a cool girl. I think the word “cool” has another meaning than the one I mean it to stand for here. I mean she is not easily made hot. When she gives way to passion, it is as a result of having understood the consequences. A considered decision to let go.
She went out and bought clothes and walked to work and ignored phone calls from Lars and walked back to Ben’s apartment. On the seventh day, Ben flew back to Australia. Karin did not go to see him off at the airport. She kissed him good-bye like she would kiss a friend who has been good to her but who is not going to be important to her in the future. That is how she described her feelings, on the steps of the apartment block, as he climbed into a taxi.
Then she went home to the apartment she lives in, and which she owns, and told Lars to leave. I have spoken to her many times on the phone since then, and she has always sounded happy. I have not had reasons to be fearful about her. Sitting in my shed, in the dark, she still sounded happy as she told me she is pregnant. She did not mean to conceive, however, and it was a shock to her. There is no possibility this is Lars’s child. She has known for three months now, but the news was, of course, new to me, and my first thought was a joyous one. A baby. There is nothing more joyous than that. But no sooner had I felt this happiness than I was overcome with despair. What would happen now to my lovely Karin? Would she pack herself up and go to Australia to join the baby’s father, a man I had never met and might dislike or distrust? Or would she be left alone to raise the child, with no one to share the responsibility with? Was there, I wondered, a way for her to do the job she does in Copenhagen here in Silkeborg, so I could be the person who carried the burden with her? Would she come to me, or should I retire early and go to her, to Copenhagen? The first thing I said, through the turmoil of these thoughts, was: “Have you decided not to have an abortion?”
This was a cruel thing to say, implying I thought this was the best solution when, if she had said she was still considering the option, I would have been as upset for the child I would never meet as if he or she were already sitting in my arms and about to be taken from me. In fact, she said:
“I have decided that I will have the baby.”
She had, of course, thought it all through. Coolly. The baby has been given to her, as she sees it, as it might have been through sperm donation. The week with Ben was like a story she told herself. The baby is the happy ending. She has heard from Ben once since he left, to let her know he had arrived home and to say thank you for a wonderful few days. She did not reply and does not intend to reply. She will not tell him she is pregnant. When she says this, I am truly shocked. Has he not the right to know? I ask. She says: For generations, women had no rights except those granted them by men. Now if a woman claims
the right to deny a man something he believes he is entitled to, why should this be so shocking? Is it not the way it has always been, only with the genders reversed? She is denying him nothing he has asked for or expects. She is asking for and expecting nothing from him. It is, she repeats, like sperm donation.
Early next morning, she left to return to Copenhagen, and I was still not sure of what I felt about the story she had told me. I had said so little. I said, of course, that whatever she decided to do I would help her in any way I was able. She said: “I have decided.” She looked at me with defiance, for just a moment, then she smiled and kissed me. She does not need to be defiant with me. I am not going to challenge her; that is for other people.
But what do you think? Should I argue with her about the rights of the father? All the time she was telling me the story, in the gloomy little shed, I had in my mind the thought of writing to you. I listened better, I think, to be sure of telling you the story without any errors. I hope I have done that. Whether you feel you can tell me your opinion, if you have an opinion, is less important than the comfort it has given me to be able to share all this. I would never have believed it could be so.
Thank you.
Anders
Bury St. Edmunds
July 20
My dear Anders,
I believe I have already told you that I do not often hold strong opinions; I am rarely confident of being in the right. I find it difficult not to see both sides of a story. This is a good thing, I think, and also a bad thing. I am not easily outraged, and outrage is so often a waste of energy. I find it easy to sympathize with those who appear to be the sinners as well as those who appear in the role of victim; I don’t know if this makes me a better person than someone who condemns without hesitation, but it does make me like myself a little better. On the other hand, I have tended to accept what someone else feels strongly is right, because I can so clearly see their point of view and I have not felt strongly enough about the alternative to stand by it. You could say that is why I married Edward. My parents and his parents were eloquent about the impact on them, the baby, Edward, and me if we did not marry each other. This was all so true, and so the fact that it was not what I had wanted to do with my life, that it was a short-term solution, and that it put the immediate well-being of others ahead of my own long-term well-being—all of this seemed flimsy in comparison. I could not express it with any conviction.
My mother thought I was not so much able to see all sides as I was desperate to avoid conflict at all costs, which was entirely a product of my position in the family, as the middle child of three. She was a lovely woman, my mother, but fond of categories. (I know I am diverting away from the point of this letter, which is to respond to the story you told me, but I will do that, I promise.) I was irritated by the simplicity of my mother’s view of the world when I was younger, but now that I know how hard it is to keep upright, cheerful, balanced, and in control, which is expected of us as adults, I can appreciate the mechanisms she used to achieve this. There was no subtlety and no malice in the judgments she made. Every family, according to her, would be “well off” or “struggling.” I asked once which we were, and she was upset, which should have made me feel guilty but did not, at the time. The categories were there to keep a distance between herself and the people she saw as able to cope better than she could; a distance that prevented her from being judged in her turn. I am mentioning this because I don’t know how much of my willingness to see everyone’s point of view at the same time is because that is my nature, or whether by repeating the mantra so often my mother made me believe it, and therefore live up to it, and therefore allow it to become true. Or—here’s an odd thought—she may have been right. I have three children, and the middle one, Andrew, is the most thoughtful, the kindest, I think. But he has no difficulty in asserting his opinion, whereas I do.
I am not, in any event, the best person to ask for an opinion on the decisions your daughter has made. Except that I feel strongly she has a right to make her own decisions. But you will want to be certain she has not been entirely influenced by emotions that might turn out to be misleading her.
I have mentioned our correspondence to no one. It felt like a conversation with no room in it for others, like the best conversations with a close friend. However, you spoke of sharing our discussion on the pheasants with your daughter, and this made me think I should share your daughter’s story with my daughter. I wanted to have a point of view clearly expressed, as I knew Mary, who is a very certain person and a plain speaker, would express it. Then, I thought, I would be able to see the other point of view, the alternative, clearly enough to be able, perhaps, to give you a strong opinion.
Mary and Vassily are living in a converted outbuilding on the other side of the yard. Vassily converted it himself as a holiday rental, before he became part of the family. It is a very plain sort of building, inside and out. Fit for purpose, you might say; the conversion was carried out without spending money on anything a summer visitor would not need or would not miss. I thought, when Mary and Vassily moved in, that they would make it less plain—put down rugs, hang up colorful curtains, paint the walls a color that was not white, buy ornaments and pictures and extra pieces of furniture. Make it, in other words, more like the farmhouse where Edward and I live. We have geological deposits of belongings in every room on every surface; things we inherited from Edward’s parents and grandparents, from mine, things given to us or (the smallest group, this) bought by us. Mary and Vassily, starting with the bedrock, so to speak, had a choice of how thick and diverse a stratum to lay on top—heaven knows, I was ready enough to shovel up some of the accumulation of things in my house for them to have. They have done nothing. Tam’s wife, Sarah, who has made the interior of the bungalow we built for Edward’s parents a nest of her own construction (I’m mixing my metaphors here, I know, but I like them both so will keep them), is very critical.
“It looks as if they don’t intend to stay,” she says. “They aren’t bothering to make it into a home at all.”
Sarah, I will just tell you, is the daughter of another local farmer and she is, for all the energy she puts into matching towels in tapering piles in the bathroom, scented candles in the dining room, valances and tie-backs on the curtains in the living room, committed to the business of farming. She worked as hard on promoting a marriage between her brother and Mary, in the interests of economies of scale from the union of the two farms, as she did in turning the house into a show home. It was certainly not in the interests of either Mary or Sarah’s brother, who had never a thought in common and who each chose for themselves partners as unlike each other as possible.
I don’t share Sarah’s view; Mary and Vassily are plain people, plain speaking, indifferent to material comfort. The house suits them. They suit each other.
Vassily was there when I went to talk to Mary. We sat at their kitchen table drinking tea. I told them that a friend had asked my opinion about whether his daughter, who was unexpectedly pregnant by a man with whom she had spent a passionate few days with no intention, on either side, of a longer relationship, should tell the comparative stranger he is about to become a father. They have a way of listening when I share news with them, or when I comment on something I have seen or heard, which is perfectly polite but which I feel implies they are waiting for me to finish speaking so they can go back to doing or thinking about whatever they were doing or thinking about before I spoke to them. This was not their reaction to Karin’s story. They looked at me, as I was speaking, as though I were saying something of sufficient interest for them to concentrate, investigate, respond. They were not satisfied with the few details I had given them, and I had to tell them the whole tale, as you told it to me.
Once they had all the information they needed, they were definite and articulate in their opinions. This was wonderful for me to listen to; you may remember I was concerned that the secret of their intimacy was that they did not bother to talk to each other ve
ry much, so did not fall out. Now I saw that their togetherness is so much more than this. It is based on a willingness to disagree with each other, and to enjoy doing it.
Mary is entirely on your daughter’s side. Vassily believes as strongly that your daughter is wrong. Mary expressed the views you describe Karin as expressing. The mother has an absolute right, so Mary says, to decide for herself whether she will have the child and also whether she will bring it up, or entrust its bringing up to someone else, or share the responsibility for bringing it up with someone else. Mary would not respect, she says, any woman who made these decisions without considering the impact on the child and anyone else who might have an interest in the child. She would have to know she could support it, care for it, avoid emotional damage to herself and others. She would have to know someone else had not had their life blighted because of the decision she had made. In this case, Mary says, Karin sounds like a woman perfectly capable of giving the child everything it might need—she sounds, she says, like a woman she would like to know—and the father cannot miss the child, as he does not know of it and did not long for it. Mary would defend to the hilt the decision Karin has made.
Meet Me at the Museum Page 7
