Havoc
Page 4
“Amen!” intoned Steffensen, who, in a preemptory manner, had taken the bottle and filled the glasses—all three of them. Then he lifted his glass to his lips and emptied it in one gulp, without tasting or enjoying the wine.
Jastrau looked at him in astonishment for a second, then carefully raised his own glass to his lips.
“Skål!” he said, and managed to smile as Steffensen unceremoniously took the glass intended for Sanders and quickly emptied it too. There was something hard, almost brutish, about that face, Jastrau thought as he took another sip. He let the wine fill his mouth, then slowly glide over his tongue and down his throat so that it would leave a pleasant aftertaste. But he felt disappointed because neither of the others were drinking with him.
“But this other Communist here—Comrade Steffensen—he drinks. What about that?” With an ironic but dignified gesture Jastrau extended the hand that held the glass in Steffensen’s direction. At that moment he was master of the house, the proper host.
“Him?” said Sanders, laughing scornfully. “He’s no Communist. He’s a freebooter.”
Just then a key was inserted in the lock of the front door.
It was Johanne returning home.
*The familiar form of the pronoun “you,” which at the time Kristensen was writing Havoc was used only when addressing a member of the family, a child, or an intimate friend.
2
“MOTHER!” Oluf shouted, running toward the door.
Sanders had already gotten up. Standing with his hand against the back of his chair he made a rather fantastic and gaudy picture. The yellowish Russian blouse and the shiny belt accentuated his slim athletic figure. He was the prototype of the Russian Communist.
Steffensen, on the other hand, remained seated while he stared self-consciously at one of the empty glasses.
Then Fru Johanne appeared in the doorway, looking surprised but with an air of authority about her. She was tall and buxom, and wore a pair of high-topped boots with a becoming casualness. A suede jacket and a shoulder bag with cowboy fringe conformed to the lines of her figure, which had not yet become dumpy.
“I see you have guests,” she remarked unenthusiastically as her blue eyes flashed momentarily. But then her critical glance grew milder, as became the situation, and a smile formed about her sensual lips, giving a bright aura to her face, an aura heightened by the radiance of her blond hair. A big golden blond.
“It’s always nice to have people drop in,” she added, laying a package down on a chair and letting a sigh of exhaustion escape her. “But now I’d better hurry and take off my things,” she went on, pulling off her long leather gloves as she closed her eyes and took a deep breath as if to dispel the impression of overburdened activity she had created. Jastrau could see by the look in Sanders’s eyes that she had brought a ray of light into the room.
“I see, Ole, that you’ve managed to take care of your guests. Has Oluf been quiet? And what about the stove? There are so many things a housewife has to think of.”
Her last remark was addressed to Sanders, who gallantly had come forward to help her off with her jacket. Steffensen had also risen, but with difficulty. He seemed wobbly on his feet, and as soon as she noticed him Johanne’s expression froze. The benign golden aura vanished, and her features grew hard.
“Yes, I remembered to look after the stove,” Jastrau replied with an air of preoccupation. But now something else was wrong. What was it? Oh yes—he must introduce them. He emptied his glass and pulled himself together.
“This is my wife, and these are—my friends, Bernhard Sanders and Steffensen. From the old days. They’ve just come from the lunchroom at the university.”
“Bernhard Sanders,” Sanders repeated, bowing.
Fru Johanne extended her hand to him in a stately manner, and Jastrau noted with a twinge of pain how naturally the dignity came to her.
Toward Steffensen, who mumbled something unintelligible, she was more reserved.
“My husband’s friends are always welcome in our house. But what a lot of friends he has! It seems that new ones are always turning up.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Jastrau said as if his mind were on something else. He was wondering how he should acquaint her with the situation.
Then the telephone rang.
“Has it been ringing often?” asked Johanne. She had seated herself and was using her feet to extricate herself from the high-topped boots. When her strong, shapely legs came to view in their flesh-colored stockings they seemed suddenly naked.
“It’s been plain hell,” said Jastrau. Then he answered the telephone: “Yes—it’s me. No—no, it isn’t set up yet. Yes—I suppose I could. Oh yes, there’s more than enough up in the composing room—both ten-point and eight-point. Yes, and enough for the cuts, too. There’s plenty of material, but it’s that review of Stefani’s book. I’d like to have seen it go on the book page, but—Couldn’t we run it in the main section? Stefani is constantly pestering me about it. Yes—he keeps running up to the office every single day—either that or he’s on the telephone. Ha! Impossible! Yes, damn it, he looks out for himself. He’d prefer to write the review himself. Well, if that’s the case, all right. Yes—all right, all right!”
“Do you have to go over to the paper tonight?” Johanne asked with a touch of anxiety in her voice.
“Yes, I damn well have to,” Jastrau replied.
And just then as he glanced over at Sanders he caught the last trace of a malicious smile before it disappeared. What was going on here? And behind his back, too. Whatever it was, he detected only its shadow before it slipped out of sight. And Steffensen? Steffensen had a faraway look, as if he had been eavesdropping. But what had he been listening to? The telephone conversation?
“Yes, unfortunately I’m being browbeaten into it,” he repeated pensively. Here was a way out. The copy editor had not been insistent. And he shouldn’t leave his wife here alone with two men, both perfect strangers. Oh, for a little peace! Just to get away—down into the street where he could calm down. People didn’t bother to listen to someone else talking over the telephone. Or did they?
“I can’t understand all the running around you do,” Johanne exclaimed in irritation. “It’s getting so I never know when you’ll be home. After all, you’re not a newspaper reporter.”
“No, unfortunately,” Jastrau sighed.
“That’s the way it is, frue,” Sanders said consolingly. “Being a journalist and a homebody at the same time is too much to expect—practically an impossibility.” His words came so adroitly.
“Listen, Johanne, there must be enough food in the house so that all five of us can have something,” Jastrau remarked casually. He had to get around to the delicate subject of their staying, and he thought it best to approach it obliquely.
Sanders was watching him closely, and there was an annoying hint of mockery in his black gypsy-eyes.
“Yes, if your friends will take potluck. I thought we’d have some macaroni and a couple of steaks. I could run down and get another one, and fix them up with a tomato sauce. What do you say to that, Herr—Herr Sanders?” Suddenly she stopped, as if startled by the name, and her expression became more serious, her face paler. For a moment she was unable to speak. Then the words came again, strangely impersonal words, and her pale blue eyes stared into space as she recited what sounded like a nursery rhyme: “Yes—we have beer, we have coffee, we have sugar and cream. We’ll manage, but it won’t be anything fancy.”
“Nothing fancy, frue?” remarked Sanders in a singsong voice. He sounded half shocked, half jubilant. “As if such a meal wouldn’t be outright gluttony. After all, food isn’t so very important.”
“Hell no,” muttered Steffensen. “Hunger isn’t so bad—that is if it doesn’t last too long.”
“You may be sure that poor folks wouldn’t agree with you there,” Johanne said sharply, with a didactic nod. “So don’t put my boots away, Oluf.”
“I’m poor myself,” Ste
ffensen objected indignantly. But at the same time he accorded her a jerky bow. He did not want to lose his temper. He stared inanely down at the wine glasses. Green glasses! Green glasses! In green glasses, port wine looks like medicine, he thought.
“But Johanne, do you think we have enough bedclothes,” interjected Jastrau.
“No—no.” It was Sanders who spoke up. “You really mustn’t go to so much trouble. I can sleep in a chair if I have to, and Steffensen can use the sofa. That’s better any time than a bench down on Søndre Boulevard—”
“Or the one on Frederiksberg Circle, huh?” said Steffensen, grinning. He raised another glass to his lips and emptied it.
Johanne’s blue eyes shifted in perplexity from one to the other, then came to rest distrustfully on her husband. Then suddenly she found an outlet for her emotions. Oluf was trudging off with one of her boots, and she bent over him impetuously. “Oluf, how many times do I have to tell you? Leave my boots alone.” She gave him a rap on the knuckles.
“But frue, you mustn’t think we’re a couple of tramps,” Sanders said politely. Johanne did not hear him. Jastrau knew that she was quick to develop dislikes, but why her sudden aversion to Sanders? It had manifested itself with such startling abruptness—literally in the twinkling of an eye.
“What are we then?” Steffensen asked with a grin.
“Yes, you—you’re a tramp. But I have a place over there that I call home.” He nodded in the direction of Vesterbrogade.
“But you don’t dare go there. You’re scared stiff of the cops,” Steffensen replied.
Johanne gave a start.
“Look here, Ole—I’m getting all confused. What is this all about anyway? The police? And sleeping here tonight? We don’t have room for them, and you know it very well. We can’t have overnight guests here.”
“The police? That doesn’t amount to anything. And we can easily put them up—easily, yes easily!” Jastrau stamped on the floor and felt ridiculous. “We can. We can. We can. Because we have to. At any rate, I have to. I owe it to myself.” He tried to sound furious.
“Well then, that’s settled,” said Johanne, raging inwardly. She disappeared into the kitchen so abruptly that the room suddenly seemed empty.
“No—I don’t like this,” Sanders hastened to say uneasily. “We don’t want to force ourselves on you. If it hadn’t been you, Ole, whom I’ve known for so long, I would never have dared—”
Steffensen said not a word, but seemed to be enjoying the situation.
“Oh, you beast!” Sanders snapped at him.
Meanwhile Jastrau heard the clatter of plates in the kitchen. There was no mistaking the irritation behind the sound. A cabinet door was slammed shut.
“Wait just a moment,” he apologized nervously, and went out to the kitchen.
“Listen, Johanne.”
She turned her back on him, as if completely absorbed in her calculations, and did not answer.
“Listen, Johanne.” He tried to be both calm and insistent.
She put the little finger of her left hand into her mouth and bit on it, for she was deep in thought.
Then she wheeled about. Her face was pale and her expression so frank that it caught him off guard.
“You’re going over to the office, and then I’ll be left alone here with those two!” she burst out.
“Hush, hush. They can hear you.”
“Yes, and I don’t care. I must say, you have some fine friends.”
With that she turned abruptly and walked over to the kitchen table. She idly picked up a glass, stood for a little while with it in her hand, then set it down with a vehement bang. “No,” she said. “I won’t have it!”
From the rigid lines of her back and bare neck, Jastrau could see how agitated she was.
“No! I won’t have it!”
Her mind made up, she leaned against the kitchen door as if to buttress her authority.
“Do you hear? I won’t have it! Tonight I’m going home to my parents. And I’m taking Oluf with me.”
Now her voice assumed a tone of peevish complaint. “Yes, I’m going to. And it’s your fault. You’re driving me out—out of my own home. It’s getting so that it’s impossible to stay here any longer.”
“But Johanne—” protested Jastrau.
Johanne shook her head and smoothed out her hair in an effort to regain her composure.
“No, don’t give me any buts. Now I’ll fix something to eat, and then we’ll say that unfortunately I have to leave. But—” and now her voice grew harsh—“but things have gone too far when a person can’t have any peace in her own house. And now they’re going to spend the night here in the bargain. Why—if I may ask? The police are going to grab them because of those dirty articles of theirs. Don’t you think I know this Sanders? I suppose you think I don’t read anything, but I know very well the stuff they write in that—that smut sheet.”
“After all, they’re not a couple of outright sex criminals,” objected Jastrau. “They—”
“Oh, no? When they write the way they do, they’re not one bit better. That’s my opinion. And the mere fact that you’d let them in here at all—”
Jastrau raised his eyebrows wearily.
“I wrote the same sort of thing myself—at one time.”
“No you didn’t. That was something different.”
“I’m damned if I can see the difference. They’re people who are fighting for the sake of an idea.”
“An idea! Yes. An immoral idea! A fine idea indeed—that women should be the property of the state. Isn’t that what they advocate? And you’d put up with a thing like that!”
“Now, now—”
“Isn’t it immoral?”
“Well now—”
“All I know is that my father never would have tolerated such people inside his house—and neither would Adolf.”
“Your dear brother Adolf! Ha! Johanne, don’t you understand that I can’t do anything else? Look, an artist who’d shut his door in the face of a friend, who’d turn away old friends because the police are after them—Can’t you see that if anything is utterly impossible, that’s it? Yes, even if it were a case of murder with intent to rob—”
“You mean it?”
“Yes, what do I care about the police? And in this case it’s only a matter of serving a sentence in lieu of a fine because they had the courage to write something that nobody else dared to say. It’s true that I don’t agree with them—not entirely, that is. But I’ll be damned if I can shut my door to them, feel scandalized, or take a bourgeois attitude toward them. I just can’t do it. Besides, it’s only for one night, because if the Social Democrats win tomorrow—and they’re going to—then they’ll be granted an amnesty—”
“Well, it makes no difference to me. You’re simply turning your home into a cheap saloon. But when it’s my family who pays us a visit, then you always get sulky! Yes, you do! Well, anyway, I suppose I’d better go down and get some more meat.”
“Are you going to stay with your parents tonight?”
“Yes.”
Ole Jastrau chewed nervously on the stem of his pipe and went back to his guests.
He found that they had made themselves at home. Sanders was leaning back comfortably in his chair, reading a thin book whose covers he had doubled back so far that the spine had broken. Steffensen was tapping his pipe against the heel of his shoe and letting the ashes fall on the floor.
“It’s odd that you should have Sigbjørn Obstfelder’s poems,” Sanders said, laying the open book in his lap. “I didn’t think you knew what he was all about.”
To break the back of a book that way! Black fingerprints on the white pages! No, Jastrau would not answer him. Furiously he sat down in a chair near the window, as far away as he could get from the smug complacency of the others.
Meanwhile Steffensen had lighted another pipe and was now engaged in writing. He wrote on a sheaf of smørrebrød menus that he had filched from a restaurant.
“Thank you,” said Jastrau.
“What? Are you being sarcastic, Ole?”
Jastrau did not reply. But with an odd submissiveness he went over to the pile of review copies and picked up H. C. Stefani’s Wherefore Hast Thou Forsaken Me? It was the humble side of his nature manifesting itself.
Soon everything was quiet in the room. From Vesterbrogade, a block away, came the muffled rumble of traffic, and from the central train station the whistles of the locomotives. Steffensen’s pipe bubbled. It was the loudest sound in the room, in fact the only sound. Johanne had taken Oluf with her to do the shopping.
In spite of everything, there was something cozy about the atmosphere. It was rather nice that a few friends could settle down and feel at home in his apartment. And the fact that the police just happened to be after these two made it so unconventional, so unrelated to the normal humdrum existence. He wondered if it did not have something to do with open-mindedness, with the infinite. There were, indeed, people whose outlook could be so unbounded. Unbounded, yes. But was that sort of thing conducive to coziness?
No, it was more like sitting in the cold glare of an electric light. Under such a light a person might well freeze on a winter evening. He discovered Steffensen’s hard, glassy eyes staring at him. Yes—in a glare like that of a winter evening. A horde of people. The cold, blue, hazy light of the arc lamps. The asphalt pavement.
Then Steffensen shifted his gaze again and stared down at his paper.
Sanders, however, did not move, except to turn a page in Obstfelder’s collection of poems, or to light one cigarette from the butt of another.
Yes, there was a certain coziness about it. In any event, Jastrau wanted it to be cozy. The two of them had sought him out when they were in trouble. It was youth that had come to him, the poet and critic. Yes, they were scornful of him, but wasn’t that to vindicate themselves? They quickly calmed down and soon felt at home. Consequently, he must have the proper temperament—the boundless temperament and open mind that youth admired so much. Youth? He was thirty-four—no longer young. No, not young. Had it already become his turn to bow his head and listen with rapt attention?