In a low suburban building behind the trees in the garden of the Lorry glowed a little, unimpressive doorway. Only the long row of taxis drawn up beside the sidewalk revealed the presence of the nightclub.
A doorman peered suspiciously through the window when Jastrau tried the doorknob, but the sight of the well-known journalist reassured him. After having produced his membership card, he slipped in past a row of friendly if somewhat skeptical observers. Was he drunk? Were they politely appraising the condition he was in? He greeted them cordially.
As he did so he heard the wail of a saxophone in beside the dance floor. Now he could calm down and stop his disordered flight, and the feeling of oppressiveness that all the while had been so marked in the region of his heart had evidently subsided. A call of the wild, a scream and a sob, perhaps a lamenting cry from out of the distance, perhaps an animal or a woman somewhere nearby. Now he could give himself up to remorse and still feel calm, for no grief was as intense as the wail of the saxophone.
Fortified by the jazz, he stood in the doorway leading in to the dance floor. A banjo broke up all worries and cares into fixed rhythms. A grillwork. The air vibrated with a melancholy born of virtuosity. A piano without pedals. His eyes reconnoitered among the dancers in the room, where the nation’s golden-age poets peered darkly from frames hung on the light walls, like gigantic oval medallions. And just as he caught sight of the tall and lugubrious Raben, who here was continuing his intimate, long-drawn-out dance with Fru Krog’s sister, whose Madonna coiffure rested caressingly against his white shirt front, Jastrau heard someone call out:
“Hello, Brother-in-law.”
He glanced nervously down at a table beside him. There, with mouth wide open, sat his wife’s dear brother, Adolf Smith-Jørgensen, flushed and looking somewhat befuddled. And sitting next to him was the blond, handsome architect, Joachim Michelsen, with his blue, girlish eyes and soft, curving lips. The blue eyes stared at him with an illusive depth as Michelsen withdrew an arm that had been resting on the shoulders of a girl in pink and rose from his chair with an air of marked cordiality.
“Nice to see you,” he said in a subdued voice that sounded as if it had musical accompaniment.
Jastrau was immediately conscious of his own heavy bulk in contrast to this slender individual. A remote, gentle smile crossed his features, as it did whenever he saw a thing of beauty.
“The champagne is flowing here!” roared Smith-Jørgensen.
“Oh, how nice he is—your brother-in-law,” purred a girl in brown, laying her head tenderly against Adolf’s shoulder as with round leaden baby eyes and doll-like cheeks flushed with wine she looked at Jastrau. “How nice he is. Why haven’t you ever told me that you have a brother-in-law?”
“Oh—a brother-in-law,” said Adolf, laughing. “This place is swarming with brothers-in-law.”
A fleeting smile appeared on Michelsen’s lips—a somewhat sticky smile, Jastrau thought. Both of the young girls laughed hysterically.
“But this one here is so nice,” the one in brown continued. “Sit down here with us, won’t you?”
And Jastrau sat down with an awkward feeling of not being nice at all.
“I’m hunting for my party,” he said.
“Where’s Johanne?” asked Adolf. “Oh, the hell with her anyway. It’s so seldom that we’ve been out on a binge together. Isn’t she nice—this young one here? Her name is Gunhild.”
Jastrau thought he ought to explain that Johanne was tired and had gone home.
“Oh, to hell with her.” Adolf brushed his explanation aside. “I’ve seen enough of her in the last few days. Variety is the spice of life, isn’t it, Joachim?” He leaned forward toward Gunhild, laughing. “Yes, as a matter of fact, he is nice. All brothers-in-law are.”
His eyes were glazed, his cheeks flaming.
Jastrau, whose head had cleared during his walk, noticed it at once.
He could see that Joachim, on the other hand, was sober and only preoccupied with the girl in pink.
“We’re all brothers-in-law.”
At that moment Jastrau received a vigorous kick in the shin and let out an exclamation.
“What’s the matter with you, Brother-in-law?” asked Adolf, staring at him dully and uncomprehendingly.
“Somebody kicked me.”
“What? Somebody kicked you? Look here, Gunhild, are you kicking? You mustn’t do that. Take it easy now, take it easy.”
Gunhild protested.
“You’re a peculiar girl, you are,” Michelsen said in his gentle voice. “When I go to kiss you, you shut your eyes. I guess you don’t know that that can drive me completely wild.”
Shut her eyes. Shut her eyes. Was it a nightmare he was experiencing? Johanne. Johanne. She always shut her eyes. It was the modest side of her nature asserting itself, part of her personal feminine mystique, and here Michelsen had tossed off the remark to a girl he had met casually. Two saxophones tooted and wailed. All the other instruments joined in. A tuba’s low notes reverberated through the room, filling it with compact strident sound and sweeping away all sense of spatial dimension. Away with it all!
A glass of champagne was placed before Jastrau, and he fumbled for it like a person who had been drugged.
Everything anyone said tonight had a double meaning. He was surrounded by diabolical remarks. It was driving him crazy. A persecution mania. This was what a persecution mania must be like. Everything assumed an insidious secondary significance. Every single word, no matter how trifling, was artfully devised by a devil. She shut her eyes—shut her eyes. A deep erotic secret given away.
“So here you are.” A figure in evening dress leaned heavily against his shoulder, weighed him down, and put a stop to his thoughts. It was Kryger.
“I was hunting for you. Johanne went home.”
“Good you came, good you came,” Kryger intoned through his nose as he stood wobbling a bit. His eyes were bloodshot. “And what a lovely lady there beside you!”
“You—you’re barging in on a private party,” Adolf barked, raising his head oafishly.
“And what a charming gentleman you’re with.”
Jastrau introduced Kryger, and Adolf’s obstreperousness gave way to a damp, cringing smile.
“So why don’t you all join us?” Kryger went on in his lilting voice. “There are so many of us, a wonderful party with lots of women. Come along, all of you. Jastrau, you make sure they join us. Otherwise I’ll forget because I’m drunk, and God knows how I love women.”
“It’ll be a great honor, Herr Editor—” Adolf got no further, because Kryger had taken the girl in brown by the arm.
“Ah, how sweet you are,” they heard him say.
The members of Kryger’s party were gathered in the small room where the bar was, together with a number of unknown and dubious characters. Fru Kryger was listening not only to Vuldum, whose face was pale beneath his bright-red hair, but also to a completely unfamiliar man whose countenance resembled an inflated red paper bag drawn together at the top and tied by a small puckered-up mouth. How excited and nervous she seemed, now more provocative than the young girls who sat like a row of parakeets along the brass rail, now ladylike and austere as befitted a married woman. She seemed altogether unaware of the way her husband was buzzing about.
The scar on Raben’s cheek was flaming red—a danger signal. His little Madonna leaned closely against him.
Then he found himself in a swarm of journalists, actors, business men, and other well-dressed individuals, as well as young girls. Jastrau did not catch their names. There was a man with slicked-down hair, gray around the temples.
“Quite a crowd,” Kryger exulted, hauling Jastrau around by the arm.
“Where is the judge?” Jastrau asked.
Raben smiled sarcastically.
“I thought he liked his liquor,” Jastrau went on.
“Nothing but idle talk,” Raben replied. “All he does is talk about it.”
“Ah, yes—if o
nly that was the way with the rest of us,” mused Kryger. “As far as women are concerned, too. Yes, if only one could be satisfied with talking about it.”
Fru Kryger responded with a laugh that was altogether too loud.
Then Kryger dragged Jastrau over to the bar. “Here are a couple of thirsty gentlemen,” he said.
They thrust their heads in between the row of parakeets. Jastrau felt shoulders and hairdos brushing him. He was swimming in a sea of feminine charm, a soft yielding femininity on all sides. He reached for the highball glass that stood sweating and fizzing on the bar and encountered Kryger’s impetuous, licentious smile. It seemed to radiate a somber intensity. Was it really Kryger—the small, elegant, arrogant journalist?
“Skål!”
All restraint seemed to have been lifted. So it was Kryger’s real self that was asserting itself from behind his official mask. His eyes were bloodshot like those of an animal.
“Are you sitting here nipping soda water, you poor things?” said Kryger in a tone of endearment. “You shall have Blue Moons and Red Devils and White Ladies—do you hear, bartender?” He turned and shouted to his wife, “Watch out that I don’t spend too much money!”
“He’s a good fellow—this editor.” Jastrau turned and saw Adolf’s gaping mouth right next to his face. Deep inside the murky cavern a gold-crowned molar glistened.
Jastrau nodded. A woman’s neck. Smooth white skin beneath a blushing ear. Everything was enveloped in a mantle of jazz.
He barely managed to bring his head up above the swirling sea of emotions and intoxication and reply, “Yes, Brother-in-law.”
As he did so, he heard an asinine laugh.
“All of us here are brothers-in-law.”
At the same time, he looked toward the door. There stood Michelsen, the handsome architect, helping his lady on with her wrap. His own coat was over his arm.
“He’s a big spender,” whispered Adolf, his moist lips close to Jastrau’s face. “But so what? Here we’re all brothers-in-law.”
The place was mobbed. Not a bit of empty space. Perfume brushed his face as heavily as if it were a hand.
“If only we could be satisfied with talking about it,” said Kryger, laughing and disappearing with a woman on each side of him. One of them had a morose, virtuous look about her. Jastrau remembered having seen her every time he had been in the place.
Then there was shouting and more hilarity. A jazz melody was repeated by request.
Jastrau went out on the floor to dance, a difficult undertaking. Several times he bumped into other dancers. It was too crowded, and he edged his way out of the jam. The girl he had danced with laughed. It was the one with the baby eyes.
At one of the tables sat two unaccompanied women with vacant smiles. A drunken man had come up and was speaking to them. He was swaying back and forth.
“You aren’t enjoying yourselves this evening.”
It was Kryger’s voice. It had a nasal tone.
“Is that you? Jastrau?”
“Yes. Is this where you landed?”
“Yes. I can’t stand to see all the lonely women sitting near the wall. They’re not doing any business, and so I have to drum up trade for them. You’re going to have a whiskey, girls—yes, damn it, you are. I can’t make love to them all—not tonight. But I can see to it that they all have whiskey—that they feel happy. People—”
Jastrau interrupted and put an arm around him. “Do you feel that way too?”
“Yes, I feel that way too,” Kryger replied, looking at him with glazed eyes.
But just then he caught sight of a solitary woman at another table. The tablecloth with its single coffee cup presented a dreary picture.
“Deflation,” he muttered and went over there. Jastrau followed him, badly befuddled but faithful unto death.
“And here you must also have some whiskey—isn’t that so, Frøken?” Kryger asked.
They sat down beside her. She was a broad-bosomed woman and bore herself with dignity, but she condescended to smile.
“Is that the way you feel too, Kryger? Is it Jesus among the whores that you’re thinking of?” Jastrau burst out.
“You needn’t be blasphemous.”
“I’m not being blasphemous,” said Jastrau, bringing his hand down on the table so hard that the glasses shook. He had completely forgotten the broad-bosomed lady. “That’s the way I feel. I can never forget Jesus among the whores. The more I drink and dissipate, the closer He is to me. He is resurrected inside me in the midst of all this havoc—here, inside me.”
“You should really be ashamed of yourself,” said the woman indignantly.
“If only one could be satisfied with talking about it,” Kryger intoned with a warm, uncomprehending smile. His black hair hung down over his forehead.
A glazed stare.
6
A ROUGH waiter jabbed the corner of a metal tray into the side of Jastrau’s head.
It was as if he suddenly found himself inside a red cave. Paper festoons swirled in confusion and threatened to fall like rain from a supersaturated cloud. And at the same time a hush spread over the room. Voices faded and were obliterated, and a melancholy, continuous splashing filled the void. Outside, in the gray morning light, it was raining. The walls of a house on the other side of the street were dark from the rain.
Jastrau guzzled a glassful of bitter beer.
Two faces suddenly were visible. He was sitting beside them. A blond, square-jawed fellow with a ten-gallon hat, and a dark-haired chap with a blue stubble on his cheeks and a fleeting smile. The dark-haired one was drawing on the tablecloth with a pencil.
“It’s a hell of a note how little kick there is in beer,” said the cowboy, peering down at his empty glass.
Jastrau looked around in confusion. He was tired and drunk, and the liquor he had consumed in the last twenty-four hours was like so much stagnant, foul water. But finally he began to penetrate the fog. He was in an early-morning beer joint and restaurant. Yes, that was it. And in front of him, on a flat plate, a fried egg floated in a puddle of beer. So a glass must have been upset. All over everything.
“You might buy one more round.”
“Yes, my friends,” said Jastrau, his confusion and his cordiality merging into one. “We’ll have another round. Waiter, more beer.”
He laid his hands on their shoulders in a fatherly manner, but heavily, as if he were about to fall forward.
The dark-haired one nodded appreciatively.
“Because I like you—you two—let me tell you that,” Jastrau went on. “Because I like your faces. They’re real human faces.”
“Yes, all right,” the cowboy replied in English.
“Yes, they are,” Jastrau’s voice grew intense and hoarse. He gaped a little at them and went on stubbornly to make his point. For, after all, here he was, sitting between a couple of pimps—yes, two pimps. It seemed that he could visualize it all just like a picture, and he grew expansive. A table. Himself in the middle, dignified and paternal, fluent though drunk, and these two pimps, one on each side of him. Yes, pimps was just what they were, because otherwise the picture did not have the depth of meaning, the biblical significance that he was unconsciously striving to invest it with. “Because you are human beings,” he went on, “you live the life you must lead. You follow the dictates of your nature.”
“Sure,” said the cowboy. He spoke with an American accent.
“You have faces, you two—crafty, shrewd, depraved—”
“Ho ho,” laughed the one with the dark hair.
“You have no idea how much I love you, you two human beings, for you are human beings.”
“Boy, have you got a snootful!” the cowboy said sullenly.
“Jesus would—”
“Ho ho ho!” shouted the dark-haired one. “Well, here’s the beer. Do you think you can shut up long enough to get some beer into you?”
Jastrau slumped over dejectedly. There was a loud snap as his shirt front
buckled and crept up, giving him the appearance of having a bosom.
“You don’t understand me,” he whimpered.
“Sure—you’re drunk,” said the dark-haired one, grinning and biting on the pencil.
“How honest you are,” Jastrau mumbled to himself as he stared down at the inundated fried egg.
The cowboy nodded to his companion. They got up and left, still laughing.
Then another outburst of laughter sounded from the back of the room. Jastrau straightened up.
“Aren’t you going to eat that egg, sir?” asked a waiter. “Here’s your bill.”
Jastrau obeyed mechanically. Carefully he tried to balance a bit of the damp egg on a fork and convey it to his mouth. The yolk dripped down onto the lapel of his dresscoat.
“There’s the bill, sir,” the waiter repeated.
Jastrau went through his pockets. They were empty. He got up with difficulty and looked in his topcoat. Ah, yes—now he remembered. He had tossed it into the cab to Johanne. His wallet with all his money. And now, now he had to go home. Home to Johanne—and Oluf. He must. The waiter kept standing there waiting, insulting him by his very presence.
“Damned if I have any money,” he muttered, and then let out a belch.
“Then I’d advise you to get some,” came the rough answer.
“But the other two fellows—”
“They’re gone. And besides, it was you, sir, who ordered.”
“Yes, yes. Yes, yes. So it was I who ordered. But now let me alone.” Jastrau slumped wearily back into his chair and directed his attention to the refractory egg.
“But there’s this bill, sir.”
“Yes, just let me think,” he mumbled, stuffing his mouth full of egg.
The waiter disappeared, looking as if he might burst a blood vessel in his broad neck.
Jastrau sat for a while fumbling with his knife and fork. Sitting to one side of him were a couple of boisterous men in evening clothes and two young girls, and in the background, from behind some partitions, came a babel of voices and hoarse obscenities. A Swedish girl was babbling something about matches to an accompaniment of raucous female laughter.
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