“She was a pretty girl—your mother,” Steffensen said. Jastrau drew himself up, irritated.
“Damn it, after all, she’s a woman now!” Steffensen exclaimed.
“She’s dead.”
“Well, then she was a woman,” Steffensen said scornfully. “One can see that your ideas are deeply rooted.”
Jastrau answered him by putting a strident jazz record on the phonograph.
“This one has a feeling of disaster about it,” he said in order to talk about something else.
“Yes. Nonsense is something there’s plenty of. But it has a good swing to it.”
And then began a series of records, one after another, so that the blood rushed to both their heads. Steffensen sat motionless, biting his pipestem, but a jolly grin brushed lightly over his dour features, a kind of humorous jeer, whenever an artful dissonance filled the room.
“Beautiful logic,” he muttered.
Jastrau, on the other hand, stood up and began an improvised dance. As always, it did not come off. He muffed every temperamental arm movement that he tried. The rhythm fell to pieces between his feet. And he was aware of it. He was a big man. But in his imagination, he saw himself now as a slim dancer, now as a heavyset, cakewalking gentleman, and his dance steps alternated between abandon and awkward constraint, a most unsatisfactory performance which gave him no adequate release from the tension he felt. On such occasions, a light-footed, dancing temperament in a gross, clumsy body might at first seem reasonable enough, but then he would succumb to a feeling of dualism and despair that had to be overcome, blunted, and drowned out by getting drunk.
It was in such a frame of mind that he caught sight of the Shrove Monday rod over in the corner. It was mocking him because he had lost a son. Again everything was working up to a scream. That scream! But then Anna Marie came in with a basketful of beer bottles and packages, and while the phonograph went on blaring he sidled over to her with a dance step, grabbed a couple of the bottles, and swung them in time with the music.
“Ah, Bournonville!”* Steffensen exclaimed. “The beer-bottle tableau. Let me have a bottle right away.”
Jastrau sat down, puffing heavily.
“Yes, waiting for beer is a difficult thing,” Steffensen said comfortingly.
But just then the record played itself out and Jastrau had to get up and put a new one on.
“We ought to have a permanently employed record changer,” Steffensen went on.
After the eggs had finished boiling and the late luncheon was on the table, Anna Marie was assigned the task of tending to the phonograph. It had to be kept going incessantly. They did not want to be disturbed by the silence of the apartment while they ate.
But now Anna Marie had grown nervous. She had a distracted look, and her face was flushed despite its basic pale, sickly look. She fumbled with her egg. Her stubby fingers, with their plebeian nails, held the spoon the wrong way.
There was an uneven whirring and wobbling as the record ran out.
“The phonograph,” Steffensen commanded harshly, screwing up his eyes.
“Yes, yes,” she replied with a Jutland accent as she nervously got up from her chair. Jastrau had to grab the egg and egg cup, which she nearly upset, and as he did so he happened to brush her soft bare arm. Then it came to him, more emphatically than ever before, that she was diseased and untouchable. He could not help looking at her short sturdy body in the cheap dress with the leather belt that rested too far down on her hips. She was fleshy and sensual, even to her full lips which she adorned with lipstick. Otherwise she used no make-up. And this sensuous creature was untouchable.
He smoothed out the newspaper. He had to caress something with a gentle loving touch. Then a new record began playing.
“Well,” said Jastrau, looking at his watch, “I guess I’d better get busy.”
“First some beer,” came Steffensen’s answer. They each had four bottles standing in front of them.
Steffensen put one of them to his mouth, although there was a glass beside his plate.
“Ah yes, you have to get busy,” he said, wiping his mouth. “Yes, of course, you have a steady job. A respectable critic—of the arts. Damned if I hadn’t completely forgotten that.”
“Otherwise we wouldn’t get anything to eat,” Jastrau replied. Anna Marie nodded in a practical manner.
But Steffensen only took another swig of beer.
“Tell me, how long do you think it will be before they toss you out over there?” he asked as he set the bottle down with a thump.
A nervous glance from Anna Marie. The phonograph cut in in full force with a chorus from the brass instruments.
Jastrau did not answer. His eyes had a weary, foggy look.
“Things just can’t go on this way,” Steffensen continued, staring at him with eyes that were unnaturally bright.
“No, I’m slipping away from respectability,” Jastrau replied in a sing-song tone. The jazz formed an accompaniment to his words. “I’m finally drawing closer to youth. I’ll soon be on an equal footing with you two.”
He nodded toward Steffensen. “I’m getting more like you, I am,” he went on, “because I want to know what goes on inside you, what youth is, what the future holds. I want to be on an equal footing with you.”
The music carried his words. He felt they were true. There was a strong element of fate in his life. Now he could feel the beer. It was freedom that he sought, the infinite soul. That was why all this had happened. Now he knew it—the jazz told him so.
“Why do you want to talk about it, Stefan?” Anna Marie protested. “You can see that Herr Jastrau doesn’t like it.”
“Take care of the phonograph, wench. You forgot to wind it. It’s whining.”
Jastrau started at the brutal tone of Steffensen’s voice. The thought flashed through his mind that she was a helpless woman and that he should come to her defense. But she had already gotten up.
Then, as if by way of recompense, he let his glance roam over her head. He felt a desire to pat it. Like a sick animal that one could not help.
And Steffensen suddenly got a harsh look from him.
“Have you read this interview with Professor Geberhardt?” he asked after a brief pause.
“Don’t know the man.”
Jastrau smiled with a superior air and began to underscore with a fingernail a few of the lines in the newspaper.
“Well, what’s it about?” asked Steffensen.
“Sometimes,” Jastrau read aloud, “a person is overcome by disgust at being an active participant in this world’s perverted affairs. I am assailed so strongly by this feeling that I am withdrawing from the scene.”
Steffensen raised his head with a gloating smile.
“Are you withdrawing from Dagbladet?” he asked bluntly.
“No, damned if I am. Who told you that? I’m only reading something that it might do you good to hear.”
Steffensen’s shoulders shook, and soon came the sound of his affected laughter.
“Yes, you’re going to the dogs all right, and whatever else you say is a lot of nonsense.”
“No, no!” Anna Marie exclaimed impulsively.
“Yes, yes,” Jastrau replied in a melancholy, gentle parody of her voice.
“It’s a good thing you recognize it yourself,” said Steffensen with a grin.
“Frøken—Frøken Anna Marie,” Jastrau said without troubling to answer Steffensen, “now the record is running out.”
She nodded.
“Frøken Anna Marie,” she repeated quietly, trying to reproduce the tone in which Jastrau had addressed her. Now she no longer moved sluggishly. She wound the phonograph as if she enjoyed doing it.
“Otherwise you damn well wouldn’t put up with the way we’ve forced ourselves on you,” Steffensen went on, his eyes still twinkling and directed at Jastrau. “I have a nose for that sort of thing.” He reached out and helped himself to another bottle of beer. “Skål.” They crossed the necks of their bo
ttles and clinked them together. “No sooner had Sanders—”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Jastrau exclaimed heatedly.
“Oh, what of it? It had to happen,” Steffensen muttered. “What if it was his fault that the apple cart got upset? It had to be upset anyhow.”
There was an instrument that kept up a shrill, turbid refrain throughout the new record, and it sent cold shivers up Jastrau’s back. It was an ominous, fateful sound.
“Yes, no sooner had Sanders told the story that he had cooked up than I was Johnny-on-the-spot.” A crafty smile played about Steffensen’s rigid lips. “I saw you floundering around in this big apartment—an abandoned wreck, luxurious but gone adrift. And I couldn’t stand to see that, so I came aboard with the wench.”
Anna Marie compressed her lips, but her eyes were glued on him apprehensively.
“And it worked. You didn’t throw us out. Here we sit. I tell you, I have a nose that can smell when things are going to pot.” Steffensen sounded boastful, and suddenly Jastrau was aware of how young he was. “I saw the whole picture, just like a story or a poem, or whatever the hell you want to call it. That’s the way it is with me. It helps a person to look at things logically.”
“So you have a nose for logic, too?” Jastrau asked ironically.
“Yes. After all, I’m not a fool,” came the reply.
Jastrau stared at him. He had heard that answer and been through the same discussion once before. No, this dark north room, the sunlit wall across the way, these two individuals, the phonograph music playing incessantly, the beer bottles on the table strewn with bottle caps—no, all this was something he could not have experienced before. But suddenly the scene around him assumed clear, ineradicable form. These two faces. This famished, fanatical student—for that was what Steffensen was, that and nothing else, a demented student—and this servant girl who had no idea of what to do with either her body or soul.
And once again Jastrau sat at the end of the table and put his hands together as if about to break bread. Emmaus! In that position, he seemed to understand everything and put his trust in an inner light.
But Steffensen went on talking.
“Like a picture, I tell you. That’s the way it has always seemed to me—as if the apartment were floating through the air.” He took a swig from the bottle. “All I had to do was come in here, and everything levitated. The apartment, these rooms sailed along through the air like a flying ship, and that’s the way it is now. Especially with the music—ha! And now I’ve gotten the idea into my head that it will all keep on floating—way up high, high up over the whole dirty mess—as long as we—we’re the passengers—what shall I say?—as long as we simply let everything happen, everything. In other words, let the infinite call the tune.”
Jastrau leaned forward and stared at Steffensen’s pale harried features, the unpleasantly high forehead, the gleaming eyes, and the lips that seemed like those of an automaton. Yes, he was demented. The previous winter had left its mark on him. But the thought, the picture he had sketched, left an even stronger impression than the hard bitter face.
“Yes, I understand,” Jastrau replied as Steffensen sat looking at him uneasily. “There’s always a feeling of the infinite about anything in a state of decay.”
“Yes.”
Steffensen fell silent. He sat staring at a beer bottle as if he were clairvoyant.
But all of a sudden the jazz ground to a stop.
For a moment they all sat rigidly motionless. Jastrau expected a further development, and Anna Marie did not move.
Suddenly Steffensen grabbed his beer glass and flung it at Anna Marie.
It grazed her temple and crashed against the sideboard.
“How often do I have to remind you to tend to the phonograph, wench?”
Large tears welled up in her eyes.
And then things began to flicker before Jastrau’s eyes. He saw nothing but the reflection from the white curtains at the neighbor’s across the way.
“Just because you’ve infected her is no reason to mistreat her.”
He heard the words. They were spoken clearly out into the room. It was his own voice. But it seemed to him that the words originated some inches away from his mouth. They materialized out of the air.
Steffensen sat motionless. The skin around his cheekbones was chalk-white, as if a death mask had just been removed from his face.
But Anna Marie had gotten up. She looked at Jastrau with eyes ablaze. She gasped for breath so that her gross body assumed a brutish posture. Her dress, that had worked up above the belt, bagged like the shirt of a man wearing a belt.
“And this is what we have to put up with. This is what we have to stand for from a person we don’t know. We’re poor, and we get our food for nothing, so we have to let ourselves be stepped on. No, no, no!” She gasped again. Her hair had fallen down over one eye. A deep flush had colored her throat and cheeks so that the morbid, lackluster complexion of the skin around her eyes was more noticeable. But now there was no fear in her eyes; they were large and bovine. Her whole being was poised for an uncontrollable onslaught, a blind spring, as she stared straight ahead with the wide-open gaze of a sleepwalker.
Jastrau got up, feeling wretched, and was going to lay his hands reassuringly on her shoulders. But she tore herself loose. Beneath the skin of her bare arms was a hint of muscles that were not like a woman’s.
“Stay away from me! Help me, Stefan—protect me!” she screamed in a wild, senseless outburst.
“Oh, this is all insane,” Steffensen drawled. The color had returned to his cheeks. “Start the phonograph going.”
Anna Marie glanced at him quickly. With a brisk shake of her head and a sweep of her hand she got her hair back in place. But then her agitated face and trembling lips were thrust forward so prominently that everything she said sounded indiscreet, almost too intimate.
“Oh—I can’t think,” she groaned with her face held close to Jastrau’s. He was afraid that she was going to fall against him. “I’m at my wit’s end.” She stared right into his face. But now her eyes were again disoriented by fear; the irises opened wide and milky and she seemed to be staring out into a fog. “I don’t know anything. I’m stupid. I’m stupid. I’m stupid.”
Then suddenly she took his head in both of her hands.
“But you’re good,” she said, nodding gravely. “You are a good person. But you don’t believe I’m sick, do you? Not sick in that way. No, no, because then I’d be so ashamed of myself, then I couldn’t stay here a second longer. Could I? No, of course I couldn’t.”
“Start the phonograph going now,” Steffensen repeated in irritation.
Jastrau sat down, feeling weak.
“What are you thinking about?” he said with a preoccupied air to Steffensen, who sat stuffing his pipe.
“I’m thinking logically.”
“Ha.”
Steffensen’s eyes were shining.
“I’m thinking that if I had been such a—a bandit, shall we say—well, what then? We’re all drifting toward the infinite. Aren’t we? We let everything happen. We’re in tune with the infinite, aren’t we?”
He stared at Jastrau with a leaden expression.
“But if that’s the case, we’ll have to go the whole way as far as crimes are concerned. And so what I’ve done—done to her—doesn’t amount to anything.”
“Is it true, then? Have you committed such a—?”
Jastrau was not able to finish the question, because Anna Marie let out a shriek, ran and threw herself on the sofa, and began sobbing convulsively.
“Let me take care of her,” Steffensen said, getting up reluctantly.
Jastrau got up, left the apartment, and went downstairs into the street.
Bareheaded and with hands in his pockets, he sauntered over toward the Town Hall Square.
*August Bournonville, nineteenth-century Danish ballet master.
2
BAREHEADED, Ole Jastrau walk
ed toward Dagbladet’s red building. That too was deserted. He could tell as soon as he looked up at the windows. In the course of one evening, it too had sunk into the sea and become unreal. And he himself drifted helplessly along like a person who had been drowned.
He still had his hands in his pockets and a pipe between his teeth as he made his way in the sunlight past the streetcars and cars over to the revolving door of Dagbladet’s building. He felt relaxed now, in a mood in which all events seemed to be part of a dramatic performance and in which all the people he saw were playing roles. He felt strangely free now, as if someone else had relieved him of the need to make decisions.
Up in the editorial department he nodded to the copy editor. Then he said a few kind words to the woman on duty. But suddenly he realized that he did not know why he had come there.
He wandered into the peristyle.
Eriksen was sitting in one of the small, box-like offices, making a conspicuous show of drinking a cup of coffee while he wrote an article.
Why shouldn’t Jastrau lean against the door frame and watch him?
“Oh—so it’s you, Jazz,” Eriksen said with a grin as he spilled a few drops of coffee on his manuscript. “Uh-h—what a God damned mess—the sort of thing that happens only when you drink coffee.” Exasperated, he grabbed a blotter and mopped up the drops. “What a mess on a clean sheet of paper. Now why in the devil are you standing there staring at me?” He threw the blotter on the floor. “And looking so superior?”
But suddenly he began laughing and coughing.
“Never mind, Jazz. How about shutting the door?”
No sooner had Jastrau complied than Eriksen, with a confiding smile, brought forth a glass of port from a hiding place behind a pile of telephone books and cleared his throat.
“There’s none for you.” He emptied the glass, emitted a satisfied “Ah-h,” and carefully secreted it again. “But this sort of thing doesn’t ordinarily happen during working hours,” he added in a tone of mounting wrath. “On my word of honor, it never happens.” He turned indignantly in his chair. “Don’t you believe me?”
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