A gleam like that of amber, Jastrau thought as his mind dwelt musingly on his neighbor’s white curtains in the forenoon sun. But it struck him at once that the gleam was not like that of amber. A gleam of amber? How had he happened to think of that?
He was conscious of a sense of relief. Anna Marie was walking about the kitchen, boiling eggs. Everything was peaceful in the dark apartment. Steffensen had left and had remained away.
How dusty and dilapidated everything looked. He got up. Should he clean the place up, get rid of the clutter? That big Shrove Monday rod topped with the figure of an elf. It would have to go. But he couldn’t. Not yet. There were pangs that could not be obliterated—yet. For sometime he would have to get rid of them. He stuck his hands in his pockets, turned on his heel, and went into the living room. Oluf! No, it would have to remain standing there in the corner yet awhile, that Shrove Monday rod. Then he would in any event have that sorrow relegated to a corner, a fixed and garish object. A sorrow. A Shrove Monday rod.
He could dust the room. He took out his handkerchief and rubbed the frames of the two photographs, those of his mother and his son. He breathed on the glass that covered them and polished it until it shone, and finally he put them back in place. A cryptic movement of his hand, a symbolic gesture. He had to make it whenever he stood before the two pictures, for perhaps they had the power of warding off a misfortune.
Then he sat in the rococo chair for a little while and looked at the Negro fetish. Steffensen had spoken of the apartment as a ship. A dilapidated chapel would also be a fitting description. The chapel of a religion in process of germinating out of the dusty furnishings around him, out of the stained clothing he wore like a Negro jazz-band player or a ship’s cook, out of people and events. But what a sense of relief he felt. Steffensen was gone. And suddenly he realized that he and Steffensen had been confronted with a showdown, spiritual or physical. But how did things stand now?
Now Steffensen was gone.
“The food’s on the table,” Anna Marie called from the dining room, and Jastrau went in. He felt as if he had begun to build up something new again in a small way, one grain of dust upon another, and he smiled at Anna Marie.
“Thanks for yesterday,” she said like a nice girl.
Jastrau sat down.
And as they sat there with their eggs, bread, and coffee, things became very cozy.
“We might as well be married,” Jastrau remarked with a smile.
Anna Marie swallowed hard and shifted her glance in embarrassment.
“No—we won’t talk about that,” she said imploringly.
Jastrau laid his hand on her bare arm.
“Well, it’s true,” he replied gloomily. “That damnable—” he went on and then stopped. “But I could engage you as my housekeeper.”
“Yes, that would be more like it—as filthy as things are here,” Anna Marie exclaimed with a scornful toss of her head.
She looked over at the windows.
“How those windows do look!” she added.
“Oh, what of it?” Jastrau said with a laugh. “At least the birds haven’t made use of them.”
“No, because that means luck,” Anna Marie sighed. “And luck—there’s none of that here. No.”
Her voice rose ominously.
“Yes, I seem to catch a glimpse of it in the offing,” Jastrau said quietly as he poured some coffee. “So now you’ll be my housekeeper, and I’ll go over and take up my job again.”
“You’ll do what?” Anna Marie asked in surprise.
“I gave them notice at Dagbladet yesterday,” Jastrau replied with a trace of a smile. “That was the stupidity we—”
“Yes, but what will we live on then?” Anna Marie exclaimed. “We—no, I mean you, of course.”
“I could go over and take up the job again,” Jastrau said hesitatingly. Then everything would be solved. He enjoyed the thought as a little glimmer of joy, a bit of relief.
“But a person can’t do that.”
“Yes, I can.”
“Oh, everybody’s crazy. You and Stefan—” Anna Marie shook her head so violently that her thick hair began to fall down over her forehead.
“That’s right. Stefan infected me with his craziness. But now he’s gone.”
“Where did he go? Don’t you know?” Anna Marie asked nervously. “Oh, you really mustn’t tell him that his mother is dead, because then he’ll take it out on me. You won’t—will you?”
“No, no, but now he’s gone,” Jastrau said reassuringly.
“But he’ll come back, he’ll come back,” she said in a tone of alarm. A deep flush began to flare up over her throat, and with a brusque movement of her hand she swept the hair away from her forehead.
“No, no—why should he do that,” Jastrau asked, a bit exasperated.
“He’ll come to get me,” came the despairing answer.
“No, no.”
“Oh, then you haven’t understood a word I’ve said.”
And with a violent start she lowered her head and hid it in her arms. Her shoulders shook as she sobbed quietly.
Jastrau got up and began to stuff his pipe.
“Yes, of course he’ll come,” he said slowly and reflectively. “But now we are two to his one. You’ll see—everything will be all right.”
He felt so composed and rueful as he lit the pipe.
“Now there are two of us, isn’t that right, Anna Marie? Now we’re Jastrau and his housekeeper. Unfortunately, we’re forced to maintain a platonic relationship,” he added with a faint, melancholy smile, fondling his pipe affectionately. Something untouchable. Perhaps it was just as well. Her figure was rather coarse, her lips altogether too moist. Something untouchable, unfortunate, feminine.
Anna Marie lifted her head but kept her hands raised to her temples so that at any second she could shield her eyes. A few tears glistened in them.
“And now you’re going over to take up your job again,” she exclaimed with a moist, bright-eyed smile. “Aren’t you? You’ll promise me that. You will, won’t you?”
Her eyes radiated happiness.
“We-ll,” Jastrau replied with a profound sigh, “I don’t really know about that.”
“Yes, yes—you’ll do it. You’ll promise, won’t you? It’s a promise, isn’t it? And you always keep your word.”
Jastrau smiled wearily.
“I think we should say I will try to do something reasonable!”
“That sounds strange.”
“Yes,” he said hesitantly. “It could be that I’d—yes, that I’d withdraw my resignation. It might be that I’d try to do it, but I can’t promise.”
Nevertheless, it was in such a frame of mind that Jastrau later went over to Dagbladet.
He could, of course, go into Editor Iversen’s office and say that he had acted rashly. It would make him an object of ridicule with the entire editorial department. But wouldn’t he also be ridiculous if he quit the job?
On the stairway he met Bruun who, in riding boots, was on his way down to an imaginary horse.
A gracious “Hello, Jastrau,” a regal wave of the hand, but no questions. It was rather strange, because Bruun was not a heartless individual. He might well concern himself over his neighbor’s future.
Jastrau walked into the dusk of the vestibule.
The woman on duty in the editorial office was abusing someone over the telephone. Her face was set in an expression of rage. Gundersen was leaning against the big green table. He asked if there was anything new.
“No, everything’s the same as it was,” Jastrau muttered philosophically, feeling annoyed as he did so.
“Have you been drinking?” Gundersen asked in a matter-of-fact tone.
But otherwise not a word. It was as if he were floating about in the empty room. Not even Gundersen, the inquisitive head of the lobster shift, questioned him. Was he wandering around among ghosts? Or was he a ghost himself?
The police reporter gave him a paternal and pa
tronizing slap on the shoulder, then hurried on.
The door to the editor-in-chief’s office stood ajar, so that a narrow shaft of light penetrated the vestibule.
The copy editor was sitting in his room, and raised his head. “Well, is it you, Ole Jastrau?” he said with casual amiability.
And from behind a closed door at the rear of the editorial department came the sound of Eriksen’s hollow cough.
Everything was going along in routine fashion. No one knew that Jastrau had resigned. It was as if he had not done it. Nothing had happened. Editor Iversen had forgotten it. And he probably was sitting stooped over his desk, his walrus mustache drooping over his mouth, with a faraway look in his eyes and his thoughts in Rangoon.
From force of habit Jastrau seated himself in the chair outside the editor-in-chief’s door, as if waiting for an audience. Did he really want to go in and see him? He sat back comfortably with his hat in his lap and looked around as if he were a stranger, and it filled him with a melancholy pleasure.
The woman on duty had stopped talking. She had hung up the telephone and was sitting at her desk, very red in the face. A little later a white cloud of powder drifted up around her head.
“There’s no one in Herr Iversen’s office,” she suddenly shouted from across the room. “You may as well go in, Ole Jastrau.”
Jastrau got up with a self-conscious smile.
“Damned if I’m going in there,” he said in a low voice. “I was just sitting here having a nap.”
“Were you out again last night?” she asked in a tone of envy.
Jastrau nodded and slipped quietly up to his room. He might just as well write that review. He had promised Anna Marie to do something sensible.
And that, then, would be his last review.
The four yellow desks shone in the sunlight. Now it made no difference that the poorest of them had been assigned to him. He no longer had any ambition. And the word DAGBLADET, with the letters reversed, was outlined in dark shadows across the patch of light cast from the window onto the varnished floor.
He composed each sentence with a strange feeling that this was a leave-taking. Yet, he could go downstairs and say that he had acted hastily. He could—yes, he could. Nevertheless, this was his leave-taking. He knew it. It was impossible to keep a subjective tone out of the article. The style resounded with it. Each word took on a double meaning. Keep his feelings in check! Be disciplined! There—that was something that resembled objectivity.
There was a knock on the door.
Jastrau quickly glanced at his watch. It was four-thirty. “Come in.”
Yes, sure enough, it was Arne Vuldum, who was just coming from the library. Looking deathly pale in the sea of sunlight that flooded the room and gleamed on the varnished woodwork. Lusterless and gray in the face. With his elegant derby hat, his walking stick, and the inevitable cigarette.
“I thought I’d find you sitting here. And I did so want to have a chat with you. Is it something exciting that you’re reviewing?”
He seated himself on the creaking sofa.
“No. A translation of Renan,” Jastrau replied. “I’m treating him like Papa Renan—in a filial tone, you know.”
“That’s as it should be,” said Vuldum. “And it’s the easiest thing to do.”
Jastrau turned in his chair so that he could keep an eye on him. Didn’t he know anything about it, either? But Vuldum’s eyes did not have the gray, unfathomable, animal-like expression that they usually assumed when he was lying in wait to ambush someone. His thin lips were not compressed about his cigarette. His hard face only looked tired—very tired.
“Renan was in reality only a cruel intellectualist,” Jastrau remarked.
“Only?” said Vuldum with an air of preoccupation.
Jastrau looked at him with distrust. Did he want to borrow money? But Vuldum caught his expression immediately and managed a genteel smile.
“Actually, yes,” Jastrau went on. Vuldum could no longer undermine his position. He was invulnerable. Just say no to him if he wanted a loan. Perhaps entice him into doing so, and then—
“Actually, yes,” Jastrau repeated in a haughty sing-song tone. “His ideal was, after all, essentially an intellectual dictatorship, cruel and relentless—not at all construed as a transitional form.”
Jastrau’s eyes shone mischievously.
“A spiritual and aesthetic dictatorship—I must say that’s a pretty ideal,” Vuldum replied, raising his eyebrows. “And a little cruelty, a little bloodthirstiness—why not? At six o’clock, when I’m sitting there at the long table in my boardinghouse, I’d relish such an idea. An aesthetic Cheka. Have you ever lived at a boardinghouse, Jastrau?”
“Yes. For short periods at a time.”
“For short periods,” Vuldum repeated slowly and spitefully. “But not for fifteen years—fifteen years.”
“No.”
Vuldum’s expression grew sharp.
“Then you don’t know what hate is. That tablecloth—I tell you! The people! That row of faces bent over that tablecloth! It makes a person sick. An aesthetic Cheka would sentence the whole kit and caboodle to death.” He made a gesture with the flat of his hand, as if lopping off a row of heads. “And what a relief that would be.”
“You’re bloodthirsty, all right,” Jastrau exclaimed with a laugh.
“Yes, it’s made me vicious. You sit there and talk with this row of heads and are affable and then go back to your room, to an inferno in tasteless Skindergade style. You sit there—and read Mallarmé. Mallarmé in the most hideous of all worlds—the boardinghouse world. Huh!” He stood up, feeling cold all over. “And then, ‘endlessly view the dreary chimneypots,’ ” he quoted to himself as he went over and stood in the sunlight by the window.
“This is apparently one of your bad days, Vuldum,” Jastrau remarked. Vuldum looked at him as if he expected sympathy.
“Yes, today I’m being visited by the executioner’s apprentice—the headsman’s boy, who doesn’t know his trade. A miserable bungler. He was supposed to make another attempt to chop off my head, but this time the axe didn’t cut through either. It’s still sitting here in my cervical vertebra.” He rubbed his neck as if racked by pain. “And now he’s trying to wriggle it loose.”
“Nicotine,” was Jastrau’s unmerciful diagnosis. Vuldum smiled wearily.
“It isn’t only nicotine. It’s life. I swear I’d have been a different person if I’d had a room to live in with nice things around me, and not these ugly boardinghouse furnishings.”
“Oh, we all live in a shabby manner,” Jastrau protested. Now and then, a glimmer of opalescent light came from the streaks left on the windowpanes by the rain.
“Yes. We poor immortals.” Vuldum spread his hands in a tragicomic gesture. “We who sacrifice our lives for a well-turned sentence.”
He looked gloomily at Jastrau. But his long, severe face with its prominent, pointed chin did not invite sympathy. In the sunlight, his red hair shone with a pale, chilling intensity.
“Shouldn’t we go out to a restaurant and have something to eat together? Then I’d escape the boardinghouse,” he proposed quietly.
“I’m busy.”
“I see,” came the sharp reply, and Vuldum’s lips tightened. For a moment there was an awkward silence. Formerly, Jastrau would have felt compelled to oblige; there would have been a tug at his heartstrings. But now it made no difference to him. He shrugged his shoulders, with a show of regret, to be sure, and he was about to incline his head teasingly to one side when Vuldum drew a ten-krone note from his vest pocket.
“Look, I don’t suppose you could change this for me, could you, Jastrau?”
Taken by surprise, Jastrau shook his head.
“Well, then I may as well go. You’re busy. Good-bye, sir.”
His words had the faint metallic resonance that Jastrau knew so well. The door closed with a discreet, barely perceptible bang. But it was a bang, was it not? And then Vuldum was gone.
Jastrau wanted to leap up and run after him. They could, indeed, have eaten together. Vuldum was tired. He needed company. Wasn’t that it?
Wasn’t it?
He needed someone to talk to—living as he did in that boardinghouse world. He was dejected and tired. He was weak. An attack of weakness.
Jastrau got up and stood for some minutes by the window. The executioner’s apprentice! He rubbed his hand against the back of his neck and had the uncomfortable feeling that it shrank from his touch. Wriggling the axe loose. Why did people never realize when they ought to help each other?
Because Vuldum had suffered an attack of weakness—yes he had. But no—Vuldum weak? No, no, that was unthinkable.
But good God! Jastrau paced back and forth. He was going to miss Vuldum.
“Damned if I won’t end up as a humanitarian,” he sneered half-aloud.
Good heavens! This room with its glossy, varnished floor and the four shiny desks, the radiators marred by the caps of the beer bottles that he and the other journalists had opened on them, the wastebaskets that sometimes were filled with empty bottles—a recognized characteristic of all editorial premises—and the dry atmosphere of central heating. Should he say good-bye to all that? Farewell, dearly beloved telephone. A farewell poem.
He could, of course, go down to Editor Iversen right below him and tell him it was all the result of rashness. That he could do. Perhaps Editor Iversen was sitting there expecting him. And besides, he had promised Anna Marie—his housekeeper now—to do something sensible.
Suddenly he grabbed the telephone and called his home.
“Is that you, Anna Marie? This is Ole Jastrau.”
Strange that he should be so formal in giving his name.
“Is it you?” came her voice. It struck him how melodious her dialect was. “Yes, Stefan has come back.” She paused for a moment, and at that same instant Jastrau knew that he would not be going down to see Editor Iversen. “He’s upstairs at the janitor’s—drinking beer.”
“Where did he spend the night?” Jastrau asked. Now his life seemed recognizable to him again.
“He slept at Bernhard Sanders’s.”
Havoc Page 39
