The next morning Ebbe comes home in terrible shape. His jacket is buttoned crooked and his scarf is all the way up to his eyes, even though it’s spring and mild weather. His eyes are red from drinking and lack of sleep. I’m so glad to see him alive that I’m not interested in yelling at him. He stands there swaying in the middle of the floor and does a few awkward steps of the ‘baboon dance’, a solo dance he always does at a certain point in his drunkenness, while everyone around him claps. He stands on one leg and swings around, but loses his balance and reaches for a chair. I cheated on you, he says, in a gravelly voice. Dejected, I say, With who? With a pretty girl, he says, who isn’t pregnant, no, fri-frigid. Someone Ole knew from the Tokanten Pub. I ask, Are you going to see her again? Well, he says, plopping down in a chair, that depends on a lot of things. If you make that Mulvad guy play solitaire instead, then maybe I won’t see her anymore. Otherwise, I don’t know. I walk over to him, remove the scarf from his mouth and kiss him. Don’t see her anymore, I say emphatically, I’ll have Mulvad play solitaire instead. He hugs me around my waist and lays his head against my groin. I’m a monster, he mumbles. Why do you want to have anything to do with me? I’m poor and a drunk and I’m good for nothing. You’re beautiful and famous and you could have anyone you want. But, I say wholeheartedly, we have a child together. I don’t want any man but you. He stands up and embraces me. I’m so tired, he says. I can’t solve our problems by getting drunk. That damned van de Velde; it gives me a backache. Then we laugh and I help him out of his clothes and into bed. Then I sit at my typewriter and I forget, while I’m writing, that my husband has gone to bed with someone else. I forget everything, until Helle starts crying because she’s hungry.
The next day I write a poem that starts like this: Why does my lover walk in the rain, without a coat and without a hat? Why does my lover leave me at night, no one could understand that. When I show it to Ebbe, he says it’s good, but that it wasn’t raining, and that he had a coat on. I laugh and tell him about the time Edvin read my poems and said that I was such a liar. Ebbe says that he’ll never lose his way home again, since it makes me so miserable. It’s the damned pullimut, he says. To get a beer at a pub, you have to buy a glass of pullimut too, and that gets people drunk. I’m jealous and I ask what the girl looked like. He says that she wasn’t anywhere nearly as pretty as me. The kind that chases artists and students, he says. There are so many of them you could use them to feed the sharks. He adds: If we hadn’t had Helle, everything between us would still be fine. I say, It’ll return to normal; I think it’s getting better. But it’s not true. Something essential, something incredibly good and valuable between us has been destroyed, and it’s worse for Ebbe, since he can’t just write away his problems and sorrows. Before we fall asleep that night, I stare into his slanted eyes, whose brown dots glow in the light of the lamp. Whatever happens, I say, promise me you won’t leave me and Helle. He promises. We’ll grow old together, he says. You’ll get wrinkles, and the skin under your chin will droop like my mother’s, but your eyes will never age. They will always be the same with the black line around the blue. That was what I fell in love with. We kiss and lie in each other’s arms, chaste as brother and sister. After the van de Velde period passes, Ebbe doesn’t try to have sex with me anymore, even though I’m not opposed to it and I have rarely turned him away.
8
One day at the end of May, Ester visits us. She says the club meetings are falling apart, partly because of the curfew, partly because of unwillingness from the restaurant, for which we haven’t exactly been a goldmine, and partly because of complications with the members. Sonja can’t seem to finish her novel, which Morten Nielsen edits and edits. She has also let Professor Rubow read a few chapters. Halfdan has a poetry collection coming out from Athenæum, which have also praised Ester’s own new novel, which will be published in the fall. I’ve delivered my manuscript, ‘The Street of Childhood’, and now that I’m not currently writing, I have a huge void inside me that nothing can fill. It feels like everything is going into me but nothing is coming out again. Lise says that now I have to enjoy life for a while, that I deserve it after all that hard work. But for me life is only enjoyable when I’m writing. From sheer boredom I hang out for hours with Arne and Sinne, who live on Schubert Street. They’re the couple who were lying in the child’s bed, that first night Ebbe and I met. Arne is an economics student like Ebbe, and he gets so much money from home that he doesn’t have to work. Sinne is the daughter of a farmer from the Limfjord area, and she is buxom, red-haired and full of energy. She’s started studying for an associate’s degree, because she can’t stand how little she knows. I tell her that I’ve grown used to my ignorance and that I’m terrible at learning things. I tell her I got divorced from Viggo F. before I ever even finished The French Revolution.
Ester doesn’t live with Viggo F. anymore. She says she got tired of hearing how much he missed me and how bitter he was that I left him. She moved back home, but that’s not so good either. Her father is a bankrupt grocer who brings his lovers home, one after the other. Her mother has gotten used to it. You know what, Ester says, I’m sick and tired of all that forced free-thinking. I am too, and I ask her what a couple of weirdos like us should be doing when we aren’t writing. Then she tells me her real reason for coming. Back from when she worked at the pharmacy, she knows a painter named Elisabeth Neckelmann. Elisabeth lives with another woman who wears a collar and a suit and uses an amber cigarette holder, because she only likes women. And she likes me, says Ester calmly, and she asked if I might want to live in her vacation home for a while. I think it sounds nice, but I can’t live there with Halfdan, because we won’t have any income. Would you stay there with me? The country air would be good for Helle. When I hesitate before answering, Ebbe interrupts: I think you should go, he says, a little separation can revitalize a marriage. He adds that he’ll have more peace and quiet for studying without Helle bothering him. His exams are soon, and he has a lot of catching up to do. So I agree to Ester’s offer. I like her because she’s so calm, friendly and sensible, and because she has the same mission in life as I do. Ebbe promises to come visit me there, as often as he can, even though the house is far from Copenhagen, somewhere in southern Sjælland. Ester and I decide to bicycle out there the next day, and in the evening Ebbe goes to bed with me for the first time in a long while. But he does it angrily and uncaringly, as if he’s irritated that he’s still attracted to me. It’ll be different, I say, feeling guilty, after I finish nursing. I get milk on him and he laughs. He says, Yeah, it’s not that easy going to bed with a dairy.
The house sits in lowlands, with a wheat field behind it and grass sticking up and wild raspberry canes along the slope up to the road, where a pair of crooked pine trees hide the walk. Inside the house there’s a large living room, with an old-style stove at one end, and a little room with two beds, where we lie so close to one another I can hear Ester’s quiet breathing if I wake momentarily in the middle of the night. I sleep with Helle and I feel cosy and glad with her warm little body next to mine. During the day she lies in her carriage out in the sunshine, but she doesn’t tan, just like me. We both have fair skin. Meanwhile Ester gets a tan within a couple of days. It makes her teeth look like they’ve become whiter, and the whites of her eyes resemble wet porcelain against her taut brown skin. I wake up first in the morning, because Ester needs more sleep than I do. With lots of difficulty, I light the stove with wood we buy from the farmer nearby, who also sells us milk and eggs. The stove puts out more smoke than fire, and I have to light it several times before it really catches. Then I make tea, and butter some bread, and sometimes I serve Ester breakfast in bed. You’re going to spoil me, she says happily, rubbing the sleep out of her fall-brown eyes. Her long black hair falls down over her smooth forehead. The days pass with long walks, talks, and playing with Helle, who has just got her first tooth. I’ve never been out in the country before, and I’m amazed at the silence, which is like nothin
g I have ever experienced.
I feel something resembling happiness, and I wonder if this is what is meant by enjoying life. In the evening I go for a walk alone while Ester watches Helle. The aromas from the fields and pine forest are stronger than on the day we arrived. The lighted windows in the farmhouse shine like yellow squares in the darkness, and I wonder what the people there do to pass the time. The man probably sits listening to the radio; and the wife probably darns socks which she pulls up out of a woven basket. Soon they’ll yawn and stretch and look out at the weather and say a few words about the work awaiting them in the morning. Then they’ll tiptoe to bed so as not to wake the children. The yellow squares will go dark. Eyes will shut all over the world. The cities go to sleep, and the houses, and the fields. When I come back to the house, Ester has made some dinner, like fried eggs or something like that. We don’t go to much trouble. Then we light the petroleum lamp and talk for hours, with long pauses in between, which aren’t tense and sizzling like the silences between Ebbe and I have become. Ester tells me about her childhood, her unfaithful father and her gentle, patient mother. I tell her about my childhood too, and our pasts come alive between us like a section of a wall teeming with life. These quiet days are only interrupted when Ebbe or Halfdan comes to visit. Sometimes they ride their bicycles out here together, and they arrive hot and panting. We have a nice time while they’re here, but I like being alone with Ester better. She’s like a boy in her faded short-sleeved shirts and long pants and her pouty mouth with the small, upturned top lip.
On warm mornings we wash all over out by the edge of the field. Ester’s body is brown and strong with large firm breasts. She’s a bit taller than I am, with broad shoulders. I squeal when she pours the cold water over me, and my skin turns blue with goosebumps. But Ester doesn’t mind at all when it’s her turn, and she lets the sun dry her shiny smooth limbs, stretched out in the grass like a crucifix. I think I could live this way for the rest of my life. It’s too complicated to think about Ebbe and our constant problems.
The grain is golden, standing there swaying in the wind, heavy with ripe kernels. I’m awakened very early by a cuckoo calling outside the house, first near, then distant, as if amusing itself by teasing us. Finally one of us tumbles out of bed, dizzy with sleep, opens the top half of the Dutch door, and claps to scare it away. An hour later the harvester starts cutting out in the field, and the sun lifts its yellow forehead up behind the pine woods. I lie there looking at Ester while I nurse. I’m thinking that soon we will leave and each go back to our husbands. I think about Ruth too, my childhood friend, and a warm feeling leads my thoughts aimlessly around in space. When Ester wakes up, I ask her, Do you think I should stop nursing? Sure, she says smiling. Helle doesn’t seem to be lacking anything, but some solid food wouldn’t be bad. Though you’ll lose your nice-looking bosom.
I come home to a sunburned Ebbe, who passed his first semester with the lowest grades possible; but he made it. He is sincerely glad to see me again, and when he hugs me I can tell that my frigidity is passing. I tell him, and he says, Then nothing in the world will ever come between us again. I don’t think it will either. But in the following days I think about Ester’s little boyish face with the pouty mouth, and how in some indecipherable way she is the reason that Ebbe and I have become close again.
9
In the fall my new book comes out, and it gets good reviews everywhere except in the Social-Demokraten, where Julius Bomholt rips it apart across two columns under the headline: ‘Escape from Worker Street’. He writes that the book contains ‘not a single glimmer of gratitude’. ‘It also lacks’, he adds, ‘a description of our young healthy boys in the Danish Social Democratic Union (DSU).’ I cry into my ersatz tea, blubbering: But I’ve never met anyone from the DSU so how could I ever describe them? Ebbe does what he can to comfort me, but I’m not used to being criticized like that, and I sob as if a member of my closest family just died. He used to be so nice to me, I say, when Viggo F. and I visited him. Ebbe says that he’s probably angry because I left Viggo F., just like Barnhof was, and the review does seem cruel, as if there were a personal grudge behind it. Graham Greene writes somewhere, Ebbe continues, looking up at the ceiling like he always does when he’s really thinking, that there is something wrong with a person who has never had a flop. So I let him comfort me. I cut out all the reviews except the bad one, which doesn’t matter anyway, and I bring them over to my father. He glues them in my scrapbook, which is already half full. Then he says to me reproachfully, Couldn’t you have left out the part about me lying there sleeping with the rear end of my pants worn shiny and turned toward the living room? I am not always asleep and my pants are not worn shiny. My mother says, No one knows that it’s you. The mother in the book doesn’t resemble me at all. Then she tells me that she lent their copy of my book to a woman from the ice-creamery when she asked her what it was like having a famous daughter. My mother says, Before that she never gave me the time of day.
This is a brief happy period, when Ebbe doesn’t go out in the evening and doesn’t drink too much. On the other hand, it’s not going well between Lise and Ole. They’re fighting over pressing financial problems, because Ole has student debt and Lise doesn’t earn very much at the department where she works. They would die of starvation if it weren’t for the mushrooms from the landfill, which Lise picks at dusk, and she tells me she wants to get a divorce and marry her lawyer. He’s married with two children. And Arne wants to divorce Sinne, because she has a lover who sells on the black market and earns fifty kroner a day, an outrageous amount. In the evening I lie in Ebbe’s arms and we promise one another that we will never separate and never cheat on each other.
I tell Ebbe that I’ve always hated change. I tell him how sad I was when we moved from Hedebygade over to Westend where I never felt at home. I tell him that I’m like my father. When my mother and Edvin changed the furniture around at home, my father and I always moved it back. Ebbe laughs and strokes my hair. You’re a goddammed reactionary, he says. I am too, even though I’m a radical. Then his gentle, dark voice spins an unending spool of comfort and constancy into my ear. He’s developing his theories about why Negroes are black and why Jews have hooked noses, and about how many stars there are in the sky; unanswerable questions to which I fall asleep like a child to a repetitious lullaby. Outside is the evil complicated world, which we cannot bear and which wants to brush us aside. The police have been taken over by the Germans, and Ebbe has become a CB’er.fn1 It’s supposed to be a kind of replacement for the police. They have blue uniforms with slanted shoulders, and Ebbe’s uniform cap is too large for him. I think he looks like the Good Soldier Švejk in it, and when he says that he ought to join the resistance, I can’t take him seriously.
When Helle is nine months old, panting and grunting with effort, she stands up in her playpen. She grips the bars, swaying and screeching with joy. When I bend over to congratulate and praise her, my mouth starts watering and I have to run and throw up. I tell myself that I probably ate something that didn’t agree with me, but the thought that I could be pregnant makes my legs tremble. If that’s the case, I know it will ruin everything between Ebbe and me.
You’re in the second month, says Dr Herborg, my public-healthcare doctor, and he sits down, while the curtain that is always hanging between me and reality turns gray and perforated, like a spider web. A button is missing from the doctor’s shiny white coat, and he has a long black hair sticking out of one of his nostrils. But I don’t want to have this baby, I say emphatically. It was a mistake. I must have put my diaphragm in wrong. He smiles and looks at me unsympathetically. Dear Lord, he says, how many children do you think are born by mistakes? The mothers love them anyway. I ask carefully, Can’t I have it taken out? and immediately the smile disappears from his face like a rubber band gone limp. I do not do that, he says coolly, and you may know that it is illegal. Then I ask him, following Lise’s advice, if he can refer me to someone who does do it. No, h
e says, that is also illegal. So I go and visit my mother, who I know will understand. She’s sitting in the kitchen playing solitaire. Oh, she says, when she hears my reason for coming, it’s not so hard to knock it out of there. Just go to the pharmacy and buy a bottle of amber oil. Drink it down and that’ll work. It’s worked for me twice, so I know what I’m talking about. I buy the amber oil and I sit across from my mother on the kitchen chair. When I take the top off the bottle, a nauseating smell surrounds me and I run out to the bathroom and throw up. I can’t do it, I say, I can’t get that down. My mother doesn’t have any other ideas, so I walk to the government office where Lise works and I stand outside against the building, waiting for her. I can see the green roof of the stock exchange, glinting weakly in the twilight, and I remember my walks with Piet through the dark city on the way home from the club meetings. Back then I wasn’t pregnant, and if I had stayed with Viggo F. I wouldn’t have become pregnant either. People go by without noticing me. Women walk past alone, or holding their children’s hands. Their faces are relaxed and introspective, and they probably don’t have anything growing inside them that they don’t want. Lise, I exclaim as she walks toward me. He won’t do it. What in the world am I going to do? On the way to the streetcar I tell her about my mother’s horrible amber oil, which is a remedy that Lise has never heard of. I go in with her to pick up Kim from her mother’s. Her mother is an authoritative woman wearing a floor-length dress with a cap on her head because she has a bald spot. I recall that she has given birth to ten children, because Lise’s father always wanted there to be a baby in the cradle, and no one ever cared what she thought about that. When we’re back at Lise’s, she says that I mustn’t panic; there must be a solution. She’s going to ask a young woman at her office who had a pregnancy terminated illegally about a year ago. Unfortunately the woman is sick at the moment, but as soon as she’s back at work, Lise will get the address for me. Dr Leunbach isn’t doing them right now, says Lise, because he was just in jail for it. Maybe Nadja knows of someone, she says, but I don’t remember where she and her sailor live. But I can’t just wait around, I say desperately, I have to do something. I can’t work, and I’ve lost all feelings toward Ebbe and Helle. Lise says that there are probably lots of doctors in the same situation as Leunbach. She says that if I have to do something, I could call them one by one from the phone book, and maybe I’ll get lucky. In the meantime, the woman from the office might get better; so I shouldn’t lose hope. She looks at me solemnly: Do you really think it would be so terrible, she asks, if you had another child? Lise doesn’t understand either. I don’t want anything to happen to me that I don’t want, I say. It’s like getting caught in a trap. And our marriage won’t be able to bear another period of nursing frigidity. I can’t stand it as it is when Ebbe touches me.
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