by Dorthe Nors
“Free market forces,” says Sonja and moves her legs; there’s really not room for them under the café table.
The aloe wobbles a bit, and Molly proceeds to talk about her clients. Sonja’s certain that that’s forbidden, but no one’s very concerned about oaths of confidentiality anymore. The private has become so trivial and pawed over anyway, and who cares, and so she sits there and watches Molly expound upon someone else’s catastrophe. Molly’s had a role in the client’s life, a life that has gradually turned into chaos. There’s hardly anything the client can figure out anymore, so she’s started to starve herself. And besides the diet, she’s also begun seeing another man, and now her nerves are in tatters—but that’s why it’s good she has Molly, because Molly has the perspective you’re supposed to have at the clinic. She’s got the perspective, and a barred grille she can yank down in front of the jewelry shop. The dairyman’s deficient ability to love? History. Skjern, and the long, death-bringing canal that was once the Skjern River? Also history. Now the river wriggles like a worm again, out toward Ringkøbing Fjord. One time Sonja biked as far toward the fjord as she could go, and out there lay a stag. Drowned, perhaps, but in any case it was lying on its side in the process of advanced putrefaction. Now the stag has drifted out to sea and the dairyman’s dead, but there are still farmers there hunting for one more square foot to raise corn in, and the place you come from is a place you can never return to. It’s transmogrified, and you yourself are a stranger.
“How’s it going with the driver’s license?” asks Molly.
“Bumpily,” Sonja replies.
She relates how Folke pulled her close in the driving school office.
“You think I’ll have trouble with him in the car?”
“I think you already have trouble with him in the car.”
Molly dips a wedge. Then she looks at Sonja and says she could also try her luck. See what Folke has to offer.
“Oh Lord,” says Sonja, but the images have already made themselves known:
Sonja and Folke on the backseat of the car. Or in front, her one leg over the headrest, the sole of her other foot on the instrument panel. Arms splayed and folded the best they can, Folke’s little ass sticking out the door. The slap of belly on belly, the penetrations, the damp spots on the blanket.
“And what’s that supposed to lead to?” Sonja asks, thinking of Paul the Ex, whose ass was relatively compact as well.
“A bit of street action,” says Molly.
“He’s married to a doctor.”
“So?”
Which men belong to which women isn’t a topic that interests Molly. Life ought to be kept at a boil, dramas a-simmer, and beneath the love you never had there should be the roar of tinder-dry twigs catching fire.
“It’s just not me,” Sonja says, and she peers up Vesterbrogade.
A helicopter approaches overhead and follows the street up toward Frederiksberg Boulevard, where it veers off. It’s yellow and orange and looks like the kind that flies doctors around sparsely populated areas. But that’s not what’s best about it. What’s best, Sonja thinks, is that it can rise straight up and down between asphalt and sky, and she starts to hum. Molly’s in the midst of her burger and a long explanation of love’s paths and detours, but Sonja’s sober, and she hums. She hums the one about the little lark. She hums the passage where the bird takes flight. You take the straight way from Earth to Heaven, she hums.
8.
Dear Kate,
So now we’re writing each other postcards? you must be asking. But it’s just that I found this card with heather on it and thought you should have it, since I suppose it must be blooming now, the heath. The other day, I also came to think of how you’d often find me out in the rye. Funny, because I haven’t thought of that in years. I’m sure I wasn’t easy to keep tabs on, ha-ha! Hope you’re doing well. As for me, I’m finding Copenhagen on the muggy side. The driver’s license is coming along (another ha-ha!) and so’s work. I’ll set aside a copy of the new Gösta Svensson for you. Then you can get it when we see each other. Or I could send it—it’s up to you. Hello to the family, and I’ll talk to you soon.
Hugs, Sonja
Sonja’s folded the postcard and stuck it in an envelope. All that’s left now is the addressing and stamping, but she’s not really sure about that. In truth, she wasn’t thinking of sending the card. If she were going to send something that sounded like her, it would sound different, but she’s not sure that Kate likes her when she sounds like herself. She decides not to send the postcard. I should have written it to Mom instead, she thinks. Mom loves heather.
Sonja takes the postcard back out of the envelope. She places the card with its pleasant image of heather in the wastepaper basket beneath the desk. Then she takes out a clean sheet of paper and her favorite black marker for writing with:
Dear Mom,
I was just sitting here thinking of you. I also thought of you the other day, because I was thinking of the rye. I used to just out there in the rye, enjoying myself. Sometimes Kate would drag me out. I don’t know if you can remember it, but I remember you standing behind the windbreak and calling me. It was nice that you knew where I was, even if it was a place I wasn’t supposed to be. But why wasn’t I actually supposed to be there? What was it that Kate and Dad had against it? A couple of stalks, good grief. But in any case: I miss places like that. My apartment doesn’t do the trick. Sometimes I lie down over in the cemetery to get a bit of the effect. The other day I nearly sent you a text saying, “Hey Mom, I’m lying in the graveyard.” (Ha-ha-ha!) I’m not, not in that way anyhow. And fortunately, you aren’t either. Not yet, that is. But what am I going to do when you are? I think about that often. That I’m going to miss having family members who understand me, and it’d be nice if I could get Kate in conversation. I know it makes you sad that we can’t seem to get along. I’d like to. I’m also trying to, but never mind that now, because I hope you and Dad are doing well. You guys should stick around for years, of course. Otherwise there’s nothing new to report, other than it’s not going so hot with the driver’s license. I can’t change gears. I’m so fond of you, Mom.
Hugs from your Sonja
Sonja regards the letter. Then she crumples it up and throws it in the wastepaper basket. It’s lying on top of the postcard now. It’s lying there crumpled up with its black letters, on top of the picture of heather. It’s hard to find clothes to fit the body you have, and it’s hard to find words to fit the people you love, Sonja thinks, looking at the aloe plant that Molly brought in her purse. “I take a leaf every morning and cut it into pieces,” she said. “Then I rub it around my face. It soothes and moisturizes.”
Sonja runs a finger along the aloe’s sharp, tongue-like leaves. With her other hand she probes her face where the skin is soft and working its way loose.
She tries to recollect the fortune. She rummages around in her mind for what the woman in the curry tunic said as Sonja had stood there, leaning up against the fridge. What lay in wait for Sonja as a woman? More of the same, or a break? The unhappy infatuation with Paul, naturally, but what else—a tragedy? A catapulting, a happy ending?
She can’t recall. She’s removed it from her consciousness and placed it in storage. She’s afraid that it’ll become true if she remembers it, or else she’s afraid that it’ll lose its power if it’s brought to light. She’s afraid of not believing and she’s afraid of believing, and she remembers how, several years ago, she went into the church back home. She just wanted to sit a bit and talk about the fortune with something bigger. It was nice to let go of things and then gamble that Something Bigger was listening and wouldn’t blab to Dad, who feared Something Bigger, because its existence would tear him from the reality he knew. Members of Dad’s family shouldn’t tear themselves from the reality he knew either and then leave him there alone, but here she was, sitting in Balling Church. First pew, the one up by the baptismal font. On the chancel arch there hung a pale Jesus, and then there w
as the altarpiece, where the risen savior was depicted with a defective left leg, for the hardest thing to draw is foreshortening. Anyone who’s tried to draw a person from below knows that; giants become dwarfs, but there Sonja sat, chatting with Something Bigger about the feeling of not being able to fill her life in the right way. It was pleasant, Sonja remembers. There was something reassuring about sitting there and trusting someone besides herself.
It also felt as if someone had answered inside her, telling her she mustn’t lose her grip, for there was someone to whom she would one day become a source of pleasure. Someday she would come to someone’s rescue, yes. She must believe that. In the end she had said the Lord’s Prayer, the way Marie had taught her when they were kids, with a singsong emphasis on the words, and then she went out into the vestry before anyone discovered her sitting inside and being holy. She also had to pee, but then the door was stuck. The door leading from the vestry was jammed. She heaved and hauled on it; it wouldn’t budge. It was as though her fear about roadside churches—that someone would lock her inside—had been realized. Her communion with Something Bigger turned to silent panic. It was nice talking to Jesus and those guys, but she didn’t want to be locked up with them. She also had to pee, she really had to pee, and over there was the collection box, there was the font, there her sacrilege, so she heaved and hauled on the handle till she barked the skin off her knuckles, and finally it hit her that she had her phone in her pocket. There was contact info for the church employees tacked to the bulletin board. The sexton’s name was Niels Jørgen, and she had a hard time placing him in Balling’s topography, but what she did was to ring up Niels Jørgen. She remembers the conversation clearly as she sits and rubs a stub of aloe vera around her face.
“Niels Jørgen,” Niels Jørgen said on the phone.
“Sonja Hansen. I’m over in the church and can’t get out.”
“You can’t get out?”
“I’m standing in the vestry, and I can’t budge the latch. I’ve just been in here for a little while, sitting in the church. Did you lock me inside?”
The instant that Sonja asked about it, the door opened. She’d attempted to try the door one last time, just to illustrate to Niels Jørgen that she was trapped in the situation. And then she wasn’t trapped in the situation after all.
For a long time after, she felt that whenever she told someone the story, the power would drain out of it. And there was power in the story, something significant in it that was hard to put into words. She still feels that way about the fortune. She doesn’t believe it, but there’s something there that might vanish if she lets light fall upon it, so she keeps it in the dark, down in the dark with her future, and the aloe around her face.
And her and Kate? When did their break start to show on the surface? A few years with separate lives, and then a microscopic crazing in the enamel. She’d noticed the tiny cracks, and no doubt Kate saw them too, but Sonja can barely recall when it became obvious to her. She supposes it was fall. Yes, it was one October, she thinks, and they’d taken a walk around Balling, she and Kate. On the eastern end of the village outskirts lay Østergård. Sonja remembers back when the farm had resembled an ordinary farm, but after Bjarne took it over, the barns sprouted narrow extensions that stuck out on every side. As the two approached the farm, they managed to get through Kate’s routine worries, her fear of burglaries, and the pain in her knee.
But then at some point they’d reached Østergård. The farmhouse sat there diminutive and forlorn in a small cityscape of long extensions. From inside the piggeries came the rustle of bodies against metal, and while Kate busily expounded on her workaday fears, Sonja caught sight of the narrow strips of ground left between them. No architect had been consulted on how to best expand the farm, or how the ground plan could be harmonized. The pig barns had been knocked together in no time, and there were all these narrow strips of dead space between the extensions.
“See,” Sonja interrupted. “That’s negative space there. If the Devil himself had to live someplace, he’d pick one of these appendixes.”
Kate stopped and stared into the long dark ravine between a piggery and an equipment shed. At the end of it was a gray cinder-block wall, and out of the earth there poked withered weeds of some indefinite species. The ground reeked of ammonia.
“Don’t you see?” Sonja asked. “Only the Devil himself could live in such an intestine. Any life, any form of aesthetics, communication, or love—they’ve all vanished from in there. It’s the ultimate non-landscape.”
Kate stared into the constricted patch between piggery and equipment shed. Her eyes wide open in the twilight, a childlike expression on her mouth. Silent.
“Not even chickens could survive in there,” Sonja went on. “Not even a couple rows of potatoes,” she said. “A dead landscape.”
Then Kate had started to walk, quickly. Sonja had to almost run after her, and she wanted to ask what was up. But when she caught up to her, Kate refused to be led or driven. It was all about the pork loin that had to go into the oven, Frank who had to be picked up from soccer, and his sweatsuit wasn’t going to wash itself, was it?
Sonja looks at the aloe where the leaf’s broken off. Small droplets are oozing from the stump. Essential oils, no doubt, soothing. So she reaches for the pot, which feels nice and warm. I can use the pot in any case, she thinks, and she sticks her hand down into the soil and uproots the entire plant. The contents of the pot feel sticky in her hand. The leaves of the succulent poke up from the soil like knives. Or tongues. Or fingers that are reaching for Sonja’s face and mouth. A vulgar plant, she thinks, throwing it into the wastepaper basket. There it lies, atop the heather, atop the letter, atop the things she cannot find the language to say and the people she most wants to say them to.
9.
BECAUSE FOLKE’S LARGE in every way, he’s got a car to match. That’s not something Sonja had considered in switching driving instructors; that she should go from Jytte’s Hyundai to an Audi Q5. It’s the size of a camper, black as a Batmobile, and Folke’s sitting in it with beard out-thrust.
“Today I want to test you,” he says.
“Test me?”
Sonja casts a sidelong glance at the bag of Gösta that she’s just deposited on the backseat. The books are for Folke to take home to his wife.
It’s also Sonja’s plan that they’ll talk about Folke’s wife as much as they possibly can. It should be as if she’s there with them in the car. The wife and Gösta and Folke and Sonja.
“I need to see, of course, what you’ve learned with Jytte, so now we’re going to drive into a neighborhood where the intersections are unmarked.”
“You’ll help me with the gearstick, won’t you?”
Folke points down in between the seats.
“There it is.”
“It’s not the placement, it’s the handling,” Sonja says, but she shouldn’t have.
Or rather, she shouldn’t have said it in quite that way. Now Folke’s compelled to quiver his eyebrows. He’s compelled to tell her that obviously she’s a big girl. Sonja pretends that she doesn’t understand the sexual innuendo. She’s not paying four hundred crowns an hour for sexual innuendo.
“It’s nice that your wife’s a reader,” she says, putting the car into first gear.
She’s able to do that just fine. She’s also able to look back at her blind spot. She signals and drives away from the curb; second gear.
“Pretty good,” says Folke, and he directs her into a neighborhood with unmarked intersections.
Neighborhoods with unmarked intersections are Sonja’s bugaboo. It’s not only that nobody knows who’s supposed to yield to whom. It’s also because people park along the curbs. That makes the streets so pinched, they get scarily narrow and are studded with cars whose doors open suddenly, temperamentally. Sometimes the parked cars function as hiding places for kids, and kids’ lives are governed by impulse.
Back when Sonja drove with Jytte, Jytte also kept telling h
er to “STOP DRIVING INTO OTHER CARS’ EARS!” Naturally, Sonja didn’t know what that meant at first. But the ears turned out to be their side-view mirrors, and Sonja wasn’t supposed to drive into them, and now Folke and Sonja are alone in the car. Sonja pulls herself together in every way. She and Folke both have their seats pushed back so that their long legs have room. Her feet pump the pedals, her fingers clench the wheel. They clench the wheel so tight that she automatically veers left when she lets go with her right hand to change gears. It’s difficult to find third. Her driving’s unsteady, and Folke’s Audi is too big for the street they’re going down.
“Work with the car, use your body, use your body!” says Folke.
But Sonja’s body cannot get from second to third. She’s stalled twice now.
“Then let’s pull over here to the side,” Folke says in a soft voice.
He helps her to turn the wheel as well. Someplace over in the bottom of Folke’s side of the Batmobile he manages to brake, and now they’re satisfactorily stopped behind a Toyota.
“Give me your hand,” Folke says, and she doesn’t want to, but she gives Folke her hand anyway.
He takes the hand and places it on the gearstick.
“Can you feel it?”
She can, and then Folke places his hand over hers. Sonja can now feel both the gearstick and Folke’s hand. Then he begins to move their stacked hands: the gearstick is activated.
“You have to imagine an H with two segments poking out of the middle, and then we do like this …”
You cannot make diagonal movements with the stick, Folke explains. You cannot go from second to third by taking a shortcut. You have to follow the construction of the gearbox. That all makes sense to Sonja, but she has a hard time concentrating with Folke’s hand on top of hers.
