by Dorthe Nors
It’s quiet on the other end of the line. Not even the slightest rustle from a bag of soil being lowered into a shopping cart.
“But who gives a rat’s ass about that?” asks Sonja. “As long as Marie’s doing well. It can’t be that easy, with her Indre Mission background, to have Tonny in tow. Or maybe it’s the Mission background that compels Tonny to go around airing his tulip. One time we were supposed to bring in urine samples for the school nurse, and Marie forgot her pee, and in retrospect it may well have been that in spite of all the hogs her dad had in the barn, they didn’t deal with pee at all in the Mission. At least not girl pee.”
Now Kate sighs.
“Tell you what, Sonja—Frank’s traveling, so why don’t we chat another day? The boys are coming home for the weekend and we’re going to have pork roast, so I also need to stop by the supermarket.”
“Pork rift?”
“Pork roast!”
Sonja sits down so she has a better view of the sky. It’s a good thing she moved the bed, because now she’s able to see upward, and there’s still a buzz of helicopters, and she tells Kate that she once had her fortune told by a fortune teller. It’s Sonja’s impression that at this point in their relationship, she can tell Kate whatever she wants to, assuming her sister answers the phone, because Kate sidesteps everything. Just so there are no speed bumps in the conversation, and while Sonja does miss her sister, at the same time it ignites a yearning in her for fire. She wants to flush Kate from the bushes. Kate needs to show herself, she needs to speak plainly and wield the sort of arms, legs, and persona that would want to embrace her neighbor.
“Yeah, I went to this party at Molly’s, you see, and there was this fortune teller who I didn’t manage to stop in time. She interpreted my future, and I’ve forgotten most of it, but as far as I can recall she was quite detailed. You remember that German translator? Paul? Well anyway, she said something about him, and the weirdest thing about it is that I can’t remember the rest of it now. In a sense I lost my future because she told me about it. That’s been bugging me lately, and it’s not going so great with the driver’s license either. I think my driving instructor has designs on me. He probably thinks I’m desperate, and I am, but not in that—”
“Did she say anything about me?” interrupts Kate.
“Who?” asks Sonja, and Kate is not walking around a garden center.
That sound in the background is a golden retriever scratching on a door, and Sonja’s not so unhousebroken that she can’t recognize the sound of a washing machine announcing that it’s finished.
“You want to know if the fortune teller said something about you?”
“Yes,” says Kate hesitantly. “It could be quite amusing to know. Since I had my knee operated, it hasn’t been working properly.”
“That doesn’t sound so good,” Sonja whispers.
“And we’ve got this new neighbor. Some divorced man or other from Aalborg, and he’s got a job out with Frank. Such a loner. I haven’t talked to him, but he walks around over in his yard, setting mole traps and glaring over the hedge.”
“I don’t think she said anything about you,” Sonja whispers. “I can’t remember what she said, but I’m sure your neighbor’s not a violent criminal.”
“One never really knows,” says Kate.
Sonja watches the rotors reflecting in the sunlight, and then she lies down.
“Are Mom and Dad doing okay?”
“They’re fine, and now I’m by the cashier, so is it all right if we …?”
Kate is standing by the cashier in her imaginary garden center. She lies expertly about the vegetation around her and says it was good to hear from Sonja, and Sonja says it was good to hear Kate’s voice, and afterward, when they’ve hung up, Sonja folds herself up on the bed. It’s been ages since she’s closed herself up this way, like a drying rack, but at the moment it’s the only thing that can provide comfort. The only acute medicine, and in the distance there’s buzzing. Somewhere in Copenhagen the helicopters have risen with a purpose, and Sonja wishes she were hovering up there with them. Not so much in the middle of her life as with a view of it.
19.
THE BES T THING IN THE WORLD was to be taken up on her lap. To be lifted up and pressed into Mom’s turtleneck. Mom’s breasts under the fabric, the smell of her throat, the shiny picture cards in Sonja’s fingers; the confidence that all would turn out well. Next best was the weight of Dad’s hand on her head when she’d made him laugh. Gotten him to look at her as if she came from another planet. After these came playing with the others, but even better was playing by herself. Freedom resided in unpeopled spaces, in the bottom of closets, and as far back as she could go inside the chicken coop. A trail led out to it. And into it.
Once I hid during gymnastics, Sonja recalls, back behind the equipment. I sat there under the vaulting horse and sniffed the leather and the untold generations of sweat. I remembered how Dad had fallen in love with Mom because she’d shone like a kingfisher in Skjern. The others were playing pirate tag in the gym, but under the horse, I sat with my knees up by my nose. I suppose I was painfully aware of my isolation and at the same time, hopelessly enamored with its possibility.
It’s green around her, green and warm, almost stifling, and she glances at the path in front of her. She walks as quickly as she can. She’s trying to keep up.
The spirit of the times demands one thing of us, thinks Sonja. Other people demand a second thing, and we ourselves something entirely different. If you’re not careful, you stop getting it all to fit together, and then suddenly you’re a helpless piece of meat trying to catch up to your driving instructor.
Sonja looks up the path. There’s Folke’s little ass, bobbing away from her a bit farther ahead. He zigzags in and out of the rosebushes, while his slender guitar fingers point out what she assumes are a product of the local fauna.
There’s a mound, and there’s another.
Folke’s pointing at features that look like barrows, overgrown with grass, and Sonja’s been following him while he’s on the prowl for these great piles of earth, just as she’d once been on the prowl for wild oats.
Sonja did the driving on the way here, and it went pretty well. As long as they stay away from Vesterbro, she’s amenable to instruction. With Jytte, Sonja was able to manage Istedgade by closing her eyes, but she hasn’t been that deep into the heart of Copenhagen with Folke yet. Today they drove out of the city, and she knew already when she slid into the driver’s seat that something was afoot.
He just handed her the keys, first gear, look back, flash flash with the blinker, and then they were off. He was a tad timid too, his arms crossed, and then that smell in the car.
Sunscreen?
It isn’t Sonja’s job to have an opinion on where the car’s going. It’s Folke who’s got the map in his head, and it’s Sonja’s lot to be subject to his will. He can lead her wherever he wishes. She doesn’t orient herself geographically at all, as she’s busy with the gears and the practicalities of the car. “Throw the car, throw the car,” he’ll say, and then she’ll pretend she has physical contact with it. She doesn’t really, but when he says “right” she turns right, “left” left. Folke is Sonja’s lord, he shall not want, and at one point out along Gammel Køge Landevej, he told her to execute a simple left-hand turn at some unexceptional intersection. Before she knew it they were out in the open. She thought it was because she was supposed to demonstrate once again that she’s best when she’s driving backward, but when they reached the end of a network of gravel roads riddled with unmarked intersections, Folke told her to park on what looked like a lawn.
“And now we’re getting out of the car,” he said, taking the keys out of the ignition and clenching them in his fist.
She had no desire to leave the Batmobile’s interior. There was hardly a cell in her body that did not feel disinclined, but at some point she did have to learn how to put wiper fluid in the car. Something to do with the hood.
“We’re going this way,” Folke had said, and off they went, because in this relationship he’s the one who’s directionally equipped. What does Sonja know about driving instructor pedagogy, other than that the student must relinquish her free will? Folke went first, then Sonja. In through a thicket of rugosa roses, down a trail by the water. Over past a windsurfing club and then beyond, beyond, with Folke’s long legs a stride ahead the entire time.
Am I paying for this? Sonja wondered, instead of enjoying the prospect of the Avedøre power plant. Isn’t this precisely the sort of thing I should refuse to pay a single crown for? she asked herself, and then Folke opened a gate of the type that keeps in sheep.
“After you,” he said, for she had finally halted.
“I really don’t know …”
“I just want to show you Tippen,” he said, hitching up his sweatpants in that way she doesn’t care for, but in his face, in his eyes, Folke looked like a kid, so now they’re walking, Sonja behind and Folke’s little ass ahead, and he’s pointing out piles of earth.
“There’s one, and there’s one more. You see ’em?”
The hillocks stick up out of a flat, grass-covered plain. It’s pretty enough, Sonja can see that, but she’d have preferred to be here alone. In the early summer there must have been lots of elderflowers, and the roses are faded now, but Sonja can see the bushes flourishing hither and yon—rugosa roses, sweetbriar roses, dog roses—roses aplenty. In among them, the trunks of birches poke up pale and proud, though a garden tractor has gashed a track through the wilderness.
It doesn’t count then, thinks Sonja. That’s definitely cheating.
“There’s one more, and there’s another. Exciting, huh?”
It’s the strategically laid-out mounds that Folke wants her to notice, and then they’re almost down by the water. In the distance, Avedøre Power Station towers like an intergalactic castle. Somewhere over to the left, Amager Nature Reserve stretches out toward the airport, planes are aloft, and a freeway bridge spans the horizon, though she can hardly hear any traffic. They should have sent a poet, thinks Sonja.
“Gorgeous, eh?” says Folke.
“Yeah, some nice mounds,” says Sonja.
“They’re scrapheaps. Garbage!” cries Folke, and he puts a hand to his beard. “Garbage, ha!”
They’ve turned so that they’re standing with the water on one side and a large mound on the other, and it’s this mound that Folke dips his head toward now.
“That’s the remains of the Gestapo headquarters downtown, the Shell House. They didn’t know where else to cart the shit, and so someone came up with the idea of just hauling it out to the dump at South Harbor. It’s hard to see it now, but you have to imagine that in the forties, this here was a scrapyard. A rubbish tip, Sonja. A war zone. German trucks, the Gestapo, Danish forced labor, just picture it.”
Folke rotates, his arms extended.
“It was an incredible Allied action,” he says. “The Germans had stuck the resistance fighters out of the way just under the roof of Shell House. They were sitting up there twiddling their thumbs like human shields, but the Allies knew that, so they flew in from the side, boom. It wasn’t just that they got the Nazi swine on the lower floors, because they did, but lots of the resistance folk were lucky enough to escape.”
“They also hit a Catholic school in Frederiksberg.”
“You know the story?” Folke asks, astonished, and he walks over toward the scrapheap.
“A bit,” says Sonja, and then Folke and his long legs start clambering around in the scrap.
He shows her the tender shoots of elder and birch. He shoves small cement blocks to the side, and he holds up pieces of building debris so that she can see it better.
One morning long ago, thinks Sonja, some trash hauler wrestled all this crap up onto the bed of a truck with bad suspension. He shoveled Shell House up off the street, corpse stench and all, and then he drove it out here. He gazed over at the Amager reserve and shoveled all the misery into a pile. The human capacity for moving on is unique, thinks Sonja. Our adaptability’s remarkable. Except for mine. Mine limps behind, she thinks, looking out across the lacerated landscape, which is not a landscape but a garbage dump that’s been allowed to grow afterward.
If the panoramic experience of nature can be compared to drugs, then this is a wad of used nicotine gum, thinks Sonja. But people like Folke fled the countryside generations ago. What do they know?
“It’s lovely here,” says Sonja. “You come out here often?”
“I was born over there,” says Folke, pointing in the direction of outer Vesterbro. “So we’d come over here to play and make forts and kiss girls.”
Something gives in Sonja, and she starts walking. She walks down to the water. There’s a path down there, and she bears right. It might be the way they came, she can’t remember, for this is not her territory, and she has no clue how they came down here or how she’ll get back to the vehicle. It’s Folke who decides, and he’s also the one with the keys. Some distance out in the water, a sail sweeps past, and then another. It’s the windsurfers, and it’s good to have humans nearby. Potential witnesses, thinks Sonja, who can hear Folke hurrying along behind her.
“Easy, easy!” Folke calls out, catching up with her. “What’s up with you? The car’s back up there.”
Now he’s pointing again, but in the opposite direction, and Sonja’s jaw tenses. He starts to grasp her upper arm but she isn’t having any of it, she snatches her arm from his grip.
“Glad to hear it!” she yells, while the waves slosh the old tires, the used condoms, the cola bottles around. “Why the hell can’t I just learn to drive?”
Folke takes two steps back. He does this demonstratively, with his hands raised a bit in the air, a bit like John Wayne when someone’s finally caught him at close range in some town far out on the prairie. The locals have hidden in the saloon, the brothel, in the trees and scrub, but now Sonja’s calling him out on a trash trail in South Harbor.
“I just want to learn how to drive, okay? I don’t want to have my hand held, I don’t want to be massaged, hugged or interrogated, to be hit on or coochie-cooed. I want to learn to drive that car so I can drive over there!”
Sonja can point too, and what she points at is Avedøre Power Station, but also behind it, at Denmark and the world in general.
“I want an ordinary Class B driver’s license, and all the other bullshit you people dish up is stuff I got wise to a long time ago. I’m over forty, and I’ve learned it the hard way, so don’t push your Gestapo on me.”
Folke lowers his arms and walks carefully over to the little bank that slopes down to the shore. Then he sits down on the edge and smacks his hands against his kneecaps. His beard curls down toward his driving instructor’s belly, but the top of his head is ruddy and bare, and now he raises up a bit, up with the crotch. He works a hand down in his pocket, and up comes a little tin. Folke gets the tin open, and a finger deep into it. On the tip of his finger, Sonja can see a cream-like substance, and it’s going onto Folke’s head. Now he’s smearing his bare scalp in cream. Now he’s sitting and looking out over the water. A black windsurfer sail crosses in toward him from the one side, a gull flutters past from the other, and there are coots too. Seen with his back to her, Folke looks like someone who’s had his ears boxed. A male ego in retreat, fragile and easily bruised, someone to treat with kid gloves, yet at the same time human too. And Sonja will be damned if that trick doesn’t work every time. If a man just has to seem like a human being, she thinks.
“It wasn’t meant in that way, you know,” Sonja says. “You’re an excellent teacher, it’s not that.”
“It’s no damn picnic going to work and then being yelled at like that.”
Foot doctor problems, thinks Sonja, but she knows that ploy and it doesn’t interest her, she doesn’t want to go there, and her silence prompts Folke to embellish his alibi.
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“It’s not so often I drive with someone my own age,” he says. “Those eighteen-year-olds are nice enough, but they’re kids, and they’re into some crazy shit.”
“The future, for instance,” Sonja suggests.
“More like tattoos and shit like that,” says Folke.
Sonja sits down on the bank at a safe distance; she doesn’t want him to get confused, but to judge by his face, he isn’t. He’s embarrassed, his lower lip protruding like Dad’s would when Mom rebuked him. When his boyish nature received a rap on the knuckles, Dad would wallow in misgiving, and then it wouldn’t be long before Mom would indicate the gun cabinet and suggest he go out into the farthest part to shoot partridge and hare.
It was all about reestablishing the sensation in his cock, Sonja thinks, and Mom knew that. By and large, that was something that women learn with time: how much psychology resides between men’s legs, and if you can be bothered, you learn to deal with it, and if you can’t, then you sit here with your driving instructor looking out across the water toward Hvidovre Harbor.
“Well, here we are,” says Folke. “Sitting in the middle of nature and catching our breath.”
“This isn’t nature,” says Sonja. “Back where I come from, we’ve got a heath so large and ancient that it’s developed its own consciousness.”
“It probably has,” says Folke. “All the Jutlanders I’ve met are a bit quirky, and I’m going to teach you how to drive. Don’t you worry your head about it,” he says, and then he laughs a bit goofily.
Sitting there, with his long legs and cloven hooves hanging over the bank, all he needs is a pair of antlers to appear a little stately, Sonja thinks. A handsome man, in theory, but other women’s men are a closed chapter, and now I want to go home. Yes, I want to go home.
