The guests listened and nodded and saw Inngili before them, the beautiful Greenlandic woman with all her hunting gear. I told about my great grandfather with his bushy brows and grim words, he’d been a priest in the colony, hallelujah. Herr Löwe succeeded in raping a twelve-year-old girl before he scampered off with my grandmother’s possessions. Löwe had to leap from the edge of the ice to escape my superhero of a grandmother. She pursued him with my grandfather’s harpoon and struck him in the thigh. She was wild and frothing at the mouth. She wanted to murder him. The swine. Another time I said that Löwe had eaten himself sick on pickled auk. My grandmother had to care for him until he was recovered, at which point he hightailed it with the swag. Those tales were invaluable, more than priceless, they were . . . they were . . . indescribable.
Vita came and spied me between the kamiks and the kayaks. She’d insisted on knowing when the tour was taking place, she’d love to see it. Ane was there as well, and the curator Ulla Lund arrived together with Marianne Fillerup.
The words leaped and danced from my mouth, it was a song. I levitated, in front of those women I absolutely levitated.
“You own the floor you’re standing on,” said Vita. “Thank you for including us.”
Her gaze sucked me in.
“You’re so radiant. And wonderful.”
“Yeah, she’s good,” Ane said. “You should see some of the other things she’s done.”
For the occasion I’d put a thick burgundy ribbon in the bun on top of my head.
“Thank you for a fine performance,” Ulla Lund said. “Have you met Marianne?”
“Where do you get your material?” Marianne Fillerup asked.
“What were you thinking of in particular?” I asked.
“Oh, all of it. But maybe we should get together some other time and talk?” she said.
We arranged a meeting in the glow of Vita’s pearly skin, which radiated in my direction.
Vita’s ankle-boot heels clicked sharply on the way to the bar where we were going to drink a celebratory beer. She slid on the cobblestones. I caught her. Ane and Vita seated themselves in a corner, they had no difficulty talking, Vita’s reserve was entirely absent. They chatted, laughed at the same things. Ane asked Vita for stories from her time at the academy. Vita was Venus. She placed her hand on my thigh beneath the table and talked about professors, about sculptors and materials and projects. Everything was in its proper place. Ane and Vita talked. I ordered beers. What I’d said during the tour and the reactions and the custodian who’d stopped and listened, and the light in the room, Lund and Fillerup and the sound of the floor beneath shoes, and the dry, stable air, and the perpetual awareness of Vita’s scent, it all came rushing back.
The clock empties its contents into the streets and alleyways and into the factories. It flows away in the shape of hours and days, and nights are long, nailed in place, I watch time rise. Soon I’ll nearly be up to my neck in weeks, and everything has never been so far away. I’m drowning? Here comes the ivory-colored wax floating along. Past. And the true to life bones. Floating right past. And over there. Huts and blankets and skins are rocking in the water. Here the Eskimos come swimming. Their hair is matted in thick tufts. Their smell is harsh and strong. The women with hanging breasts and nearly toothless mouths paddle. The men stand further in along the coast, distant and perhaps hostile. Two children disappear over a field, race down to a river. The trout hover like torpedoes in the restless time between my legs. I step onto a stone. Day. The night has been reduced to a turquoise rim on the horizon. I focus intensely on the sky. Now shouts are sounding in the distance, numerous and piercing. The great hunters have returned home from the catch. The women are already dragging the fat seals along, laughing and shouting. The children come running with the great catch clapping on lines. They’re all together now. Inngili opens her mouth and shows her four teeth. She slices a strip of liver dripping red turning black. I chop the whole into small pieces and send it away with the stream. And here comes my great grandfather striding along, slightly out of chronological sync he marries ten wildlings at once and bids them welcome to Heaven. Tiny, bow-legged women and men. Turn around and depart. In the opposite direction. Away, Inngili. I can’t take anymore. I can’t take anymore. Farewell.
Farewell? What remains, then, if not that which has endured so long it’s perpetual? What’s the alternative? Yes, who’s the alternative? The me that is now is formless, not exactly dissipated, but flailing around, thrashing, reflecting off windows and surfaces. Everything changes so quickly, I can’t grasp it before it’s gone. Is it just light and movement that speeds off to wherever? If I use aperture eight and perhaps attain a hundredth part, can I reach it then?
I’d like it to see me. For it to position itself over there and tell me what it sees when it looks at me. I don’t care what I am. Just that it shows me how I am, from all angles, at all moments, no buts about it. Now I just need a camera.
Seven
Behind Ane, the apartment has a particular light. Umber. Sheets obscure the windows so that if the sun is sharp, it doesn’t hurt her eyes. She hasn’t been sleeping well at night, she says. Torben’s coming now, he forces his way past me and disappears into the living room, but he appears again in the doorway, shirtless and in his underwear gives me a look.
“It’s in the kitchen,” Ane says.
She’s talking about the camera I’m going to borrow, which she got from her father as a maternity gift. It’s already taken thousands of pictures of the baby who’s sleeping on her shoulder.
“Let me show you how it works,” she says.
“Do you have the manual? I can just read that.”
She rummages around in her bag and hands me the booklet.
Torben has put on a T-shirt, but he’s still in his underwear. His body cuts my body on the way out to the kitchen. “May I take a bath?”
“Of course.”
I stand beneath the showerhead. The fish odor persists on my skin, in the oil and the folds. I unhook the sprayer and stick it between my legs.
“Are you almost finished, Justine?” she calls. “What are you doing in there?”
“Bathing.”
“You’ve been bathing for an hour.”
“Thanks for letting me.”
“So, Torben is waiting on me. We have to go. Can you just lock up?”
He’s standing in the hallway outside the door and waiting on her—or on me? Under some ridiculous pretense or other, what does he want?
I pull open the shower curtain and douse my lips, press the sprayer into their softness, rinse their depths of semen. The dog. If that’s what he wants, he’ll get it. He stands lurking in that despicable way, his eye against the hole, staring. The water flecks my body around the nipples that swell, my body is three pulsing buds. Bared.
The apartment is empty. He wasn’t there at all. Or was he?
I’ve got a camera now, it’s a good place to start. I feel like I’m on such secure footing, it simply can’t go wrong. Now I’ve just got to take the pictures. But before that: I need a tripod, then I can do it myself, do myself, timed release.
Trine Markhøj sits in her studio among tools and wood and plaster and clay in plastic sacks piled around a square podium. On the podium is a plastic-packed figure on a modeling stand. I’ve just knocked, but Trine doesn’t look up.
“It’s gone totally downhill,” she says. “It’ll never, ever amount to anything.”
She leans on the figure that resembles a bowed body beneath the plastic.
“Careful!” I shout.
The small amount of pressure she’s applied to the body puts it on the verge of collapse. Now it’s happening, bending backward in a sluggish movement that accelerates abruptly until it topples onto the floor.
“There,” Trine Markhøj says. “That’s that. What can I help you with?”
She hunts for the tripod beneath the table and behind the cabinet.
“What a good thing you showed up,�
�� she says. “That was just the thing. The last little push. It never would’ve amounted to shit anyway. Just think, sometimes you can’t see it yourself.”
She pulls out a wallpaper roll and a pair of fishing rods. I tell her to leave off looking, but it’s no problem at all, she says, and continues.
“See, I also found my water hose.”
She tugs the end of a green hose that proceeds to unwind. Beneath the cabinet she finally finds what I came for: the camera tripod.
“If I need it, I know where to find you,” she says, and transforms to clay, brown masses fall and pile on the podium like a tower.
Bo’s come. He asks if I want to go to Vega and hear some reggae, dry, sharp.
“This tripod’s fucked,” I say.
I fidget with and press on Trine Markhøj’s tripod, what a piece of shit. Bo grasps the tripod between his hands and unfastens the clasps one after the other, adjusts, twists a little lever with a gently rotating wrist. The base rises, shooting out of its cocoon.
“So are you coming?” he asks.
His body nears, wrestles the tripod into a relatively balanced position. Three legs and an appendage. I whack the appendage that dangles and droops.
“Stop it,” he says.
“I’m deciding,” I say.
“Don’t you like reggae?”
“Did I say that?”
He leaves.
I’m left with three legs and unsteady, limp hands turning a lever.
Vita will not, she doesn’t want to, she simply will not answer the phone when she sees that it’s me calling. No. Vita. Why the fuck is she being so cold? I want to call and ask why, why the hell . . . I’ll think of something to ask . . . and then she doesn’t answer.
Someone is knocking on the door. Ane walks in with the baby in a sling on her chest. He’s sleeping.
“Torben’s application has been turned down,” she says, waving away Vita’s ghost with a hand.
“We were really counting on him getting that grant. They know good and well we’re new parents . . . and how much the money means to us,” she says and starts crying.
The baby wakes up.
“Have you seen her?” I ask.
“Who? Who are you talking about?”
“Vita. I’m talking about Vita. Have you seen her?”
“No. But . . .”
Ane stops crying and that’s good.
“Wasn’t she going on vacation? Wasn’t she just talking about that?” she says. “I don’t know what we’re going to live off of. I just don’t know.”
The boy starts crying.
“I just wish something in life was dependable. I can’t take this. Shit, we need something to live off of. What about when I finish up . . . we’ll just have nothing, I guess? Spit out into reality with no food and no clothes.”
She’s taken the stroller and rolled home again, home to Torben. She’s left me with a dull feeling. I know she’s right, and she knows it, too, even though we pretend it’s nothing. It’s bad enough with Torben, he deserves to get the short end, but there’s an even bigger problem for Ane. Myself I don’t even want to think about, just forget it. We discovered it right when we entered the academy of arts, and now the smoke’s in the clothes.
At one of our very first joint critique sessions, our painting instructor told us that it was likely that just one, maybe two of us, would ever amount to something, would continue doing art. But he said that he thought we should just drop it, quit for our own sakes, that it was a mistake that we’d ever entered this arena. He didn’t think it was possible for us girls to create anything truly interesting. It was always about womanhood, motherhood, or something else sweet and funny and cute, small animals with big eyes, fairytales and feelings. You’re terrible concept artists, he said, and meant it.
It was a spoonful of flour in our mouths that we believed to be sugar. We sucked and sucked and thought we’d heard wrong. The instructor’s eyes swept over us while we stood pressed together in a workshop stall across from the five paintings that were being critiqued. The paintings showed a woman in different stages of dissolution. Mascara ran down her cheeks. The woman held a wine glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other. The painter in question had slack shoulders. But then the instructor said it wasn’t necessarily her he meant, she really was very sweet. Ane sat and pressed herself into a corner. A couple of weeks later she was scheduled for a critique session with the same instructor. It was already on the calendar.
One Friday after a bunch of openings we had met our painting instructor in the city. He was standing at the bar together with a couple of professors drinking highballs with ice.
“Bitches,” he called.
Me and Ane and a girl named Katrine.
“Girls, come join us for a drink.”
The first professor downed his drink and had trouble walking away. Our instructor stared at us and called for the bartender to hurry and bring three double Havana Clubs.
“You’re all three beautiful as goddesses,” he said. “Come on, girls, come, come, come.”
He hustled us between himself and the remaining professor, who followed his colleague’s example, packed up, and left.
“Hey, girls. It’s just us now,” the painting instructor grinned, guzzling his highball and ordering another.
Katrine left on the excuse she was going to the bathroom.
“Well now,” said the instructor. “Ane. When are you going to show me what you can do?”
Ane blushed, but the instructor drew her closer and kissed her hair.
“Fuck me, you’re so hot,” he said.
I kicked him in the shin. He jerked back, still with Ane under his arm. His drink splashed over her and down my arm when my boot struck, and he stiffened. Ane twisted free and left.
“Hey,” he said. “That wasn’t what I meant.”
He set his glass down.
“Excuse me,” I said.
He looked completely off. I thought he was about to start swinging or shouting.
“You’re welcome to see my things,” I said.
“I don’t know anything about videos,” he said.
“How can someone know nothing about videos?” I asked.
“I don’t like watching them,” he said.
“What are you drinking?”
“Rum.”
“Two rums,” I told the bartender. “I also do things other than videos.”
“Talk to Ole Willum,” the instructor said. “That’s who you should talk to.”
And he downed his drink and left.
Rikke’s standing in front of the gate, Rikke with the soft arms and big hair, the person who’s so preoccupied with herself and her career and others, including me. As soon as she sees me, she shouts that she heard about the fire from Per Olsvig. I don’t remember saying anything to him about it, but yes, I did.
Rikke, whom I know from Juanna Gomez’s guest instructor days, is someone I’d really like to avoid, just like that, but I’m sucked in her direction. Much of what I decide gets nullified and now, against my will, I’m on my way over to talk to her.
“It’s totally surreal that your house should just burn like that when you think back to your experience with Juanna,” Rikke says. “If it weren’t for the fact that it was so long ago, someone might almost think it was a piece you’d set up. Did you film it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, the fire?”
“My camera burned along with everything else. And my computer.”
“But what about that exhibition you’re having? Isn’t that just around the corner? What are you showing?”
“Paintings, I think.”
“Okay? Crazy. Is it anything I can see?”
“Sometime or other.”
“We’re just in the process of researching an exhibition, and I was thinking . . .”
I’d like to set her hair on fire.
Juanna is a Mexican artist our professor, Gretha Müller, knows. She works with p
sychoanalysis in her works, and with hypnosis. The first thing she did when she came to the academy was to lie us down in a circle. Rikke, who never misses an opportunity, and who always participates in the good exhibitions, and who generally gets a lot of things handed to her, whispered that a number of places ached within. One of the other girls admitted that she’d consider murdering a certain person if it weren’t for the fact you’d get punished. There was also someone who thought he was a vampire. He’d seen an a video online and now he knew there were others who, like himself, longed to taste a woman’s blood.
Juanna had learned hypnosis from a relative and she thought it was important that each of us try it out. Rikke was anxious to see me enter a trance. There was no reason not to do it. I wasn’t afraid, neither of the trance nor of Rikke.
“Stay calm,” said Juanna. “Most people don’t even realize they’re hypnotized. That means there’s nothing bizarre or mystical about it.”
Juanna’s snake eyes stared into mine. She said: “You’re completely relaxed. That’s right, good, very, very good.”
My neck hurt, I wasn’t relaxing at all. My eyelids fluttered, danced, wouldn’t stay shut, and I itched everywhere, behind my knee, beneath my foot.
“Now you’re completely relaxed, yes, completely relaxed, that’s it,” Juanna said, “just close your eyes.”
“I can’t keep them closed,” I said, “because then they can’t see.”
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