Vita went to the opening. She wanted to see the clinic and its particular architecture. I thought: Hell, this is a snoozefest, no one understands the paintings, not even me. They weren’t especially good. I sold two to the art society’s president, but he was almost obliged to purchase them.
The exhibit hung for two weeks until Ane came home and repeated what Randi had said, what I already knew anyway, that no one understood the pictures. If only they’d been attractive or in some other way agreeable to look at. I went out and took them down one Monday afternoon. The woman behind the counter got a strange look on her face when I began cutting the lines.
“There’s been a misunderstanding,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”
Ten
The armoire was drunk with memory, and now it’s burned together with everything it held. Flakes of remembrance float in the air, cast about in the stream, disperse, collect, settle on skin and in hair that’s cut short. The armoire was full of shit, that’s what it was, full of old shit. Truth be told, I couldn’t stand that armoire, not even now when it’s been razed to the ground. Now it just fills up even more. All that was forgotten, is.
In her armoire, a blue armoire she never came and collected, there were three photographs. I inherited it from Grandpa, a farmhand’s armoire with a large red poppy on the door that hung askew, it didn’t close tight. In one of the pictures she was small, she was sitting on the handlebars of a bike, Grandpa’s, with a bonnet and round cheeks. In another picture she was young, fifteen years old, I think, with a fine hairdo, the kind they wore back then. In the last picture she was together with my father, they’d just gotten married, my father, my mother, my father looking handsome in his suit, she in a very short dress and knee-high boots, they looked so happy and in love, and they were, Grandpa said, so in love, inseparable. She was the most beautiful girl in the whole wide world.
When I stood to the side and studied my reflection in a second mirror, I thought that our noses were similar, we both had that kind of long, straight nose, and there was also a certain something about the mouth. “Yes, of course you’re beautiful,” Dad said, “you look just like yourself.” The boy’s body I inherited from him, the oversized feet, and also the hands, not too big, but bigger than the others’, and the broad shoulders, those were his as well, he said, my father.
I sat inside the armoire with Mom, and her cheeks were bright red in the pictures; there was also a likeness about the eyes, the way they slanted down toward our ears. Whatever she was inside, that’s what she was inside the armoire. If I stretched my arms out, I could touch around me everywhere and the world on all sides, see me, see me in the dark, and she touched me with her pupils, fondled and touched, “it’s fine, everything is good in here, I exist, therefore you exist,” “why aren’t you in here then, out there, where are you?” “it doesn’t matter, everything already is,” “you need to be here now, inside, not outside,” “I’m here,” “where?”, “here inside you,” “but I don’t want you like that,” “it’s already like that, my sweet, there’s nothing to be done,” “but I want you here.”
“Is it true what he says, that my mother was drunk the entire time, why was she like that, and was it really like that?” Grandpa dropped the bag, egg whites splattered across the floor, yolk too, yellow on the ground, “oh, for fuck’s sake,” he said, “nothing to be done about it, so what did he say, your father?” “just forget it, he didn’t say anything, it doesn’t matter,” “no, what did he say, he said your mother was drunk, that she was drunk the whole time, is that what he said?” “just forget it, I didn’t mean anything by it, I was just talking to myself, it’s not important,” “yes, it’s important, and now you tell me exactly what he said, you tell me right now,” “no, Grandpa, stop, ow, that hurts, let me go, I said it was nothing, let me go, I’ll yell for Dad,” “go ahead and shout for the S. O. B, but by Satan you’d better shout loud, he doesn’t know how to help, anyway, if you think that, if there’s something he can’t figure out, the idiot, it’s how to help a woman in need, no, my girl, I tell you what, you can’t count on him, he’s only out to save his own skin, that’s all he’s ever done, by God, argh, the big ass, what did I ever do to deserve such an impossible son-in-law, gah, for fuck’s sake!”
Grandma was dead, she died quietly and peacefully, nothing to be done, that’s how it should be; it was also for the best, she hadn’t been doing well. She was buried next to the church. My mother was supposed to come, but never showed, nothing to be done, no one had really expected it, I wasn’t doing too well, my stomach was tense somehow, but in a way I was also doing okay, even though I’d like to have seen her, it was nice that she wasn’t there, nothing to manage. I was with my father, I said that we’d better hurry up, yes, we’d better, it was getting late, we arrived just as the doors were closing, the music was audible out on the steps. Dad opened the door to the church, there weren’t many people inside, just a bunch of empty pews, though way up at the front there were a couple of people after all; I couldn’t find Grandpa. Dad said that we should sit in the back, so we sat on a long pew in the corner right beneath the candles, the light dripped, down the stick, down the wood. On the pew in front of us there was no candle, but a small flower instead, and so they alternated, candle, flower, candle, flower, candle, flower, candle, flower, all the way up to Grandpa who was sitting way up front, I’d caught sight of him, his hair stuck up over the pew back, it was him, no mistaking it. The music stopped, no one was singing along anyway, aside from the priest and Grandpa and a couple of the others, I didn’t know who they were. The priest began his sermon, loud in the church, Grandpa’s head lifted, he turned around and looked back at me, his face said: Come up here. My father had folded his hands, he didn’t see Grandpa, or perhaps he did, I don’t know, but he looked at me and said: You can go up there, I’m staying put. He said it with his eyes and jerked his head toward the casket in the aisle in front of the priest, white with flowers on top, light red roses, I believe. I couldn’t stand up, no matter, suddenly the whole thing was over, and then I could stand and walk down the aisle toward the door, we waited outside, Grandpa emerged with the casket along with a couple of other men. We were also in a hurry, we were going to the swimming pool, but we said goodbye to Grandpa, small beside the casket, she was within, no doubt, with hands folded across her chest, isn’t that how they lie? Folded hands and closed eyes, just like she used to sit in the chair back home watching things unseen or TV, and she’d fallen asleep in that chair, Grandpa had found her, but by then it was too late, he’d been down in the basement, it was over, nothing to be done, and that was also for the best. Grandpa didn’t cry, but in some way he was probably sorry. The casket was enormous! Hauled away in a trailer with windows so we could see the roses lying on the cover, a ribbon and a wreath, and then the car drove away, Dad clapped Grandpa on the shoulder: It’ll be okay, you’ll see, the best that could happen, how great that she should just happen to fall asleep like that, so quick and painless. How did he know it was painless? No clue, but Grandpa looked as if he wasn’t listening, he just sank together and became a point on the gravel path.
Grandpa said that Dad was so busy playing smarty-pants at the university that he didn’t have the time to take care of her, getting clever was much more important, oh so clever, and what in the world did he need all that knowledge for, his head just ballooning and getting bigger and bigger until it was no use to anyone? A complete waste of time, nothing that benefited my mother certainly, she’d needed him, that’s right, she’d needed help, he’d been too busy to see it, he simply didn’t get it, right there before his eyes, like that! Unfortunately, I’ve got some work for the department, Grandpa said in a voice that was supposed to be Dad’s, sorry, I’ve got no damn time. So she got tired of it, he thought only of himself when she gave birth to me, how could she make him understand that becoming a mother wasn’t easy?
In some way Grandpa did blame my dad, but whose fault was it really? Simply take the blame and le
t it wander from the one to the other, I didn’t know what to believe, they said so much, all of them, Dad, Grandpa, well, there were just the two, but they did talk about it often. And what about Grandma? It was undoubtedly wrong that she just sat at home, she never went out, and did a doctor ever come visit her, did she ever go see the doctor, did anyone actually even know what was wrong with her? How should I know, I wasn’t a doctor, Grandpa probably knew what he was doing, he was pretty smart, in any case, he was a good man, and that was more than you can say of so many others.
She stood at the train station with her hands in her pockets, was it her, was it not? Visiting her had been my idea, this lady with the skinny legs, the knees bulging beneath her pants, would she be wearing a yellow jacket, would she still have those pants on, is a mother more substantial than the lady or the woman? What’s the difference really between a woman, a mother, a lady, and a person of her age? She fit the lie, they’d all lied, he wasn’t trustworthy and he knew exactly what he wanted me to believe, about her, too. There she stood.
“You’ve gotten so tall and beautiful,” she cried, she laughed, “just think, Mommy’s little girl has gotten so big.” Would she smell like that? No, she wouldn’t. Or rather, yes. “Hi Mom,” I’m not a little girl, I wanted to say, but didn’t say it. Would the gaping hole of her mouth be missing a tooth? Would she have wrinkles, black in the crease upon crease of her upper lip, just like the man at the pub? Her nose wasn’t straight. She had curly, short gray hair, she smelled, and with that we took the bus.
A woman she wasn’t. It was hard to say why exactly, she just wasn’t. There was nothing feminine about her, like her very sex had vanished, had shriveled to dangling skinflaps, her breasts to hanging bags, skinny, lanky, slack. She was porous, shaky, with yellow nails and with a voice that grated unevenly, and the various cardboard wine boxes that leaked and ringed the table, red, blue, purple.
When she returned home that morning, she had an entirely different odor, rather bland but nonetheless sharp, a mixture of grease and skin and hair, somehow gray, something that was dry and waxy, that flaked and caked off. The smell stuck in your nose, full of a heaviness that bored its way into your nostrils, swirled around your hair and up to your brain, swirled dismally, then down your throat into your lungs, penetrating your every cell and settling like fat around your heart, more dismal still. When one hasn’t bathed in a long, long time, it smells like that.
And liquid splattered the linoleum in the kitchen through the hall and into the bathroom, on the tiles, splish and splash, and finally on the sink’s porcelain, a clump here: She’d eaten something after all.
And the buttocks that were nearly gone, just two hollows, the skin almost drawn away, sunk down, hanging in strips beneath the gray, brown pimpled skin of her ass, would come off in layers, stinking of cessation that stretched to eternal suspension, time that stalled or dropped into the bowl along with the rest of the liquid and cough, cough, void, completely devoid of hours.
And still. No nasal sounds even, no snoring or mumbling or tossing, just silence and the body, quiet as a mouse beneath the covers, a quiet little mouse.
And while it lasted: My pants that almost became one with the chair, an adhesive bond that you neither would nor could, yes, SHOULD break. The silence was so still and eternal, and that was good somehow, because at least then nothing was happening.
I heard her fumble with the key in the door, now she was finally home, sneaking past the room where I lay, the yellow jacket coughed and laughed at something, the grumble of a zipper, and then the door to her room closed, silence. I saw by the clock it was four thirty. And woke again, a smell in the room, I couldn’t figure out what it was, smoke crept through the crack above the door, and I sprang off the couch, we were on the eighth floor, and ran to the window, ran to the door, a voice called, took my pillow, held it before my face, opened the door was full of smoke perspiration, redolence and skin, couldn’t see her, away in the smoke, small flames on her coverlet, and smoke crawling up the walls, fire creatures and trolls with pointy hats crowding under the ceiling, a blanket, ran into the kitchen, her voice that called from the eighth floor, ran back to my mother, fire, fire, fire on her clothes, pulled and heaved, out of the room my head roaring at the door firemen, masks, suits, my mother and me, carry me, carry me, and cars on the street.
My father sat at the bedside and mumbled, “oooh, ohhh, ahhh,” he said, not another sound, he looked up at me, “oooh, ahhh,” and then he wept.
Something that both ticked and dripped, she lay in another room like a lady packed in white with wild red eyes, a ghost because she’d fallen asleep, now her lashes bubbled, resembled live lava. She’d set fire to her coverlet. It was her own fault. That she’d melted.
“I’m a huge idiot,” said my father, “what have I done? What was I thinking?” nothing, “we’d be better off if she was, her life is not, it never has been, it’s always been a life full of, I can’t take any more, no, no more now.”
I didn’t think, and the silence that dripped and bleeped with a small blip, blip was as it should be, on the brink of nothing, just the red in the white and soon to be no more dripskin in tatters with ruffles, it .
And the body. They bore her body out, we weren’t allowed to watch, it wasn’t pleasant, the dressings were bright red, wet, and one of her breasts was burnt off along with a portion of her underarm, like a muscle perhaps, an overdone roast, coal. What do you call a breast, anyway, once it’s been burned? Not a word from her, and suddenly she was gone, out of bed and out of sight, away, away, away, infection, and then she was burning again.
Here’s what filled the armoire: memory’s cremated bones.
Eleven
My bed is wet. I’m splashing in water with my head full of memory loss, all those memories I left on Kluden’s floor, and it feels simply wonderful, weightless. Now I meet ground. My legs are still floating in water. I pull them in and stand.
I’m staying at Hotel I’m Someone Else. Noted, and so what? The me who’s at this hotel likes that the old, warped, panel door hangs ajar, and has stopped trying to close it. There are people in the hall walking back and forth, going out, in, passing the gap in the door, there’s flickering light and sounds that rise and fall. Right now I’m here. In a moment I’ll be at The Factory.
Here’s The Factory. I’m inside. A moment ago I was outside. I took pictures in front of the container, I was a workman, a graffiti artist, an addict, I was someone who fell and busted a knee.
Trine Markhøj has relocated to the hall and has cleared a space, obviously she’s starting a new project. For the moment it’s just a long iron skeleton wrapped in chicken wire, a diagonal pattern in space. Four young men are helping her out, they slap clay onto the skeleton, hum, gossip about who got into the academy this year. Two of them applied, but didn’t make it. Next year they’ll try again, they say, and in the meantime they’re working here, and here is where I am, and there’s Trine Markhøj.
“Hooray!” she shouts. “Hooray! Hooray! We’re finally starting.”
She dries her hands on her pants and takes out a drawing that she unfolds, a sketch of something that resembles a piece of excrement.
“A sausage,” says Trine.
“A sausage?”
“Something like that. It’ll be thirteen meters long with the amount of clay we’re using,” Trine says and disappears.
I disappear too, or rather: I’m right here inside the studio. The door hardly closes thanks to the enormous brown bolster expanding and dividing and creeping down the corridors, or so it seems, and the camera is out of batteries. Shit. There won’t be too many pictures anyway, because my eye is itching again, though it has also left me in peace for a couple of days. I’ve simply got to get out of here.
I’m wearing a patch, somehow the darkness and the pressure help, fortunately the air is clear, my destination not too far, the hotel is close, but what’s happening here? The small plaza is frothing with people, they’re all flowin
g down the street in the same direction.
It’s got to be Bo. He said the soup kitchen was up and running, today they’re setting up the area. Come by, he said, but I declined, and now it’s nearly impossible to avoid turning up, one is simply swept along to the street kitchen that’s been put up on the plaza behind the hedge, boiling pots await people standing around in clusters, skinny jeans, hoodies, it looks like the whole academy has turned out, not to mention a bunch of others, bicycle wagons packed with kids mingle with old strollers, raccoon tails, uniforms, and layer upon layer of plastic bags.
There’s Bo standing with a girl who introduces herself as Åsa. She’s busy unpacking paper plates and towels. She holds out her hand and smiles with an open face, blonde hair and a nose ring, the clink and chatter of multiple bracelets. Bo is tending the pot on the burner, tomato sauce, Åsa laughs the entire time, she shouts in Swedish that she’ll grab the bread. There’s a motorcycle cop on Dybbølsgade.
I drink a beer. Here I am leaning against the wall, right on the brink, can anyone see me? I recognize every one of you this warm evening, and man, am I exhausted. You laugh and talk, I’m blue becoming violet turning dark, like the sky. Now you’re headed off to Kluden, I could go with you, but don’t bother.
Justine Page 9
