Justine

by Mondrup, Iben; Pierce, Kerri A. ;

  I grab a bottle of rum from a kiosk, and dub the bottle Haddock. The name fits the patch sitting snug against my eye hardly even irritated. We wander along the bridge and hunker down on the wharf, just Haddock and me. We look at the water. Out across the harbor. People in silhouette. We kiss, a long sloppy kiss, kiss we, it burns. Then we take a walk along the water, across the bridge, and out onto Amager Fælled, the nature park. Here everything is topsy-turvy. Out of the twilight emerge four, five large tents and a row of baby carriages, next to them sits a woman who’s incapable of standing, she’s totally drunk and has puked down one of her pants’ legs. Beneath a tent canopy a group sits shouting around a table. A heavily bearded guy yells he couldn’t fucking care less, a woman shouts that, fuck, she’s there too. I step on what’s left of a garden torch. I can’t figure anything out, and at present Haddock isn’t much help, the place reeks strongly of piss, and over there a woman is striding over a garbage sack that’s burst open on the grass, she’s intent on joining the others, nothing else matters, she knocks into a skinny guy who’s also striding along complaining that his tent collapsed, someone sliced holes in the canvas, he shouts, they also tried to set it ablaze, and no one at the table understands a thing. The tall man performs several high knee-lifts and jogs on, “Damn, that’s far out,” mumbles the lady in the grass, who’s lying completely prone now. “Totally way out,” I tell Haddock and look at my feet. We’ve left the path, somehow or other we’ve wandered a ways into Amager Fælled, on the horizon I can see Ørestaden, and the path must be around here somewhere. And indeed, there it is, right there. It was just crouching in some bushes. Now I’ll just follow it back to The Factory, I’ll even snap a couple of self-portraits before calling a taxi.

  They crowd around me, no matter where in the city I go, it’s entirely unprovoked, they shove forward, trying to get a look, here comes Hans Duns, the . . . He just resigned as professor at the academy of arts, right after our Kassel trip in the spring, and now he’s getting younger and younger, soon he’ll start his basic training over again.

  Oh, no, he’s coming over, shit, shit, shit.

  “What did you do to your eye?” he asks.

  “Nothing.”

  “One of your eyes is all red, did you know that?”

  “Yeah, something to that effect.”

  Duns laughs and claps me on the shoulder. Clearly, he knows what I’m about.

  “You’ve always been something special. When are you finishing up at the school?”

  ”Next year.”

  “Tight. I was wondered if you’d like to have a peek in the gallery at some point? I have an exhibition. The whole thing’s already sold beforehand.”

  Hans Duns laughs and slaps my shoulder again. This can’t go on, we’re not comrades, or are we? How intimate does he think we are?

  “We should also figure out something about a performance.”

  “I don’t perform anymore.”

  “Really? Since when?”

  “I sculpt.”

  “Oh yeah, fuck, you’re together with Vita Laura. She’s quite accomplished, isn’t she.”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s she doing lately? Is she still working on the stuff for the opera?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hey, here come Asgar and Torben. Hey, you two!”

  Yes, it’s high time to hightail it, because there’s Torben, and him I can’t take right now.

  The exhibition arena was a writhing human body the day Documenta opened to the public. There were press viewings the days prior, and many well known artists had stuck around. They circulated among us.

  Ane and I were there with Duns’s department. Gretha Müller had gotten sick and couldn’t travel, a plus for us, Duns said, drawing us along, a rooster in his element.

  “It’s time for you to start networking,” he said. “That’s what you’ve got to do if you really want to get somewhere. I did the same thing when I was at the academy.”

  “What did you do?” one of the other students asked.

  “Went to openings with people I hadn’t met before. You’ve got to be pushy, that’s the trick. That’s the only reason I have so many contacts all around the globe. I’m pushy.”

  We stayed in a hotel on the edge of the exhibition arena. Ane and I shared a room. Ane, who didn’t want to miss out on the breakfast buffet, went down to the restaurant with the others. By the time I got up, the day’s program had already started, and I saw the others hurrying through the exhibitions behind Duns, who pointed out important things.

  That evening we sat in a pub and ate sausage and sauerkraut. Duns was generally satisfied and bought a round of beer.

  “Did you all see the videos hanging up by the ceiling in the long hallway?” I asked. “They’re totally fantastic. You all should go down and see them. They were made by some Inuits in Canada. They made a whole TV series about life back in the old days.”

  “I hadn’t heard anything about those videos,” Duns said.

  It disturbed him, I could tell, that something was out of his control. “Strange. Where did you say they were?”

  We rotated places so that Duns could sit next to me.

  “It’s very interesting the way you use yourself in your work,” he said. “Why don’t you just take the final step and give a live performance?”

  “I’ve done that plenty of times,” I said.

  “I’m having an exhibition in my gallery in the fall. Couldn’t you come and do something in that context? Something crazy?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It depends on what the subject matter is.”

  “I loved the video that got you into the academy. You had my vote immediately.”

  “Many thanks.”

  “None of that, damn it . . . it was good. Because it was so wild. So direct . . .”

  I pondered the meaning of wild. Ane, who had joined us, threw me a look asking if I knew where this was going. I sent her a look back that said: Keep your pants on.

  After the pub closed, we headed to the massive opening party at the train station. Duns tried to dispatch the boys in the direction of a couple of big named artists who stood talking in a crowd. They passed the bar on the way and grabbed more beers instead. It didn’t take long for the group to fall apart. Duns’s whole demeanor said that we were a bunch of wet blankets, but he walked us home.

  We sat and chatted in the hotel lounge; a couple of people headed up to their rooms to keep drinking, I wanted to go to bed. Ane decided to hang out for once, even though she was pregnant. Duns overtook me at the elevator.

  “I was heading up to watch some TV,” he said. “Do you want to watch something together? I have a bottle of whiskey. I bet we can get some ice at the bar.”

  He had a large seventh-floor room with a view of the exhibition arena. People were still out on the square beneath the street lamps, I saw, pulling the curtains wide so the night could stretch out on Duns’s king-size double bed. Behind me the toilet bowl resounded, Duns’s was clearly no cautious rim-pisser. The next moment he stood in the room with two glasses and some crackling ice.

  “Cheers!”

  The bed pillows were enormous. Duns watched while I drank my whiskey. Then he smiled with his overly small and yellow teeth.

  “I smoke forty cigarettes a day and drink four liters of cola, and I’m addicted to whiskey,” he said, draining his glass.

  He positioned himself at the open window and lit a cigarette.

  A song by Radiohead was playing on the TV, which hung from the ceiling. Duns took his clothes off and sat on the edge of the bed so he could see the screen. Then he turned toward me and touched my nose with his index finger, it smelled of nicotine. I wondered if his dick was shrunken and coiled in his underwear or whether it had unfolded. They played yet another Radiohead number. Duns lay flat on his back and watched TV.

  I fell asleep next to the professor. At some point, I woke up and removed my pants and jacket. The next morning I flashed him my
breasts while I was dressing. I took my sweet time. We rode the elevator down to breakfast and went to our separate tables.

  When I came back to the room, Ane was still asleep.

  “Where have you been?” she mumbled.

  “I’m a creep,” I said.

  “If you were with him, then yes.”

  He was so beautiful lying there in the bed, spilling tautly out. His haunches, with his leg and foot thrown out to the side, while like a small bird on the nest: his cock.

  “Don’t you want to take off your clothes?” he asked.

  “I will,” I said.

  “So do it. Take them off.”

  “Okay.”

  “Shall I help?”

  He rose onto his elbows.

  “You should lie down,” I said, pushing him back onto the mattress with a foot.

  “So we’re not messing around, huh?” he said.

  “No, we are,” I said. “That’s all we’re doing. Look what I can do.”

  I towered above him. He was a vaulted landscape below, his chest two hills that heaved-sank, heaved-sank, his eyes twin black pools.

  I pulled my pants off.

  “Can you see?”

  “I can see your cunt.”

  “How does it look?”

  I parted the banks and let my finger glide along the river. Smooth.

  “I want to touch it.”

  “You will.”

  “Can I?”

  I put my foot on his face, the heel in his mouth, crushed his nose beneath the arch.

  “No.”

  “Do you know what you’re doing?” he asked.

  “Your dick is hard,” I said and turned around.

  “I can see your ass.”

  “Can you?”

  I parted the hills, let my fingers wander along the cleft, land in the grotto’s ring, enter.

  “You like that?” I asked.

  “I love it.”

  I sat my ass between the hills of his chest and took his bird into my mouth. He moaned and bucked and slapped me hard with a hand. He heaved and sank and tossed me. I grabbed him around the neck with his head on the mattress pressed my fingers in, into his eye sockets.

  “Now you’ll be all eyes.”

  “You’re nuts.”

  “Yep.”

  “I’m coming.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m coming on your ass.”

  Twelve

  It’s totally confusing. I’ve been to Amager Fælled again and the tents are nowhere to be found, not a single cigarette butt, not a can, not even an old shoe. But here in Vita’s kitchen the stench from the box of potatoes is spreading, the carrots have shriveled up like little old women, and what’s even worse: Something’s knocking on my cranial door, something wants in. Now!

  It’s no zombie, but memory coupled with red wine glasses standing provocatively on the table, broadcasting their significance to the room, I can’t escape it, it’s here:

  It must’ve been just past midnight, it was dark anyway, and the allotment society slept, just a couple of the houses had their lights on. At Vita’s, I leaned my bike against the hedgerow and saw another bike there, huh? Nothing to see, just a light in the kitchen window.

  In the yard. The window was a movie screen on a dark wall, the light streamed across the ground, and there she was, Vita, on the couch. She was leaning back against the cushions with a glass, oh no, holding it by the stem. Next to her, almost on top of her, sat a . . . woman . . . a woman with short, bristling hair. The woman glanced from her book at Vita. The way she smiles in a loving way. Vita smiled back at the short-haired woman, beamed, opened her mouth, drank, her lips tightened, relaxed, smiled. The women caressed each other, up and down, up and down in sure strokes. They caressed. They kept on caressing.

  Then the short-haired woman closed the book and drank Vita instead, who caressed, mouths moved, they kissed. They stood up, in sync they stood up from the couch and vanished from the picture, perhaps to the bathroom? Gone. The light from the window fell in a fan to the ground, then they returned, oh, no, oh, no, naked. The short-haired woman walked to the window, she leaned forward with huge, dangling breasts that bobbed, no, pitched from side to side like waterbags. She blew out the candles. When she filled her lungs, her breasts heaved from side to side . . . then all was dark.

  I couldn’t see in the dark and tripped over something and fell. It was a box, black, with a label on it, and then I recognized it. Vita and I had retrieved the box one evening when we’d wanted to watch my videos. They were all my recordings, all the mistakes and also the good minutes, everything that never amounted to anything, along with the things that actually did. It was embarrassment become amusement to watch those recordings with Vita. It was amusement become embarrassment to see that box in the night.

  She’s right, I really should get rid of this key, and how I do long to be rid of it. I’ll never come here again, now that there’s nothing to come for. The key is furious and almost too large, but I take a gulp and wash it down with tapwater, oww, it rends the whole way to my stomach.

  The evening it burned, just a short time ago, she stopped by, yes, multiple people stopped by my house, people of importance, suspicious, one might say, if one was a detective, and a detective of sorts, that’s me, hunting for a place of rest that perhaps doesn’t exist.

  Vita didn’t want to talk. Actually, she wanted to leave again as quickly as possible. Her replies were curt, almost superficial.

  “?”

  “No.”

  “And what if?”

  “Forget it.”

  “Couldn’t we?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Never?”

  “No.”

  “.”

  Not a single word about the short-haired woman.

  When I suggested we grill up some sausages, she put down her half-full glass, she hadn’t tasted the wine, which, by the way, was wonderful, a special kind of grape or something.

  “I can’t, Justine, I just can’t keep up.”

  “Keep up with what? Is it because I want it, or is there something else I want that’s a problem, or what is it you think I actually want?”

  “It’s nothing specific . . . or . . . it just doesn’t fit. To be honest, there are a lot of specific things I just don’t like. I’m just done, you need to understand that.”

  “Something I did?”

  “Stop asking questions. We’re way past the trivial. It’s the whole thing part and parcel, and it’s also just a decision. I think it’s best for us both. I’m sure you’ll be able to see that, perhaps not now, but . . . later.”

  Suddenly, there she was in the armoire, banging and protesting, she screamed so loudly, unable to break free, the blue wardrobe door vibrated, the key sprang from its lock and landed on the floor, chink.

  “Just relax, you’ll get out, I just need to take care of something,” I shushed her.

  Finally, it was quiet, just the sliding noise of a surrendering body and a deep sigh.

  “You’re sick, Justine,” she said from inside the armoire. “You’ll regret this.”

  I relaxed with my wine and sausages and was a sphincter and a whole mess of other things.

  I grilled all my crap around ten that evening in the yard under the sky and saw Torben walking up. Was he here? Shit. How could I have forgotten? Why do I forget so much? What’s up with my brain, I can’t fucking stand it nothings working I can’t control shit!

  I’d killed the rest of the bottle, and another bottle, and considered things from a variety of different perspectives and seriously needed something else to think about, and so he came as called, I myself had picked up the phone.

  “There you are.”

  “Are you talking to me?”

  “What do you think?”

  “What are you doing out here?”

  “Visiting you.”

  “I didn’t invite you.”

  “Oh, excuse me, then which other Justine was it who
called?”

  I didn’t want to talk, no problem, he didn’t want to talk either, we both wanted and needed something else.

  “I’ve brought you something,” he said.

  “I don’t want it here.”

  “Do you know what it is?”

  “Strong beer. Isn’t that what you drink?”

  “You’re way off base.”

  “That, I don’t want. At least not out here. Come with me into the house.”

  ”Do you mean it? Take a look. Looks tasty, don’t you think? Should I take you here in the grass?”

  “No.”

  “Just look how big it is.”

  “I know.”

  “And so? Don’t you miss it?”

  “Go home to your wife or come inside.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Like hell.”

  “So touch me.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Can’t we?”

  “Never.”

  “No?”

  “.”

  Luckily, I had a bottle of gin I could open. Torben tucked away his limp dick, zipped his fly and drained the last drops, together we looked out over the green tree crowns becoming black against orange changed to turquoise, and what became of him? We grilled sausages, and then what? We went into the house with the armoire that was no longer thumping. I headed into the city. But before that? I went to Kluden, played it cool until I was so drunk I could no longer manage the cue or the balls.

  Grandpa died in the garden house one winter day. He sat in his recliner with a blanket over him and fell asleep, just like my grandmother, and in a strange way, if I’m finally able to see the positive in it, who wouldn’t want to go like that? Not by murder, not by suicide, not incrementally by destructive behavior, but undramatically, a death come when least expected, just . . . and that’s how Grandpa died.

  He’d put the first charcoal strokes on a new painting, and then he’d sat down to let the motif form before his eyes, I thought. Perhaps he’d considered how exactly to come at the painting, had laid back his head, perhaps he’d snoozed, his heart, at any rate, had stopped beating, bum bum b u blmm . . .