Vivian

by Christina Hesselholdt

  And we thought that we would finally have a little peace after the succession of nannies we have struggled with. The previous one had severe anaemia (it turned out) and was always so tired, every day after lunch she fell asleep with Ellen on her lap, and when I came home late in the afternoon, they were both sound asleep, but then obviously Ellen couldn’t sleep at night; the one before that (and that was a pity) had hit her head falling from a tree and was not exactly age appropriate, it was like having a big kid in the house, she missed her mother and comfort ate and then just shoved the dirty dishes under the bed and left them there; and then there was Susan who rode strangers’ horses in the paddock during the night, I caught her in the garden early one morning with spurs and a bridle in hand.

  Later in the day they played out in the garden, Ellen was with the children from the road, and I received confirmation that I had been right to keep Viv. They were down in the wild part of the garden. She filmed them, but when I came out of the house, she started to film me. We never ever get to see any of the many films or photographs of us. When I ask, she always says that her things are in disarray and she can’t find anything, or if I press her, she promises to look for them, but nothing ever comes of it. I’m not entirely sure if I like that. The children lay behind the shrubs pretending that the shrubs were houses, they held the large leaves up in front of their faces and knocked from inside – I think they were pretending to be apples. Finally, they tumbled out of the bushes, bursting with laughter, and Viv said: ‘I think I’m going to make apple sauce out of all this nonsense.’

  Viv

  Let’s bring it out in the light, so it doesn’t remain secretive and grow dangerous in the shadows, in total obscurity: before I started to stuff food down her gob, I sensed the evil pass through me, it came alongside me and cut me off the road by turning in front of me. It added an extra profile, so I suddenly could be seen in three profiles; that is, with the evil as the third.

  I would really rather not add more evil to the massive amount that already exists in and emanates from this country. But the evil entices and carries me off. I want to be rid of myself, I want to put myself down.

  Narrator

  At this point I happen to think of one of my first days on a drama course I took when I was young. The teacher had a couple of large suitcases with him, and when he turned them upside down (he was probably gentler than that), a colourful array of masks were revealed, and we (the students) were asked to each choose one and put it on. I chose a blue half-mask. Then he told us which masks we had chosen. Mine was a (blue) phantom spirit. He encouraged us to look in the mirror with the mask on, and the mask, which left the lower part of my face free, drew attention, as I saw it, primarily to the lower part of my face, which no longer looked like it was mine – I could see both my father and my grandmother in it, and rather than feeling possessed by something wild or unrestrained, I had become possessed by my family, by Jutlandic soil. Well, then we had to find the mask’s sound. Mine didn’t say very much. But you can bet that its counterpart did, a red phantom spirit that the oldest student in the class, a woman in her sixties, had put on. It practically screamed. Then the teacher said that now we had to see what the masks wanted from each other, and the red phantom spirit started sniffing at me more and more intensively until it suddenly knocked me, the blue spirit, onto the floor, because even at that time I was delicate, and launched itself on top of me and started to perform something that resembled mating. The teacher had to use force in order to manage to separate the red spirit from the blue one and to get me back on my feet.

  Mrs Rice

  You allowed yourself to be overpowered by a sixty-year-old woman? Was she a soldier? A police officer? Was she employed as a security guard?

  Narrator

  I think that’s where the game ended, and it was clear how things could go when the masks took over. The elderly student’s violent conduct was one thing, another thing was my brutally exposed lower face, the way I was tormented by my family for the rest of the day; I would say that is the closest I’ve come to a psychotic experience: that my relations had taken up residence within me and were not easily expunged.

  Sarah’s psychologist

  I’ve started to think of memories as Thought Phantoms.

  Viv

  Caroline from the camera shop asked if I wanted to come round to her place and see the moon lose its virginity, well actually she put it like this, ‘see the moon get dragged out of its virginity’, but I couldn’t make it fit in with everything I had to get done that night, I didn’t see the landing live. So for me the moon is still a virgin. Besides, I haven’t visited anyone (other than Mother naturally), I mean strangers, since I visited Nicolas Baille, also called Grand-père, and I didn’t really like the thought of stepping into a home without having to carry out a job there. It suits me far better to have a chat with her over the counter, at the shop.

  Ellen

  When we’re in town, first we go into the long store and all the way to the back, to the candy, where there are free samples. Miss Maier has brought her purse with her. I keep watch and tell her when all the shop assistants have their backs turned at the same time. Then she dumps the whole tray in her purse. We get one piece from her purse every time she takes a photo. She takes a lot. The purse is usually empty when we get home. Her father once worked at a candy factory and brought candy home for her and her brother. He was the one who made sure that the machines worked so that the candy turned out right. The candy that looked wrong, he was allowed to take home. But he didn’t tamper with the machines so that they produced misshapen candy that he could take home, because then he would lose his job, and no one would get any candy. The misshapen candy didn’t taste any different. It could have been a gummy bear without a head or sugar dusting, or a chocolate coin on which the year couldn’t be made out.

  Viv

  My masterpieces from Champsaur have surfaced again. I can’t think of anywhere I have not looked for them, but nobody’s been in here, have they? And the moment I found them I sat down and wrote to the photography lab in Saint-Bonnet – so that I didn’t have a chance for second thoughts. I told him that I have quite a lot of interesting things lying around, a huge number in fact, and things where I have tried a bit of everything. In short, I asked him whether he was interested in working together, whether he would make prints for me again. I remembered to write that he should use the same paper as he used for the postcards. It turned out so well that time. And he lives so far away. Things would not get confused. The person I am here and the person I was there. And in a way, neither would the photographs and myself. He would not see me when I had to deliver the films, he would just receive them in the mail. It will be terribly expensive. I am not in the least certain that it can be done.

  Then there is the question of style and choice of subjects: do the pictures point back to a certain person, to me? I ponder that every time I have been to an exhibition. How much of the person behind the camera can be seen in the works? Is one hidden behind them or on the contrary do they unveil you? I think they do. The narrator is the real main character.

  Narrator

  I can only agree with you.

  Viv

  My latest unforgettables:

  Burnt-out armchair on the street, cloud of smoke hanging above

  Woman in flowing white dress, around the neck a cape of silver fox, heading towards her flashy American car, night

  Audrey Hepburn

  Well-dressed plastered dwarf being led away by an officer and a man in evening wear, they have him by the arms, but have to walk bent over (dwarf’s triumph)

  Two elderly people, are they siblings, are they a married couple, he is well-dressed, she is wearing an extremely crumpled nylon dress, he leads her off (could Carl and I have shared our life in a sisterly brotherly way – I was definitely the one given the task of carrying him away). I often see people being led away – on the way to a prison, on the way to an institution – and it fills me with dr
ead.

  Fat Polish woman talking threateningly to a police officer, she has thrust her face right up to his

  While I wrote the letter, Saint-Julien became so vivid for me. When I inherited the farm from Aunt I did not for a moment doubt that I should sell it, I was not going to be part of this little gossipy community where everyone knew more about you than you yourself did.

  Beauregard lay in a bend, with its back against a forest and its face overlooking the land. I sold it off, bit by bit. In the end only the farm remained, left to face all its losses.

  Sarah

  I’ve started to see the garden as a mind or a psyche or a character, maybe my own, with weak points and strong suits and cravings and aversions; that might be a bit on the extravagant side, but when I reflect on it, it’s perfectly clear to me, in that case the weeds are an expression of… yes naturally: perseverance, not accepting a rebuff, immediately getting up when you’ve fallen, that sort of thing. Then there is the rose garden that nearly had Peter demanding a divorce because it demanded so much of us; the roses, my craving for the mysterious, all these perfect twists and turns which constitute the rose, the unicorn of my garden. There are several ways that I could describe the cherry tree to Peter so it would not disturb him. I could say: to me it seems to be somewhat Christ-like. Then he would ask: How? And I would be able to say a little about the exposure it exhibits, that it looks faltering and vulnerable. If I put it bluntly: ‘It is a matter of time before the other trees set upon it, our Christ-tree which this year for the first time stands with its crown full of berries,’ and he would fetch a blanket and shove me down on a chair and speak of too much reading and long days, the effect of poor sleep, and while he wrapped the blanket around my feet he would say that the only ones who are out to get something here are the birds swinging in the treetop to get the berries. But I wish I could tell him everything exactly as things are. I can, if it concerns the modestly simple and hardy hollyhocks (from the seeds Mom brought with her from Denmark some time ago) which sprout up all over the place between the flagstones on the lower patio, so we sit in a forest of tall swaying perfectly fresh newly arrived flower faces, namely: Peter, we must never rebuild the patio. There is no other patio in the country that looks like this. It is completely original. But that is not the way I feel like talking to him. And that is not the kind of thing he feels like hearing.

  Soon I will have been a mother for a long time, I notice it most when I look at Ellen’s things. The clothes change size, the bike gets swapped for a bigger bike. Then there is a new school year. Time goes by, but when does life begin? I rarely speak to Viv, she is usually too busy to sit down with me in the garden, and as soon as she gets a day off, she leaves the house. I don’t like to ask where she goes. Usually it’s just the garden and me. How do you build a relationship with a person who has no desire to talk about herself? I am accustomed to familiarity arising through the exchange of information about one’s past with another person: a bit of a childhood and a flourish from a love affair, there you are, so what have you got for me that can shed some light on you? But I can’t meet Viv that way. If I am lucky and catch her on the right foot, I can get an analysis of the latest movie she has seen, or we can talk about what we’ve read in today’s paper, but that’s how it is with me – I’m a hound for intimacy. When I most hate myself for that, I see myself as someone who basks in other people’s confidences in order to bind them to me.

  Viv

  Everything blossoms lavishly, the bumblebees seem twice as big as they normally do, and there are wasps. Just now one of these oversized bumblebees landed in the grass next to my and Ellen’s blanket; it is really two to three times the size of an ordinary bumblebee; the impossibility of it taking flight – I got it to crawl up on the newspaper and carried it over to a shrub and set it down high up (the leaves gave way dangerously under its weight) from where it then launched itself in death-defying manner, but it could not stay in the air and sunk into the garden. We tried several times, the bee and I, onto the paper over to the shrub, the leap into the air, the wings whirring, without being able to keep its body up, but at least they are able to act as parachutes and set the body down on the grass in a soft and secure landing. In the end I left it alone; a deliriously lurching machine between the blades of grass.

  I am overcome with thoughts I haven’t had since puberty. I am overwhelmed by wonder and strangeness, I don’t understand what I am doing here, submerged in this enclosure of time that is my life, or what everybody else is doing here. And words like life and world mean nothing to me. It comes easier when I pretend it’s not strange; then I can talk a little about the bumblebee. I take a deep breath and see whether it can’t rectify my being out of step with the world.

  Sarah

  When I walked past the flowerbed with the metre-high foxglove (also from the seed Mom brought with her) one of them struck me on the shoulder like a penis, an accolade, like something from a forgotten world, a world where you can stay in bed with your loved one for an entire day and delve into each other; where you have been asked to dance so many times that you are weak with happiness and can no longer move. The window is open, and the forest or the lake outside has moved in and has settled over you – that’s how heavily you’ve rested. Oh, such a long time ago.

  A Bee his burnished Carriage

  Drove boldly to a Rose –

  Ellen

  The little kids on the street call Miss Maier ‘Army Boots’, because she has such big feet and wears robust men’s shoes. It’s because men’s footwear is practical, without heels, it’s necessary because she walks so much.

  Viv

  And now look at what is taking place: A bumblebee has been feasting high up in the hollyhocks and has now landed on my thigh, its lower body is yellow with pollen – now it performs a kind of gymnastic exercise in order to shake off the pollen: it stands on its forelegs and shakes its hindlegs in the air. And afterwards it stands on its hindlegs and fences with its forelegs… I’m starting to doubt whether it can even fly in its heavy pollen suit, so I blow on it, sending pollen flying into my face. It takes off and is gone! Maybe it’s hiding in the pleat of my dress.

  Last night I woke up to an incomprehensibly disgusting sound – at first it was incomprehensible, then it dawned on me that it was the large brown moth trapped in my room, now clattering around down by the skirting boards, seemingly weak, in the process of drying up. I encountered it for the first time when I switched on the light around 9 p.m., and it shot around bewildered and covetous. Over the course of the summer I have taught myself to free butterflies. When a butterfly hits the windowpane in an incessant belief that the windowpane is air, I capture it in a glass and slide a plate between the windowpane and the mouth of the glass so that the plate forms a lid – and then a rescue to the heavens.

  Ellen

  We’re not allowed in the long store any more. Someone saw us taking all the candy, and we had to give it back. I think they just threw it out, because I didn’t see anyone pour it back in the bowl. There was also lint from her purse on some of it. But then why couldn’t we just have kept it? Miss Maier said it didn’t matter, she had been thinking of buying me an ice cream anyway, because there was something we were going to celebrate. I couldn’t eat dinner, but Miss Maier never gets cross at night, because then I just have to go to bed. Miss Maier said that we were celebrating the fact that she had been with us for exactly two years today. We all toasted to a long life for us all and with Miss Maier in the house always.

  Viv

  Hull House: the weather was truly awful, I was out there alone walking around like a phantom, taking my pictures and thinking about the other phantoms, the emigrants who had left their small dark rooms, if they had not been lodged here at Hull House, who had come for a bowl of soup and a glass of milk and a bath and English lessons and sophisticated lectures about various interesting subjects by professors who made themselves available free of charge on Sunday afternoons at Hull House, it could for ex
ample, as the case was in 1903, be a lecture about the Lake District in England or a recital of Euripides’ tragedy, Alcestis. I took a picture of myself, so that I could see that I was not an old emigrant phantom fluttering through time, but stood there with my big feet.