Vivian

by Christina Hesselholdt

  Sarah

  Now you might think that today you are going to hear about my round-cheeked companion, my chubby eight-year-old daughter Ellen who does not want to sleep and eats too much, I said mentally to my psychologist, sitting in his waiting room, considering what I was going to divert him with this time, but no, I said to him, still only in my thoughts, no you’re not, you’re going to hear about me again, about the time I myself was a round-cheeked companion, probably around ten years old, but I’ll probably keep the best part to myself, which is that sharply drawn scene inside me of my grandfather, who, shortly before I went back home to Chicago after one of the numerous holidays I spent in the house with them in Denmark, pulled me aside and asked me to follow him into the bedroom. I knew perfectly well what was in store, because it happened each time I left: he found his brown leather wallet on one of the top shelves of the built-in wardrobe in the bedroom where (on the same shelf) the important documents also lay, among other things, the deed to their house their bankbooks their passports. I knew that from all the numerous times these important documents were taken down from the shelf during fierce thunderstorms and taken into the living room to join us as we awaited the outcome of the storm – on the sofa, above us, a painting of a mighty sailing ship sweeping off under a darkened sky – ready to hastily flee the house with the documents in hand if lightning struck the thatched roof, since the house, precisely because of the thatched roof and the old dry beams, not to mention the old crumbling walls, would quickly catch alight. This is connected in my mind to the fact that upon purchasing the house they had found large quantities of old clothes buried out back when they started to dig up the garden in order to landscape beds of flowers, but first and foremost vegetables, and especially potatoes – that goes without saying – their primary source of nourishment; and quite early on I had my own patch in their large garden where I cultivated the same things as them, just on a lesser scale, and so I also cultivated potatoes, primarily, but also leeks, onions, beets, peas, strawberries, and after every single meal we readily agreed that the crops from my patch of the garden, these vegetables I brought home, that is to say these vegetables which I drove along the flagstone path from the furthest reaches of the garden and into the kitchen on my yellow wagon, we agreed that they tasted best. And one time when I thought I had pulled up the long root of a carrot, it was the tail of a dead rat, not a carrot, that I pulled up. I just want to add that the greatest object of fascination in my childhood was a book cover that depicted a stylized landscape (stylized to the extent that, for example, the treetops were shaped like green balls), consisting of – besides these trees – a river, many different fields marked in different colours, and an oh-so-brown road meandering through the landscape which I could never tire of slowly running my finger along – I don’t remember if there was a house at the end of the road – whilst enjoying the billowing cornfields, the meadows, and the river that flew past. To settle down and journey through a miniature world that matched the size of my finger, a world that consisted of blotches or areas of different colours, yes, that was a little like driving my yellow wagon down the flagstone path in my grandparents’ garden.

  Now I have to loop back to our present garden, my two thousand square metres of earth, where my round-cheeked companion last poked up her sad little head; I had rashly had an area of one hundred square metres cleared of bushes and scrubs in order to add this patch to the already large lawn, and I now pictured a row of brightly coloured shrubs forming a fence up to the neighbour’s after all this boring brown shrubbery had been cleared away. I, or my occasionally numb soul, have developed an addiction to bright colours, and I am often on the verge of buying some completely meaningless object as long as it is red, yellow or orange; I saved a yellow snail from the road, the grey ones I left; and in a corner of our kitchen, out by the patio, I have hung up several colourful posters of tulips, roses and poppies respectively, so I can plant myself in that corner and take a heartening and bracing colour shower.

  ‘Well, it isn’t risky art,’ Vivian said at the sight of the posters. ‘No Vivian,’ I said or should have said, because I said nothing, ‘it’s not art, they’re flower posters.’

  ‘What’s that you’ve hung there?’ Peter asked when he came home from work, and when I explained to him that it was meant as a provision to warm the soul, he said nothing; but I could tell that he thought these posters reflected bad taste. Let me also mention that I have placed scented soap bars among our clothes and bed linen, and though now there will be no more confessions it might be an opportunity to mention that to some extent I am afflicted by a need for openness, and that I have possibly inherited this openness from my mother, even though there were times I suffered when she opened up, whether to me or to a virtual stranger; I seem to be under the notion that I have a quasi-obligation to give a detailed account of perfectly private matters to complete strangers, that I have to make a report about what strictly speaking only concerns me. As though I owe them that, as though they expect it, even though in reality they would probably prefer to be spared. Living day-in and day-out with Vivian, who is quiet as a clam about everything concerning her life, has made me more attentive to that side of myself. I remember that my mother wondered about this need within herself which she was nevertheless incapable of combatting – she continued unabashed along the road of open speech, and the same goes for me, apparently. My mother was born in Denmark, less than one hundred kilometres from Germany. And instead of seeing her openness as a personal psychological phenomenon, it could be viewed as an ideal that came into being in the light of the uncanny silence that gripped Germany after the war. No, that’s a bit far-fetched, to put it mildly. She would vehemently object to that theory. I don’t know what I’m thinking. She was forty in ’45 – did she suddenly develop her openness so relatively late in life? No, she was frank as far back as I can remember. Openness is quite simply a family weakness or eccentricity, at any rate a characteristic of the family. Sorry for persisting in embellishing this. My mom hates it, by the way, when I ‘embellish’. There was however something she never or very rarely talked about. Which is what has led me to think about Germany. And, by the way, I am happy to admit that I have Germany on my mind – the other day I dreamed about Hitler again. She once said that it was – yes, what adjective did she use: maybe ‘curious’, to contemplate the notion that if her mother and her, both of whom have occasional psychotic episodes, had lived in Germany under Hitler, they would likely have been killed because they were mentally ill. I would like to make it clear that I am not attempting to connect myself to this gruesome episode from history in order to inflate my words with significance or give them greater weight, I said in my mind to my psychologist.

  Well, the sight of this barren patch of earth billowing like a sea made my heart sink in my chest; two tonnes of roots had been removed, the gardener told me; now I had to rake and remove rocks, branches, more roots, dead leaves, before I could roll the patch of ground, rake it and plant some grass. I had decided. I’d do it myself. That was when my round-cheeked companion poked her sad little head up. I was overwhelmed by the task at hand. I felt completely alone and helpless as a child, standing before the wilderness. What I had initiated was senseless. Finally, I fetched a spade and a rake, hedge shears, a wheelbarrow and gardening gloves, got down on my knees and started to sift through this enormous amount of soil by hand, enormous viewed from a kneeling perspective. It took a week. All the while I thought of Jewel in As I Lay Dying, who singlehandedly clears forty hectares of land for the neighbour, during the night, by the light of a lantern, in order to be able to buy a horse which he then by turns strikes and whispers ingratiatingly to.

  So there I lay rooting through my rich earth like a truffle pig, on my knees, shovelling dirt with my hands, the shovel long since abandoned as too coarse a tool, and, gradually, as the work progressed and I became completely enthralled with this ground-clearing work, it was as though I managed to force my round-cheeked companion
back into the past, where she belonged.

  And while we sat there on the sofa, my grandparents and I, I had all the time in the world, all the livelong night, because it was always the nightly thunderstorms that were the worst, the most ill-natured, those where it hailed so much that the windows were smashed in and the calves killed on the fields, to look at the documents and realize that apart from a couple of wallets, there was the deed to the house, their birth certificates, the marriage certificate, their passports and some foreign currency, in all probability lira, as they had once travelled to Capri. So I knew that brown wallet with spaces separating the notes, like walls between stalls which separate horses. These objects seemed to me to be a kind of essence of the two, my grandparents on the sofa next to me, and at the same time the chest in which the objects lay seemed to me to be the heart of the House which we had to save should the house burst into flames. There was also a smaller, well-worn, rather small purse with a clasp. It was a shade of black and looked like the one the milkman had hanging around the neck, and the ticket inspector on the coach had hanging down over the hip, but this was smaller, of a similar colour, and was used for coins. That wasn’t the one he took down from the shelf. While my grandfather slipped his fingers inside to get a note, I adjusted my face to the right amount of enthusiasm and gratitude. ‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘thank you so much, Grandfather.’ ‘Now show moderation,’ he said, ‘put them in your passbook, you have to learn to save, and don’t tell Grandmother.’ ‘No,’ I said enthusiastically, ‘I’ll be sure not to do that.’ A moment before I had been through a similar scenario with my grandmother, in the living room, or out in the kitchen, where she had dug out a note from somewhere on her person (she was an outright monstrously physical person). When I was a child, she spat unhesitatingly on a handkerchief and with the help of saliva wiped chocolate and such-like off my face, so that I got the impression that despite our nice clothes we belonged to the animal kingdom. Now I can’t quite believe that she pulled the note from her brassiere, as it was called back then, and I think she had probably taken it out of her apron pocket – even now so many years later I know her body by heart. It was milky-white – and very well-preserved, said my mom who washed her and dressed her for the funeral when she died, exactly what she was dressed in I don’t know, but I know from my mom that, by washing her mother’s body, she demanded almost more of herself than she could fulfil, to grapple with this body, white and soft because it had never seen the sun, the maternal body containing the now extinguished maternal mind, which she had fought so terribly with throughout her life.

  ‘Don’t tell Grandfather,’ Grandmother said when she handed me the note with a loving expression on her face.

  (Just like the cloth bag with a nozzle at the end that my grandmother filled with whipped cream when she was going to make scalloped edges on the birthday cake and write congratulations on the cake; the emptier the bag got the further down towards the tapered opening her hands slid, until the last of the whipped cream was used and the bag hung empty and sticky over her arm – that was how I now wanted to squeeze out the last recollections of these people, until I have emptied my memories, if that can ever happen to me).

  To this very day I’ve thought that she said ‘Don’t tell Grandfather’, because he was so thrifty, and she didn’t want him to resent me for the fact she had given me this note, the five-kroner-note (it was by the way also a five-kroner-note that he had given me). Only now, sitting in my psychologist’s waiting room, do I realize that she knew his ritual with the wallet in the bedroom and did not want to deprive him of the joy of thinking that with this little ritual he had performed a unique act. The concealment of her gift to me was in fact out of goodness towards him, and not, as I had thought until this moment, a heeding of his thriftiness, so that he would not grumble about it, because for long spells they lived like cats and dogs, but only during the day. Every night they made peace, an agreement prevailed between the two to reconcile every night, that the sun must never set on an argument, here stretched or extended to the very pitch-black descent of night over the bed, where every night they then fell asleep, hand in hand. I know that because, until I was eight or nine, during the holidays I spent with them, I slept between them, and their interlaced fingers rested on me, or rather on my duvet.

  If I am able to come to so many realizations in the anteroom, I thought, what insights await me then when I step inside – what should I call it? the consultation room? – with my psychologist. Or, as they say, the devil lies in the detail – maybe insight is found in the anteroom.

  Narrator

  We open our mouth and out comes… ourselves. I got an illustration of this, though that was probably not the point, when I saw the opening of Miley Cyrus’ 2014 concert at Forum in Copenhagen, on YouTube, where first a massive three-dimensional face of Miley Cyrus appeared, then this giant Miley opened her mouth and a red chute was lowered out. Shortly after, the living Miley Cyrus appeared in the giant replica of her own mouth, slid down the chute, and landed energetically on the stage, born from herself, a virgin birth, by which the most over-sexed offspring imaginable had come into existence – no sooner was she was born than she showed every indication of a desire for reproducing herself anew. (Such an entrance demands an exit of a similar scale: hours later Miley Cyrus left the stage riding a red hot dog – this sounds like something out of Angela Carter’s magic circus, or like Major Kong famously straddling the bomb). But that’s beside the point. We open our mouth and out comes ourselves. That was what wore me out and for a time at least drove me into the arms of the silent photographs.

  Ellen

  I’m never going to have kids, it seems like they’re only trouble. I have to go to New York City with Miss Maier, she has to take care of something. Mom and Dad are away for seven days, they didn’t want to take me with them. I saw them kissing in the garage, and they called the trip ‘a romantic getaway’, and each other ‘lovebirds’. But first we have to pick some flowers. Miss Maier hides behind the cars in the driveways or out on the street, sometimes part of her is protruding, I can’t have all these flowers in my hands and run back and forth and give them to her. In that garden I dropped an orange rose, but they don’t have orange roses growing there, and soon someone will think: I wonder who has left an orange rose here, for me, right in the middle of the garden path, is it my lovebird? Now it is a large bouquet. Miss Maier has scissors with her and cuts the ends equally long, she does that while we walk. Afterwards she wraps a wet newspaper around them. I am allowed to rest my head on her shoulder on the train so I can sleep. She points at some men working on the tracks and remembers a poem which she thinks I should learn by heart. It’s a train poem.

  THE DAGO shovelman sits by the railroad track

  Eating a noon meal of bread and bologna

  A train whirls by, and men and women at tables

  Alive with red roses and yellow jonquils,

  Eat steaks running with brown gravy,

  Strawberries and cream, eclaires and coffee.

  The dago shovelman finishes the dry bread and bologna.

  Washes it down with a dipper from the water-boy,

  And goes back to the second half of a ten-hour day’s work

  Keeping the road-bed so the roses and jonquils

  Shake hardly at all in the cut glass vases

  Standing slender on the tables in the dining cars.

  Our flowers are wrapped in wet newspaper, and we eat fish in the dining car that has brown wood on the walls and oh-so-white tablecloths, and the waiters’ black hands poke out of sleeves that are even whiter. Miss Maier is drinking ice coffee. She loves it. She gives me small mouthfuls from her teaspoon. She is mother number two. She describes to me a photograph she took last winter, when she saw three empty sunbeds on the beach; she went down to them and formed a snow figure in each one. Then she went up on the terrace she came from and photographed it. I had my sled with me. I arrange the napkins like the sunbeds, and my fingers walk around
them, imitating Miss Maier’s long legs.

  We have taken several trains, and it is an entirely new day by the time we walk through St. Mary’s Park. This is the park Miss Maier cut through when she was a child, when she and her mother visited her brother and father who lived on the other side of the park, the man and the boy both called Charles. They had split into two camps because the apartments were so small. Now we enter a staircase. It smells of sweet tinned goods, peas and pineapples. The door handle moves, and then bells on the other side of the door ring. There seem to be a lot of locks, and the bells ring and ring. The door opens. The lady takes the flowers, turns around and walks into the darkness. Maybe we’re meant to leave now. We’re not, we’re meant to follow her, but first I touch the bells that are tied to a yellow string and hanging from the door handle. Miss Maier says that the bells are the lady’s dogs – they bark if anyone tries to come in. The lady is French. She points to a stool on which I can sit down. She speaks my language to me and her language to Miss Maier. I can see her bones through the blue dress. I would like to go home now. Then I get some red powder in a cup, and Miss Maier pours water over it and gives me a spoon. It fizzes, it’s raspberry. Miss Maier has to take care of something somewhere else in the apartment. I would prefer not to be alone with the lady. I have tried to keep myself from crying for a long time.

  ‘When Vivian was little, there was no consoling her when she cried,’ she says in my language. ‘Is it the same with you?’