The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf

by Kathryn Davis

  Inger pressed a kiss to her baby’s forehead; Gunhild wiped her mouth with the napkin she’d stuck into the collar of her blouse; Niels regarded Maeve with dumb admiration through the pale blue fishbowls of his eyes; Hans sighed and ate a turnip. The kitchen was disturbingly bright, and it occurred to Helle that this was the first time she’d seen it lit by electricity. The key phrase in Maeve’s outburst was “common greatness”—it was one of her favorite phrases, and helped clarify the distinction between her sense of justice, which would prove soon enough to be tragically prophetic, and Inger’s, which was always highly personal. But such a dream, Hans pointed out, couldn’t exist in a vacuum. Wasn’t such a dream, whether on behalf of the farmer or the merchant or the artist, dependent on the economic health of society as a whole? Surely Helle would agree that an extravagance such as opera could never find adequate support in times of economic hardship? How annoying, she thought, that Hans—stupid Hans, tall and round, his Adam’s apple rising and falling like a turnip swallowed whole—should have hit upon an unarguable line of reasoning. Except that art wasn’t a luxury, she replied, and was preparing to explain how the problem was cultural, not economic, when Anders suddenly yelled “Ida!” Gunhild got up to see what he wanted, and the baby began to howl.

  According to Helle, if you made the mistake of returning to the cradle of deceit—by which she meant the house where you’d spent your childhood—you would shrink; go back once too often and you would vanish altogether. Eventually she extended this theory to include the discontented children of the middle class, runaways whose hazy pictures you would see in post offices, pinned up among the pictures of murderers and bank robbers. Those children weren’t lost but had merely become so small, so transparent, that their own parents—the terrible agents of this metamorphosis—could no longer see them. You and me, Frances, she would say, we got out just in time. Look at us! Possibly she was right. At the very least her theory would account for her feeling of having been transformed, that December night, into something as flimsy as one of those sheets of tissue paper you find covering the full-color plates in an expensive book; of having become the expendable protector of all that is lavish and valuable.

  It was a cold night. Helle slept fitfully, and some time around three o’clock was awakened by Maeve’s snoring: Puh puh puh puh, a delicate, flaccid sound. Lying on her back, her lips moving as if to blow kisses or bubbles at the ceiling, how pretty Maeve looked now that she was no longer filled with zeal! Helle got out of bed and walked over to the window, drawn by that hidden system of cords and yokes which governs the soul’s enigmatic motion. The moon was almost full, roosting in the branches of the linden. Puh puh puh puh—where had she heard that before? As she listened, the sound within the room was answered by a similar, albeit more resonant, sound from outside. Puh puh puh puh. Poo poo poo poo. Subject and answer, subject and answer. All at once it came to her: what she was hearing was the opening section of the love duet near the end of Die Zauberflöte, though in this case Papageno was her sleeping lover and Papagena a hungry owl—specifically, Aegolius funereus, or Tengmalm’s owl, vagrant to northern Jutland, a little creature about the size of a dinner roll, with a child’s large, surprised eyes and an appetite for wood mice. Of course Helle didn’t know this at the time, only that an owl was flying across the bog, its blue shadow racing beneath it across the surface of the snow. The owl was headed in the direction of Sandhed, toward those provocative, moonlit chimneys.

  The next day Anders, perverse as always, rallied. Unlike Lazarus, he rose without divine assistance, and then, trailing cerements, shuffled down the hall to the kitchen, where he came upon Gunhild kneading dough in the dark. It was very early, the rest of the household still asleep. He frightened her to death, Gunhild admitted later. One minute she was alone in the room, the next minute she could feel hot air on the back of her neck. Evidently Anders stood there breathing on his wife for several minutes before requesting a cup of coffee. As Gunhild explained it, even though this was the first normal request he’d made in months and should have been cause for celebration, she discovered that what she felt was more like dismay than gratitude. Indeed, she might have ended up paralyzed with guilt forever had Anders not suddenly started to beat with their sterling soup ladle, a wedding present from the Funen cousins, on the cast-iron lid of the teakettle. Wake up! Wake up! he yelled. Everybody up! His idea was that they should all go for a trek on snowshoes, several pairs of which, he happened to know, were stored in the root cellar.

  It was the kind of winter day when everything in the world looked like it was about to crack into pieces, when the sky seemed to be made of the thinnest blue porcelain, and there was a fine black outline around each tree, each branch, each tiny drop of water depending from each twig. By the time Niels located the snowshoes the sun was just coming up over the rose garden, turning its dark lattice of canes pink, the thorns red; Anders, whose enthusiasm had turned to ferocity in the wake of Gunhild’s objections, was once again yelling. What was everyone afraid of? That he’d drop dead? But wasn’t that what they were all waiting for? A man couldn’t drop dead while he was lying down, could he?

  As it turned out, Gunhild need not have worried. Instead of striking out toward the white expanse of low hills to the east, or toward the white expanse of peat to the west, Anders led the group Indian-file around the house. Around and around the house they marched, their track deepening with each successive orbit. Was anyone else getting sick of this? Maeve asked, but Helle could see that her cheeks were pink and her eyes were shining, and realized that for Maeve there was very little difference between adventure and derangement. Eventually Anders brought them to a halt in front of the middle parlor window. The fruitwood table, he said, pointing, was to go to his dear wife. Also the bell jar and whatever that thing was that was under it. Niels was to get the clock. Panting Time toileth after him in vain, if they took his meaning. The rest was to go to Maeve.

  So they continued their journey, pausing at other key windows, notably those looking into the examining room, the dining room, the kitchen, the morning room. A brass candlestick here, an embroidered cushion there, a pair of bookends shaped like hands, a set of knives—Anders’s method of dispersal remained the same, consigning one or two objects to his wife or son while the lion’s share went to Maeve. They were all aware of the diagnosis, that Anders was suffering from a form of dementia associated with senility; Gunhild reminded them of this fact, gathering them together in hurried colloquy behind a clump of elder bushes. Obviously Anders was not to be taken seriously, Gunhild said. She appeared anxious, chewing on the tip of her gray and yellow braid like a young girl. Well, of course not, Maeve replied, although she had to admit she’d taken a fancy to that cloisonné vase in the morning room.

  By the time Anders finally ran out of steam, Helle was the only member of the party to whom he’d bequeathed nothing. It wasn’t until much later, when they were sitting together eating potato soup in the kitchen, that he suddenly chose to acknowledge her presence. Three things for that one, he said, waving his soup-coated spoon more or less in Helle’s direction. Primo, the piano, assuming she could afford to move it. Bringing them to secundus, a certain box of gold coins, about which one could only say, non numero haec judicantur sed pondere. Ditto ultimus, the remaining half of what had once been a pair of dueling pistols, with the stipulation that if she decided to use it she bear in mind that summa petit livor. While talking, he sat with his neck tilted downward, regarding his soup bowl like Narcissus at the pool. Why, he isn’t crazy, Helle thought. He might be fooling the rest of them, but he knew that she could understand every word, for hadn’t he taught her himself? Cicero: “These things are judged by weight, not number.” Ovid: “Envy seeks the highest things of all.”

  Maeve and Helle left Krageslund the next day, and Anders died a month later. Because Helle had given in to what came to strike her as a coward’s impulse, accompanying Maeve on a concert tour through the geographic confusion of Bavaria and Austr
ia, by the time the telegram met up with them in Berchtesgaden it was already too late, the funeral was over. A beautiful service, as Gunhild hastened to reassure her in a subsequent letter. The Lutheran pastor from Frederikshavn had delivered a beautiful eulogy; there were hundreds of beautiful wreaths, even though it cost a fortune to buy flowers in January; the church was overflowing, and you could hardly hear the organ for the sound of sobbing. If it was any comfort, she added, they wouldn’t be able to inter Anders until April at the earliest, after the ground thawed. She’d let Helle know when. In the meantime, she could take her word for it that her father was resting peacefully in a vault—and wasn’t that the important thing, after all, resting peacefully? Evidently, Anders’s tendency to express himself in dead languages had become more and more pronounced toward the end. His last words had been a paraphrase of Horace: “A ridiculous mouse will be born.”

  How charming were the towns and villages through which Helle and Maeve traveled, the roofs of the houses covered with snow, smoke curling from the chimneys! Children heated pennies and melted perfectly round holes in the frost on the windows, the better to watch these elegantly dressed strangers pass by. Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Bad Tölz, Munich, Berchtesgaden, Dachau, Ingolstadt, Nuremberg: history had not yet invested the names of any of these towns with symbolic meaning. In Nuremberg they bought slabs of hot gingerbread which they ate in the front hallway of Albrecht Dürer’s house; in Dachau they visited a twelfth-century castle and then went ice-skating on the frozen Amper River. The last stop on Maeve’s tour brought them to Berchtesgaden, where they were the guests of the Baron and Baroness von Schadenheim. Their chalet, a make-believe structure perched on the side of a mountain, reminded Helle of the engraved cottage in Daisy’s window, just as the baron reminded her of Daisy’s china polar bear, and the baroness of Daisy’s ivy heart. It was only when you looked back, Helle said, that you could see the ghostly shape of future events spilling out of the contours of the commonplace, those dark humours wreathing the nearby Obersalzberg, the little house at its summit built with royalty money from Mein Kampf.

  The routine, chez Schadenheim, never varied. Every evening the baron drove them in his white Mercedes to a nearby resort hotel where Maeve was being paid, as she put it, to distract a bunch of Munich businessmen from close inspection of their wives. Every day, while Maeve and the baron went skiing, Helle remained at home with the baroness, whose health was apparently as delicate and subject to sudden reversals as were the emotions that flitted beneath the surface of her heart-shaped face. One minute she was cheerful and distant, yielding and forlorn the next. A confusing woman—was it in the former mood or the latter that, on the third afternoon of their visit, she confessed her love of Wagnerian opera, and called Helle’s attention to the upper ledge of a Gothic prie-dieu in the corner of the room, on which sat a model theater? Lush vegetation, vines and flowers—the second act of Parsifal, Helle guessed, after Klingsor has caused the tower to magically disappear, replacing it with a tropical garden, thereby paving the way for Kundry’s destruction.

  As if in confirmation the baroness began singing Kundry’s famous second-act narrative “Seit Ewigkeiten harre ich deiner”—for an invalid, Helle said, she made a lot of noise. The usual snow was falling, tumbling in overlarge flakes past the window; the baroness was leaning back against the chintz sofa cushions printed with overlarge poppies, stretching out her long, silk-stockinged legs. Did she plan it that way, that her painted toe should touch Helle’s knee, that her neat, small head should land precisely within the dark nucleus of a poppy? Poor Kundry, the baroness said, forever doomed to wander the earth because she’d laughed at the Savior’s agony. This was, Helle realized, not only a seduction but also a thinly veiled reference to the way in which she’d met the news of her father’s death. She felt set up, tricked. Was it possible that at this very moment, as their woolen hats turned white with snow, Maeve and the baron were tumbling into each other’s arms? At night, in the hotel, you could tell whose job it was to distract whom; during the day it wasn’t so obvious. I’m nothing like Kundry, Helle said. Kundry became a penitent and dedicated herself to a life of service: “Dienen … Dienen,” remember? The baroness lifted a silver swan from the table, pressed a button on its head, and when its beak sprang open to release a tongue of fire, she lit two cigarettes. Oh, she remembered. But she also remembered that Kundry was a sorceress. She took a deep drag and then, having left behind the imprint of her red lips, handed Helle one of the cigarettes. A Turkish cigarette—it tasted wonderful. Helle thanked the baroness and retreated with it to her room, where she continued the endless unfolding of a phrase in the Dorian mode. “It is said that Leda, long ago, found an egg the color of hyacinths”—the first hint of what was to become Fuglespil. Her notebook, she couldn’t help noticing, had been moved from the walnut table to the cushioned window seat.

  According to Helle, there was a certain kind of married couple to whom any single woman will become easy prey, the element necessary to the creation of drama on a stage otherwise designed for farce. Of course the roles were familiar, since they duplicated the condition of childhood. In the beginning there were Anders and Ida; in the end there were Maren and Sam. If Helle refused to let the baroness have her way with her, did that refusal pave the way for future refusals? Or was Helle merely refining her role? Was she preparing to emerge, finally, as a heroine, or was she never anything more than a pawn? Your position remained clear so long as you stayed in your room composing music. The problem was that at some point you had to come out of your room. You had to come out and, when you did, you might find yourself pinned against the door handle of a car as it swerved around a curve on one side of which an avalanche warning had been posted, on the other side of which a vast, gaping emptiness waited to be filled. The baron’s gloved hand might reach out to touch your knee, reassuringly, and it would be the same hand which, earlier, swatted your fingers after you trumped your partner’s ace in a game of bridge. Bridge in the late afternoon—Helle said that if she’d neglected to mention that feature of the daily routine, it was because it was, arguably, the feature she hated the most. After the Great War, civilized people played bridge. Or more precisely, indoors they played bridge. Outdoors they played tennis. After the Great War civilized people thought they could substitute manners for morality. So it happened that by the time the monster had arisen, slavering, from its pit, it was too late; the habit had been formed. By that time, didn’t everyone know that it was bad manners to interfere?

  IV

  Fuglespil, Act One. Juxtaposition of two themes, one played on the glass harmonica, one on clarinets and strings: Niflheim, realm of swirling ice crystals and fog; Muspelheim, realm of dancing fire. An empty space in the middle, out of which emerges—what, a big egg? Please. All right, how about Act One, soprano aria offstage, a capella? A pond ringed with cattails, the water clear and motionless, two blue-violet eggs in a nest on the bank? Suddenly the shadow of a female form swirls and dances across the tall stalks of the cattails; suddenly a crack appears in each of the eggs. A crack! Imagine the drama of that moment, the way in which the tension is enhanced by the tapping of a drumstick on the metal rim of a drum. Yolk or chick? Tap-a-tap. Really, Helle thought, if you can’t be serious, you might as well give up. You might as well trot out the full orchestra, the full complement of gods and goddesses. You might as well dress up Zeus in his swan plumage and send him flying, his shadow swirling and dancing across the face of the pond where his lover has hidden her nest. She’s on the lookout, her blue-violet eyes darting this way and that. Yet the question remained, Where did they come from in the first place: the god, the pond, the nest, the girl, the blue-violet color of her eyes? And if there was an instant of separation of light from dark, sun from shadow, male from female, fire from ice, at what point did that separation also suggest the twin possibilities of good and evil?

  Act One, two girls, twin sisters in matching white dresses, on a bright green lawn. White dresses with hems of sc
alloped lace; the delicate, far-off clink of a porcelain cup coming to rest in its saucer. Yes, that was better. The primary condition, after all, must appear to be one of innocence. Act One: A lawn extends, back, toward a raised terrace, the tapering fluted columns and rosette-studded rail of its stone balustrade intercepted at each corner, and on each side of the central portal, by an armless marble caryatid. It is Easter morning. The sun is just coming up, stage right, behind a huge beech tree; leaking through the tree’s leaves and branches, its light casts a wavering blue net out across the lawn, across the sisters’ excited faces. And does the sun make shadows, the first sister sings, shadows to trap itself before it can get away? Gold disks, gold disks! She leans over and from within a clump of white flowers extracts a yellow egg, which she then places in a basket at the foot of the tree. Luminiferous ether, the second sister sings, wave or particle, light must always bend around obstacles. She reaches behind a juniper bush, extracts another egg, this one deep scarlet, and puts it, too, in the basket.

  I’ve always liked this duet, the way it’s saved from mere prettiness by the perversity of its instrumentation: the first sister’s theme, a cheerful music-box melody in A, is assigned to the cello and the clarinet, those most pensive of instruments; the second sister’s theme, a pensive inversion of the first, is assigned to the essentially cheerful glass harmonica. Of course that was the point. Helle wanted to conjure up a world in which, no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t disentangle one little girl in white from the other, a world in which conventional wisdom is defied, and all of the eggs get put in the same basket. She wanted to conjure up that world, and she wanted it to look very pretty. The duet concludes with the second sister counting—twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four! There’re all here, she sings, but the first sister refuses to believe her. How do you know? she asks. Why not twenty-five instead of twenty-four? Why not a hundred, a thousand, or more? Meanwhile the twins’ parents appear on the terrace, the mother wearing a rose-sprigged dress, the father a white shirt, linen trousers, and a pair of striped suspenders. In recitative they discuss their daughters, Bluette and Viola. Apparently the only way a stranger can be taught to tell them apart is that while Bluette’s eyes are more blue than violet, Viola’s eyes are more violet than blue. The parents know that there are other, deeper differences between the two, but for the moment they find themselves unable to agree about which child is which. (“Captain and Mrs. Harry Tuck, at home,” wrote Aksel Bram in his review of Fuglespil. “Refreshed from their recent bout with a tidal wave the happy couple try their hand at parenthood.”)