The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf

by Kathryn Davis

  There they were, right where she’d left them, Inger and the Don, the Bog Queen and her three daughters, having just concluded the so-called Heresy Sextet—that troubling piece which begins as a philosophic discussion of the nature of God’s heart, a logical and even melodic interlocking of voices in the key of A major, but which breaks apart, no doubt spurred by Inger’s reference to the heart as “a crystal hive,” into an eerie, moaning concatenation of unintelligible syllables, a dense, blackening swarm of dissonant sound, where every attempt to elevate an individual voice, every upward-surging strand of notes, every brief flight into melody or meaning, is ultimately drawn back down into the prevailing hive of gibberish. A queer and pessimistic composition, it seemed to me, characteristically perverse in its view of the created world: God engages in endless replication of His form, the sextet suggests, but whatever diversity He appears to promote is limited by His overwhelming desire to see Himself wherever He looks, to be everything—this is the world “analogous to man’s imagining,” as Inger sings, and clearly we’re meant to understand that she’s making a crucial distinction, that the world as imagined by a woman might be completely different. I regarded the ring on my finger, my face in the salt-bleary mirror. So what, I thought. You make something, you have an obligation to it, even if you don’t like it. A man and a woman end up in a bog, and then what? Once you’re dead, you’re dead, I thought—and that is the whole sad truth about the human heart, which eventually, no matter what kind of god you choose to see as its creator, stops beating.

  At first I did nothing more than “watch” them, Inger and the Don, to see what they would do. Only they did nothing, standing there separate, discrete, as the Bog Queen’s daughters twined their two statuelike bodies more and more thickly around with great looping nooses of sphagnum, just as Nanna and Harry Tuck had swaddled their own dream-bodies with yards of silk. I waited for them to begin talking, but their lips remained sealed. All they did was stand there, stage center, decorative in the mute, unsettling manner of topiary. I considered a possible dismantling and recombining of parts, the fate Helle had devised for Nightingale in Fuglespil: under their mossy coats the bodies would break apart, topple, the pieces creeping toward each other, coupling on the bog floor and then sprouting anew in fantastic androgynous forms. Or, conversely, when their bodies broke apart, the pieces would become indistinguishable from the moss, so that what ultimately would prevail would be the comprehensive network of the moss itself. The music would echo this condition, a kind of musical response to horror vacui. But then it struck me that this latter option seemed to be headed in another direction, the one implicit in Lahloo’s apocalyptic ending, Damian Spark’s wave annihilating everything in its path; a cowardly ending, as even Helle herself had admitted. What about the man’s bad eyesight, the gap between the woman’s two front teeth? Although maybe it was the case that those physical details which had drawn them together in the first place, those touching little differences, were the very things which when brought into close proximity would set the great tidal engine in motion.

  On the other hand, perhaps I ought to regard the wave as a species of deus ex machina. How about the huge cupped blade of a peat-cutting machine suddenly appearing out of nowhere and dredging them up? And then a coda: the man and the woman restored to their former lives aboveground, the sheets of moss, even the sheets of air, replaced by emptiness. Or perhaps by furniture. They remove the dust sheets from the furniture: Darling! the man sings, I may have strayed but you’re the one woman I’ve always adored. Darling! the woman sings, I may have stayed, but you’re the one man I’ve never abhorred. They get married, duplicating the capitulation to complacency, the bored compromise of Nanna and Captain Harry Tuck. Such overstated irony! Inappropriate, I thought. For hadn’t Helle insisted, on more than one occasion, that marriage was always a red herring?

  A man and a woman. How many possible solutions were there? Of course one of them could kill the other. An inadvertent and romantic killing, as in Det omflakkende Møl or Delia, both of which also include thematic references to food and consumption. The princess in the Lindworm; Mr. Holly’s heart in the aspic; in each instance the lover—the prince with his sword or Delia with her knife and fork—deals the final blow. Dying explorers, I knew, had tried to keep themselves alive by stuffing their mouths full of sphagnum, and a party of explorers could survive by eating moss containing the man’s and woman’s decomposing bodies. A party of female explorers, I thought, and for a moment I was excited, as if I were finally on the right track. Though I realized almost immediately that such an ending would not only be embarrassingly circular—the opera beginning and ending with people venturing into a boggy wilderness—but would also disgust the audience, not to mention the fact that it was at odds with whatever hidden truth I was in the process of discovering I believed. Very nice, Frances, I thought I could hear a familiar voice saying. Admirably circumlocutious.

  For Helle, following an apparent period of silence extending from the day in the bathroom when I heard the chord to the day I began work on the opera, had once again become communicative. No matter how recondite its source, her voice was with me all the time, chattering on and on, humming, suggesting key signatures and instrumentation, criticizing and courting. “How about this? A single female explorer digs up the perfectly preserved body of the Don,” the voice might say, “and takes him home with her. Uses him as a sex toy. Oboes and flutes—ticklish music with a sleek leathery undercurrent. Or maybe she sells him to the museum at Silkeborg, where he gets put in the same display case with the sorrowful Tollund man—two erotic and leathery dreamers side by side, routinely photographed by German tourists, one of whom, a nice-looking young man, sends a snapshot to Inger. Violins, C-sharp minor, very mournful. Write it down! Write it down! Min skat—min stakkels skat, overrasket af natten! [My sweetheart—my poor benighted sweetheart!]”

  Or how about this, I thought: The concept of gender itself defies embodiment. Surely the various physical forms taken by the singers in Waves were beside the point, not unlike the mutating aspects of Despina’s outward appearance, not unlike the gray-suited executives of Fortune’s Lap, that continuously growing horde of genderless figures, male voices and female voices raised in unison for the “Xerox finale,” as if to imply that no basic difference existed between them. Viewed through this lens, the separate uses to which the Don and Inger might originally have put their bodies was unimportant; perhaps, I thought, the issue of gender ought to remain tangential, providing, as it no doubt had in Helle’s life, a convenient arena in which to investigate the nature of dichotomy, the attendant impossibility of synthesis.

  Although what about lust? Some days I would return to the apartment and find myself unable to remember a single thing that had happened while I was in the restaurant. Summer ended, fall came and went, the tourists emerged from their campgrounds in the highlands and headed south beneath the honking vees of geese; winter arrived with its dark gray, ice-spangled air, its furious winds born in the far-off Torngat Mountains of northern Labrador; the bay rocked up and down, up and down; a boat sank, then another; a moose wandered down Main Street and vanished in the fog beyond the fish-processing plant. The twins were attending the local school, Stella Maris Elementary. Star of the Sea. Ruby, bearing out her sister’s prediction, was immediately the most popular girl in the class; while Flo, surprisingly, made friends with a boy named Elmo Weed.

  “You should get out and have yourself some fun,” Lucy told me late one November afternoon, when I stopped in the bakery to buy gingerbread and ended up staying for tea. “There you are, same age as I am,” she said, “and you act like you’re about eighty.” We were sitting at a small wooden table in the bakery kitchen, a yellow room without windows, every molecule of air in it swelling, preparing to burst, with the smell of things being baked. On a long stainless-steel counter, faintly dimpled hemispheres of pale dough rose slowly above their huge silver bowls; on a wheeled rack, speckled loaves of oatmeal bread and cro
ss-marked rounds of Irish soda bread lay cooling in rows. “You were married, eh?” Lucy asked cautiously. No, I said. I was having an affair with a man who was married. Huh, she said, frowning. Never a good idea. Did I love him? Oh, yes, I said, realizing for the first time with absolute certainty that it was true, just as I finally comprehended that I wasn’t ever going to see him again. I started to cry, and Lucy handed me a tissue and a cinnamon roll. Carrying the torch, eh? she said. Listen, Francie, time to blow it out. She made a little puffing motion with her lips. Blow it out, throw it away. Only it was harder, I said, if you didn’t know until afterwards. I paused, considering. Then you could never be sure, I added. Besides, the truth was I’d killed him. Go on, said Lucy. No, really, I insisted. Well, we’d all wanted to, hadn’t we now, Lucy concluded. Those married men. She smiled at me, refilled my cup; seriously now, her smile seemed to say, and I gave up, smiled halfheartedly back. Ongoing warfare, I was thinking, an irreconcilable gap which might be bridged only by lust. The Heroine, Delia, Despina. They could kill each other. Devour each other. Fall in love. There was another woman, I said. There was another woman, and I was no match for her.

  Eventually I returned to the bread, the original loaf which, together with the shoes, had been the cause of Inger’s downfall. In Andersen’s story the loaf provides a sort of pedestal for the statue Inger; in Helle’s opera, once it has served the purpose of speeding Inger’s descent to the bog floor, it is appropriated by the Queen, who gives it and the shoes to her daughters as toys. They have no other use for such objects: their toes are long and splay outward, the brown skin stretching thinly over the bones like silk over the ribs of an umbrella; they eat only insects, the linings of their throats oozing the same sticky substance, sprouting the same dense growth of entrapping hairs, as those of the carnivorous plants which flourish high above on the bog’s surface. Indeed, we’re told that food prepared by human hands is for them a deadly poison. One bite, that’s all it takes. So we see Retaliation and Grudge playing with Inger’s shoes as if they were dolls, dressing them in garments of moss, talking for them, arguing for them, banging them against each other in irritable combat. Whereas Unnameable cradles the loaf in her slick, reptilian arms. My baby, she sings, Sky-puff, Cloudlet, Dream-tuft. Easily the most perverse lullaby ever written.

  The bread, I thought, bread made in a human kitchen by a human baker. Why, I wondered, should I assume that just because Inger and the Don had, at one time, been sucked down into the hell of the bog, they would have to stay there forever? So long as they accepted their lot as inevitable there was nothing I could do, but it seemed to me that to agree that it was inevitable was also to submit once again to the severity of Helle’s vision. I imagined a duet in which they confessed to each other their impatience with the apparent solutions to their dilemma, such dismaying solutions as were suggested by all of Helle’s other operas. No, I imagined them singing, we won’t break apart, disappear, gobble or kill, battle or marry, merge or die. The force of their essential antagonism, I decided, the strength of those opposing wills which had damned them in the first place, might now prove useful. What if Inger and the Don were to put their two devious, clever heads together? What if Inger were once again to resort to the nasty habits of her childhood, setting traps for insects—millipedes and spiders, the appropriately named ambush bugs, assassin bugs—and then, relying on her talent for dissection, pry open their tiny bodies, concealing an even tinier piece of bread in each one? Naturally she’d have to sneak the loaf away from its fierce mother, but the Don could be counted on to work his diversionary charms. He could even sing his famous canzonetta, “Deh vieni alla finestra,” although the words would have to be changed, since there aren’t any windows in a bog.

  Thus we would watch them, the vile Bog Queen and her three vile daughters, sitting down to eat their deadly supper. A platter laden with the glinting carapaces of hundreds of dead bugs, carried in and set ceremoniously by Inger on the sphagnum-strewn pile of bones that serves as their table, while ceremoniously the Don ties bibs of sphagnum around their snaky brown necks. Perhaps an onstage orchestra might be playing the aria from Figaro, just as it does in Don Giovanni before the Commendatore’s demonic arrival? “Non più andrai”—You will no longer flutter around, you amorous butterfly—a nice touch, I thought, since the minute the first fistfuls of insects vanish down their sticky, hairy throats, the Bog Queen and her daughters start to swell, the brown leather of their skin straining to impossible thinness, turning them into huge brown balloons floating slowly upward, making the hideously high-pitched squealing sounds balloons make when they bump against each other. Treachery! Treachery! they squeal, accompanied by the high-pitched notes of the violins, staccato volante, faster and faster, higher and higher. Higher and higher they float, as Inger and the Don cling to their wildly kicking, wildly failing legs. The opera ends as we watch Inger’s shoe-clad feet, the Don’s boot-clad feet—those feet we first saw descending slowly into the bog—now ascending rapidly out of it.

  As for what they do next, I told myself, that’s their own business. Although I could picture them standing there on the surface of the bog, a human man and a human woman, each one close enough to recognize the expression of shy admiration on the other’s face, but not so close as to suggest that they now were linked by a common purpose. The air had finally cleared, the former dense and suffocating soup of air molecules having gradually vanished, the scrims lifting, bearing away all of those many-colored globes, all of those yellow and blue and green globes of air gradually having been dispersed, along with the four brown globes which had been, not so very long ago, the Bog Queen and her daughters. The reddish crowns of the moss glistened in the sunlight. An animal ran by. A bird sang, and neither the man nor the woman had any idea what kind of bird it was.

  Meanwhile, from the bay, the hotel, the headlands, the roof of my apartment, the fog likewise began to lift. “Oh, Frances, Frances, how could you do this to me?” Who? I said. Show yourself! It was the deep heart of mid-winter; I put on my coat, walked down the stairs and out the door. There was a path that circled around behind the bakery and led down to the beach, where I could hear the voices of the gulls tearing long slits in the gray, foggy ceiling. Miles away the Bay of Fundy, its gray hide wrinkled and opaque, rose and fell, rose and fell, breathing in its sleep under a narrow strip of blue sky. Black grains of sand mixed with gray ones, pinkish ones; an overturned crab shell like a helmet filled with sand from which protruded the crab’s bent white legs, feather-edged, hollow. Low tide. My father was a fisherman, I found myself remembering—one of Helle’s first songs; how did it go? My father was a fisherman, my mother was a fish? Yes. One of the Fantasi, I thought, her earliest compositions. And then it went on: He threw her back, he mixed them up, desire and a wish. In Jutland when the tide is low I look among the stones and shells and bits of sea-green glass to find my mother’s bones. How had we ever come up with the idea of fidelity? I wondered. For when had the animating spirit of a thing ever remained faithful to the form which contained it? The human voice, I thought, that most tragic of all instruments; the hopeful human voice singing, trying to hold a note forever.

  III

  AND WHAT OF the key with the red plastic head? Would you believe me if I told you that one day not long ago I found myself standing in the Albany bus station, that very key shoved deep into the pocket of my red winter coat? I was on my way to the University of Rochester to pick up Ruby for Christmas break; Flo was in Munich, taking classes in restoration technique at the Pinakothek. In fact, it was a recent letter from Flo that had suggested this detour in the first place: “To the Gold Room yesterday, ring a bell? I went because of her,” she wrote, going on to ask whether I remembered the time Helle had first mentioned the Gold Room, at that horrible birthday party when I drank too much wine and went on and on about storage lockers. The room in question, Flo told me, was filled with reliquaries, most of them, predictably, made of gold, all of them containing the shriveling or decomposed a
ttributes of long-dead saints. A room lined with rows and rows of lavish, valuable receptacles, golden heads concealing scraps of colorless hair, golden hands concealing powdery metacarpals, golden feet concealing toenails, anklebones—enough body parts, Flo wrote, to construct hundreds of saints, thousands of saints. What you saw when you entered was, essentially, a room full of lockers, though it wasn’t anything like a bus terminal. In the Gold Room every available locker was already taken. Taken for eternity. To pry a reliquary open, to insert a piece of yourself, would be nothing short of blasphemy. “A self-serving metaphor,” Flo concluded, “as usual.”

  Of course I never dreamed for a minute that the key would still fit any of those lockers, or if by some miracle it did, that I’d find anything besides a stranger’s luggage. Certainly not a sacred artifact, a shred of Christ’s loincloth or a splinter of the true Cross. Number 73, the number obviously chosen to remind me of Helle’s Opus 73, a pensive little song called “Rain on Thorn” she composed shortly after we met. So I wandered, speculative and apparently aimless, up and down the aisles of lockers, just as I used to do when I was myself a girl, although this time I didn’t have the luxury of my own inspiration to guide my choice. How many years had it been since I’d last felt the hand of Helle Ten Brix pulling me this way and that? The Albany terminal was filled with students, independent young men and women wearing bright backpacks, and for the briefest instant I felt envy lifting its tusked head in the place at the base of my ribs—how lucky they were, I thought, and then realized with shame that I was as guilty of romanticizing them as the piped-in music was of romanticizing the season. Eventually, though, I found it, a medium-sized locker located at eye level in the middle of a row along the back wall. Bus to New York now loading on platform 3, I heard. May your daze beee mer-reee and bright. I removed the key from my pocket and tried it in the lock. Effortlessly it slid in; effortlessly it turned; effortlessly the door opened.