Companions

by Christina Hesselholdt

  Seven years and not a moment longer. My man-child. Child because he clung to me. (When we would lie face to face and I turned my head away, towards the room, he grabbed it and turned it back so that I could see him again. He could not get enough contact. He could never get enough. The more he made his demands on me, the more I preferred to write. The more insistently he turned my head towards his, the more defiantly I looked away.) And then he was so afraid of dying if he got a bone caught in his throat or scalded himself on a teaspoon of hot porridge or got stung by a mosquito (Lake Victoria, safely entrenched behind malaria pills). You should be able to surrender your life with a grand gesture. I believe that. At this moment.

  I have torn myself free. My heart is pounding something fierce. I am alone. I am heading into the unknown. I am going to live with Alwilda for a few days, on Sankt Peders Stræde, that will be my first stop. But when will I know that I have truly left? That I will not fall back; like when you have thrown something in the rubbish bin and an hour later you regret it and take it out and clean it off. Or a longer period of time will pass, and it will be like opening a house that has been empty all winter long, and the first thing you do is sweep out the cobwebs.

  Nobody’s back is straighter than Alwilda’s. She never uses a backrest but still manages to sit ramrod straight. Then I am aware that I am sprawled out, my back is an arch, and I straighten up a little in the chair out of embarrassment. Alwilda has ironclad discipline. Me – I need a broom to sweep myself together. I sleep until noon. I have become dependent on my heating pad. I make a cave out of my duvet. I wrap myself up and disappear inside it; I want to sleep within my duvet like in a snowdrift, burning hot. Then I think that it is lovely to be a person, with breasts, wearing a white nightgown. Alwilda hangs the strangest objects to dry in her bathroom, requisites for exotic sports, are these for the knees, Alwilda, or the elbows? The other way around, it’s the other way around. Such a nice red kayak. What would it feel like if I headed out in one, alone among seals and icebergs or merely a silhouette against Rungsted Havn. Alwilda chose a short, sensible education and lives for her free time. She became an elementary school teacher because of the long holidays. She has no problems with noise in her classroom. She is firm but fair, and her heart is in the right place. My work has no beginning and no end. When Alwilda grew tired of Edward, she made short work of it. I don’t know how many years it took me to leave Kristian. Now I am about to fall asleep again. On Alwilda’s hard chair. I close my eyes and dream about a man I saw in the park. I am alone and searching for someone so I can send my thoughts in their direction. What am I going to do with my longing? Where am I going to send my notions? What am I going to do with myself? I take up too much space, I am overflowing. But now the door opens. Alwilda is back.

  ‘If you don’t have a boyfriend, you need to get yourself a vibrator,’ she says firmly.

  I am caught off guard and let out a laugh. Is that what she has been out shopping for? No, she just happened to think about it on the way up the stairs, which she took in long strides.

  ‘I’m more the dreamy type,’ I say, ‘thanks all the same.’

  What more could I say? I could say: I am romantic, but precise. The ringing of a bell out in the blue yonder. I ring incessantly. Plant me firmly on the table.

  And I think about how as soon as Obama was elected, all kinds of objects were produced with his face plastered all over them.

  ‘Why are you shaking your head?’ Alwilda asks, ‘Why are you sighing? It sounds so melancholic.’

  In return, maybe I could ask her where she gets all her energy from, this staunchness and lack of doubt? Tearing along in a canoe, is that life? Are there not all kinds of reasons to sigh? Is life not fundamentally sad, we enter through one door with a scream and soon after we slip away through another (oh, now I sound like Kristian) and someone has taken my tail; I want to lose myself in my work, I am at my best when I do not feel like I am here (maybe only when I have sat in the same position for too long and have to stretch my neck a little). Why do I get so terrified when I see women with infants, the exhaustion spreads through my limbs, I don’t like all the chalky white delicate skin (the children’s) with all the throbbing blue veins that suggest the frailty of life (over, over) and the mothers’ skin when they bend down to pick up yet another fallen object, and their tops slip above the waistband to reveal a patch of skin that is almost blue-white, but then there are also two children in the pram, and maybe one holding her hand, no time for a moment in the sun for the blind handmaidens of broods & breeding. Alwilda is different than the rest of us. She goes to protests and does not shy away from clashes with the police. Myself, protests make me cry, I cannot manage large (or even small) crowds in motion, something works loose within my chest, and the sight of the long lines of police, shield to shield, makes my legs tremble. I am afraid of these black beetles. I hide my face in my hands and sob silently when the megaphones crackle, and the crowd sings and hollers and feels like one great body. I cannot join the crowd; nor do I long to. I long to be free of myself – with just one other person. And now it is June, and the graduating students drive past in open lorries and shout and wave, and people wave back and honk, and my face contorts idiotically so I have to hurry down a side street. The other night Alwilda was nearly run over. She chased the car at breakneck speed, and at the first red light, she dropped her bike and jumped into the front seat and put the driver in a chokehold. That’s Alwilda. Not much talk. Someone who acts. And she does not care much for the idea of part of Nørrebrogade being made car-free, if you don’t want cars side by side with us, move to the country, now I recall a protest to have cars banned from the city, the parents shouting in time: ‘Our young / shouldn’t have black lungs’; a capital city should look like a capital city. She will do everything in her power to ensure that the same does not happen with Vesterbrogade. There are groups for everything; the first Saturday in the month dog owners meet on a hilltop in Østre Anlæg to fight for the right to walk their dogs without leads, Edward told me about that, there was shouting, clenching and shaking of fists, the dogs bay at the red sky, a lot of people wearing Hunter boots and looking like landowners, but apparently landless and reduced to parks; there is one group for the Metro and one against, and so on and so on, every time an issue arises, two groups arise. So much activity, so many leaflets. As for Edward, she says that he needs to sell his house; that he is presiding over a death house, running a death cult, ‘the house is a ghost ship,’ she says and I picture him standing on the bridge of a long black ship with worm-eaten sails.

  ‘Poor, lonely Edward,’ she says, ‘he feels so sorry for himself.’

  ‘He does have the dog,’ I interject.

  ‘Yes, he’s married to that dog,’ Alwilda says, which is also wrong.

  She does not believe that he will relinquish the sorrow that is his last link to his parents, if he relinquishes that sorrow, he loses them entirely. It sounds like night school wisdom, but I say nothing. I think she is brutal. I once confused this brutality with honesty. I found her honesty laudable. I imagine her orgasms are like a smack with a fly swatter, swift, hard, and practical. Afterwards she leaps up and tightens her belt. Not much of the sea about it, oceanic movements, I mean, drawn-out Atlantic breakers and then a sweet sleep, no. But she is the only one of us who does not want anything other than what she already has. As far as I know.

  Kristian wants a child. Charles wants a new back. I want a life without heating pads, where I write like I played the piano, flip page after page until suddenly I have pumped out an entire book. Camilla wishes her mind did not resemble greasy dishwater, or how does she describe it: like a bag filled with slips of paper, you stick your hand in and pull one out: Guilt, it reads. Defensiveness. Bitterness. The need to blame.

  But all of this I am unable to recognize – in Camilla.

  I think (with regret) about what has been left at Kristian’s. All the things I could not take with me when I left; things that could not be tak
en back. And things I would prefer he not preside over. My life story, for example. Intimate confessions. Embarrassing incidents. My idiosyncrasies. My pettiness. All the things he knows ad nauseam; but things which, when we were together, could be smoothed over and placed alongside my more excellent & redeeming qualities.

  Is it how he will remember me that concerns me?

  I would like to be gone completely, to be able to remove all traces. I am not prepared for him to be wheeling and dealing with ‘me’ when I am not there, where he can add and subtract.

  Oh, and then there are my letters; once glorious, now cringeworthy scraps I would like them back, please. And if he refuses? Then I will be forced to break in and collect what is rightfully mine.

  Kristian was (is, unless he is suddenly over it) a nudist, not an avowed nudist, but one who is happy to strut about naked, which can be viewed as a protest against the puritanical upbringing he was subjected to, despite being born in the late twentieth century – but isn’t that a tedious way of thinking, third-class thinking, originally stemming from ‘the Viennese quack’, as Nabokov calls him, and then diluted and diluted again into pop psychology, like a sandwich we are all thrashing about inside, enough already – in support of this (his upbringing) his sister Cecilie recalled the time when she was watching a movie with her mother, when two lovers abandoned themselves to a long kiss, the mother clucked and raised and lowered her hands and attempted to distract her and in the end, she suggested they turn it off, because the kiss just went on and on, but ‘no, I would like to watch this,’ and I wonder whether the mother then got up and disappeared into the kitchen, or did she simply cover Cecilie’s eyes? My suggestion is that Kristian regarded nudity as a form of communication, wordless; when we are naked we have something in common, we have nudity, so we do not need to make an effort to reach one another through all these layers of clothing, these inhibitions and reservations. The one who remained clothed was, translated into Kristian’s system, the silent guy of the group. Jack of spades. And wasn’t that also why he became a doctor, to be among the undressed, or partially undressed. Then he was forced to take illness as part and parcel. In any case, every time he threw off his clothes, he became equally sheepish and content at being able to parade his body around freely. No, he did not ‘throw off’ his clothes, because as happy as he was to be naked, he was equally meticulous with his clothes. He had a lot of clothes, expensive clothes, good clothes, and he always hung his clothes neatly over the back of a chair. He got angry if a dog, big or small, in its eagerness to reach his face, placed its paws on his legs, then he brushed off the fabric angrily even though there was nothing to be seen. He had always been good at getting his girlfriends to walk around the house & garden naked, though not me, I am very modest, (maybe as a result of my liberal upbringing) but not as much as Camilla’s well-swathed Indian friend who says: ‘I have never understood why people would want to expose their body when the world is full of so many beautiful materials,’ but I remember seeing Susanne, an old friend of his, trotting briskly around a corner, bare-arsed, wearing a sunhat and red clogs, carrying a trowel, one hot summer’s day when I stepped into the garden unannounced.

  Personality cannot be encircled, Camilla says, and then I imagine a sheepdog barking in ever smaller circles as it herds its flock. Or a prisoner tethered to a pole.

  [Alwilda]

  ‘Tonight I want to present you with an example of fear and an example of greed. When I was in Africa with Edward, we spent a week at a mission in Mozambique. We were given room and board in return for helping out. Edward worked in the fields, and I looked after children. There was a house with orphaned children, and there was a schoolroom. The children immediately grew attached to me, they called me “Sister Alwilda”; they were locked inside an enclosure (when they were not sleeping or receiving tuition) like little goats, but they received clean clothes every morning. It was a dirt pen they walked round in, and a moment after they had been shut inside their clothes were dirty, and their hands and feet embroidered with filth. I don’t think there were any toys. They had their hands and their bare feet.’

  (And the dust, Alma thought. And God, flapping above like a big, crumpled-up coat.)

  ‘During the day, the laundered clothes were laid out to dry on bushes, we, Edward and I, were told to iron our clothes (when they had hung to dry outdoors) in order to kill off the eggs that certain insects lay in moisture, and whose larvae can burrow under the skin (but the children’s clothes were not ironed) and when the children caught a glimpse of me – outside of the enclosure, they crowded together by the fence and called me and enticed me, “Sister Alwilda, Sister Alwilda.” I was enraptured by each and every one, there were probably twelve or fifteen of them, but I was particularly enraptured by two beautiful children, a small boy by the name of John and a little girl named Mary (and now that I think of it she might have learned to adopt the right facial expression a little too early on, I now think of John and Mary as the youngest in a musical) and as I mentioned they were all enraptured by me, their Sister Alwilda. There was one child who was not terribly charming, and she was also listless, her name was Mildred. She was probably five. Mildred reminded me of how happy I had once been to vaccinate my big filthy Dorthe Doll with a potato peeler.

  One day in the schoolroom – I was observing the teacher, who was African, attempt to drill the alphabet into children as young as two, (the missionaries personally saw to God’s drilling) imagine an infant holding a pointer and attempting to hit the letters on the board. I sat, without thinking about it, like a lady, with my legs crossed. The teacher’s skirt reached all the way down to the ground, to all intents and purposes she had no legs. Suddenly she smiled at me and pointed at my legs and signalled for me to turn around. Around me sat fifteen miniature versions of myself – legs crossed, faces beaming – yes, fun and games, nobody noticed the alphabet out of delight at seeing my legs. I remember especially how John’s face shone.’

  ‘The screw is tightening, Alwilda,’ Alma said and pulled herself into a seated position.

  ‘One day I decided to take the children for a stroll. They all wanted to hold my hand, they pulled and tore at my hands and at one another to get to my hands. Finally we established that they could hold one finger each. I held out my hands behind me, and one child latched onto each of my fingers, what a strangely wild cargo I walked with. The Lilliputians weighed Gulliver down. Fingers like teats, and thus we entered the woods. It was a listless wood, sparsely vegetated. Never before have I seen a forest with such great distance between the trees. What kind of trees were they, I cannot say. I shook my hands free of the children, and they set off and swarmed around a huge stump, they climbed on top of it and jumped down from it. With the exception of Mildred. She wanted to be carried. Fair enough, because there had been no finger for Mildred to hold. I clasped my fingers together to form a kind of chair which I placed under the back of her knees, she wrapped her arms around my neck, and her bum dangled about in the air. She had me all to herself and out of pure satisfaction, she stuck a couple of filthy fingers into her mouth and began to suck. Maybe she also fiddled with my ears. Suddenly the children began to scream – “Snake, snake.” And they cleared away from the stump in one movement, like a school of fish, a flock of birds. And what did I do?’

  ‘Yes, what did you do, Alwilda?’

  ‘I tore my hands apart so that Mildred landed on the ground with a heavy thud, and then I ran – fifteen, twenty metres. I noticed two of the children helping Mildred to her feet. It had been a false alarm, or else the snake was gone by now. Because the flock was calm. I walked back and wiped off Mildred’s cheeks and picked her up again. The entire way home she cried mechanically and inconsolably. If it had been little John or little Mary, I would never have let go.’

  When Alma said nothing, Alwilda continued: ‘And now I want to talk about greed.’

  (Would you like a pointer, Alma thought.)

  ‘All meals were consumed in a refectory. It was s
elf-service. Next to the stack of plates were bowls and pots. There were a lot of missionaries, a lot of people eating. The first day Edward and I arrived relatively early – I mean, there were not many people in the queue in front of us when we arrived. That day they were serving rice with beans in tomato sauce and a little onion and some avocado slices. Outside, over the fires, the same bean dish was stewing in the pots of the African women. I had seen that on the way to the refectory. I had passed the women earlier that day, when they had been sitting in front of their huts observing everything. Little John had fallen and had sliced open his big toe on a sharp rock. I grabbed him and ran towards the nurse’s domain, in the main building. His foot was bleeding and he was screaming. I looked at the women as I ran past. I sought solidarity, that together we could feel sorry for the child (because he must have been in real pain), but all I found was complete indifference, perhaps outright coldness, or else it was listlessness. They did not move. Their faces reflected nothing.

  We were terribly hungry. We were far out in the country, and there was very little food to go round. We took one spoonful, and another. We could not stop. We must have thought that the pots would be filled again, that there was more food, behind the curtain where the kitchen must be. When we sat down at one of the long communal tables, hundreds of eyes sought out our plates and crept all the way around the portion like flies, measuring. We had taken at least twice as much as everyone else. My face contorted like it had blood dripping from it. We could not put the food back. We had to work our way through each of our voluminous portions. I did not know whether to eat quickly – so that my crime disappeared. Or slowly, to show how much I enjoyed the food that I had purloined. Edward leaned as far over his plate as he could. At one point he fenced the plate off with his arms. But it seemed so possessive – that I elbowed him in his side. The last person in the queue got next to nothing. Tiny blobs on big plates and ours were full, oh no. And do you know what, at the next meal, there was someone at the counter to dish up – so everyone got the same amount. To guard against our greed.’