Companions

by Christina Hesselholdt

  ‘He bent down with a grunt, cursing his knee, to fix his skis, in the driving snow, on the brink of the slope, but the skis had vanished, the bindings were shoelaces, and the slope, a staircase.’

  — Vladimir Nabokov, Ada

  The character in the novel Ada does not suffer from sleeplessness, but is in a highly emotional state because of a romantic betrayal, when he mistakes indoors with outdoors. I often mistake occurrences in the physical world. And I ask myself how differently from other people you can experience things that ought to be a given, that is to say where there is consensus, without being considered completely wide of the mark. What degree of subjectivity in the perception is permissible or excusable, how far can you deviate from consensus if you want to be deemed sane? If you are willing to correct yourself (well no of course that’s not the sound of water falling, but the sound of electricity, obviously there’s no waterfall here, how could I make such a terrible mistake), the people with normal perception would still allow you to squeeze in with their group, it is only when you insist on the rightness of your perception that the group closes before you like a wall. Now I think of something slightly different. My mum had a fever. I was visiting her. Suddenly she straightened up in bed and waved in delight at a blackbird on a branch outside the window; as if it was essential that the bird saw her greet it, now that it had at long last appeared.

  Back to the subject of sleep… nonetheless, in the care of another doctor, or lack thereof, I grew addicted to these seemingly innocent oval pills that are so difficult to divide into two. When I shut up shop and declined to take any more because I got so dizzy during the day that I staggered like a drunk and several times sat next to a chair instead of on it, it cost me five sleepless nights, every sound cut me, and I had no skin, the atmosphere squeaked like cotton wool and scraped at my bones and nerves.

  Rohypnol meant obliteration from the surface of the earth for the following ten hours. My mum must not have known that OF supplied me with these pills. Or else she trusted that I would use them sensibly, which I did seeing as their effect was horrifying, more or less like – first a shadow (of heaviness) fell upon me, and the next moment a bird grabbed me with its claws and flew me off to its nest, far from the world, giving me a foretaste of death. The other day when I was out for a stroll with Edward, he had an errand at the pet shop, and I went in with him. The staff had let four or five small birds out of their cages so they could fly around the shop, and I prayed that none of them would land on my head, or get anywhere near my face. Both of those things happened. I felt an intense loathing, I cannot stand the whirring of wings, and the darting movements. The fact that I am short-sighted and my eyes are different, the left is more short-sighted than the right, (‘remember “lousy leftie”’: my optician) makes it difficult for me to judge distances, and often I think that a pigeon or a gull is about to land on me when I am down by Sortedams Sø or on Rådhuspladsen so I duck and shield my face, while in reality, apparently, it keeps to a safe distance. In Orlando a loving touch is praised as being light as the wings of birds. It is the Russian princess Sasha who touches Orlando in that way, like the stirring of plumage. When I read that passage, I pictured something I could not bear: a bird brushing its wings against my naked body, and stop thinking of birds as genitals like in Catullus’s poem about the sparrow: ‘My girl’s sparrow is dead … It would not leave her lap, but hopped around now here now there … He chirped constantly to his mistress alone.’

  Here, with me, bird means bird. Once I discussed the frequent occurrence of dogs in one of Alma’s books with a teacher. He mentioned symbols. I said that the detailed description of each dog meant that it was not a symbol; that the details made it specific, something in itself, the dog, on each occasion one dog in particular.

  ‘I don’t buy that,’ he said (that is one of the expressions I care least for, perhaps only surpassed by ‘that’ll teach him’), ‘we’re talking about text here, not life.’

  ‘Then what do the dogs symbolize?’ I asked, ‘Do they symbolize wolves?’

  ‘Precisely,’ he replied, ‘they symbolize something lurking, something uneasy, something subservient, some kind of lone killer.’

  ‘But they are retrievers,’ I said, ‘gentle retrievers.’

  Again he said that he did not buy it, and asked whether I knew that a dog can tear a leather wallet to pieces in less than a minute.

  Incidentally, one time in Greifswald, the only thing I recall of my weekend stay there, a raven at the zoo had caught my attention, and I sat down right by the wire cage, and it came right up to me, and we stared into each other’s eyes for a long time (a little too long to be strictly healthy, on my part), the bird with its head cocked, me gradually ascribing this to the fact that its eyes shone with intelligence, and was in quite a state that this creature with such an ability to connect had to remain locked up.

  OF had been a patient of my mum, now he was healthy, and things proceeded like they sometimes did between her and her patients, they became friends (but he had wanted more, he had chased her round the desk in her office, and I picture her holding up her arms to ward him off and putting her full authority behind her refusal), which had the advantage that she could continue to keep tabs on her former patients and intervene if their illness recurred.

  At times the patients drove me crazy. She almost always came home from work late, nearing seven, in a taxi because she was tired, and at long last when we sat down to dinner the telephone started to ring, and it was one of them. I had no siblings. I had the patients, the persistent, those who had permission because they were ill. Because (maybe) it was a matter of life or death. And since her soothing voice could save the ill, or if the matter was less serious, merely relieve the pain, soothe, (her voice as a hand) then it should be able to do so.

  Every month she had to fill out a form to record her overtime, but often she was too tired to do it and missed out on being paid for it. Just as she was too tired to get public transport to and from work. She did not have a driving licence. Several times she purchased a theory guide with the intention of engaging in some kind of self-study, but she never managed to book a lesson. Her weekends she spent in bed, reading, exhausted.

  Every time Charles and I try to track down a doctor through the hospital system, usually in vain, to get help for his wretched back, I think of how my mum overworked herself and how I often had to act as a buffer between her and the patients, in her own home. The most annoying one of all was Birthe, a dull woman with a voice like a foghorn; my mum had given her permission to ring every Sunday, and for that reason we called her Sunday Birthe, which she also adopted.

  ‘Hi, it’s Sunday Birthe.’

  (But it’s not Sunday, it is Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.)

  She wanted me to call her Auntie.

  She wanted me to say I loved my Auntie Birthe. And I agreed, begrudgingly.

  It was difficult for her to make her extremely nasal voice sound inviting, it sounded like she stood above it and pressed down. After an ingratiating introduction (I was Saint Peter, my mum heaven) she asked to speak to my mum. If my mum waved her hands in protest, I had to come up with an excuse. Only if Birthe was in one of her rare good moods was she able to accept no for an answer. Usually she insisted until her voice reached its natural pitch – foghorn – and she became truly angry and told me that I was mean and that I should be ashamed of myself and I would be to blame if she had an attack. She suffered from epilepsy. Then I had to hang up, and if my mum was not on call and it was possible to pull the plug out of the socket, I did so. Otherwise we had to come to terms with her calling as many as eight or ten times, growing increasingly angry and crude. I met her only once, on a Sunday, where she came to visit with her husband, Svend. Her appearance was much like her voice, big and powerful, a bear under the guise of a lady, and she held out her arms and drew me in. Her husband was small and wretched, he had been exploited as a child, forced to work as unpaid labour on a number of farms. He was run down and b
roken. He laughed nervously at everything Birthe said. Once in a while she stroked him on the shoulder and said ‘isn’t that right, Svend,’ and he sunk under the weight of her hand. Svend wanted to get away from her (her violent temper wore on his nerves), but she would not allow it. In the end some government authority must have taken mercy on him and got him into a nursing home. Without her. To her great despair. On the Sunday they visited us, they had brought a jewel box for each of us, cigar boxes decorated with glazed tiles that weighed down the lid, dark blue, light blue and pink tiles (the glue applied generously, bubbling up between the tiles, first whitish, later almost brown) and overloaded the veneer where the small hinges rested, so they ended up sagging after opening them only a few times.

  We had had a drug addict stay with us, on methadone, she suffered from a heart that was too big – literally, she seemed out of breath. Being forced to turn away drug addicts due to lack of beds at the hospital was one of the things that made my mum most unhappy and angry with the system (a word seldom heard today) – so she brought this woman home with her companion, Peter, thrown in for good measure; the two of them, Anne and Peter, who had just met in the admission ward, perhaps he came along to help her with the methadone, my memory is inadequate – he came with her, and they both settled in on mattresses, one in each of our two living rooms. Anne was a Marxist, and she supplied me with a long list of books (political theory) for me to pick up from the library where at the time I worked as a shelver (a monotonous job; even the librarians were properly bored, in any case they drank a good deal, apart from re-shelving books it was my task to supply the lunch room with food for their meals, I purchased delicacies of every kind, some of them were rather stout not to mention fat, and wine in great quantities, they had a predilection for plump bottles in straw baskets) so I knew where everything was, of course the entire set of Das Kapital, she could not do without that, Lenin Mao and biographies about the anarchists Kropotkin and Goldman and several works that I do not remember (on the other hand I do remember my mum saying something along the lines of it being lucky we did not live in a country where your lending history was monitored, the books were borrowed on her card), and when I stacked them by the head of Anne’s mattress, I realized that her stay with us was going to be a long one if she was going to read all these books. She moved slowly through the rooms. And when she was going to read, she placed a pair of glasses on her long nose. She was only twenty-six. But I did not think of her as young. How could I, I was seventeen. She preferred tight velour tops and had a long sloping bosom. She was hollow-backed, and it did something to her bosom, extended it perhaps, or thrust it out. She wore a chain with a gold heart round her neck, and she pulled it, the heart, over the collar, letting it dangle over her tight velour top. And under her top worked her large overstrained heart.

  She had been a ‘streetwalker’. It made me nervous that she had been through so much, she brought the streets with her – slowly and breathlessly through the rooms, her bosom that I could not stop staring at, the books I kept tabs on as to whether she read them – places I would never have access to, would only get a sense of from the few words my mum occasionally let slip, casually and intimately, like this ‘streetwalker’, ‘how else do you think she made money’. No. I would have tipped my hat (to her), if I wore one, when she drifted past me in the entrance.

  I only treated her as a normal person on one occasion. She opened the door to my room while I was dancing in front of the mirror, without knocking – and I said harshly, exposed and embarrassed: ‘you can’t just barge in without knocking.’ Then she beat a hasty retreat in her slippers with trampled heels, which also seemed deliberate. A detail (I can remember exactly how she closed the door, the embarrassment at being exposed and me putting her in her place has left contours of the door closure in my memory), she looked down at her hand on the door handle and bent over the hand as if it was the guilty party, and she now had to monitor its actions, as she overcautiously (ironically) closed the door.

  Peter was a centre of restlessness. He was in a manic phase, he followed several TV programmes simultaneously, he changed the channel every thirty seconds, confusing for the rest of us, but no problem for him. At the same time he talked incessantly, and soon his goal was to seduce me and my friends, Alma was the only one he was successful with, in the rocking chair, during a maths lesson after he had been chosen as our tutor, not a particularly pedagogical one, the explanations lost in associations. And my mum arrived home from work, perhaps a little curious as to whether her menagerie had made it through the day, whether I had bunked off again, always late, just before the shops closed, holding shopping bags, friendly and tired. Peter was a member of the Mad Movement and introduced us to their magazine, Amalie. Alma wrote a colourful poem (sobbing owls, midnight, full moon, delirium) about him, ‘Mania’, it was called, and it was published in Amalie. He was a bitter opponent of the psychiatric establishment; he viewed my mum as an exception or as some kind of ‘good cop’. Being a psychiatrist was not popular in those years, the seventies and eighties, when anti-psychiatry raged. The left wing, which she ascribed to, considered psychiatrists to be some kind of lackeys based on the Laingian notion that madness is a healthy reaction to an ill society.

  As for the rest of the medical profession, psychiatrists (incidentally) were considered, according to her, to be at the very bottom, the binmen of society; whereas surgeons were at the top. If Charles ever runs into the surgeon who poked around in his back and failed to notice (even though he spent several hours in there) that his bones were brittle, he would push him as hard as his back allowed. And a surgeon from Stege Hospital, where my mum and I lived for a couple of years in a hospital flat, whose name resonated like Glasgow and who had a habit of greeting his patients with the words: ‘Yes, so we’ve sharpened the knives, Mrs Xxxxxxxxxx.’ Something similar could possibly be said about opticians – unpleasant memory in the queue for later use, all the same it slipped through: We’ll get that sty with a knife ‘now you lie down, and I’ll get up and you’ll be in my power’ (direct quote, accompanied by a flourishing scalpel, straddling legs); ‘Snip there we go do you want to look at your eye in the mirror on the wall up you go yes that is quite the bloody snip.’ Neck hits the deck blackout wake up on the floor with two opticians over me alarm bells fight hard to believe anything other than I have been raped after the talk of power. Ashamed of not sharing the perception of reality with two against one. Slinking home.

  Folkets Hus, the communal house on Stengade, was Peter’s second home, and he said of his activities there: ‘First I made tea, then I seized power.’

  He sat on the floor with his legs crossed and brightly coloured crocheted items. He had an overbite and protruding brown eyes and thick glasses (when he took his glasses off in order to clean them or rub his eyes, there was direct access to his mind, it seemed restrained and expectant, the small slightly red-rimmed eyes looked outright cute. I could almost kiss those eyelids. But his hair was so greasy. When the glasses were back in place, the covetous staring returned, and I felt like teasing him. His hair was black; I realize that all the people I am deploying here are dark-haired: OF, my mum, Peter, myself, Anne’s Czechoslovakian boyfriend: ‘dark and intense,’ my mum’s expression. But Alma is blonde, my GPS, my light in the darkness) and he wore a Peru hat and red corduroy trousers that stopped a good ways above the winter desert boots, the summer sandals, and crocheted waistcoat. He was quick-witted, fast and hungry for love. He had a hard time keeping away from his maths pupils, which he got more and more of from my secondary school class. Exclusively girls. The teaching took place at ours. He must have kept his lust in check when my mum was present.

  Anne and Peter’s different tempos obviously did not harmonize very well. Peter annoyed her beyond all reason, and one day she decided to move. I returned the books to the library.

  When Peter eventually moved out – it could only have happened in a way reminiscent of how a swirling bee changes course, thrust by a su
dden movement in the air. But him we just about kept in touch with. Whereas Anne disappeared forever when she went out the front door with her dissident boyfriend, a member of VS, a Danish Marxist Party and ‘terribly brilliant’, that was how he was introduced to me; I assumed it was because of him that Anne had wanted to read all those books. We saw him only a couple of times. Once during a visit when he sat holding her hand with our blue painted Mormon clock (sold to us by a Mormon) in the background, while with her toiling and hoarse voice she breathlessly explained something or other, maybe that Emma Goldman had once decided to sell herself too and went out and bought salmon-coloured underwear, but changed her mind and threw them in the river, probably the Spree. And then another time when he came home to pick her up and help carry her belongings.