Companions

by Christina Hesselholdt

  When he entered the living room where I lay on the sofa drying up, I had a feeling that he came from the outside, on a visit. He felt like that too, he went awkward and almost hesitant. If I was well disposed, I pulled myself up into a sitting position, so my double chin smoothed out. I was privileged, because as long as I had the sofa, he had to make do with a mattress on the floor, in his room – which was not a living room like mine, but just a room, though with stucco just like mine. Kristian had never unpacked his belongings, they were still in moving boxes in his room, entire towers or pillars or consoles of boxes which clothes and towels were slung over. Wet towels – detour required, the sound of flames, the sound of accidents: our honeymoon was in Paris. During our stay we visited a friend, Maja. We stayed with her for a couple of nights. Morning. Kristian comes out of the shower. He hung his wet towel to dry above a standing lamp in our room. The cover of this lamp was open on the top, like a sieve, so to speak, the bulb was exposed, good lord. We left the flat and wandered around the city all day, among other things we saw von Trier’s The Idiots, the French did not laugh by and large, not even when the idiots try to sell a Christmas decoration. Twelve hours later when we came home, I turned on the light to our room and continued into the kitchen where Kristian had sat down with Maja. A little later a burning smell. We raced out of the kitchen. A pillar of fire rose from the lamp. The towel had long since dried. One of us, two of us, grabbed a wool blanket to smother the fire as we tried to throw it over and span it like an arched bridge, but the fire greedily ate the wool and received the fuel to jump over to the furniture. Such speed. But not on the part of the fire service. Soon the entire flat was burning, and the three of us stood out in the staircase wringing our hands. (We had taken our rucksacks with us even though we were in doubt as to whether it was the right thing to do now that all of Maja’s things were burning.) Suddenly Maja thought: ‘Oh God, my letters. My photographs.’

  We tried to hold her back, with no luck. She ran into the flat and began to struggle with a large chest of drawers. We followed her and pulled and dragged, but she was practically glued to the chest of drawers. Then the fire service arrived. They got her out. There she came, bent over, between two firemen. ‘My hands, my hands,’ she wailed and held out something white and flossy as well as black for us. We followed her down to the ambulance and stood watching it drive away. On the way up the stairs we again passed a couple of firemen who were on their way down.

  ‘Is he finished?’ I asked them, struggling with my French.

  ‘Is he finished?’ one repeated and laughed and nodded. We went up to the completely burnt out flat. The walls were black, the smell was raw. I looked to where we had left our things. I found a small hard orange clump. It was my beloved orange coat (artificial material) with white stitches in the seams from Nørgaard, melted. I stuck the clump in my pocket. The next day we visited Maja at an ultramodern military hospital, but we were not allowed in due to the risk of infection. We had to stand behind a glass pane. Her bandaged hands were placed on a suspended stand and looked like large helpless fins. She lay tossing her head back and forth on the pillow. Her upper body was naked under a sheet, and a long breast was sensed. It ended up occupying a disproportionate amount of my attention, watching it disappear and appear under the sheet. She had just had her bandaging changed, we heard, and it required her getting a large dose of morphine.

  She could not work the following year. We had destroyed her life. To top it all off, our insurance company launched a conflict with hers, and it ended up being a long time before she got compensation.

  ‘You were the one who hung the towel over the lamp,’ I said to Kristian.

  ‘But you were the one who switched on the light,’ he replied.

  We had collaborated in the disaster. We had collaborated on the destruction of her life. For a long time, I was angry at her because she had been so stupid as to try to save her chest of drawers. Yes, yes, I realized that the anger was out of self-defence; but we could not pull her out, she was big and strong. The panic made her strong. I thought that we ought to buy her something.

  ‘What do you give someone who has lost everything?’ Kristian asked.

  And that might have been a fair point. Where do you begin? With a vase? An armchair? I pictured various objects positioned, one at a time, in the sooty living room, and immediately it became an artefact. And very alone. I happen to think of Charles who at the moment is taking photos of the things from his life which have had significance for him, each item is isolated against a background of white cardboard. The project is extensive, and it is growing. He has begun, no, he has always done that, picking things up from the street, things which have a direct appeal for him, it could be a woman’s red hat or a screw or a dirty dummy. One thing draws the next with it – because Charles also thinks of what suits what, or what requires what, he would never use an expression like ‘the objects speak together’. Thus the other day a miniature ballerina made of yarn required the company of a cod. Camilla went to the fishmonger’s and returned with a seven-kilo beast. When they had taken a photo of it, it had to be cut into suitable pieces and placed in the freezer, for future consumption. I could hear on the phone that she was gradually growing tired of the project. In the beginning it had made her sad, ‘Charles is giving up,’ she said, ‘as if he is about to close up shop.’ I replied that you don’t die of a bad back. ‘With all that morphine,’ she sighed, ‘all those cigarettes.’ Then she complained for a long time about the chaos their home had become because of the sickbed. Charles cannot lie in the practically brand new bed that they couldn’t resist buying because of its shapely steel legs, because the mattress is too soft. So he lies on a harder mattress on the floor, by the window. Since he cannot have a bedside table, he lives with stacks of books and papers on the floor around him. Leaning against the walls are rolls of white cardboard to be photographed. I don’t know what this special type of paper is called. And a long piece is placed on the dining table, supported by a couple of chairs it reaches all the way down to the floor; not a wave, but a ski slope, here the immortalization takes place, here the items become new and alone, icons against the deathly white, items without landscape. Camilla drags boxes up from the basement with things to be photographed. The photographer comes and goes, in addition to a whole bunch of other visitors, often two or three different ones every afternoon, they are kind, they are loving, and go into the kitchen to make coffee themselves, they are also her friends, Kristian coming over to watch a football match with Charles, Alwilda, Edward, and more, including the painter who in my mind is named Clea because she is blonde (and paints) like Clea from The Alexandria Quartet. Camilla isolates herself in her study and is close to screaming every time she hears a sound in the kitchen which her room adjoins. She feels like she is living in a public space together with all these coffee sisters and coffee brothers. She is embarrassed about the mess on behalf of the visitors in Charles’s room, the bedding scattered with ashes. She needs a façade. She compares him to her granddad who was also a hoarder. ‘I am a tape recorder,’ he said when he picked up a piece of tape from the road with his walking stick. Charles uses one of his staffs to grab hold of things on the street. He has become a Nordic walker, for the sake of his back. She thinks that he cannot acknowledge the extra workload on her, victim of a hoarder. She has taken on an afflicted expression. And Charles is bitter, he does something or other with his mouth which I connect with Uffe Ellemann-Jensen – yes, he presses his lips together.

  Camilla thinks of her grandmother who went on screaming raids against her grandfather’s accumulations when he was down at the harbour, how she had to hide what she threw out underneath ‘innocent’ rubbish, rubbish beyond the grandfather’s interest, which there was not very much of, for example he would rinse out all the milk cartons and stack them in his woodshed for later use, he would cut them in half and use them to put paintbrushes in. Back then she always sided with the grandfather and thought that the grandmother was be
ing hysterical in saying that the objects were forcing her into the sea. They lived on a hill, the sea was half a kilometre from there.

  Charles’s project has made me speculate as to which things I would choose as ‘my life objects’; of course there is the plant I have had since I was a child, a hardy growth that has only got new soil two or three times over the past thirty years. If it gets a lot of light, the leaves grow big, and backwards. Then there is my amber tree that the light falls on so golden. It is cleaned under the shower. And my flowered porcelain pig that Camilla’s mum gave me when my first book was published. And a yellow vase Camilla gave me last year. The orange clump from the fire I have kept to remind myself that if at some point someone happened to injure me by accident, for example by burning my home down, I should show magnanimity. I will probably come up with more – things.

  They have asked if I want the double bed with the chubby legs, then they will buy a new harder one so they can get Charles up from the mattress on the floor and again get to sleep next to each other. And yes, I want that. Not that long ago they were going to stay in Aarhus, at a hotel. They had been to the premiere of my new play. They had brought Charles’s mattress with them so as not to risk having a potentially soft hotel bed ‘break his back in half’, as he says. ‘It was,’ Camilla said, ‘years since I had heard myself laugh so unrestrainedly. (It felt almost as if a physical love was waiting around the corner. Lightness – soon someone will take over from me. Soon I will be someone I do not recognize. Exactly like the sound that had just escaped me, for once my head thrown back in laughter. Foreign. A touch irresponsible.) I laughed at the mattress, that we arrived with our own mattress in tow, into the hotel. That would correspond to taking your own casserole to the restaurant. Almost. In addition there is nothing more impossible to drag than a mattress, sliding and bending, it is alive and does what it wants – and it did that, through the reception and into the elevator. A moment later, in the hotel room, lying on the mattress, Charles began to talk about Jews, in the thirties. I thought that I could smell the dust of the coats. I was locked in with Charles and his Jews. They are mine too. Every time I occupy myself with that, I relive the shock from when I heard about it the first time, every foundation disappears. I asked him to talk about something else that evening at the hotel. So he talked about the Gulag. You cannot think that you have the right to laugh once in a while.’

  Now Charles wants to, by the way, have a torture implement tattooed on his back. In the place where the pain stems from, on top of the scar from the operation. His friend the painter is going to make a picture that will then be transferred to the back. Camilla considers it macabre and does not know how she will touch his back. She has no desire to run her hand across that image, involve it in the caress. You probably cannot say that he has gone over to the side of the suffering, anyway it can mean several things. He suffers, and his obsession with suffering and pain is great. That much can be said. The long flat back no longer belongs to her, only to the pain.

  In the end we bought nothing, only a fancy confectioner’s cake and a bunch of flowers for Maja’s parents who took charge of us on the night of the accident, and whose guests we were for a day or two. But a long time afterwards I considered, apropos cod, to have an enormous Norwegian smoked (flame-coloured, I realized) salmon sent to the family in France, (I must have seen an advert somewhere) but that too remained an idea.

  The room smelled of old cardboard. Our wedding certificate and a pile of unusable wedding gifts (fountain pen, silver napkin rings et cetera) also lay on the floor somewhere. Kristian lay there when he was ill, with a sore throat or something, and looked at the stucco with a harried look, or he sat there using a couple of cardboard boxes as a desk. It was hard to avoid the thought that he had not wanted to move in; that in a way he was ready to move out at any moment, the boxes already packed.

  It was very dusty, and once I insisted on vacuuming in there even though he was lying ill on the floor, because I was left with all the cleaning, whereas he had arrogated every form of contact with food, he jumped up from his sickbed and grabbed me by the throat. I vacuumed as best I could with his hands around my neck. (The world would run smoothly if everyone carried out their work with a similar enthusiasm. He kept squeezing until I dragged the vacuum cleaner out of the room.) That is the thing with Kristian, he hates rubbish but has nothing against dust, for example he had the notion that it would be a waste of time to clean before we had guests, it made perfect sense to wait until afterwards. Now I do not want to make him sound generally violent, he isn’t; I was no better; the only time I gave him a slap, I hit his glasses so that one lens was crushed, and he bled from his eyebrow. It looked worse than it was. I remember that shortly after this incident we coincidentally happened to see an episode about violent wives, all from the English-speaking world. There was a woman who had tried to run down her husband in the driveway several times; it was a drama documentary, a genre (according to me) that seldom succeeds, because the illustrative scenes that accompany the narrative, as a rule, attempt to cover it in a 1 to 1 relation, they are simply cut short and involuntarily comical, fragments of fiction poke their head up from dramatic music, and you see a man throw himself out of the way of the car with the raging wife and land in the hedge, and then once more for Prince Knud, in slow motion (first I have to say something about Prince Knud. Several years ago I went to a university in Gdansk to talk about my authorship with the Danish students there, I launched into a discussion with them about ‘warm’ and ‘cold’ texts, and at one point I must have (excitedly or insistently) said ‘once more for Prince Knud’, because several months later I received in the post a dissertation about my authorship from one of the students who had been present and made notes during the talk, I could read: ‘As Prince Knud once said, it can really burn intensely beneath the cool surface of a text.’ Her dissertation supervisor was a Danish lecturer, she must have ridden through the dissertation at a gallop) a woman who was always lurking to push her husband down the stairs, and then there was the very worst woman, the one who one night had melted countless candles on a frying pan, pulled the duvet off her husband and poured the boiling wax over his groin. We were introduced to the poor husband after he had many operations (new skin, maybe even brand-new genitals). I was happy that I did not belong to this violent category, that I had only hit Kristian a single time, that it was an accident that the glasses were broken. But every day, almost, we said horrible and irreparable things to each other. He had got rather fat, and if I got a glimpse of him coming out of the shower, I told him that he looked like Michael Moore. ‘Michael Moore, Michael Moore, Michael Moore,’ I would say, standing and pointing at him. Over time I felt such a nausea and began to tremble whenever I heard his key in the lock.

  On the kitchen table was a list with two columns with our names above where we wrote the amount we had spent on shared food. I ate certain things that did not interest Kristian, Danish pastries or a tin of bean paste, and so I did not mark those foods on the list. At the end of every month we then settled accounts so we paid approximately the same amount of the shared food. This calculation had a festive feel where we both, while Kristian added up – he was best with numbers, he thought – tensely sat waiting for the outcome, wondering which way the money would travel the following moment. Once I had been really ill with a chest infection and when I finally worked up a bit of an appetite, I asked Kristian to go to the bakery for a bread roll. He did, but only served it to me after meticulously charging the four or five kroner to my name on the list.

  What did Kristian do in his room… he sat (with an un-unpacked cardboard box as a desk) writing his PhD and despaired and rewrote and saved the various versions and did not know which one was best, and crossed back and forth between them like a dinghy on the sea of endless possibilities. When he was not working, he ate. He kept plastic bags containing nuts and raisins and bread slices in one of the boxes. I was not supposed to know about it. He ate all day long while using both h
ands (like one of our ancestors with a long tail), though not sitting curled up beneath the ceiling on a box the tail whipping against the cardboard, to despairingly stick his foot in his mouth. The right hand up to the hole pop chew left hand up to the hole pop chew right hand already ready with a new load.

  ‘Why do you always have to work?’ I complained back when I still missed his company.

  ‘If I don’t work, I eat,’ he replied.

  To eat meant to break down. And I pictured his ego itself, his soul, his consciousness, whatever you prefer, as a ramshackle shed that was braced with a couple of slanted boards – and then someone came and kicked at the braces.

  We had not been married very long, the eating cannot be classified by what Herta Müller writes about one of the minor characters in The Hunger Angel, who eats his wife’s food at the labour camp in Ukraine, but here it comes anyway: ‘An old marriage makes you hungry, infidelity makes you full.’

  And what did I do on my sofa? If it was morning, I wrote. If it was afternoon or evening, I waited for it to be morning so I could start writing again, with a head not muddled by the day. I lay and was occupied, my mind was occupied with hating, despairing, defending my own loathing, deciding to pull myself together and make it work. I was occupied by the idea of leaving, I played out my break-up endlessly, on my heating pad, my heart growing heavier.