Companions

by Christina Hesselholdt

  My mum had been happy when she discovered that she fell under the remit of Marmorkirken; then immediately embarrassed at her happiness, because she was not a person who liked to be associated with pomp and splendour. And then one day we stood in a small group around her coffin, in this church that was far too big.

  When the hearse was about to drive off, I reached into the car and placed my hand on the coffin for a moment. Kristian said afterwards that it had made him dizzy, that it had been uncanny, as if I was not going to let go, as if I was going to go with her. Which wasn’t the case at all. It was simply meant as a final touch. As close as I could get. Give the traveller’s shoulder a squeeze. But it did not feel much different from placing a hand on a wall. I was not able to connect with her, even though she lay inside the coffin. (I have previously said that I would no longer busy myself with death, but this is real death, not the death that the mind winds around itself and uses as its prayer beads – and that is the one I want nothing to do with.)

  I inherited the summerhouse. Now I painted the gate for my own sake. It felt empty and strange that there was nobody but me to appreciate it. It only struck me much later that I could have stopped thinking of happiness in relation to the freshly painted gate; but had grasped it pragmatically and thought that the wood treatment had secured the gate against rot. And that’s that. But I was clearly locked in the memory about the desire to please from ten years previously. Now I was the one who (with force and power, you could almost say) had to be happy – and I had to do it alone, I had to learn to be alone with happiness. I had to learn to see for myself, not be dependent on other people’s gazes, my mum’s, Charles’s – for example see the garden and the storm of shearing and destruction that blew through it, and the freshly painted gate.

  I felt like a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces had been thrown high into the air, that I was rummaging around to pick them up, and some of the pieces had yet to land and might hit me on the head at any moment. I had, but again it sounds so active – the circumstances had caused me to un-know myself to what seemed to me a considerable degree. Just a moment ago I sat flicking through Louisiana Revy and looked at photos from an exhibition of self-portraits; how time and the (more or less) personal style still flow in over the self in the portrait, I thought, what actually remains, you could ask, where does a small flake of unique self hide itself, if that even exists – the answer is probably: in the style itself (more or less characteristic of the period). I want to have my portrait done in a shower of puzzle pieces.

  It made me think of a conversation Charles and I had had about the obligation for happiness, it was in France, where we drove round and looked at cave paintings, and sitting in the car we discussed how not only you could feel like crap (at times), but when you simultaneously felt an obligation to be happy about everything that there was obviously reason to be happy about but were unable to, that made you even more miserable; a sense of misery and misfortune, of lacking a potency in relation to life, set in. I am certain that Charles quoted Kierkegaard and on the whole exhibited a Christian understanding of the compulsion for happiness, or the duty of happiness. But I am ignorant as far as theology is concerned. The conversation, I remember, ended up isolating us. We sat in the car next to each other, and drove through the magnificent French countryside, but the conversation had kicked us inside ourselves and away from each other. Maybe that was the day we had been in Rocamadour and seen the Black Madonna, a small, if I recall, modest wooden figure (modest in the same way as the statue of the Little Mermaid, unostentatious), and while I sat on the bench in the church looking at her, I thought of my mum: the Virgin Mary was the only one of the church’s figures that meant anything to her. I was thinking that my mum’s life neared a conclusion, that it had been a hard life with a lot of pain, spiritually and bodily, and I had never been able to bear that it was often so hard for her to exist. Only during the final year of her life was I capable of, when I left her flat after a visit, not thinking about how she was doing until I talked to her the next time, and that was normally that same night, over the phone. I was able to put it aside, as they say. The day she died, I forgot her telephone number. She had had the same number for at least a decade. I was in an incredible rush to empty her flat, I shovelled her clothes and shoes into black bin bags while now and again I could not help checking if she was lying on the sofa. I was afraid. Of the emptiness left by her. I had to do it quickly. Perhaps a little like Muslims who have to bury their dead immediately; if the burial is delayed it is said that neither they nor the dead will be able to have peace later on. I had to get everything out of the way – not to cut off her retreat, but to cut off the idea that she was still there, from letting it conquer my head.

  My mum said on a number of occasions (when I had sought help from her to talk something through) that I had to learn to talk to myself (because she was not always going to be there). Now I do nothing but that. I talk out loud to myself. I have started to, without really thinking about it. And if anyone hears, I say: ‘Yes, I was just walking around talking to myself about…’

  ‘Yes, I heard,’ the person in question sometimes answers.

  I need to be both myself and another.

  Dream, from the notebook saved from my forgetfulness: A man (anonymous, unfamiliar) approached me and asked me to follow him. He wanted to show me the strange light that just now had descended on the attic and walls of the church. The church had belonged to Mum. I understood that the light was Mum, and was happy that she revealed herself to me.

  Later, perhaps while the man and I stood in the church (now mine), it was recommended I get the ceiling renovated. It was falling down.

  Late one evening Edward’s dog began to bark out in the garden, it barked as if it was going to explode, and I hurried out of the house. It stood at the end of the garden, near the new fence. On the lawn in front of it was a hedgehog, rolled up into a bristling cone; in front of the small animal stood the frothing wild beast that did not dare attack and was close to flying off the handle. The hedgehog’s heart was beating insanely loud. So much fear under cover of quills. I took the dog under my arm and carried it into the house and closed the door. Then I returned to the hedgehog. It had not moved an inch. And its heart was pounding just as loud. I withdrew from the hedgehog in the hope that it would calm down and be able to continue its journey through the garden. All the way back to the house I could hear the sound of its heart, it was incredible that such a small animal had such a loud heartbeat, that there was resonance space for it – in the chest of the hedgehog. Then it made me think that by fencing off the garden I might have cut the hedgehog off from ever meeting other hedgehogs; now it was for all eternity doomed to be locked up with the dog and me.

  This hedgehog is not me. I am alone, but my heart beats gently. The hedgehog alone is proprietor of the fear.

  The longing for love has for some time been visualised in this way: A hand passes me a cup of tea or places a blanket over my shoulders, I, sitting somewhere that most of all resembles a sanatorium, I, a centenarian. (The sanatorium perhaps this garden.) I possibly do not have the same need for, or strength for, intimacy that I previously had in my life. How the cost of intimacy often was to be transformed into a whimpering fool, with the tears pouring down the cheeks.

  Thomas Bernhard said in an interview that intimacy would kill him.

  A small list to note my pleasure at being the only one of my kind in the garden:

  Nobody to complain to, you avoid this pathetic approach to another person to do something for you, cheer you up, et cetera. I now carry, more or less cheerfully, my life on my own shoulders.

  I have dragged the garden furniture out of the shed and settled in out here, with a notebook and with the first part of Thomas Bernhard’s autobiography, The Origin. Around me an undifferentiated mass of trees rustles. They are my trees, and I cannot tell them apart, rustling, crown weaved into crown. Though I do recognize the apple tree in front of me. It bears pitmaston pineapples, small an
d rugged, they won’t be ready till July. An apple falls (suddenly) off the branch with a crack, shot towards the grass by the worm inside it, I believe. Apples and the thought of the family, that could not be more suitable.

  I intended to cough all the misery there has been down in this pail, the notebook, which I hereby dub Document Black. Behind the verb ‘cough’ and the entire idea of pails or tubs a literary origin lies hidden: Ron Weasley, Harry Potter’s friend, whose magic wand is in pieces, accidentally invokes a kind of curse upon himself consisting of him coughing up slugs; he is literally running over with snails, they pour out of him, and so Hagrid gives him a tub to lean over, where the snails can be collected. Well, I am bending over my notebook and start where my thoughts often founder:

  My mum had been depressed for some time when one of her friends rang me and told me that she thought my mum was having suicidal thoughts. I rejected that most definitely, as I believed and trusted what my mum had told me, over the years, on several occasions, that when you have had a child, the thought of taking your own life has to be wiped out, I think she said: ‘Then that possibility no longer exists.’ (I knew that she had attempted to take her own life when she was quite young because she had fallen in love with a married man, an impossible love; she used to say that she was probably one of the last in the wave following the young Werther. In the hospital room an old lady in the neighbouring bed gave her a turquoise scarab, the resurrection beetle, for the new beginning she had woken up to; she later passed it on to me, and I have it in an envelope, because it is so small that it could easily disappear in my jewellery box.) I did not think that this child, me, had by now been an adult for more than twenty years. I shrugged off her friend’s concerns. I think that I forgot all about the phone call.

  One afternoon I visited my mum, a suitcase was packed; she who always preferred to ride out her depression at home had personally arranged an admission and was on her way to the hospital. The ward, dull sad futile, the lounge full of smoke and smokers (if as in other parts of society a smoking ban had been introduced at the psychiatric wards, the wards would have been devoid of people, the chain-smoking patients camped outside, but what about the closed wards, the few non-smokers perhaps moving around in a kind of mobile aquarium-like oxygen box steamed up with breath, ‘come as your madness’: Anaïs Nin placed a birdcage on her head at a party under that theme), it was either later that same day, or the following day, that my mum asked me for her grey bag, in itself gloomy, like a small collapsed donkey, but she changed her mind, as I reached for it, and jumped up from the bed and grabbed it… one of the first nights she attempted to take her life with some pills she had brought with her in the donkey bag, in her hospital room, but ended up vomiting them.

  I know that she did it at the hospital out of concern for me (had herself admitted in order to take her own life there), so that I would not come and find her, and I also understand how terrible she was doing, and how difficult it was to make such a decision. She talked about it on another occasion, how difficult it was for her to reach that point, to make the effort to leave life behind, that it demanded a huge effort (maybe she was referring to her suicide attempt when she was very young, now she was at the other end of life, probably around seventy).

  Thomas Bernhard writes about himself (in the third person):

  ‘But he, yes, he had never managed to muster the power, determination and strength of character that was necessary to commit suicide.’

  — The Origin

  It is not only the degree of despair that determines the outcome: if the suicide attempt ends up taking place.

  The attempt failed, and I was deeply grateful for that, but I felt conned cheated deceived – and guilty, because I had not been attentive to ‘the preparation phase of suicide,’ in Bernhard’s words, unlike the friend who had warned me. A little later she, the friend, committed suicide. (In my mind it is connected to the fact that her husband shortly before choked to death, a chunk of meat got stuck in his throat one day when he was at home alone. After that I, the vegetarian, stopped putting avocado pits in my mouth in order to suck off the remaining avocado – I imagine the pit flying into the abyss.)

  Five years later when my mum was near death she had a couple of days of vomiting that she told me were due to a kind of mechanical irritation, caused by taking all her evening medicine at once, instead of in several doses as she normally did, it left me with a doubt as to whether it was in fact another suicide attempt. And if her death was the result of suicide. But she lay, as mentioned, so peaceful when I found her. It looked natural.

  ‘I can’t take much more,’ she had said, weak after her vomiting. ‘Nor should you,’ I had replied.

  When we then sat together, the day before what would become the day of her death, I said to her: ‘When you say that you can’t take much more, I feel that I should give you permission to die.’

  ‘I simply can’t understand how you can come to that conclusion,’ she replied, ‘five years ago, back when I tried to take my own life, you said afterwards that you still needed me. And so I decided that I would be here for you as long as I could.’ She reached out for my hand: ‘We need each other.’

  She only did it – tried to take her own life back then – I said to myself sitting in the garden that now mercilessly was mine alone – because she thought I was in good hands with Charles and no longer needed her, and for a time I truly was, in good hands, but then I could no longer endure the marriage, I developed a kind of hypersensitivity towards it.

  And after the enormous exertion of deciding to take her own life – and managing to carry out the act, the act of suicide, which then failed – then she was right back where she started, in bed.

  Dream: my mum lived in an attic, I walked up the attic stairs, the door was not locked, she had been asleep and was frightened that she had lain there completely defenceless, with the door unlocked.

  I feel bad writing about her. I am certain that she would not care for it. And she is defenceless, not sleeping, dead. But I can’t stop. I can meet her when I dream about her. And when I write about her. It is a somewhat selfish project, possibly outright improper.

  ‘I have always wanted to gun someone down from behind,’ Charles had said and laughed (depraved), so you could see the void where the tooth was missing, or else he said ‘shoot someone in the back’ and basked in the not very heroic nature of the statement and his own toothless charm, he could get away with standing in the position of the coward because of his charm. Could he also have gotten away with it by saying that he wanted to be a rat, even wanted to rat on someone? The other teeth in his mouth were heavily discoloured, all things considered there was something brown about him. He mentioned it on more than one occasion. Two or three times over the ten years that our marriage ended up lasting, he said that he had always dreamt of shooting someone in the back. Each time I pictured a small town in the Wild West, it could be OK Corral, dust rising up, and the bad guy’s straddling legs, the cowardly shot in the hero’s back. And while I pictured the western scene (the guy with the brown glow as the baddie), I saw myself sitting in the brown corduroy armchair watching a western on TV, with my legs dangling over the edge of the armrest, while from a bowl, with a spoon, eating something that might be dough, an afternoon during my teenage years, quite possibly a Saturday or Sunday, because only on the weekend would you expect to see a western. In all likelihood I had felt like baking a cake, but had not had the patience to wait until it was baked, or else I had not managed it because the film started, and for that reason I ate it raw (raw food, decades before it became modern), though in all likelihood with baking powder in it. Which makes me remember my grandmother’s flat cakes; for some reason she never used baking powder, and her cakes were always flat, and they crumbled easily. When I asked her why she did not use baking powder, she brushed it aside. It seemed as though she simultaneously wanted to bake and not bake, or as though she wanted to bake a little – bake, but bake flatly. There was something i
mmensely unassuming about her cakes, just as there was something immensely unassuming about her, who almost always stood up drinking her coffee with the accompanying flat cake, or if she sat, she sat on the very edge of the chair. All because she belonged to a time and a milieu, she came from the country, where the women waited upon the men while they sat eating, and she had a hard time staying still during an entire meal, even when she reached an advanced age; she preferred to walk back and forth between the kitchen and the dining table, even though everything already, before the meal began, was placed on the table, and the people eating could easily manage to pour and serve themselves.

  As far as my family history is concerned, at the age of fourteen I was introduced to a point in it that turned everything on its head. As far as my family history is concerned, I quite simply have to settle my inheritance, no matter how heavy it seems, but with an eye to what, you might ask? A kind of liberation, I presume. To let a heavy burden fall. By talking about it? Would that be enough? Incidentally it seems to me that in my family there has always been a certain eagerness in relation to, prevailed a certain need for, talking about weighty topics. In order to thereby lighten the load? And here I picture the family placed in a row, with a boulder passing from one set of arms to another, the recipient sinking to their knees each time under the weight. Their suffering could be perceived as an attack (even though there is a certain unreasonableness in saying that), like the open end of a cannon pointing at me.

  I can’t put it off any longer: I was on a trip in the countryside with my cousins, in Ermelunden, we sat on a blanket and ate our lunch when the youngest of them (incidentally it is unbelievable the extent to which she and I share gestures and diction, suddenly in the midst of a stream of words she lets out a high sound, an uh or an uhm, so high-pitched that I am initially taken aback, but then I recognize the voice from myself, and the hesitations, all these small tosses of the head, the wrist’s sideways movement through the air, which I find immensely affected when I have seen video recordings of myself, but with her just see as life and consideration) took it for granted that I knew something I (nevertheless) did not know; that my grandma, when her children were little, had slit the artery of first her daughter (my cousin’s mum) and afterwards herself. Shock always leads to, in any case on my part, a change in the surroundings, in this case the lake a little ways from us became more radiant, more like a mirror, and my own movements, the movement of everything seemed jerky, as though time had stopped flowing.