Companions

by Christina Hesselholdt

  I don’t really know if this belongs in Document Black, but it could serve as a horror story, a warning to my future self: this evening down by the fjord I met an older woman with a Danish-Swedish farm dog, a spitting image of mine (I don’t think Edward will ever want it back), greying ageing and clearly with arthritis in the hindquarters, it practically has to drag itself along. A little ways away there was a pushchair which the woman told me that she drove the dog in when it could no longer walk. I thought I had seen the dog before and I had, it turned out, that is on a TV programme about dementia research, for which dogs were used, and this dog was in the early stages of dementia.

  The woman was very close to it and talked about its loyalty over fifteen years, about all the painkillers it took, she talked about a ninety-year-old neighbour, also with dementia, how the neighbour and the dog both forget what they were doing and in confusion come to a halt in the middle of the room. She talked about how she would never be able to have it put down, ‘we don’t do that with people, do we?’ she said defiantly, she was a doctor. I happened to think about the dog in The Stranger that runs away from its owner after being mistreated by him for years. The dog here might have to run away from its owner just to get the opportunity to die in peace. I told her that I had read that some people make a diamond out of their beloved pets’ ashes.

  ‘Then you could have it in your bag or attach it to your keys,’ I said to her, ‘a truly beautiful and shiny one, yes, a memorial shining in the light.’

  She picked the dog up and put it into the pushchair and rolled off with it, as if she had to protect it from me. Then I sat alone on the beach and felt like Death.

  Another day I walk down by the glittering fjord, in a better mood, I didn’t think that it was so bad to imagine myself walking along here in fifteen years, still alone, besides an old dog (or two, though it would make it easier to have lost one of them); once in a while one of my friends would probably drive out to visit me, like Alwilda the other day, especially if I consistently dish up fish, because people always have an expectation about fresh fish when they come for a visit by the sea.

  BERNHARD’S SHOES, A NOTE

  [Camilla]

  In Thomas Bernhard’s house in Obernathal the shoes have their own room. In a photograph, which is all I have to go by, there are around twenty pairs of shoes and a pair of wellies. There are possibly more shoes on the shelves, out at the sides, which have not made it into the photograph. Edward has visited the house, and he says that the staff constantly dust these (stationary) shoes. Clean, clean shoes. I am interested in these shoes, this shoe room, for the following reason: during his unhappy time at upper secondary school during the war, Bernhard had been allocated the shoe room (at school) to practise his violin. Each day he camped out in this room with his violin, the shelves around him filled with secondary school students’ shoes. He played in a completely different way than his violin teacher had directed. The entire time he was absorbed by the thought of suicide, of hanging himself, from a hook in the ceiling, in the shoe room. Peculiar artistic expression, the thought of taking one’s life and the shoes found a place to merge. It is not strange that shoes from then on had enormous significance for him, and that he later in life had to establish a similar room, a separate shoe room, a burning room, a survival room.

  A place of refuge. To isolate yourself in order to be able to devote yourself, unfold that which has conquered you, like here the thought of suicide, no matter how terrible or subversive it is, at full sail. The intensity of the sound, the intense movements across the strings, the (playing) style that is the release of one’s nature – I expand so that the room has to give way. I play it to bits, I play it pieces, myself included. Then I survive. Presumably. Only the shoes are witness to it. The shoes witness everything. (They absorb it, like sweat.) And from now on there can almost not be enough of these elongated shining cases, in place in the witness box.

  THE BOSS

  [Camilla]

  (Is my skull collapsing, my brain matter seething? Everyone tips over and is combined into one mass; a centaur is conjured up by a person like me who could not decide, but let one be the other, my horseman my manhorse, who is the horse, is the horse even a horse?)

  When there is an empty place, something else (presumably) will attempt to be placed there – by me. (There was an empty place, and in stepped the horse.) Now I have the animals with their iron wills instead of the two ill ones, my mum, Charles; I could have told myself that the horse would get ill when I replaced ill Charles with it. I take its heavy head in my arms and kiss its eyelid. Then I pull myself together, the veterinarian has said that it is not that strange that it hangs its head when it hears me sigh so deeply. The veterinarian is a scrawny sardonic creature in an open rider’s coat which almost reaches the ground. She moves so quickly that I still do not have a reliable impression of her face. When she arrives, she often has her brother with her; they look like two skinny broomsticks climbing out of the car. There was almost no end to their enjoyment when the veterinarian, after having felt the horse’s legs, could tell me that there was talk of an old injury that had flared up; that I had been cheated; that I had bought a horse with a previously injured front leg. She impatiently grabbed my hands and let them feel press touch, ‘you have to learn to touch your own horse;’ I felt nothing, not the hard or gelatinous gooey areas she led my hands across furiously, but I kept that to myself.

  A couple of cats live in the stables, and one day I had Edward’s dog with me, it barked and eagerly moved towards them. Then the veterinarian took me to task.

  ‘It has to have its attention on you.’

  ‘You’re the boss,’ the brother added.

  ‘It’s the cats that live here, it has to reconcile itself with that. It is only visiting.’

  ‘You look very tired,’ the brother said, ‘but if you can’t train your dog, then you can’t train your horse, and then you probably can’t train your children either,’ he said and nodded in the direction of a child that impetuously rang its cycle bell a little way from there.

  I fuss over the animals and feel sorry for them – the dog (borrowed dog replacement dog, which Edward no longer needs, because he has Alma) that has to stay home alone, its dark gaze when I leave. The horse that is injured and has to be dragged along every day. I am keeping it in a livery stable, close to the summerhouse; it is a curious place, with farmhouse and stables that look like they were taken out of the old TV series Dallas, the theme song sounds in my ears every time I cycle towards the house; in addition, stone lions are generously strewn over the area, at every corner the lion guards. The large folds are surrounded by white-painted fences, in front of the house there are several golf carts and other small motorized vehicles whose function I am clueless about, and also a bunch of four-by-fours. The house is inhabited by bodybuilders. These bulging nouveaux riches are not the least bit interested in horses, but they have bought a house with accompanying stables and large folds, perhaps because they thought it would look good with some rocking horsebacks in the midst of all that green. One day I walk around with the horse on the track, because there is also one of those, it gets a long thick nail stuck in its hoof. I pull and struggle, but I cannot get it out. Luckily one of the bodybuilders is walking around in the vicinity polishing the vehicles. I shout at him. He approaches me and the horse hesitantly. I show him the nail. He shrugs and says that old building material has been used as a drain for the track, and now it has obviously worked its way up to the surface. I decide against telling him how bad an idea that was, and what the veterinarian and her brother would have to say about that. I point at his bulging biceps and ask him to pull the nail out. He shakes his head. He is afraid of horses. But he’ll happily lend me a pair of pliers. He fetches them for me and then lets himself into the house so as not to be met by further demands, the pliers don’t help. But then a new bodybuilder emerges from the house.

  ‘Your friend is afraid of horses,’ I say to him, ‘but do you think
you are brave enough to help me?’

  He is, as long as I position myself so the horse can neither bite nor kick him. The horse is completely calm, it spreads its hind legs and urinates, intensely and amply, and while he pulls at the nail and gets it out rather easily I come to think of the time I was in a public toilet, it was in the Algarve one afternoon, my mum and I had shared a pitcher of sangria at a café with a view of the Atlantic and afterwards had nearly floated along the beach and over the rocks; when I emerged from the toilet, out to the common area, she said: ‘You have such a powerful stream,’ and I thought, she means I sound like a horse.

  That day or on another day of that trip, in any case with the same powerful sun (it destroyed the skin on my mum’s lower arms that stuck out of the short-sleeved dresses, and made it horse-like, that is thickened stiff, and in the years that followed she referred to it several times, as she took a pinch of ruined skin between her thumb and index finger and said: ‘That was the sun in the Algarve’) in front of the endless Atlantic and beneath the endless heavens, the astounding and unpleasant happened when we passed a group of Portuguese men who threw change at us because, we surmised by the action, we were women without men, although wearing a considerable amount of clothing, with only our lower arms showing, between beached fishing boats, below the horse-skin sun.

  ‘You now have to ride sixty minutes a day,’ the veterinarian said late in the summer, ‘ten minutes pacing, forty-five minutes trotting for periods of five minutes, with a round of pacing in between, and then cool down for ten minutes.’

  ‘But I can’t manage that in…’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But, it makes…’

  ‘No,’ and as she hopped into the car: ‘Other people can do it. Then so can you.’

  THE VETERINARIAN’S BROTHER

  [Camilla]

  How did I end up in bed with the veterinarian’s brother, I suppose only the veterinarian knows, in any case I am now embracing his lean body on my blue sofa bed and wishing I had curtains that could be drawn (I imagine that the veterinarian is not far away). It had to be either the leader of The Green Fingers or the veterinarian’s brother, the one fat the other skinny, from one extreme to the other, nothing in between, out here in the country.

  ‘What is that?’ he asks and winces and sticks his hand under the sheet.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s a chew toy.’

  And then the dog that has until now stayed in the garden arrives. It wants to join us.

  ‘No, I won’t have that,’ he says.

  ‘It normally lies under the duvet, otherwise it starts howling’ (it’s tilting its head back).

  ‘Well, then it will get angry.’

  ‘It is hot,’ I say, ‘we can let it have the duvet. Otherwise we probably won’t get any peace.’

  I pull the duvet off him and pat the bed, it jumps up and disappears under the duvet. And so it did not see how we got our bodies up and running. Everything that there had been, rested in the body, it was difficult to become light and free. Like being thawed after a long winter.

  ‘Do you feel your unassailability shaken?’ he asks.

  But it is not love, it is kindness. So no, I don’t.

  A little later a honk is heard from the road, I sit up and grab the duvet, ‘that’s my sister,’ he says and jumps out of the bed, in a cloud of feathers (there is a hole in the duvet), along with the dog which the car makes furious. I must be happy, because I start to sing (a couple of verses of ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, if anyone wants to know).

  COLUMBIA, THREE LITTLE CHINAMEN (AND A WILD HAPPINESS)

  [Alma]

  It was difficult to tear Camilla away from her animals, she has long talked about how she ought to be English, she has become so fond of dogs and horses, I am dog-horse-lady, she says of herself, but I waved the tickets in front of her nose, and along she came. And look how lucky she is, because now an incredibly handsome man is sitting on the chair next to her. I am here because I have had a short story included in an American anthology, I am on a panel with the publisher and another author, soon I have to read. I am only allowed three minutes, the publisher does not care for readings, he thinks you get to know more about the author by hearing the person in question speak. We have met twice, and both times he has asked me if I like cooking. I could see that there was a right and a wrong answer. I guessed ‘like,’ ‘but I do not swear by any particular cuisine,’ I said, ‘I take a little from everyone.’ They, it was him and his assistant, thought that Camilla and I ought to try a proper deli now that we were in New York, so I sat with a bagel with cream cheese and smoked salmon and pickles, it was no great experience, first and foremost chewy, difficult to deal with when talking, and add to that a peculiar drink recommended by the assistant, a so-called Egg Cream Soda (even though there is no egg, only milk, chocolate syrup and seltzer, mixed, it’s foaming). While we ate, we talked about food, I told them about the Icelandic dish called the Black Death (maybe I am confusing it with a schnapps) which consists of flesh that has been buried in the ground for a long time thereby making it tender. It induced a certain response. So I continued with the Icelandic and also told them about shark with fried onion and gravy – again, reaction. Then I thought I could rest a little, and sawed off a couple of bites. I thought that if we ran out of material, I would tell them about grindadráp on the Faroe Islands, it took place when I was there once. Then the publisher told me that he never cooked just for himself, and looked sad. And I said that I wouldn’t do that either, and looked down and made my face heavy. Camilla said nothing, she was in constant phone contact with the veterinarian, it was to do with scans of the horse’s legs. Actually, she said one thing. She said: ‘I have started to make budgets again, all the time, it is because I am nervous, and just before when I sat calculating, I saw a black wall in front of me, and it felt like I hit my head against it. Everything stopped there.’ ‘I have brought Camilla with me because she needs to relax,’ I said to the publisher and his assistant, there was also a Croatian translator present, ‘she has bought a horse, it is very expensive, in fact it is close to giving her a nervous breakdown. She is afraid to check the post because the vet bills are pouring in.’ ‘That’s not true, she emails them,’ Camilla said. Then they started to talk about the horse meat scandal, and Camilla got up, ‘easy now,’ I said, ‘you have said so yourself, it has been given so much medication that it cannot be used for consumption,’ but she had to go outside to smoke. I am sitting now wondering whether Jews eat horses (galloping koshers, sorry.)

  Then Camilla returned and said: ‘I recently saw a profile about an American war correspondent, she was a contemporary of Hemingway, but was much older before she finally took her own life, I can’t remember what her name was. But when her mum who she was really close to died, she wrote in a letter to a friend that she felt like a compass that had lost North. She felt aimless, and that’s what it’s like for me. The thought of having to live another twenty-five to thirty years,’ she sat down.

  ‘Camilla,’ I said.

  ‘It has to be Martha Gellhorn, right?’ the publisher said to the assistant.

  ‘There were two things she was sorry not to have experienced, to write a bestseller and have had a lasting romance.’

  ‘I would only be sad about the latter,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t believe that.’

  Alas. I have read from the translation, it went well, the beautiful man next to Camilla laughed. It’s not a big audience, probably thirty people. We are in a library at Columbia. But now comes the baptism of fire, the conversation. The publisher turns to me to talk to me about my short story: ‘Is it normal for women in Denmark to try to sell their husbands to prostitutes at strip bars?’ he asks. ‘No,’ I say, ‘it also takes place in Berlin.’

  ‘There are three Chinese characters in the story,’ he says, ‘why does it say three little Chinamen?’

  (I think: If there are Chinese people in the audience, I will die. I hardly dare look up. But luc
kily there is only one mixed-race person. It was a good thing I didn’t read about the mixed-race stripper.)

  ‘I’m not a racist,’ I say. If there had been a bible, I would have placed my hand on it. Now I’ve finally made it to Columbia with my literature, and I have to sit and say I’m not a racist.

  ‘Of course we know that the Chinese are little (he says Chinese, not Chinamen), there’s no reason to write that,’ the publisher says.

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘but actually it is a quote from an old Danish song.’

  ‘Then there ought to have been a footnote,’ the publisher says, ‘so how does it go?’

  ‘It’s a nonsensical song,’ I say and look at Camilla.

  Now help arrives, deus ex machina gets up from the chair next to Camilla and says: ‘I lived in Denmark until I was seven. It sounds like this,’ and then he makes like he is playing a mouth harp: ‘Tri smi kinsiri pi Hibri Plids stid i spillidid pi kintribis, si kim in bitjint spirt hvi dir vir hindt tri smi kinisiri pi Hibri Plids,’ he sat down again.

  ‘Fantastic,’ Camilla said.

  ‘Thank you,’ the beautiful man said, ‘the system is,’ he said to the gathering, ‘that you can vary the song with different vowel sounds and pretend you are playing different musical instruments.’

  ‘Mhm,’ a researcher said, ‘we are familiar with that in Mali.’