Companions

by Christina Hesselholdt

  ‘Don’t you feel like trying it with o?’ Camilla asked.

  ‘Mhm,’ the publisher said, ‘but what does it mean?’

  ‘You have to remember,’ I said, ‘that Denmark is not a multicultural society like yours, Chinese people were once, for a long time actually, rare in Denmark.’

  ‘Yes,’ the beautiful man said, ‘you did not see a Chinese person every day.’

  ‘How old are you?’ Camilla asked.

  ‘51,’ he said, ‘how old are you?’

  ‘46,’ she said.

  ‘5 years’ difference,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ Camilla said.

  ‘What does the song mean?’ the publisher asked, patiently, with his hand on the axe.

  Camilla got up and said:

  Three little Chinamen at Astor Place

  stood there playing on a double bass.

  Along came an officer.

  What the hell is this?

  Three little Chinamen at Astor Place.

  ‘Thank you,’ the publisher said and turned to the next author, he was finished with me, I had lost.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘but since there are also tall Chinese people, there was good reason to mention that they are little.’

  (Afterwards I thought that I could also have talked about the possible power in the image of small men buying sex from tall people or in any case taller women.)

  ‘We can ascribe that to translation issues,’ the publisher repeated, ‘there ought to have been a footnote.’

  ‘A footnote for the translation,’ I mimed to Camilla, but she was whispering with her neighbour.

  Afterwards there was a reception with red wine and cheese and biscuits, each time a new person from the audience came up to me, I thought I had to repeat that I was not a racist, but they didn’t believe that I was, they understood the spirit of what I had said. I walked over to Camilla who did not retreat from the beautiful man’s side, ‘isn’t he beautiful,’ she whispered to me, ‘I’m in love,’ ‘that’s nice and quick,’ I said. Then we can get those beep animals sent to beep.

  Well. Then there was no more wine and we had to leave. We were going out for dinner, but before we could leave, the assistant had to help the organizers pack up the biscuits and cheese, even though almost everything had been eaten. It was incredible how long it took, but it was the kind of biscuit from a box where each type belongs to a hole shaped like its shape. ‘Shouldn’t we just go back to our hotel and drink,’ I asked, ‘I’m completely wiped.’ Camilla turned to the beautiful man, now it was about getting him to come along. He wasn’t sure, he was telling the publisher about his relationship to Denmark. ‘Let’s grab a taxi,’ I said. He wasn’t sure, ‘we have loads of duty-free alcohol,’ I said, ‘let’s drink it in our hotel room,’ ‘we’re going to have to take them all with us,’ I said to Camilla, ‘otherwise he won’t go,’ ‘yes,’ Camilla said, ‘I can’t be a dog-horse-lady for the rest of my life, can I?’, ‘no,’ I said, ‘time for a change.’

  When we finally made it out of Columbia and stood on the street together, he still wasn’t sure, the publisher stopped a taxi and crawled in and then the assistant, but he remained standing, ‘then I guess you don’t love Denmark that much,’ I said and crawled in, and he sat down in the front seat. Camilla sat on my lap.

  [Camilla]

  He sat down on the chair next to mine, and after only a moment it was almost impossible not to reach out and touch his hands. When he got up and recited the stupid song, I thought, I would like to spend the rest of my life with him, that’s how quickly it happened. And I know I know.

  When the others had left, and we were alone, I reached out my hand towards him and said ‘come,’ he said ‘yes’ and got up, then we finally touched, and he began to pull me towards him and push me away from him again with his arms around me, and all the while he kissed me, with short quite fast movements, it was at most a few centimetres, away from him, towards him, and with that rhythm he drew me out of myself, I stopped thinking I should do something, be someone, I’ll just follow, I thought and allowed myself to be pulled back and forth, and the entire time his face was so close to mine, once in a while I had to see his eyes and pull back a little, they were half enclosed in darkness, two or three times he said ‘oh God’ very quietly, but I heard it and it made me happy. He spoke to me in Danish, but I asked him to speak American, because I wanted him to speak his own language, so I could be sure that he knew what he was saying. Then he did, he said in American, ‘should I speak American? It feels strange to speak American to you,’ then he spoke Danish, and I didn’t try to force him back into his own language. He sounded young when he spoke Danish. The voice became too young for the rest. Otherwise he said almost nothing. I asked him to say his name, because although I was completely captivated by him, I had for a moment forgotten his name. How can I store the strength and rhythm his body possessed, which drew me along? I can’t. I was close to accidentally saying that I loved him, because I knew no other words for the rapture and for no longer being left to myself and my own head.

  It was morning, ‘we’ve been making love for hours,’ I said, ‘we’ve been making love for five minutes,’ he said. We sat up to drink some water.

  ‘Are you married?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said simply.

  ‘So that’s why you haven’t said anything to me,’ I said. (I thought about a line by Peter Walsh, a character in a novel, something along the lines of that when you are over fifty, you can no longer be bothered to tell women they are beautiful. The veterinarian’s brother had at least said my skin was soft, and asked if I used herbs.)

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I never say very much.’

  ‘Maybe you should wear a ring.’

  ‘Do you think that would have helped?’

  ‘Then why did you do it?’

  ‘I was unsure about that too. But then the taxi arrived, and she said to me, then I don’t love Denmark enough,’ the notion seemed to make him despair.

  ‘How can you speak to me in such a horrible way,’ I said and hid my face in my hands, but a little later I looked up, ‘what are you looking at?’, ‘your eyes,’ he said.

  We lay down again, but it could not be like before, ‘sorry,’ I said, ‘No, I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘It felt harsh after such an attachment. Do you know what attachment means?’

  He did.

  We thought we had better get some sleep, but I’m not very good at that, and when he had fallen asleep, I got up and started to empty the ashtrays and throw out the bottles. A little later he also got up.

  ‘I’m happy. I think it was a lovely night.’

  ‘You’re sweet,’ he said, ‘yes, I won’t forget it.’

  It was raining, I wanted to walk with him to Grand Central Station, he put his arm around me, and there we walked, ‘you look very American,’ I said a little later and took his hand, he did not understand that, he was used to being attributed to various northern European nationalities, and he was also heart-rendingly blond or at least he had been, now he was probably rather grey, but actually it was his coat I was looking at, I had seen a man the previous day on the Upper West Side with an identical one. I thought that now I only needed to hide my despair for a moment longer, because there was the station. We embraced, and I turned and left. While I walked back to the hotel, I remembered how for a short time in my garden a couple of months earlier I had thought that I was just like Thomas Bernhard, that intimacy would kill me, now I was already close to dying without it. And a week later the great wild happiness still rested in my body.

  My consciousness is a burning room. I have conversations with him, in there; and show him things. My thoughts are directed at him, you might say. We walk together, we two homunculi, through my brain, he has placed his arm around me and turned up the collar of his coat, we walk away from the station.

  He is a straw my thoughts cling to, I know it.

  If it were real, he would gradually know a good deal a
bout me, what I love, what I don’t love. But I never tell him the sad things that have passed, because I have had enough of them myself. This is an opportunity to rediscover myself, like every time you meet a new person. I can be the one I am, as a result of this-and-this-and-this instead of that-and-that, it is clearly pure guesswork what has formed someone. Nonetheless there are people who for decades travel in set stories around themselves.

  I talk the most. He only offers a few clarifying questions once in a while. I am the one with the wheels. He is like a box that has to be pushed across the floor. And he is a gaze – on me. My idea that he observes me when I walk across the street, is so alive that I nearly dance. There is a ring at the door, and I imagine that it’s him. I talk out loud. I am exhausted. I drink wine in the middle of the day.

  It is insufferable, this fever this passion, my longing is great, it has to stop. But what did my mind fiddle with before I met him… it made budgets endlessly and wound its way around death. It had become such that certain thoughts settled across so that nothing else could get past.

  The scenario with him is better. One day there will be no more fuel, and the fire will die out.

  FRAGMENTS OF THE COMPANIONS’ CONVERSATION IN THE GARDEN

  [All of the companions]

  ‘Nearly four weeks later, I still listened to Wicked Game on YouTube, which we had heard that night, and watched Helena Christensen and Chris Isaak’s stupid narcissistic display on a beach,’ Camilla says, ‘like I was a teenager.’

  ‘You can’t have an empty consciousness, it won’t allow that to happen, it will always be the opposite of a room painted white,’ Edward says.

  ‘I’m sorry to say this,’ Alma says, ‘but your American reminded me of a camel or maybe a giraffe or an ostrich, yes, one of those animals that carries its rocking head high and deals you one hard unexpected blow.’

  ‘The fact that he put his arm around me when we came out of the hotel and walked to the station, that meant something too. After doing so much walking alone, it was lovely to walk with his arm around my shoulder.’

  ‘Yes, that sort of thing is dangerous,’ Alma says, ‘the night I met Kristian, I remember it all started with me saying to him, at a party where we sat next to each other on a sofa: “Try putting your arm around me.” And it felt good and solid. It saddled me with a marriage. It cost me seven years.’

  (…)

  ‘And after all those years of stubborn insistence on acquiring knowledge, then the enormous exertion of deciding to commit suicide – and managing to carry out the act, the act of killing yourself. Which then failed, and then she was back where she started, back in bed with all the books, and leaned up against the bed: the future: black bin bags full of library books, such courage and such bravery, continuing to spend so many hours of the day reading, for so many years,’ Camilla says.

  ‘I want to go to Syria and fight,’ Kristian says.

  ‘You’re always interrupting, Kristian,’ Alma says.

  (As though not constantly expressing your opinion about one thing or the other would be synonymous with your complete disappearance. He completes people’s sentences. He has an opinion about everything. He puts up fences with his chatter. When we were together, I quickly stopped having any opinions at all, and became rather quiet, Alma thinks.)

  ‘That’s suicide,’ Edward says.

  ‘Syria is our Spain.’

  ‘Fuck all to do with you. Or me.’

  ‘Wasn’t she meant to get the book delivery this morning?’

  ‘Maybe she couldn’t manage another stack of books,’ Kristian says.

  ‘There is a need to reconcile oneself with, to be able to endure (where is the right verb), history (because what else can you do, have you ever heard of anyone setting fire to themselves because of a calamity far in the past, a thousand-year-old bloodletting?), whether it comes to world history or family history, even though for example it might seem impossible to endure the fact that the mathematician Hypatia was skinned alive by a Christian mob in Alexandria, around two thousand years ago, or that excavators shovelled bodies of gassed Jews into mass graves, humanity’s absolute zero reached, where steel grapples human flesh like it was stone, only seventy years ago, only a few hundred kilometres from this garden. As far as my family history is concerned, at the age of fourteen I was introduced to a point that turned everything on its head, just as facts about the Holocaust had done – I assume that I concern myself with all of this, because I have to believe that in some sense I am the result of what I have heard and seen, that trawling through the Holocaust in history books and in one documentary programme after the other has done and continues to do something to me, apart from (over and over again) filling me with pure and utter horror, but precisely what that is I don’t know, perhaps it makes me more distrustful of people as such, and makes me guard against the herd mentality within me at every opportunity, I hope that’s the case.’

  ‘Yes, well I think so.’

  ‘I have only once had the opportunity to prove it, and that was not my actual intention. Alwilda, it was back when you took me along as your guest to an AA meeting. It was in a large hall, there were several hundred people, at first we sat listening to a talk by an American pilot who talked about how drunk he would get when he was flying – passenger planes. He also told us that a week went by from the time his wife left house and home until he discovered it …’

  ‘How did he find out?’ Kristian asks.

  ‘He found a message from her, dated. Anyway, afterwards someone said something along the lines of, can all the alcoholics please stand up and hold hands. Soon everyone was standing by the walls, hand in hand. Apart from me. I was left alone, with all the empty chairs. Since I’m not an alcoholic, I figured that I should stay seated. Until you, Alwilda hissed “come, come” at me.’

  ‘Then you got up dutifully and joined us.’

  ‘C’mon, Camilla, there are a lot of things to say to what you’ve just said. The way you’re muddling things together, what does the Holocaust have to do with your family?’ Kristian asks.

  ‘Nothing. Only that I heard about my grandmother’s attempt to take the life of her own child around the same time I saw the pictures from the concentration camps for the first time.’

  ‘Another thing, your eloquence is offensive, you’re turning incomprehensible hell into linguistic artwork,’ Kristian says.

  ‘Yes, you’ve got to stutter and stammer / the syntax goes to pieces / before you know the thesis,’ Alma says.

  ‘Your rhymes are hopeless.’

  ‘A language that mimes inability, makes the spoken authentic, it comes all the way from the gut directly from the screaming soul.’

  ‘And one more thing, Camilla, there are stories about people who took their own lives long after putting the calamity far in the past, think of all the suicide victims among survivors of the concentration camps,’ Kristian says.

  (…)

  ‘The Second World War has taken up so much space that there are limits to how many other wars I have been able to absorb, yes, I’m reasonably familiar with the Vietnam War as well, and the war in Iraq, but even though I have read about the Balkans wars in the nineties several times, they remain blurred, I have almost given up on letting the war in Syria in…’

  ‘Kristian will see to Syria.’

  ‘… instead I’m starting a fresh round, on TV, with World War Two, lately about the French resistance movement, and about the blitz over London and about the American soldiers’ relationship to their dogs during the War in the Pacific and and and World War Two Lost Films.’

  ‘I dream of flying in a Spitfire,’ Alwilda says, ‘I love watching clips of dogfights between Spitfires and Messerschmitts. Such elegance! Such spirit.’

  ‘Every time I turn on the television, there is a programme about the Second World War. I lie on my sofa and gorge on all that war.’

  ‘I suppose you stuff yourself while you watch.’

  ‘I occasionally grab somethin
g from the kitchen. But I finish chewing before I continue watching.’

  (…)

  ‘Last night, in a dream, I heard the words “Camilla and I” spoken inside of me, and then “I” turned out to be a long foot with the heel sunk into the sand, pointing straight into the air. “I” landed (with a hollow thud) in the sand and then began to leave prints around “Camilla”, and it was clear that she was going to be sacrificed,’ Alma says.

  ‘Trampled alive.’

  ‘Now I have to tell you something,’ Camilla says, ‘what started out as emptiness after my mum and Charles has slowly turned into peace and quiet.’

  ‘I could have had the incident removed,’ Camilla’s dad says and taps himself on the chest, somewhere near the heart, ‘I could have had it suppressed. But I never managed to do that.’

  ‘In the beginning I had felt like showing Charles everything – how big the rhododendron has become, and I think he would have been happy about the horse.’

  ‘But now we’ve seen it.’

  ‘It certainly is shiny,’ Alma says.

  ‘Tell me, do you ever hear from Charles?’

  ‘He wrote that he had replaced his hard-soled shoes with soft soles, and it couldn’t be helped if it ruined his image, since it was good for his gait, I mean his skeleton.’

  ‘So no more of those hard clack-clack-clacks.’

  ‘At night I keep the lights on and the doors open, then the insects come in and slam against the lights.’

  ‘Clack-clack-clack.’

  ‘Why do you leave the doors open?’

  ‘When I am closed in with only myself, there’s too much of me.’

  ‘So you’re airing yourself out.’