In the middle school the girls are better dressed and less sniveling than in the primary school. None of them has lice or a harelip, either. My father says that now I’ll be going to school with children of people who are ‘better off’, but that that’s no reason for me to look down on my own home. That’s true enough. The children’s fathers are mostly skilled workers, and I make my father into a ‘machinist’, which I think sounds better than stoker. The richest girl in the class has a father who owns a barbershop on Gasværksvej. Her name is Edith Schnoor and she lisps from sheer self-importance. Our classroom teacher is named Miss Mathiassen, a small, lively woman who seems to enjoy teaching. Together with Miss Klausen, Miss Mollerup, and the principal at the old school (the one who resembled a witch), she gives me the distinct impression that women can only have influence in the working world if they’re completely flat-chested. My mother is an exception; otherwise all the housewives at home on my street have enormous busts that they consciously thrust out as they walk. I wonder why that is. Miss Mathiassen is the only female teacher we have. She’s discovered that I like poetry, and it doesn’t work to play dumb with her. I save that for the subjects that don’t interest me – but there are lots of those. I only like Danish and English. Our English teacher is named Damsgaard, and he can be terribly short-tempered. Then he pounds the table and says, ‘Upon my word, I’ll teach you!’ He uses this mild oath so often that before long he’s known exclusively as ‘Upon my word’. One time he reads aloud a sentence that’s supposed to be especially difficult, and he asks me to repeat it. It goes like this: ‘In reply to your inquiry I can particularly recommend you the boarding house at eleven Woburn Place. Some of my friends stayed there last winter and spoke highly about it.’ He praises my correct pronunciation, and that’s the reason I can never forget that idiotic sentence.
All the girls in my class have poetry albums, and after I’ve nagged my mother long enough, I get one too. It’s brown and it says ‘Poetry’ on the outside in gold letters. I let some of the girls write the usual verses in it, and in between I put in some of my own poems with the date and my name underneath so that posterity will have no doubt that I was a child genius. I hide it in one of the dresser drawers in the bedroom under a stack of towels and dishcloths, where I think it will be relatively safe from profane eyes. But one evening Edvin and I are home alone because my parents are out playing cards with my aunt and uncle. Otherwise Edvin is usually out in the evening, but he’s been too tired for that since he started his apprenticeship. It’s a bad workplace, he says, and he often begs my father to let him find a different one. When that does no good, he starts shouting and says that he’ll run off to sea and leave home and much more. Then my father shouts, too, and then when my mother interferes in the fight and takes Edvin’s side, there’s an uproar in the living room that almost drowns out the racket downstairs at Rapunzel’s. It’s Edvin’s fault that nearly every evening now all peace in the living room is destroyed, and sometimes I wish that he’d follow through with his threats and leave. Now he sits sulking and withdrawn, leafing through Social-Demokraten, while only the ticking clock on the wall breaks the silence. I’m doing my homework, but the silence between us oppresses me. He stares at me with his dark, thoughtful eyes that are suddenly just as melancholy as my father’s. Then he says, ‘Aren’t you going to bed soon, damn it? You can never be alone in this damn house!’ ‘You can go into the bedroom, you know,’ I answer, hurt. ‘I bloody well will, too,’ he mumbles, grabbing the newspaper and going out. He slams the door hard after him. A little while later, to my surprise and uneasiness, I hear a burst of laughter from in there. What can be so funny? I go inside and stiffen with horror. Edvin is sitting on my mother’s bed with my poor album in his hand. He’s completely doubled up with laughter. Bright red in the face with shame, I take a step toward him and put out my hand. ‘Give me that book,’ I say and stamp my foot. ‘You have no right to take it!’ ‘Oh God,’ he gasps and doubles up with laughter, ‘this is hilarious. You’re really full of lies. Listen to this!’ Then, interrupted by fits of laughter, he reads:
Do you remember that time we sailed
along the still, clear stream?
The moon was mirrored in the sea.
Everything was like a lovely dream.
Suddenly you lay the oar to rest,
and let the boat go still.
You said nothing, but my dear –
the passion in your gaze did thrill.
You took me in your arms so strong.
Lovingly you kissed me.
Never, never will I forget
that hour spent with thee.
‘Oh no! Ha ha ha!’ He falls back and keeps on laughing, and the tears stream from my eyes. ‘I hate you,’ I yell, stamping my foot powerlessly. ‘I hate you! I wish you’d drown in a marl pit!’ With those last words, I’m just about to rush out the door, when Edvin’s insane laughter takes on a new, disturbing sound. I turn around in the doorway and look at him lying on his stomach across my mother’s striped comforter with his face hidden in the crook of one arm. My precious book has fallen to the floor. He sobs inconsolably and uncontrollably, and I am horrified. Hesitantly, I approach the bed, but I don’t dare touch him. That’s something we’ve never done. I dry my own tears with the sleeve of my dress and say, ‘I didn’t mean it, Edvin, the part about the marl pit. I … I don’t even know what it is.’ He keeps sobbing without answering and suddenly turns over and gives me a hopeless look. ‘I hate them, the boss and the assistants,’ he says. ‘They … beat me … all day and I’ll never learn to paint cars. I’m just sent out to get beer for all of them. I hate Father because I can’t change workplaces. And when you come home, you can never be alone. There’s not one damn corner where you can have anything for yourself.’ I look down at my poetry album and say, ‘I can’t have anything for myself, either, you know – and neither can Father or Mother. They’re not even alone when they … when they…’ He looks at me, surprised, and finally stops crying. ‘No,’ he says sadly. ‘Jesus, I’ve never thought about that.’ He gets up, regretting, of course, that his sister has seen him in a moment of weakness. ‘Well,’ he says in a tough voice, ‘it probably all gets better when you move away from home.’ I agree with him about that. Then I go out and count the eggs in the pantry. I take two and move the rest around so it looks like there are more of them. ‘I’m going to mix us an egg schnapps,’ I yell toward the living room and start the preparations. At that moment, I like Edvin much better than in all the years when he was distant and wonderful, handsome and cheerful. It wasn’t really human that he never seemed to feel bad about anything.
11
Gerda is going to have a baby and Tin Snout has vanished. Ruth says he had a wife and children, and that I should never have anything to do with a married man. I can’t imagine I’ll ever have anything to do with an unmarried man either, but I keep that to myself. My mother says I’ll be thrown out if I ever come home with a child. Gerda isn’t thrown out. She has just stopped working at the factory where she earned twenty-five kroner a week, and she stays home now with her big stomach, singing and humming all day long, so you can hear from far away that she hasn’t lost her good spirits by any means. Her golden braid has long since been cut off, and in my heart I don’t call her Rapunzel anymore, although, as a matter of fact, the fairy-tale girl had had twins by the time the blinded prince found her in the desert. It sounds so nice and remote that you can easily miss it, and when I was little, I never thought about how it might happen. Last year the landlady’s Olga had a baby by a soldier, who also disappeared without a trace, but she was over eighteen and she later got married to a policeman who didn’t worry about who the child’s father was. Whenever I see women with a big stomach, I try my best to stare only at their faces, where I vainly search for a sign of transcendent happiness like in Johannes V. Jensen’s poem: ‘I carry in my swollen breast a sweet and anxious spring.’ They don’t have the kind of glorious expression in their eyes I mys
elf will have when I’m someday expecting a child, I’m sure of that. I have to find poems in books of prose because my father doesn’t approve of me lugging home poetry collections from the library. ‘Castles in the air,’ he says contemptuously, ‘they have nothing to do with reality.’ I’ve never cared for reality and I never write about it. When I’m reading Herman Bang’s Ved vejen, my father takes the book between two fingers and says with every sign of disgust, ‘You may not read anything by him. He wasn’t normal!’ I know it’s terrible not to be normal, and I have my own troubles trying to pretend that I am. So it comforts me that Herman Bang wasn’t either, and I finish reading the book in the reading room. I cry when I get to the end: ‘Under the grave’s turf sleeps poor Marianne. Come, girls, weep for poor Marianne.’ I want to write poetry like that, that anyone and everyone can understand. My father doesn’t want me to read anything by Agnes Henningsen, either, because she’s a ‘public female’ – which he doesn’t bother to explain any further. If he saw the book with my poems, he would probably burn it. After Edvin found it and laughed at it, I always keep it with me – in my school bag during the day, and otherwise in my underpants, where the elastic keeps it from falling out. At night it’s under my mattress. Edvin said later, by the way, that he actually thought the poems were good, if only they had been written by someone other than me. ‘When you know the whole thing is a lie,’ he says, ‘you just die laughing over it.’ I’m pleased by his praise, because the part about it being a lie doesn’t bother me. I know that you sometimes have to lie in order to bring out the truth.
We’ve gotten new neighbors since Ketty and her mother were thrown out. It’s an older couple with a daughter named Jytte. She works in a chocolate store, and in the evening she often visits us when my father is working the graveyard shift. Then she and my mother have lots of fun because my mother gets along best with women who are younger than she is. Jytte gladly brings chocolate to Edvin and me, and we eat it happily, even though my father says that it’s probably stolen. As a result of Jytte’s generosity, something awful happens to me. One day when I come home from school, my mother says, ‘Well, wasn’t that a good lunch you had with you today?’ I blush and stammer and don’t know what she’s talking about. I always throw my lunch away untouched because it’s wrapped in newspaper. The others have wax paper around theirs, which my mother would never in her life give in to. ‘Oh yes,’ I say miserably, ‘it was great.’ ‘I wonder whether she really steals it,’ says my mother talkatively. ‘You’d think the owner would keep an eye out for that.’ Relieved, I understand then that there was some chocolate in my lunch packet, and I feel very happy, because that’s a sign of love. It’s so strange that my mother has never discovered when I’m lying. On the other hand, she almost never believes the truth. I think that much of my childhood is spent trying to figure out her personality, and yet she continues to be just as mysterious and disturbing. Practically the worst thing is that she can hold a grudge for days, consistently refusing to speak to you or listen to what you’re saying, and you never find out how you’ve offended her. She’s the same way with my father. Once, when she made fun of Edvin for playing with girls, my father said, ‘Oh well, girls are a kind of human being, too.’ ‘Humph…’ said my mother, pressed her lips tight, and didn’t open them again until at least a week had passed. Actually I was on her side, because of course girls and boys shouldn’t play together. They can’t at school, either, unless they’re sister and brother. But a boy wouldn’t dare be seen with his little sister either, and whenever it’s absolutely necessary for Edvin and me to go down the street together, I have to walk three paces behind him and under no circumstances reveal that I know him. I’m nothing to brag about. My mother doesn’t think so either, because when we’re going to the commemoration of Folkets Hus, she makes a serious effort to get me to look halfway decent. She singes my stiff, yellow hair with the curling iron, and tells me briskly to curl up my toes so that they’ll fit into a pair of shoes we borrowed from Jytte. ‘She’s pretty enough, damn it,’ consoles my father, who is having trouble himself with the collar on his white shirt that was bought for the occasion. Edvin is now so grown-up that he’s mad at having to go out with his family, so he omits his usual lovable remarks about how I’m so ugly that I’ll never get married. It’s a very special evening, because after making a speech to the workers, Stauning will personally present a gift to all of Vesterbro’s recruiters, and among them is my father. Sunday after Sunday he trudges up and down stairs in our neighborhood to enlist members in the political club, and my mother brings him to despair by withdrawing him from it once a month whenever the membership fee of fifty øre is due. Then he mumbles a bunch of curses, grabs his old hat, and rushes after the man to sign up again. She harbors an inarticulate hatred for Stauning and the party, and now and then she hints that my father was once something almost as criminal as a Communist. She doesn’t say the word out loud – she doesn’t dare – but sometimes I think about the forbidden book he was always reading during my early childhood, the one with the red flag that the happy worker family is looking up at, so there’s probably some truth to her insinuations.
My heart beats faster when Stauning goes up to the podium, and I’m sure that my father’s does, too. Stauning speaks the way he usually does, and I understand at most half of it. But I enjoy his calm, dark voice that soothingly settles over my soul, assuring me that nothing really evil can happen to us, as long as Stauning exists. He talks about instituting the eight-hour day, even though that’s a long time ago now. He talks about the unions and about the criminal scabs who should never be tolerated at any workplace. I quickly promise myself, Stauning, and our Lord that I will never be a scab. Only when he talks about the Communists, who damage and divide the party, does he raise his voice to an angry thunder, which quickly gives way, however, to a soft, almost gentle explanation of the unemployment, which my mother isn’t alone in blaming him for. But no, it’s due solely to the worldwide depression, he says, and I find the expression pleasant sounding and appealing. I imagine a deeply grieving world where everyone has pulled down their shades and turned off the lights, while the rain streams down from a gray and inconsolable heaven without a single star. ‘And now,’ says Stauning finally, ‘I have the great pleasure of presenting a prize to each of our industrious recruiters as a reward for their work for our great cause!’ I blush with pride that my father is among them and look sideways at where he’s sitting. He twists his mustache nervously and smiles at me, as if he knows that I share his joy. The battle over the workplace is still creating a coldness between him and Edvin, who looks as though he’s about to fall asleep. Then Stauning says each name loudly and clearly, grasps each man’s hand in turn, and gives each a book. Everything swims before my eyes when it’s my father’s turn. The book he receives is called Poetry and Tools, and Stauning has written his name and some words of acknowledgement on the title page. On the way home, my father, who is still elated over the honor, says: ‘I’ll let you read it when you’re grown up. I know you like poetry.’ My mother and Edvin aren’t with us. They’re going to the dance afterwards, which doesn’t interest my serious father, and I’m only a child. Later my mother puts the book so far back on the bookshelf that you can’t see it when the glass door is closed. ‘A lovely reward for wearing out the steps every blessed Sunday,’ she says scornfully to my father. ‘And then he talks about scabs and being underpaid. Good Lord!’ My father isn’t allowed to have his happiness in peace, either.
The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency Page 5