The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency

by Tove Ditlevsen

  12

  Time passed and my childhood grew thin and flat, paperlike. It was tired and threadbare, and in low moments it didn’t look like it would last until I was grown up. Other people could see it too. Every time Aunt Agnete visited us, she said, ‘Goodness gracious, how you’re growing!’ ‘Yes,’ said my mother and looked at me with pity, ‘if only she’d fill out a bit.’ She was right. I was as flat as a paper doll and clothes hung from my shoulders like from a hanger. My childhood was supposed to last until I was fourteen, but what was I going to do if it gave out beforehand? You never got answers to any of the important questions. Full of envy, I stared at Ruth’s childhood, which was firm and smooth and without a single crack. It looked as if it would outlive her, so that someone else might inherit it and wear it out. Ruth herself wasn’t aware of it. When the boys on the street yelled at me, ‘How’s the weather up there, sister?’ she sent a series of oaths and curses after them so that they ran off in terror. She knew I was vulnerable and shy and she always defended me. But Ruth wasn’t enough for me anymore. Miss Mollerup wasn’t either, because she had so many children to look after, and I was only one of them. I always dreamed of finding a person, just one, to whom I could show my poems and who would praise them. I had started thinking a lot about death, and I thought of it as a friend. I told myself that I wanted to die, and once when my mother went into town, I took our bread knife and sawed at my wrist, hoping to find the artery – all the while bawling at the thought of my despairing mother who would soon throw herself sobbing over my corpse. All that happened was that I got some cuts; I still have faint marks from them. My only consolation in this uncertain, trembling world was writing poetry like this:

  Once I was young and all aglow,

  full of laughter and fun.

  I was like a blushing rose.

  Now I am old and forgotten.

  I was twelve years old then. Otherwise all of my poems were still ‘full of lies’, as Edvin said. Most of them dealt with love, and if you were to believe them, I was living a wanton life filled with interesting conquests.

  I was convinced that I would be sent to a reformatory if my parents ever saw a poem like this:

  It was joy I felt, my friend,

  when our lips met,

  knowing this was the moment

  we were born for – and yet …

  My vague young dream vanished.

  The door to life stands open.

  Life is beautiful, my friend, thanks,

  you christened me in passion.

  I wrote love poems to the man in the moon, to Ruth, or to no one at all. I thought my poems covered the bare places in my childhood like the fine, new skin under a scab that hasn’t yet fallen off completely. Would my adult form be shaped by my poems? I wondered. During that time I was almost always depressed. The wind in the street blew so cold through my tall, thin body that the world regarded with disapproving looks. In school I always sat and glared at the teachers, as I did at all grown-up people. One day a substitute music teacher calmly came over to my seat, and said quietly but clearly, ‘I don’t like your face.’ I went home and stared at it in the mirror over the dresser. It was pale, with round cheeks and frightened eyes. Across my top front teeth there were small dents in the enamel, which came from having had rickets as a child. I knew that from the school dentist, who said you got the disease from bad nutrition. I kept that to myself, of course, because it wasn’t anything to talk about at home. When I couldn’t explain my growing melancholy to myself, I thought that the worldwide depression had finally hit me. I also thought a lot about my early childhood, which would never return, and it seemed to me that everything was better then. In the evening, I sat up on the windowsill and wrote in my poetry album:

  Slender strings that break

  are ne’er tied together again,

  unless their tone does slake,

  unless a note does die then.

  Then, unlike later on, there wasn’t any Kai Friis Møller to whisper in my ear, ‘Watch out for inverted word order, Miss Ditlevsen, and for the word ne’er!’ My literary models at that time were hymns, ballads, and the poets of the 90s.

  One morning I woke up and felt really terrible. My throat hurt and I was freezing as I stepped out onto the floor. I asked my mother whether I could stay home from school but she frowned and told me to spare her such nonsense. She couldn’t stand unexpected events or visits that weren’t announced ahead of time. Burning with fever, I went to school and was sent home already during first period. By then my mother had collected herself and accepted that I was sick. I fell asleep as soon as I got into bed again and when I woke up, my mother was in the midst of a massive housecleaning of the whole apartment. She was hanging up clean curtains in the bedroom, and turned around when I called. ‘It’s good you woke up,’ she said. ‘The doctor will be here in a little while; if only I get done.’ I was terribly afraid of the welfare doctor, and my mother was, too. When she had changed the bed linens and dug out my ears with a bobbypin, the doorbell rang and, flustered, she rushed out and opened the door. ‘Hello,’ she said respectfully, ‘I apologize for the in- convenience…’ She didn’t get any further before she was interrupted by his violent fit of coughing. Hacking and sputtering into his handkerchief, the doctor swept her aside with his cane. ‘Yes, yes,’ he bellowed when he caught his breath. ‘All those stairs – they’ll be the death of me. And there’s no room to breathe. It’s no way to run a practice. I remember you well – you’re the one with the teeth. But who in heaven’s name is sick? Oh, it’s your daughter – where the hell is she?’ ‘In here.’ My mother led the way and the doctor pulled in his stomach with great difficulty as he went past the marriage bed over to me. ‘Well,’ he shouted and bent his face over me, ‘what’s the matter with you? You’re not playing hooky, are you?’ He looked loathsome, and I pulled the comforter all the way up to my chin. He fixed his bulging black eyes on me and I felt like saying that even though we were poor, we were not in the least deaf. His hands were densely covered with hair and a thick black tuft stuck out of each ear. He roared for a spoon, and my mother just about fell over her own feet as she ran off to the kitchen to get one. He shone a little light down my throat and felt the sides of my neck and then said ominously, ‘Is there diphtheria in your school? Well? Any of your classmates?’ I nodded. Then he grimaced as if he tasted something sour and shouted, ‘She’s got diphtheria! She has to go to the hospital at once! God damn it!’ My mother stared at me reproachfully, as if she’d never expected me to present a busy doctor with anything so impudent. The doctor grabbed his cane furiously and stomped into the living room to write up an admission form. I was horrified. The hospital! My poems! Where should I hide them now? Sleep overpowered me again, and when I woke up, my mother was sitting on the edge of the bed. She asked very gently if there was anything I wanted, and to please her, I asked for a piece of chocolate even though I knew that I couldn’t swallow it. Thanks to Jytte, we always had chocolate in the house now. While we waited for the ambulance, I explained to her that I wanted to take my poetry album with me in case someone at the hospital would like to write in it. She had no objection. She sat next to me in the ambulance and stroked my forehead or my hands the whole time. I couldn’t remember when she’d ever done that before, and it made me both embarrassed and glad. Whenever I walked down the street or stood in shops, I always looked with a mixture of joy and envy at mothers who held their small children in their arms or caressed them. Maybe my mother had done that once, but I couldn’t remember it. At the hospital, I was put in a big ward where there were children of all ages. We all had diphtheria, and most of them were just as sick as I was. I put my poetry album in a drawer, and no one thought it strange that I had it there. Although I lay there for three months, I remember almost nothing about my stay. During visiting hours, my mother stood outside the window and shouted in to me. Shortly before I went home, she talked to the head doctor, who said that I was anemic and didn’t weigh enough. Both thing
s hurt my mother’s feelings. During the first days after I came home, she made me rye porridge and other fattening foods, even though my father was unemployed again. During my long absence, Ruth had attached herself to the landlady’s fat, white-haired Minna, who would soon be thirteen, and with whom she was now always hanging around the trash-can corner, even though she wasn’t nearly old enough for that kind of promotion. I felt abandoned and alone. Only the night and the rain and my silent evening star – and my poetry album – gave me some slight comfort during that time. I wrote poetry exclusively like this:

  Wistful raven-black night,

  kindly you wrap me in darkness,

  so calm and mild, my soul you bless,

  making me drowsy and light.

  The rain quiet and fine

  drums so softly at the window.

  I lay my head on the pillow

  on the cool linen’s incline.

  Quietly I sleep,

  blessed night, my best friend.

  Tomorrow I’ll wake to life again

  my soul in sorrow deep.

  One day my brother said to me that I should try to sell one of my poems to a magazine, but I didn’t think anyone would pay money for them. I didn’t really care, either, as long as someone would print them, but I would never come face-to-face with that ‘someone’. Someday when I was grown up, my poems would of course be in a real book, but I didn’t know how that would come about. My father probably knew, but he had said that a girl can’t be a poet, so I wouldn’t tell him anything about it. It was enough for me anyway to write the poems; there was no hurry to show them to a world that so far had only laughed and scorned them.

  13

  Uncle Peter has killed Granny. At least that’s what my parents and Aunt Rosalia say. He and Aunt Agnete picked her up on Christmas Eve and there was a violent snowstorm. All three of them waited at least fifteen minutes for the streetcar, and in spite of his fabulous wealth, it didn’t occur to Uncle Peter to pay for a taxi home. By evening Granny had pneumonia, and they put her to bed on a sofa made up in the parlor, which of course is heated every Christmas, ‘But you know,’ says my mother, ‘how damp it is in a room that’s only heated three days a year.’ There Granny lay all through the Christmas holidays and received visits from all of us, and she was completely convinced that she was going to die. The rest of us didn’t believe it. She lay in a white, high-necked nightgown, and her slender hands that looked like my mother’s constantly crept restlessly over the comforter, as if searching in vain for something very important. Now that she didn’t have her glasses on, you saw that her nose was long and sharp, her eyes deep blue and very clear, and her sunken mouth had a stern, inflexible expression whenever she wasn’t smiling. She talked nonstop about her funeral and the five hundred kroner that she lost when Landmands Bank scandalously folded. My mother and my aunts laughed heartily and said, ‘You’ll have a fine funeral, Mama, when it comes time for that.’ I think I was the only one who took her seriously. She was seventy-six years old, after all, so it couldn’t be much longer, I thought. We agreed on the hymns to be sung: ‘Church bell, not for the big cities but for the little town were you cast’, and ‘If you’ve put your hand to the Lord’s plough, then don’t look back’. The latter was not, of course, a funeral hymn, but Granny and I were both so fond of it, and we sang it together so often whenever I visited her. On my part, there was also a little spite involved in the choice. My father hated that hymn more than any other because the line ‘If sobs strangle the voice, then think of the golden harvest’ was proof, in his opinion, of the church’s animosity toward the working class.

  I wanted so much to write a hymn for Granny myself, but I couldn’t. I’d tried so many times, but they always sounded like one of the old hymns, so sadly I had to give up. On the second day after Christmas, something terrible happened. The three sisters were sitting by Granny’s bed and Uncle Peter was in the room, when suddenly the doorbell rang and one of my cousins opened the door to The Hollow Leg who, in an awful state, pushed his way in to the sickbed. Aunt Rosalia threw her hands over her face and burst into tears. The Hollow Leg swung at her and shouted that she damn well better come home now, or he’d break every bone in her body. Uncle Peter stepped forward and grabbed hold of the drunken man, and we children were shooed out of the room. There was a terrible uproar, women’s screams, and, in the midst of it all, Granny’s calm and authoritative voice, trying to appeal to any possible remaining decent side of his character. Then suddenly there was silence and we later learned that Uncle Peter had thrown him out bodily. He had never been allowed into their house before. It was the same thing at home on our street. Either the men drank – and most of them did – or else they harbored a violent hatred toward those who did. When Granny grew worse and the doctor said that she most likely wouldn’t make it through the crisis, I wasn’t allowed to visit her anymore. My mother was over there day and night, and came home with red eyes and discouraging news. When Granny died, I wasn’t permitted to see her, either, but Edvin was. He said she looked just like when she was alive. But I did go to the funeral. I sat in Sunday church next to my mother and Aunt Rosalia, and already during the sermon, I was gripped by an attack of hysterical laughter. It was so terrible that I held my handkerchief over my nose and mouth, hoping they would think I was crying like the others. Fortunately, tears ran down my cheeks too. I was horrified that I couldn’t feel anything at her death. I had really loved Granny, and the hymns that we’d chosen together were sung. Why then couldn’t I grieve? Long after the funeral, my comforter was replaced by Granny’s – my mother’s only inheritance. In the evening when I pulled it up over me, Granny’s special smell of clean linen flooded over me, and then I cried for the first time and understood what had happened. Oh, Granny, you’ll never hear me sing again. You’ll never spread real butter on my bread again, and what you’ve forgotten to tell me about your life will now never be revealed. Every evening, for a long time, I cried myself to sleep, for the smell continued to cling to the comforter.

  14

  ‘God help you if you don’t deliver that wringer in a hurry,’ says my mother, tossing the heavy machine over to me; I have to jump so it won’t land on my toes. She’s standing in the laundry room, bending over a steaming tub, and I know that she’s half insane on that one day of the month. But I’m in a terrible situation. She’s given me ten øre to pay for renting the machine, and it costs fifteen øre an hour. It went up five øre last time, and then I had to promise to pay the remaining five øre next time. So they were supposed to get twenty øre today, and I had only ten. ‘Mother,’ I say timidly, ‘I can’t help it if it’s gone up.’ She raises her head and pushes the damp hair from her face. ‘Get going,’ she says threateningly, and I go out of the steaming room and up to the courtyard, where I look up at the gray sky, as if expecting help from it. It’s late in the afternoon, and near the trash cans the usual gang is standing with their heads together. I wish I were one of them. I wish I were like Ruth, who is so little that she disappears in the middle of the crowd. ‘Hi, Tove,’ she yells happily, because she has no sense of having abandoned me. ‘Hi,’ I say and suddenly feel hope. I go over and signal Ruth to come over to me. Then I explain my errand to her and she says, ‘I’ll go along – I’ll get it delivered all right. Give me the ten øre – it’s better than nothing.’ Everything is straightforward for Ruth, who never wonders at the grownups’ behavior. I don’t much, either, when it concerns my mother, whose unpredictable personality I’ve accepted. Over on Sundevedsgade, I wait on the corner, ready to flee, while Ruth barges into the shop, throws the machine on the counter with the ten øre, and races over to me. We run all the way to Amerikavej and stand there, out of breath, laughing like in the old days when we’d pulled off something daring. ‘The bitch yelled after me,’ gasps Ruth. ‘“It costs fifteen øre,” she shouted, but she couldn’t get past the machine fast enough with that fat stomach. Oh God, that was fun.’ The clear tears leave streaks on the pretty little fac
e, and I feel happy and grateful. As we go home, Ruth asks me why I don’t want to join in at the trash-can corner. ‘They’re such fun, the big girls,’ she says. ‘They have such a great time.’ If Ruth is old enough to be there, then I certainly am, too. When we reach the courtyard at home again, only Minna and Grete are in the trash-can corner. What Ruth sees in Minna, I don’t know. Grete lives in the front building, and she’s the daughter of a divorced mother who is a seamstress like my aunt. She’s in the seventh grade, and I don’t know her very well at all. She has on a knitted blouse that reveals two tiny little bulges in the front, what I’m so sadly lacking. When she laughs you can see that her mouth is crooked. It’s almost dark in the corner, and it stinks terribly from the garbage cans. The two big girls are sitting on top of them, and Minna hospitably makes room for Ruth beside her. So I stand there, bolt upright like a milepost, and can’t think of anything to say. This is a promotion that I’ve looked forward to for years, but now I don’t know if there’s much to it. ‘Gerda is going to have her baby soon,’ says Grete, banging her heels against the trash can. ‘It’ll be retarded like Pretty Ludvig,’ says Minna hopefully. ‘That’s what happens to children who are conceived during a drunken binge.’ ‘The hell it does,’ says Ruth. ‘Most of us would be retarded then.’ They always talk like that, and they have something nasty and dirty to say about everyone. I wonder whether they talk about us the same way when my back is turned. Giggling, they talk about drinking and sex and secret, unmentionable liaisons. Grete and Minna won’t keep their virginity more than an hour after they’re confirmed, they say, and they’ll be careful not to have kids before they turn eighteen. I’ve heard it all before from Ruth, and the conversation in the trash-can corner seems to me deadly dull and boring. It oppresses me and makes me long to be away from the courtyard and the street and the tall buildings. I don’t know whether there are other streets, other courtyards, other buildings and people. As yet I’ve only been out to Vesterbrogade whenever I had to buy three pounds of ordinary potatoes at the grocer’s, who always gave me a piece of candy, and who later turned out to be ‘The Drilling X’. In the daytime, he quietly minded his little store, and at night he fooled the police by breaking into the city’s post offices. It took years to catch him. I’m far away in my thoughts when Ruth suddenly says, ‘Tove has a boyfriend!’ The two big girls crack up with laughter. ‘That’s a damn lie,’ says Minna, ‘she’s too holy for that!’ ‘I’ll be damned if it’s a lie,’ maintains Ruth, giving me a big smile, completely without malice. ‘I know who it is, too. It’s Curly Charles!’ ‘Oh, ha ha!’ They double over with laughter, and I laugh the loudest. I do it because Ruth just wanted to amuse us, but I don’t think there’s anything funny about it. Gerda goes across the courtyard, swaybacked and weighted down, and the laughter ceases. In her hand she has a net bag with beer bottles that clink against each other. Her short hair has gotten darker than before and she has brown spots on her face. I quickly wish that she’ll have a beautiful little baby with a normal mind. A girl, I wish for her, with golden hair in a long thick braid down her back. Maybe Gerda was in love with Tin Snout, for no one can see into a woman’s heart. Maybe she cries herself to sleep every night, no matter how much she sings and laughs during the day. Once she stood in the trash-can corner and shouted about what would happen when she turned fourteen. I don’t want to follow tradition in that way. I don’t want to do it before I meet a man that I love; but no man or boy has looked in my direction yet. I don’t want to have a ‘stable skilled worker who comes right home with his weekly paycheck and doesn’t drink’. I’d rather be an old maid, which I guess my parents have also gradually resigned themselves to. My father is always talking about ‘a steady job with a pension’ when I’ve finished school, but that seems to me just as horrible as the skilled worker. Whenever I think about the future, I run up against a wall everywhere, and that’s why I want to prolong my childhood so badly. I can’t see any way out of it, and when my mother calls me from up in the window, I leave the precious trash-can corner with relief and go upstairs. ‘Well,’ she says, very kindly, ‘did you get the wringer delivered?’ ‘Yes,’ I say, and she smiles at me as if I’ve successfully completed a difficult task she had given me.