The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency

by Tove Ditlevsen

  15

  Miss Mathiassen has told me to ask at home for permission to go to high school, in spite of the fact that at the exams I couldn’t say how long the Thirty Years’ War lasted. I’ll never learn to understand those kinds of jokes. Miss Mathiassen says I’m intelligent and ought to continue studying. That’s what I’d like to do, too, but I know that we can’t afford it. Without much hope, I ask my father anyway and he gets strangely agitated and talks contemptuously about bluestockings and female graduates who are both ugly and stuck-up. Once he was going to help me write a composition about Florence Nightingale, but all that he could say about her was that she had big feet and bad breath – so I consulted Miss Mollerup instead. Otherwise my father has written a lot of my papers and gotten good grades from Miss Mathiassen. It didn’t misfire until he wrote an essay on America and ended it like this: ‘America has been called the land of freedom. Earlier it meant freedom to be yourself, to work, and to own land. Now it practically means freedom to starve to death if you don’t have money to buy food.’ ‘What in the world,’ said my classroom teacher, ‘do you mean by that nonsense?’ I couldn’t explain it, and we only got a ‘B’ for the effort. No, I can’t continue my studies, and I can only remain a child for a short time yet. I have to finish school and be confirmed and get a job somewhere in a house where there’s a lot to be done. The future is a monstrous, powerful colossus that will soon fall on me and crush me. My tattered childhood flaps around me, and no sooner have I patched one hole than another breaks through somewhere else. It makes me vulnerable and irritable. I talk back to my mother and she says, gloating, ‘All right, all right, just wait until you get out among strangers…’ Their great sorrow is Edvin, who I’ve gotten so close to since he clashed with our parents. I don’t have any deep or painful feelings about him, so he can confide in me whatever he likes without fear. But my father has always believed that he would be something great, because he had so many talents as a child. He could sing and play guitar and he was always the prince in the school play. All the girls in school and in the courtyard had a crush on him, and since we went to the same school, the teachers always said to me with amazement, ‘Are you the one who has such a smart, handsome brother?’ It pleased my father, too, that he was a member of the working-class Danish Youth group and put body and soul into the party. My father always said that he didn’t respect government ministers who had never had a shovel in their hands, so who knows what future he once envisioned for Edvin? Now all of these dreams are crushed. Edvin is just waiting for the golden day when he becomes a journeyman and can bully the poor apprentices himself. He’s also waiting to turn eighteen, because then he’s going to move away from home and rent a room where he can have his things in peace. He wants to live somewhere where he can have girls visit him, because on that point my mother is completely intransigent. In her eyes, all young girls are enemy agents who are only out to get married and be supported by a skilled worker, whose training his parents have scrimped and saved to pay for. ‘And now when he’s going to be earning money,’ she says bitterly to my father, ‘and could pay some of it back, he runs away from home, of course. It’s some girl who’s put that into his head.’ She says things like that when they’ve come to bed and think I’m asleep. I understand Edvin completely because this isn’t a home you can stay in, and when I turn eighteen, I’m going to move out, too. But I also understand that my father is disappointed. Recently, when he and Edvin were fighting, Edvin said that Stauning drank and had mistresses. My father turned bright red in the face with anger and gave him a terrible slap, so that he tumbled over onto the floor. I’d never seen my father hit Edvin before, and he’s never hit me, either. One evening when my parents were lying in bed discussing the problem, my father said that they should give Edvin permission to invite his girlfriend home. ‘He doesn’t have one – no one steady,’ said my mother curtly. ‘Yes he does,’ said my father, ‘otherwise he wouldn’t be out every evening. You’re chasing him away from home yourself this way.’ As always, when my father on a rare occasion insisted on something, my mother had to give in, and Edvin was asked to invite Solvejg to coffee the next evening. I know a lot about Solvejg, but I’ve never met her. I know that she and my brother love each other, and that they’re going to get married when he becomes a journeyman. I also know that he visits her home and that her parents like him very much. He met her at a dance at Folkets Hus. She lives on Enghavevej and is seventeen just like him. Her father repairs bicycles and has a workshop on Vesterbrogade. She herself is a trained beautician and earns a lot of money.

  The evening arrived and we all watched anxiously over my mother’s movements. I helped her place our only white tablecloth on the table, and Edvin tried in vain to catch her eye in order to smile at her. He had on his confirmation suit that was too short at the wrists and ankles. My father had on his Sunday best and was sitting on the edge of the sofa, fumbling nervously with the knot in his tie, as if he were the guest. I got the platter with the cream puffs and placed it in the middle of the tablecloth. Then the doorbell rang and my brother almost fell over his own feet as he ran out to open the door. Bright laughter sounded from out in the hallway, and my mother pressed her lips tightly together and grabbed her knitting, which she started working on furiously. ‘Hello,’ she said shortly and gave her hand to Solvejg without looking up. ‘Please sit down.’ She could just as well have said, ‘Go to hell’, but it didn’t look like Solvejg was aware of the tense atmosphere. She sat down, smiling, and I thought she was very pretty. Her blond hair was in a wreath on her head, she had pink cheeks with deep dimples, and her dark blue eyes had an expression like they were always laughing. She didn’t notice how silent we were, but she talked in a cheerful and self-confident manner, as if she were used to giving orders. She talked about her work, about her parents, about Edvin, and about how happy she was to visit him at home. My mother looked more and more unyielding, and knitted as if she were doing piecework. Finally Solvejg noticed it after all, because she said, ‘It’s really so strange! Since Edvin and I are going to get married, you’ll be my mother-in-law, you know.’ She laughed heartily over this, but completely alone, and suddenly my mother burst into tears. It was excruciatingly embarrassing, and none of us knew what to do. She cried as she continued to knit, and there was nothing moving or touching about her tears. ‘Alfrida!’ said my father admonishingly; he never called her by her first name. I desperately grabbed the coffeepot. ‘Won’t you have another cup?’ I asked Solvejg, and poured her a full cup without waiting for an answer. I thought that maybe she might think this was something quite normal for us. ‘Thank you,’ she said and smiled at me. For a minute everyone was silent. My brother looked down at the tablecloth with a dark expression. Solvejg made much of putting cream and sugar in her coffee. Tears slid like rain out of my mother’s fiercely downcast eyes, and suddenly Edvin pushed back his chair so it crashed against the buffet. ‘Come on, Solvejg,’ he said, ‘we’re going. I knew she’d ruin everything. Stop blubbering, Mother. I’m going to marry Solvejg whether you like it or not. Goodbye.’ With Solvejg in hand, he rushed out to the hall without giving her time to say goodbye. The door banged hard after them. Only then did my mother take off her glasses and dry her eyes. ‘There, you see,’ she said reproachfully to my father, ‘what comes from his insisting on being an apprentice? That girl will never let go of such a goldmine!’ Wearily he lay down on the sofa again and loosened his tie and opened the top button of his shirt. ‘That’s not it,’ he said without anger, ‘but you’re driving your children away like this.’

  Edvin never brought any girlfriend home again, and later when he got married, we first saw his wife after the wedding. It wasn’t Solvejg.

  16

  My childhood’s last spring is cold and windy. It tastes of dust and smells of painful departures and change. In school everyone is involved with preparations for exams and confirmation, but I see no meaning in any of it. You don’t need a middle school diploma to clean house or wash
dishes for strangers, and confirmation is the tombstone over a childhood that now seems to me bright, secure, and happy. Everything during this time makes a deep, indelible impression on me, and it’s as if I’ll remember even completely trivial remarks my whole life. When I’m out buying confirmation shoes with my mother, she says, as the salesclerk listens, ‘Yes, these will be the last shoes we give you.’ It opens a terrifying perspective on the future and I don’t know how I’ll go about supporting myself. The shoes are brocade and cost nine kroner. They have high heels and, partly because I can’t walk in them without spraining my ankles, and partly because – in my mother’s opinion – I’ll be as tall as a skyscraper when I wear them, my father chops off a piece of the heels with an axe. That makes the toes turn up, but after all, I’ll only wear them on that one day, my mother consoles me. On his eighteenth birthday, Edvin moved to a room on Bagerstræde, and now I sleep on a bed made up on the sofa in the living room, which I perceive as still another unhappy sign that my childhood is over. Here I can’t sit in the windowsill because it’s full of geraniums, and there’s only a view of the square with the green gypsy wagon and the gas pump with the big round lamp, which once made me exclaim, ‘Mother, the moon has fallen down.’ I don’t remember it myself, and in general the grownups have completely different memories about you than you yourself have. I’ve known that for a long time. Edvin’s memories are different than mine, too, and whenever I ask him whether he can remember some event or other I thought we experienced together, he always says no. My brother and I are fond of each other, but we can’t talk to each other very well. When I visit him at his room, his landlady opens the door. She has a black mustache and seems to suffer from the same suspicions as my mother. ‘His sister,’ she says, ‘that’s a good one. I’ve never known a lodger who has so many sisters and cousins as he has.’ Things are not good with Edvin even though he now has a whole room to himself. He smokes cigarettes and drinks beer and often goes out to dances in the evening with a friend named Thorvald. They were apprentices together and want to have their own workshop someday. I’ve never met Thorvald, because neither of us can bring anyone home, no matter what sex they are. Edvin is unhappy because Solvejg has left him. One day she came up to his room where they could finally be alone together, and said that she didn’t want to marry him after all. Edvin blames my mother, but I think Solvejg has found someone else. I’ve read somewhere, you see, that real love only grows greater with opposition, but I keep quiet about that because it’s probably better for Edvin to believe that my mother has scared her away. His room is very small and the furniture looks like it’s ready for the dump. I never stay very long at Edvin’s because there are long pauses between our words, and he looks just as relieved when I leave as he looks happy when I arrive. I talk about little things from home. For example, I wear a pair of oiled leather boots that, as usual, I’ve inherited from him. My father varnished the soles of them so that they’ll last longer and he also gave the toes a couple of swipes, so that they turned up and are completely black while the rest of the boots are brown. One day my mother threw some rags over to me, ‘Rub your boots with them and then throw them into the stove,’ she said. ‘My boots?’ I asked happily, and she laughed long and hard at me. ‘No, you goof, the rags!’ she said. Things like that make Edvin laugh too, and that’s why I tell him about it now, when he’s no longer part of our daily life. Nothing is like it was before. Only Istedgade is the same, and now I’m allowed to go there in the evening, too. I go there with Ruth and Minna, and Ruth doesn’t seem to notice that there is something like hatred between Minna and me. Sometimes we go over to Saxogade to visit Olga, Minna’s big sister who married a policeman and has it made. Olga minds the baby and I’m allowed to hold it in my arms. It feels unbelievably nice. Minna wants to marry a man in uniform too, ‘because they’re so handsome’, she says. Then they’ll live near Hedebygade, because that’s what everyone does when they get married. Ruth nods approvingly and prepares herself for the same fate, which seems desirable to both of them. I smile in agreement as if I’m also looking forward to such a future, and as usual, I’m afraid of being found out. I feel like I’m a foreigner in this world and I can’t talk to anyone about the overwhelming problems that fill me at the thought of the future.

  Gerda has had a lovely little boy, and she strolls proudly up and down the street with him while her parents are at work. She’s only seventeen, and you’re first supposed to have children when you’re eighteen. She’s disliked because she won’t admit by her attitude and bearing that things have gone awry for her and consequently politely accept the pity that the street offers her. Everyone is outraged that she refused to accept the basket full of baby clothes that Olga’s mother had collected for her. There she goes, just like that, allowing her parents to support her beyond a reasonable age. ‘If that were you,’ says my mother, ‘you’d have been kicked out long ago.’ Oh, how I’d like to hold my own little baby in my arms! I would support it and figure out everything some way or other. If only I’d gotten that far. At night when I’m in bed, I imagine meeting an attractive and friendly young man whom I ask with polite phrases to do me a great favor. I explain to him that I’d very much like to have a child and ask him to see that I get one. He agrees, and I clench my teeth and close my eyes and pretend that it’s someone else this is happening to, someone who’s of no concern to me. Afterwards, I don’t want to ever see him again. But such a young man is not to be found in the courtyard or on our street, and I write a poem in my poetry album, which now lies in the bottom of the buffet drawer:

  A little butterfly flew

  high in the blue-tinged sky.

  All common sense, morality

  and duties did it defy.

  Drunk with the spring day’s charm

  with trembling wings unfurled,

  it was borne by the sungold rays

  down to the beautiful world.

  And into a pale pink apple blossom

  which had just opened wide,

  flew the little butterfly

  and found a lovely bride.

  And the apple blossom closed,

  over was the wild flight.

  Oh, thank you, little ones. You’ve taught me

  how to love with delight.

  17

  My granny was hardly cold in her grave before my father took us out of the state church. The expression was my mother’s. Granny doesn’t have a grave. Her ashes are in an urn at Bispebjerg Crematorium, and I feel nothing standing there looking at that stupid vase. But I go there often because my mother wants me to. She cries steadily every time we’re there, and I have a guilty conscience when she says, ‘Why aren’t you crying? You did at the funeral.’ Now that Edvin’s gone, I’m always with my mother whenever I’m not in school or down on the street. I’ve also been to a dance at Folkets Hus with her, but it wasn’t fun dancing with her because I’m a head taller than she is and I feel very big and clumsy compared to her. While she was dancing with a gentleman, a young man came and asked me to dance. That had never happened before, and I was about to say no, because I don’t know any dance steps other than those my mother taught me at home in the living room when she was in one of her light-hearted moods. But the young man already had his arm around my waist and since he danced well, so did I. He was completely silent, and just to say something, I asked him what he did. ‘I’m in the courier corps,’ he said briefly. I thought it had something to do with ‘curing’ and decided he was a doctor. That was certainly something different from a ‘stable skilled worker’. Maybe he would dance with me the whole evening, and maybe he was already falling a little in love with me. My heart beat faster and I leaned against him just a little. ‘It’s night, now the thieves are at work,’ he sang in my ear with the music. Suddenly it stopped and he set me next to my mother, bowed stiffly, and disappeared forever. ‘He was good-looking,’ said my mother. ‘If only he comes back.’ ‘He’s a doctor,’ I bragged and told her that he was in the courier corps. ‘
Oh, good God,’ laughed my mother, ‘that’s just a messenger service!’