The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency

by Tove Ditlevsen

  While all of this was going on, I didn’t have a chance to visit Mr Krogh. He had never asked me where I lived and was not inquisitive in general, just as he didn’t like others to be, either. One evening I go out to see him again. It’s winter and I have on Edvin’s made-over coat, which is more warm than beautiful. I’m looking forward to seeing my friend again and to telling him about my new job, which for now I’m happy with. I cut through the usual passageway from Vesterbrogade, and when I reach Gammel Kongevej, I stop as if paralyzed, completely uncomprehending. The yellow building isn’t there anymore. Where it had stood, there is just a space with rubble, plaster, and rusty, twisted water pipes. I go over and brace my hand against the low remains of a wall, because I don’t think my legs will support me any longer. People go past me with closed faces, wrapped up in their own evening errands. I feel like grabbing one of them by the arm and saying, ‘There was a building here yesterday – can you tell me where it is? Where is Mr Krogh?’ He must be living somewhere else now, of course, but how do you find someone who has disappeared? I don’t understand how he could do this to me. But maybe he knew so many young girls and I was just one of them. He’d said that he collected eccentrics, but maybe I wasn’t eccentric enough. As I walk slowly home, still half numbed by this misfortune, I think that this wouldn’t have happened if I’d written good poems. I don’t think it would have happened, either, if he’d desired my body, as he obviously desired Ruth’s, but no one has yet shown any interest whatsoever in me in that way; my father’s warning is completely unnecessary. At home on my street, Ruth is standing with her apprentice mechanic in front of the stairwell to the front building. I stop and button my coat at the neck because the wind is icy cold, which I first notice now. ‘Mr Krogh’s building was torn down,’ I say. ‘Do you know where he’s living?’ ‘Nope,’ she says over the young man’s shoulder, ‘and I don’t give a damn, either.’ They disappear into each other’s embrace again and I walk past, across the courtyard. As I go up the stairs to the back building, I’m gripped by the fear that I’ll never get away from this place where I was born. Suddenly I can’t stand it and find every memory of it dark and sad. As long as I live here I’m condemned to loneliness and anonymity. The world doesn’t count me as anything and every time I get hold of a corner of it, it slips out of my hands again. People die and buildings are torn down over them. The world is constantly changing – it’s only my childhood’s world that endures. Up in the living room it looks like it has always looked. My father is sleeping and my mother is sitting at the table knitting. Her gray hair is gone because, in the greatest secrecy, she has it dyed – wherever she gets the money from for that … Once in a while my father says, ‘It’s strange that your hair is still black. Mine is completely gray now.’ He’s naive and believes everything we say, because he himself never lies. ‘Where have you been?’ asks my mother, looking at me suspiciously. ‘At Yrsa’s,’ I say, not caring whether she believes me. She says, ‘It’s cold in here; put some more coals in the stove.’ Then she puts the water on for coffee and I decide that, like Edvin, I’m going to move out when I’m eighteen. I won’t be allowed to until then. When I live somewhere else – away from Vesterbro – it’ll be easier for me to make contact with people like Mr Krogh. While we’re drinking coffee, I glance through the newspaper a bit. It says that Van der Lubbe has been executed and that Dimitroff made a complete fool of Göring at the trial. I turn to the obituaries, but don’t find Mr Krogh’s name among the dead. It strikes me that it was as if he lost interest in me when Hitler came to power; again my little ship trembles with a vague fear of capsizing.

  6

  I have to be at work at seven o’clock in the morning and, with Mr Jensen, I clean the rooms and put them in order before the office personnel and the director arrive. Mr Jensen is sixteen years old, tall and thin and silly. He blows up condoms and lets them fly around over my head while I’m washing the floor, and he tries to kiss me so that, laughing, I have to defend myself with the rag in one hand. He’s just a boy, and I’m not offended by his coarseness. In the director’s office, he sits in the chair with his feet up on the desk and a cigarette between his lips. ‘Don’t I look like him?’ he asks, twisting his long bangs around his fingers. He says that I’m prudish because I’m a virgin and because I won’t kiss him. ‘If you were in love with me,’ I say, ‘then I would.’ He insists that he is, but I don’t believe him. One morning when I’m in the process of washing the floor in the director’s office, the director suddenly comes through the door, and as I feverishly gather up the scrub brushes and bucket, he takes hold of me from behind and grabs my breasts with both hands. He does it rather like the way my mother touches the meat at the butcher’s, and I turn red with shame and outrage and slip past him with the bucket and scrub brushes without saying a word. I tell Mr Jensen about it and he says I should have slapped his fingers because he always goes to bed with the female employees, and I shouldn’t put up with that. He’s married and has lots of children because he’s a Catholic. But afterwards I don’t feel very bad about it. He is the first man who has shown interest in my body, and I’ve gotten it into my head that without that, I will never get ahead in the world. When the two office secretaries and the stock room supervisor arrive, the orders have to be taken care of. It’s my job to pack the goods at the long counter in the stock room. Thermometers, absorbent cotton, vaginal syringes, hot-water bottles, condoms, trusses. Mr Jensen has carefully explained what everything is used for, and sex seems to me extremely complicated and not very appealing. One thing is for before and one thing is for afterwards; during Mr Jensen’s explanations, which certainly don’t present it very simply, I feel quite inadequate. The stock room supervisor is named Mr Ottosen, and the pretty secretaries are openly in love with him. When they stand at the counter with their papers, explaining something to him, he slips his arm around their waists, and they lean toward him, starry-eyed. Two pretty, chic young girls with tiny curls all over their heads, high heels, and wide patent leather belts around their waists. Someday when I work in an office, I want to try to look just like them. I’ll try to pay attention to what dresses I wear and how my hair looks. But I put off these exertions because they bore me. I’m wearing a brown smock that the company issued me. When I’m looking for a job, I rub my cheeks with my mother’s tissue paper, and that’s all I’ve ever done for my appearance. My hair is long, blond and straight, and I wash it with brown soap whenever I think it needs it. Mr Krogh said that I had beautiful hair, but maybe he couldn’t find anything else to praise me for. In any case, I very often stand next to Mr Ottosen, and I’ve also tried leaning ever so slightly against him, but he never puts his arm around my waist or seems to notice my weak overture at all. I think about that a lot and reach the conclusion that most women exert an irresistible attraction over men – but I don’t. It’s both sad and strange, but it does protect me from having children too soon, like most of the girls on my street. One day Mr Jensen asks me if I’d like to go to the movies in the evening. I say yes, because ever since I was a child I’ve wanted to be allowed to see a movie. My parents wouldn’t let me. For once I tell the truth at home, and my mother looks very excited. She wants to know everything about Mr Jensen, and in her mind she has me married to him at once. But I don’t know what his father does or what plans he himself has for the future, so I can’t satisfy her curiosity. My father is very happy that he’s a member of Danish Social Democratic Union (DSU) which, to his regret, Edvin won’t join. ‘Without a doubt,’ he says, twisting the ends of his mustache, ‘a very sensible young man.’ So for the first time I’m sitting in a movie house next to a very scrubbed Mr Jensen, who is wearing his confirmation suit that ends just short of his not completely clean wrists. We’ve hung our coats over the backs of the seats. First there’s someone who plays the piano. Then the lights go out and flashing commercials flicker across the screen. When they’re over and the lights go on again, I’m about to get up because I think that’s all there is, but Mr
Jensen pulls me down in the seat again. ‘It’s just starting now,’ he says patiently. The film is called The Cabin Boy, and the boy is the handsome and touching Jackie Coogan. I’m completely enchanted and forget where I am and who I’m with. I cry as if I were being beaten and mechanically accept the handkerchief Mr Jensen puts into my hand. When he puts his hand on my knee, I push it away as if it were a dead object. With the captain, the cabin boy goes down with the ship, sacrificing his life for a beautiful, violently sobbing woman and her little girl. I bawl loudly and can’t stop when the lights go on. ‘Shh…,’ says Mr Jensen embarrassed, taking me by the arm as we go out. ‘Why aren’t you crying?’ I ask. ‘Don’t you think it was sad?’ ‘Yes, I do,’ says Mr Jensen, ‘but to come right out and cry at the movies!’ We walk down Søndre Boulevard and Mr Jensen laces his fingers through mine. I give him a sidelong glance and discover that he has long eyelashes. Maybe he really is in love with me. The snow creaks under our feet and the sky is bright with stars. His arm shakes a little, but that could be from the cold. Home in the dark doorway, he embraces me and kisses me. I don’t resist, but it doesn’t make me feel anything. His lips are cold and hard as leather. ‘Why don’t we use our first names?’ he asks in a hoarse voice. ‘OK,’ I say, ‘what’s your name?’ His name is Erling, and we agree to still use our last names at work.

  Whenever there’s nothing to do in the stock room in the afternoon, I’m sent up to the attic to put metal boxes in order in long rows. I like the work because I’m all alone in the dark and dusty room. I lie on the floor and place the boxes in even rows according to what it says on them: zinc salve, lanolin. I sink into a sweet melancholy and rhythmic waves of words stream through me again. I write them down on brown wrapping paper and conclude sorrowfully that the poems are still not good enough. ‘Children’s poems,’ said Mr Krogh. He also said, ‘In order to write a good poem, you have to have experienced an awful lot.’ I think that I have, but maybe I’ll experience even more. Then one day I write something that is different from anything I’ve written before, only I don’t know what the difference is. I write the following:

  There burns a candle in the night,

  it burns for me alone,

  and if I blow at it,

  it flames up,

  and flames for me alone.

  But if you breathe softly

  and if you breathe quietly,

  the candle is suddenly more than bright

  and burns deep in my own breast,

  for you alone.

  I think it’s a real poem, and the pain at Mr Krogh’s disappearance springs up again, because I want so much to show it to him. I want so much to tell him that now I understand what he meant. But for me he’s just as dead as the old editor, and I can’t find any new wedge into the world that is moved by poems and, I hope, by people who write them. ‘You were gone a long time,’ says Erling when I come downstairs. He acts the whole time as if we are going steady. He’s standing there packing a douche bag (it’s used afterwards, he has explained to me), and says, as he bends the red tubes under the monstrosity, ‘Why don’t we sleep together at a hotel on Saturday? I’ve saved up for it.’ ‘No,’ I say, because if I can write real poems now, it doesn’t matter that I’m a virgin. On the contrary, I may have use for it when I meet the right man. ‘God Almighty,’ says Erling irritated, ‘are you saving it for the coroner?’ ‘Yes,’ I say, laughing so I can hardly stop. I don’t really know myself what virginity and poems have to do with each other, so how could I explain the strange connection to Erling?

  7

  Every Saturday evening, Erling and I go to the movies. He waits for me, leaning against the wall of the front building, his hands buried in the pockets of his father’s coat, which he inherited just like I’ve inherited my brother’s. If I keep him waiting too long, he chews on matches and twists his hair in his fingers. As we go out through the doorway, my mother opens the window and yells, ‘Goodbye, Tove.’ That means she approves of the relationship, and Erling takes it to mean that too. He asks me whether he’s going to meet my parents soon. ‘No,’ I say, ‘not yet.’ My mother asks whether Erling has a clubfoot or a harelip, since they aren’t allowed to meet him. I don’t want to visit Erling’s parents, either, because then they’ll think that we’re engaged. It would be both easier and more fun for me if I had a girlfriend, but I don’t anymore; so Erling is better than nothing. I like him a lot because he’s also a little strange, and he’s like me in many ways. His father is a laborer and often unemployed. He has a grown-up sister who is married. He himself wants to be a schoolteacher, but he can’t get into the teachers’ college until he’s eighteen. He’s saving money for it. He says that it’s outrageous that they use unorganized labor in the company, but if he joins the union, he’ll be thrown out. He earns twenty-five kroner a week. I pay for myself when we go to the movies, both because he can’t really afford to pay for the two of us, and because I think it makes me more independent. All of these evenings proceed in the same way. When the movie is over, he walks me home, and inside the dark doorway, he embraces and kisses me. I observe him with a certain cold curiosity, wanting to see how excited I can make him. If I were in love with him, I would be passionate too, but I’m not, and he knows it. At a certain moment I loosen his cold hands from around my neck and say, ‘No, don’t do that.’ ‘Oh yes,’ he whispers breathlessly, ‘it doesn’t hurt at all.’ ‘No,’ I say, ‘but I don’t want to.’ I feel sorry for him and kiss his leathery lips before I go. He asks me when I will want to, and just for something to say, I promise to do it when I turn eighteen, because that’s still such a terribly long way off. I also feel a little sorry for myself because his embraces don’t make the slightest chord in me sing. I wonder whether I’m abnormal in that way too. ‘Damned great,’ Ruth had said, and she was only thirteen. All of the girls in the trash-can corner said the same thing, but maybe they were lying. Maybe it was just something that they said. ‘When do we get to meet your sweetheart?’ says my mother upstairs in the living room. ‘When I met your father, I invited him home right away.’ She also says that he’s obviously only out after one thing, and if I let him have his way, he won’t want anything more to do with me. ‘And you can’t come back here with a kid,’ she says. One evening I say that she wasn’t nearly so eager for Edvin to bring his girlfriend home, and she says sharply that it’s totally different with a boy. There’s no rush, and a man can always get married, but a girl has to be supported and she always has to think of that. My father says that she should stop pestering me. He says that it’s smart of Erling to want to be a schoolteacher because they make good money and are never unemployed. ‘White-collar workers,’ says my brother, who fortunately has found work again, ‘and they’re the worst kind.’ My brother is annoyed that I’ve got a boyfriend because he’s always teased me that I’d never get married. He is listening to the news on the radio about Crown Prince Frederik’s wedding, which greatly interests my mother. ‘Turn off all that royalty junk,’ says my father from deep in the sofa. ‘Now we have one more mouth to feed, that’s all.’ At work, the office secretaries are completely ecstatic over the enchanting Crown Princess Ingrid. They take up one of their usual collections and walk through the stock room with a long list on which they write down what everyone donates for a bouquet for the royal house. I’ve given a krone, and a few days ago I gave a krone for the director’s daughter’s confirmation. He has so many children that there are constantly collections for their christenings or birthdays. ‘Before you know it,’ says Erling, ‘your whole salary is used up for that nonsense.’ Erling is a Social Democrat like my father and my brother, and he dreams of a revolution that will lift the masses. I like to hear him develop this plan, because it would further my own personal interests if the poor came to power. Erling wants to change the social democracy and make it more red. ‘Actually,’ he says, ‘I’m a syndicalist.’ I don’t ask him what that is because then I’ll get a long, incomprehensible speech about politics. Once he takes m
e along to a meeting at Blågårds Plads, but things get violent and the police take out their nightsticks and break up the brawling factions. ‘Down with the cops,’ yells Erling, who is in his DSU uniform, and immediately he gets a bop on the head that makes him give out a howl. Terrified, I grab him by the arm, and hand in hand we run down the street that echoes with the fleeing steps of the crowd. That’s not for me and I never do it again. At work, besides us, there are two laborers and a driver. We all eat lunch together in a little room behind the stock room. It’s not heated and that too, says Erling, is outrageous. As a rule, we all sit with our coats on. We sit on upside-down beer crates, and I get along well with this little group of people. I’m not shy with them – not even when they ask me, for example, if I really know what a truss or a vaginal syringe is used for. But I tell them that they should join the union, and one day when I’m in a light-hearted mood, I climb up on one of the beer crates and imitate Stauning when he speaks: ‘Comrades!’ I stroke my invisible beard and drop my voice to a low pitch, and my audience is very appreciative. They laugh and clap, and then I forget all about it. A little later, Mr Ottosen comes in and says that the director wants to speak to me. I haven’t been alone with him since that day he grabbed my breasts, and I’m afraid that he wants something like that from me. ‘Sit down,’ he says curtly, pointing to a chair. I sit down on the very edge and, to my horror, I see that his face is dark with anger. ‘We can’t use you here,’ he says hotly. ‘I won’t have Bolsheviks in my company.’ ‘No,’ I say, not knowing what Bolsheviks are. He pounds the desk, so I jump. Then he gets up and comes over to my chair and sticks his red face right down into mine. I turn my head away a little because he has bad breath. ‘You’ve urged my people to join the union,’ he yells, ‘but do you have any idea what would happen then?’ ‘No,’ I whisper, even though I really do know. ‘They’d be fired,’ he roars and again pounds his hand on the desk, ‘just like I’m firing you now – without a reference! You can pick up your check at the front office.’ He straightens up and goes back to his place. I feel like I ought to burst into tears, but instead I’m filled with a dark joy that I can’t define. This man regards me as dangerous, as significant in an area I know nothing about. ‘There’s nothing to laugh about,’ he yells, so I must have been sitting there smiling. ‘Get out!’ He points to the door and I hurry to get out. ‘I never want to see you again,’ he screams after me and slams the door. Over in the stock room Mr Ottosen and Erling are looking astonished. They ask me what in the world is the matter and I tell them proudly. Mr Ottosen shrugs his shoulders. ‘You’re young,’ he says, ‘and badly paid, so you can easily find some other work to do. And you just have yourself, of course. I have a wife and four children, so I’ll keep my mouth shut.’ Erling says that I should have kept my opinions to myself, and I get furious with him. ‘There’ll never be a revolution here in Denmark,’ I say hotly, ‘as long as there are people like you that won’t risk their own neck.’ Then, indignantly, I go in to the secretaries and ask for my check, which is already waiting for me. The snow is piled high in the streets as I go home and an ice-cold wind whistles right through my coat. I’ve suffered for what I believe in, and I’m eager to tell my father about it. I feel like a Joan of Arc, a Charlotte Corday, a young woman who will inscribe her name in the history of the world. The poetry writing is going too slowly anyway. With straight back and head held high, I go up the stairs, and full of wounded dignity I step into the living room, where my father lies sleeping with his backside to the world. My mother asks me why I’m home already and when I tell her, she says that I shouldn’t get involved in things that don’t concern me. She says furiously that it was a good position and that no man will marry a girl who is constantly changing jobs. This time she doesn’t back me up, and I clear my throat loudly and make a bit of racket at the table so my father will wake up. And he does. When he sits up, rubbing his eyes, my mother says, ‘Tove was thrown out. It’s because of all your blabber about unions that she’s gotten into her head.’ When my father hears the details, his face takes on a furious expression. ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ he yells, pounding his fist on the table so that the light fixture dances on its hooks. ‘Here you’ve finally gotten a decent job and then you’re thrown out for such foolishness. You don’t know anything about politics. These are bad times and there are so many scabs that you could feed the pigs with them. But the next job you get you’ll have to keep or else you’ll be just like your mother.’ They glare angrily at each other like they always do when there’s trouble with Edvin or me. I keep quiet and really don’t know what I had expected. But in the space of a few minutes, I’ve lost my suddenly awakened interest in politics, in red banners and revolutions. Erling and I go to the movies a few more Saturdays – then he stops leaning against the wall waiting for me. I miss him a little, because he made me less lonely, and I especially miss the attic with the metal boxes, where I wrote my first real poem. ‘What’s become of your young man?’ asks my mother, who had dreamed of being mother-in-law to a schoolteacher. ‘He found someone else,’ I say. My mother has to have very concrete reasons for everything. She says, ‘You should take more trouble with your appearance. You should buy a spring suit instead of that bicycle. When you’re not naturally pretty,’ she says, ‘you have to help things out a bit.’ My mother doesn’t say such things to hurt me; she’s just completely ignorant of what goes on inside other people.