The Endless Summer

by Madame Nielsen

  Copyright © Claus Beck-Nielsen, 2014

  Translation copyright © Gaye Kynoch, 2018

  Originally published in Denmark as Den Endeløse Sommer

  First edition, 2018

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-940953-71-7

  This project is supported in part by a grant from the Danish Arts Foundation.

  DANISH ARTS FOUNDATION

  This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature

  Design by N. J. Furl

  Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press:

  Dewey Hall 1-219, Box 278968, Rochester, NY 14627

  www.openletterbooks.org

  CONTENTS

  The Endless Summer

  The young boy, who is perhaps a girl, but does not yet know it. The young boy, who is perhaps a girl, but will never touch a man, never strip naked with a man and rub skin against his skin, never ever, no matter how titillatingly repellant the notion might be. The young boy, this fetching young boy with the delicate features, the big eyes, and the huge anxiety for war and illness, for body, sex, and death.

  It begins with a boy, a young boy, who is perhaps a girl, but does not yet know it. The young boy, so fetching, so delicate, so tender, so shy, plays guitar in a band. They’re playing at a party for a crowd of young people they don’t know, and who don’t know them, and it’s their first gig, and it’s that very evening. (And later, first the girl comes, and then, but just in a glimmer, like a shadow, a dazzling shadow, a shadow of light, the mother, then the two little brothers, who climb up the walls, on the shelves and on the cupboards in the dark rooms in the basement under the farmhouse where she has withdrawn in order to escape the stepfather’s eyes, his sickly nasal voice, his gun and his inferiority and hatred of every woman, fear he disguises as disdain, and where she now lives, the girl, in the basement, the walls papered with posters of Paul Young, who is still young and beautiful and soft in the pictures and later, very soon, will be fat and alcoholic and, following a swift and efficient downward spiral, will die, and then, like an epiphany, a dazzling light, the mother, her aristocratic figure, the long gracious limbs and strong bones, the sleek ivory-colored hair flowing down her back, the stallion she rides in the mist rising off the early summer morning fields seen through one of the small grimy window panes in the basement where he has just stirred and propped himself up on one elbow under the duvet in the damp warmth of the girl’s languid body, the girl who is still asleep at his side, the dark round and soft girl with the delicate bones and big soft breasts, the eternally languid pleasure-lover and the aristocratic fair Nordic mother, her straight back and the steamy breath from the horse’s slimily-soft nostrils, and then, with no warning, the stepfather, one morning, alone in the big rustic kitchen, the slender young boy and the stepfather who sits down opposite him and starts talking about weapons, guns and pistols, and especially the bullets and particularly the dumdum bullets, their magic effect, the almost invisible hole in the flesh, just here, right in the solar plexus where the bullet enters, almost without leaving a trace, and at the very moment it penetrates the darkness it explodes its way out and leaves the back, or what once was a back, one big ragged bleeding crater, the stepfather’s story about the bullets and the girl’s about the detectives paid by the stepfather to follow the mother everywhere as soon as she turns out of the avenue and is out of sight (and out of shooting range), and who clean him out so that he, who just a few years ago along with his older brother Buller inherited everything from their father and from one day to the next became a multimillionaire and bought an estate in Jutland, a magnificent manor house with sixteen toilets and bathrooms, can now hardly afford gas for his second-hand car, the detectives, who he, the young boy, never sees at all, albeit their shadows fall around him in the empty rooms when he walks through the house on his own, not a word, even though everyone except the two little brothers knows about their existence, quite openly, like a religious taboo everyone simply accepts as a matter of course, the mother and her daughter and the stepfather who knows that they know but doesn’t let it affect him, doesn’t try to hide anything, as if the terror is even more deadly from being obvious and unmentionable, and as if the mother’s aristocracy, her untouchability, is even more supreme from her getting on with life, her daily round, as if nothing has happened, which just makes the stepfather’s hatred and desperation and inferiority and obsession even greater and more bombastic, it consumes him, with every day he grows paler and thinner and savagely embittered, and determined it will be over his dead body that he lets go of this woman, lets her go free, even if it will consume him, and it will, but not now, first he’ll just disappear, one day he’s suddenly gone, and the summer has started, an endless summer, in which nothing happens, in which he, the slender boy, falls out of the world, the world he came from, and into this other world, which is a world in itself, where time and light stand still and the dust rotates and no one does anything, nothing other than living as if they were in a different era and a completely different location, as if the white farmhouse is a governor’s residence on St. Croix in the final days of the empire when everything is too late and thus suddenly at last possible. The mother spends her days on the back of her stallion and doesn’t come in until darkness falls, and she sits in the kitchen with a glass of wine, surrounded by candles, and the girl and the young boy stay in bed until late in the afternoon and never get properly up, but wander around the house wearing one another’s clothes, the young boy dressed like a yet to be sexed toreador or a virgin, and sit in the kitchen and drink milky coffee and bake bread with the last of the flour and fill it with scraps of cheese and onion and herbs and eat steaming slices and hunks that fall apart while they laugh and sink onto her big iron bed, which has now been moved upstairs into the smaller of the two sitting rooms, and make love for hours on end without knowing who is who, if there is one gender or many, and for a brief moment forgets his fear of body and death, which is coming, it’s coming, don’t worry, it’ll come, death comes in every story like this one, in the final cadence or maybe abruptly like a dumdum bullet forcing an entry in the midst of life and leaving it ripped apart, spread out across the earth.

  Before that, however, the day arrives when the aunt, the mother’s older sister, comes home from America. One afternoon when the girl and the young boy are visiting the maternal grandmother in her apartment in the nearest town, which isn’t an actual town, just a collection of houses by the coast—a school, a supermarket, a set of traffic lights, and a tavern just inside the forest where young people meet on summer evenings to drink and dance and lie on the forest floor behind the tavern in the light from the open kitchen door and kiss and screw and brawl—the mother comes up the stairs with her older sister from America. Like every female member of an aristocratic family at a time when the aristocracy no longer exists but merely survives as impoverished remnants and is preserved solely in the physical posture, the gaze and, not least, in the supercilious mindset, the aunt also has a pet name, as does the mother, who is not called Benedikte, but Ditte, and the grandmother, who is not called Rigmor, but Pip, so the aunt in this story is not known by her name, Marianne, but is called Aunt Janne from America. Along with her older brother, the lawyer, who lives at the other end of the country, she is the head and final word in the family. But given that she lives in America and cannot exercise her authority on a daily basis, she has to do so far more effectively for the few days a year she is “at home in Denmark.” The young boy, who i
s perhaps a girl, but does not yet know it, has so far only heard about the aunt, who lives in the state of Massachusetts on the east coast of America with her American husband, a professor of philosophy at the famous university MIT. They met in Rome, where she was on her Grand Tour and he was the youngest priest in Vatican City State and already picked out to be one of those cardinals who might at some point become Pope, but from the second he sees her, and she sees him see her, it’s too late, before the week is out he has renounced his vocational vows and abandoned the monastery cell and Vatican City State and has even left the Catholic Church in order to devote his life to love and this young woman who is now Aunt Janne and at this very moment steps through the door from the entrance hall into the little room in the grandmother’s apartment on the second floor in a humdrum block in the provincial town of Bogense, where he, the young boy, sits furthest away on the sofa and waits in inquisitive horror. She is tall and slim like her younger sister, but darker and utterly devoid of the inscrutability and the light that makes it impossible for the young boy ever to be finished with looking at the mother, because as soon as he glances away for a moment he has a feeling that he has not yet seen her. On the other hand, she, big sister Aunt Janne, emanates a daunting authority. She strides straight across the room toward him, but instead of getting up like a well-mannered boy he stays sitting, frozen, and she comes to a halt on the other side of the coffee table and looks down at him and reaches out her hand, and now at last he stands up, unfolds himself like a switchblade from his crevice in the sofa, and offers her his hand and says his name. What more? says the woman. What? he says, confused. What more are you called, your surname? He says his surname and her face shows no reaction, but she asks him where he was born and when, and his parents, what do they do and where do they live, has he got brothers and sisters, and what do they do, and what about him, what is he studying and if he hasn’t yet embarked on a course of study, upon which course of study has he thought to embark, and at which university and when? And he tries all confused to answer these questions, stuttering, speechless really, he’s still standing at attention, she hasn’t yet signaled that he can sit down, she too is still standing at attention, but in a completely different way to him, not rigid with fear, but erect with patrician obligation and radiant destiny. He is rigid with self-consciousness and mortification, and at the same time laughter is bubbling up in him, I can’t believe this, he thinks, brimming with happiness and shame and invulnerability, and later, far into the night, when the aunt has long since gone to bed in the guest room on the second floor in the white farmhouse, and even the mother has retired with her books in the four-poster bed by the window in the east-facing bedroom, and he is lying downstairs alongside the daughter, the niece, in her big iron bed in the girl’s bedroom full of lace and pink and posters and an awful mess, and he is still dizzy, as if terminally exhausted and at the same time sleeplessly exalted, the girl at his side will laugh at him, laugh at his hopeless ordinariness, he who comes from just another ordinary family, one that undoubtedly has more money than hers, which in actual fact doesn’t have any money at all, just effortlessly pretends to, but on the other hand his family doesn’t have any history. He has been put to his life’s test and he hasn’t passed, and from now on the aunt from America will do everything in her power, not out of malice and not for any personal reasons whatsoever, purely from patrician obligation, to get him out of the story. But this entire story within the story, the story about Aunt Janne from America and her American professor of philosophy, Uncle Bob, who had been chosen to be one of Rome’s forthcoming cardinals and member of a future conclave, but who, from the moment he saw the young woman who would later become Aunt Janne, had lost his faith, or rather had only then begun to believe and understand that he had hitherto been an unbeliever, and that the true god isn’t the Catholic God, but is Love, all this improbable but entirely credible love story is, like every story in this story, a story in itself, which must constantly be interrupted and then resumed until every story has reached its more or less tragic ending.

  But while everything is still possible, we need to see all the characters because there are already several and several more will turn up en route, main characters and secondary characters and above all the other young boy, who is actually the first and was here long before the slim, oh so sensitive one entered, handsome Lars, the girl’s best friend and confidant, he looks like the slender one, they could be brothers and, just like brothers, opposites: the delicate and vulnerable one and opposite him a fit and robust Lars, the model young man, tall and fair, an athletic body and beautiful hands with long fingers that look as if they could do everything, play tennis and basketball and piano and effortlessly grasp and hold destiny, the radiant future, as if it were not a gift but the most natural thing, voilà! He is every mother-in-law’s dream and undoubtedly also Aunt Janne from America’s, if, that is, she hasn’t already rumbled him and seen that he suffers from the same disastrous laziness as the niece, but without her ability to enjoy it, on the contrary, like any other gift he must let it slip from his hands, indolently and with a sigh let it be lost, and he, who looks as if he is the healthy one of the two young boys, the one who holds the future in his hands, will be the first to let go of it all and die, but not as in a melodrama, not in a reckless chase through the forest or the suburban residential neighborhoods, but slowly yield to the sweet despair which is sickness unto death. But to begin with, all the way through the endless summer, he just has to be there as a matter of course, Danish Lars, coming and going as he chooses, sitting up against the south-facing wall in the yard with his bare beautiful feet on the warm cobblestones and his face turned to the sun, all unthinking and empty-handed and not getting up until someone calls, and even then he remains seated and several minutes pass by and half hours before he finally turns up, sitting down at the table with a sigh and looking at the chaotic feast conjured up from yesterday’s leftovers thinned down with a drop of fresh milk or some leeks from the neighbor’s field, and without ever doing anything other than just sitting there and eating and chatting and laughing his charming and sigh-like laughter and occasionally getting up and wandering around a bit with dangling arms and those beautiful hands that never seem to catch hold of anything, not a book or a tool or another human being, but just like him pretend to be, étant donné, the incarnation of the future that will never come and where everything that is a possibility will finally become a reality. However, in the “for the time being” in which the story and life take place, he’s just going to be allowed to stay there as a friend of the family, the third, prodigal son whose disastrous indolence has undoubtedly been rumbled by the aunt from America, but whom the mother with her supreme and all-forgiving grace just carries on loving with the same unreasonable love shown by the father to his returned son in Jesus’s parable, and about whom the daughter is alone in occasionally being a little irritated without understanding that he isn’t just lazy like she is, but that his idleness is fatal because in reality it is indolence itself, he can’t face anything, not a thing, not even life, it’s simply too much bother.

  And if the story so far sounds like a dream, a glossy tale of the kind one occasionally—on holiday or a long-haul flight—allows oneself to lean back into and, as if it were sinful, a praline, vanish within for a brief moment, then it’s because life is a dream, a dream from which you never wake up, but which one day is nonetheless suddenly long since over, but you’re still here and can either use “the rest of your days” to forget and “get on with it” or on the other hand, like me, abandon what is and try to retrieve what was, even the tiniest little thing that has been lost, even what perhaps didn’t really exist but nonetheless belongs in the story, call it forth and tell it so it doesn’t vanish but on the contrary now at last becomes real and in a way more real than anything else.

  But even in the dream, some things are just a dream, “the endless summer” for example, maybe it will never begin, maybe it’s just the liberation of
which the slender boy dreams, lying there in the damp basement room alongside the sleeping girlfriend and unable to fall asleep because of the unbearable lightness reigning in the farm, the same metallic soughing of completely real unreality that underlies David Lynch’s films, the girl at his side, sleeping her pleasure-filled sleep having just told him another of the stories that, until he met her, he had always thought were make-believe, and of which she with her just sixteen years already has so many that she apparently can’t even keep them under control, they just sort of rise like bubbles out of her in the darkness as midnight approaches, lying there in the iron bed in her girl’s room surrounded by the pink and pop posters of innocence, while he, who is already several years older, doesn’t have any stories and never will have any other than the ones he creates himself, the darkness, and in the darkness her steady breathing, and upstairs the empty rooms he’s walked through now and then without ever meeting another human being, and above them the second floor with the bedroom behind the closed door he has never dared open and where she must be lying now, because where else would she lie, the mother alongside this man with whom she must once have fallen in love and married and had two boys, a thought so absurd that he still can’t quite believe it, how she, who emanates such a natural and sovereign inherent freedom, a superhuman and in fact inhuman deadly freedom that no other person would ever be able to tame, but would simply perish in the attempt to contain, how she could have fallen in love with this man who is not even, at least no longer, a man but more like a stick of dry wood, a splinter snapped off a sheet of chipboard, impossible to picture as anything other than a shadow in the periphery of the field of vision, because she must have done so, fallen in love with him, she hasn’t taken him for the money’s sake, she’d never do that, and anyway she must have met him while he was still just a trainee or assistant in an insignificant provincial bank and several years before he suddenly inherited from his father and from one day to the next quit his job and, rather than doing the same as his older brother Buller and investing his half of the inheritance in thoroughbred horses and securities, bought the estate that he, in reality, even with his sizeable inheritance, couldn’t afford. The girl has just—in the darkness before she let herself slide down into her pleasure-filled sleep, in the already dreamy state where the seasons swap places and autumn is followed by yet another autumn—told him about the time they spent at the manor, a life that in reality only lasted eighteen months, from the day her stepfather without warning moved them from the small detached house on the outskirts of a provincial town on the main Danish island of Sealand to the magnificent manor house in the east of Jutland, which he in fact could not afford and which he then, as landed proprietor, proved he didn’t have the slightest notion how to run but started, from day one, to go bust, and without actually doing anything, on the contrary by not doing everything that needed to be done and that should be done every day in order to run an estate, had taken just those eighteen months to transform from a pipe dream into a bankruptcy. To begin with he had hired a handful of men to help him run the estate, men he had taken over from the former owner along with the fields, forests, and estate buildings, and who knew how things should be done, but after just a few months he was forced to lay them off and after that he had to deal with everything by himself, but instead of trying to do at least something he just wandered around the vast buildings, the barn and the machinery storage outhouse, the shut-down dairy and the cowsheds—which under the previous owner, who had closed down the entire side of operations dealing with livestock and concentrated exclusively on the considerable acreage of fields suitable for crops, had been left empty—and then out across the fields like a proper squire inspecting his estate, but without issuing any orders because there was no longer anyone to carry out any orders, there were just fields, which at some point would have to be harvested, but by whom he had no idea so he just inspected the decline instead, until one day in late summer he got into his car and drove to the nearby provincial town and used the money that should or at least could have been spent on the imminent heating-up of the main building, with all its halls and rooms and a total of sixteen bathrooms and toilets, to buy a suitable arsenal of guns and from then on disappear with his gundog into the estate forest, not returning home until after dark and without ever bringing any quarry to speak of, no stag, not even a couple of gray geese, and without a word to anyone just sit down in his place at the head of the far too big dining table in the, for a family of two adults and three children and with neither aunts nor grandparents nor servants, far too big and now, with autumn gradually setting in, every day steadily colder dining room, in which he insisted they, being the landowning family they were, of course should have their evening meal, and ate what the mother put in front of him and which more often than not simply consisted of potatoes and the warmed-up leftovers of the pheasant or partridge he had brought home several days previously as his only quarry, without showing any sign of despair or panic and without suddenly shouting or hitting the bottle, on the contrary, he maintained a dogged and grim and puritanical discipline, rose with the sun every morning, drank a cup of coffee and ate a slice of bread with cheese while standing at the kitchen table wearing his purpose-bought hunting outfit and thereafter disappeared into the forest with his gundog. The two little brothers were still too young to go to school, but he had enrolled his stepdaughter, as is meet and proper for the daughter of a landed proprietor, at the only private school in the nearby provincial town and now every morning she took the bus and received tuition along with the town’s other specially privileged children, who unlike her were not the children of landed proprietors but simply the sons and daughters of the town’s upper-middle class of doctors and dentists, lawyers and bank managers and sales directors and lived in quite ordinary, but of course rather spacious, detached houses and a few villas on the outskirts of town with lawns leading down to the many lakes and streams in the area, and who came to school every day wearing up-to-the-minute fashions bought from the fanciest boutiques in the shopping precinct or perhaps even all the way over in the heart of the provincial capital, and every day opened a colorful plastic lunchbox filled with slices of dark sourdough rye bread and white bread with interesting toppings, roast beef with rémoulade sauce and crispy fried onions, liver pâté with a slice of salt beef and aspic with raw onion rings and cress, pork tenderloin with scrambled egg and cress, home-made pâté with cucumber slices, and ate just what they fancied along with a fizzy drink or a chocolate milk bought in the school canteen, whereas every day she just had the same dented tin box that her mother before her had used, with the daily two half-rounds of rye bread spread with margarine and topped with pre-sliced cold meats from the cheapest supermarket in town, and rather than up-to-the-minute fashions she went to school every morning wearing her mother’s cast-off trousers and sweaters and throughout the entire autumn and winter the same pair of green rubber boots, as if she didn’t come from a manor house but one of those smallholdings dotted all over the place in the voids between provincial towns, surrounded by an overgrown garden full of rusty junk cars and old trailers on punctured sunken tires. Neither her stepfather nor her mother had made any attempt whatsoever to make contact with or be admitted to the grander society of landowners and farmers in the neighborhood, they kept to themselves, barely spoke with the neighbors, but, unlike the stepfather in his first-class hunting outfit, the mother made no effort to look like a landowner’s wife, she just was one, innately, no matter where you saw her, walking across the courtyard from the main building to the stable or on horseback riding along one of the many tracks or narrow gravel roads, she emanated the effortless superiority and dignity that is the exclusive prerogative of a landowner’s wife from a long lineage of landowners. She did what she wanted to, and what she instinctively felt was her duty: she roused her two young boys and dressed them and drove them to nursery and kindergarten and spent the rest of the day in the stable with her horse or riding along the surrounding track
s and forest trails, and mid-afternoon she unsaddled, groomed the horse, cleaned its hooves and gave it fresh water and hay, and then drove into town and picked up the two little boys and very occasionally also her daughter from school, drove them home, prepared some food for them, put the boys to bed, and sat for an hour or two in the kitchen with her daughter, drinking tea and chatting. One early-autumn evening at dinner in the as-of-yet not icy-cold but just a little uncomfortably chilly dining room, once she had put the dish of steaming potatoes, the bowl of vegetables, and the modest plate of undoubtedly pumped-up smoked saddle of pork on the table and sat down, she said, as if in passing, that next morning she was going to drive to the provincial capital, it was the start of the university semester. What are you going to do there? asked the stepfather. Study, she said and picked up her cutlery and cut a slice of pork and popped it into her mouth. You can’t do that! he said. The mother did not respond. What are you going to study? he said. Art history and musicology, she said. That’s ridiculous, he said, I cannot allow that. She did not respond to this either. You’ve got two little boys, he said. Resting her hands with knife and fork on the tabletop, she stared at him for a long time. Then she spoke his name. No more was said. They ate their food, and the mother and daughter cleared the table, did the washing up and put the two little boys to bed. And the next morning, having dropped the boys off at kindergarten and nursery, she drove all the way to the provincial capital.