The very next morning after Jacob’s first visit, the girl’s mother had rung the man who had hitherto called himself and been her father and said that she had been obliged to tell her the truth. What truth? he said in a thin quivering voice (and was already about to weep), your truth?! he yelled. Jesper, she said. But he wouldn’t listen, not even to his own name would he listen, certainly not that. He wept and yelled and whispered that she was a whore, that you couldn’t trust other people, that he was all alone in the world. She asked if he wanted to talk to the girl, but he didn’t. The girl never saw him again. For the twelve years she had been in the world, she had loved this tall, fair, rather nervy young man as her own father, she had been thrilled to sleeplessness every time he was to visit the village up in the mountains and she was to parade him in front of her Spanish girlfriends, first as an elf prince and later a genuine Viking, and later she had felt like a real teenager when he took her on little holidays to Greek islands or Paris, he had gone on being her father even after she had realized that she was adopted, she loved him, and now all of a sudden he wouldn’t see her. What have I done? she wept. It has nothing to do with you, her mother said. Then who is it to do with? It’s all just about him, Stina. Then he’s never loved me? Yes, said the mother, of course he has, and that’s why he won’t see you. I don’t understand, said the girl. No, said the mother, people are like that. Then I don’t want to be like people! said the girl. But she soon forgot about that, just like she forgot about all sorts of other things, appointments, the time, that all of a sudden it was already Monday and she had to go to school, she never forgave anyone for anything, the pain and sorrow just took cover in the here and now, which for her was not one moment but a flow into the boundless world by which she was absorbed and inhabited and with which she formed and was a synthesis, just like she was also her wickedly messy bedroom and her presence in “the endless summer” at the farmhouse, as if that was it, and the future would never arrive, a feature most people who met her found charming and enviable and a feature “we could all really learn from,” whereupon they returned to the world and time and all the things that had to be accomplished, and got themselves educations and partners and children and first a supply job and later a permanent job, which after a few years they left in favor of a different and more challenging job and a different and more dynamic partner, something and someone to keep them in motion and carry them forward and perhaps many years later they might meet her again quite by chance on the street and see that she is still exactly the same, someone who time and then the future have passed by, so the luxuriance they had found seductive twenty years ago is now just blurry and shapeless, not luxuriant, but shamelessly (or helplessly) overweight, just like the life in the still dancing eyes, which makes them shudder and look at their cell phones and say how nice to see you and we’ll have to get together one of these days, I’ve really got to be going, bye for now! and turn their back on her and vanish around the corner with the frisson of shame and relief that remains when, for a brief moment, you have come face to face with self-delusion and become aware that it is the worst, far worse than your own treachery.
That evening, yes, now we’re embedded back in the very evening that is both the beginning of the story, or at least the opening through which he falls out of the world and into what is going to be “the endless summer,” and the moment before the story begins, and he is as yet far from the weird cobweb-flighty female being he will one day become, but is still just “this fetching young boy with the delicate features and the big eyes”: in ten minutes they will be going onstage—as mentioned, it is only their first or second gig—instruments and gear are waiting in the colored light on the dais in the school canteen, which for several hours has been full of totally unfamiliar senior-high students who have built up their courage and a degree of recklessness with a drink or two before coming here and have built it up even more during the meal and have now reached something like a state of near hysteria, the four or five other members of the band, the drummer, bass and keyboard players, singer, and the other guitarist are standing next to the stage or in the classroom they have been allocated as their band room with the obligatory two crates of, respectively, beer and mixed soft-drinks, discussing effects pedals with an admiring, pimpled sophomore student, or flirting with those girls who will always, no matter how unkempt a rock musician might look, hang around by the door to the band room. No matter what, he’s too shy and incapable of playacting, so he’s drifted a little away from everything, out into the entrance hall and down a staircase to the basement and cloakroom where seven hundred winter coats and hats and scarves and gloves and muddy boots from farms and small towns across the entire northern part of the island hang squashed tightly together or are just dumped in piles on the synthetic grayish-blue carpet, smelling sour from the sleet and nauseously sweet from deodorant and cheap perfume. All of a sudden, a girl comes whirling down the staircase, not elegantly or self-assured, but breathlessly cavorting in a flapping of coat and scarves and bristling fingers, good heavens! she says and smiles at him and goes on talking as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, as if she’s known him forever, time suddenly ran away with me, she gasps and laughs, turning scarlet, not from shame, just from life, and he asks her so when should she have been here? Six o’clock, she gasps, for the potluck dinner, of course! But it’s nearly nine o’clock, he says. Good heavens! she says and laughs and throws her coat on top of five others and runs to the mirror and sputters and chatters away while she gives everything a bit of a tweak. He just stands watching her. He doesn’t know if she’s beautiful, she’s just so overwhelmingly alive, all this blushing and chattering and gasping for breath, the arms and fingers flitting all over the place, and suddenly she’s gone. He walks up the stairs, through the crowd of teenagers, back to the stage, and the others ask where the hell he’s been. Down in the cloakroom, he says, to the toilet. Later in the evening, when the concert is over, or at least once they’ve stopped playing and have left the stage—no one was dancing anyway, and even the heavily-painted girls, the groupies, who had flirted with the others in the doorway to the band room before they went on, have been shouting if they couldn’t “play somethin’ we know!” and some of the boys, the bumpkins, haven’t only thrown tomatoes and eggs, but also melting butter and long foil trays full of liver pâté onto the stage (which gradually started to stink like a sweaty dunghill), and suddenly there was a power cut—he again drifts away from the others, but not down into the basement this time, on the contrary straight into the worst of the tumult, where intoxication has long been reckless and mindless, and apparently no one notices him any longer, he is free and gets all the way up to the bar before he’s surrounded by a bunch of big country lads with disco mullets who jab their beer bottles in his chest and sway right into his face shouting “why the hell don’t y’all just scram, get lost, no-damn-one asked ya t’come here an’ rooin our party, ya can’t even play!’ and suddenly she pops up, laughing, between them and puts her arms around the necks of the two biggest and kisses them on the cheek and tells him not to listen to them, they’re okay guys, they’re just a bit drunk, and later still, after they’ve loaded up the car and the others are sitting in the back of the truck with the extra crate of beers just waiting for him, standing there in the snowstorm smiling and nodding to her and her girlfriend who are both chatting at the same time, the second guitarist suddenly jumps down from the truck and tells the two girls to just come along into town, and later in the morning, once they have ended up at the last and worst bar, where there are frequent shootings, that’s what it’s like in the provinces, and he is still just smiling gently and obligingly at her, she finally gives up and goes home with her girlfriend, and he yet again feels that inexpressible relief when something, the ultimate, the most sublime, has for a moment been possible, when all you have to do is reach out but you didn’t, and now it is definitively too late, and everything will again just be the same life, which never begins, and in the c
rowd of ten-, twenty- and thirty-yearlong inebriations blearily and incoherently jostling him up to the bar, as if they were his future, he suddenly sees her come sweeping back in, she grabs him firmly by the jaw and kisses him, and done is done, and this is where the story begins.
He is lying at her side in the darkness of the basement under the farmhouse listening to her breathing, which even in her sleep is as blissful as life relishing itself. He places a hand on her skin, it is damp and soft and yielding, swaying, as if the flesh isn’t firm, but a dark liquid, a heavy water, allowing his hand to sink in and vanish. He thinks her name and she wakes up, and he asks if he’s dangerous, the stepfather, if he’ll soon be so humiliated and pitiful that he’ll no longer see himself as a human being, and will suddenly grab the rifle and without any kind of scene or demonstration of power just fire away at them all, the mother, her, the little brothers and, of course, last but not least, himself, splatter the back of his head across the wall, and she mumbles that it’s the middle of the night, I’m sleeping, and then sinks back into sleep. He lies there for a long time, listening, then he lifts the duvet and steps out onto the cold cement floor; he reaches his hands out into the darkness, which here in the basement under the farmhouse on a winter’s night in February or early March really is—unlike the suburban residential neighborhoods dazzled by the glare of a streetlamp on the other side of the bushes—the darkness no human being has ever seen. And here, in this sleepless darkness, time and happenings merge, he is both the slender young boy feeling his way through the sleeping house and the old woman who, when telling her tale decades later, creates the “white farmhouse” as a mythical place from what has been definitively lost, and, using her seven senses in the language, scrabbles it out from the dark materials of memory: the bookcase, the wall with its couple of tattered posters, the windowsill and door leading to what he (or she) comatosely labels the boiler room, where the air is thick and “suffocatingly” hot, somewhere ahead to the left he (or she) finds the door to the staircase, which is narrow and just a winding shaft up to what from the outside looks like the door to a broom cupboard hidden under the more elegant staircase leading up to the second floor, like a shift in language he walks through the entrance hall and into the smallest room, which recollection has already transformed to her room, this night the “white farmhouse” is not a place in time, but a narrative room after room after room, where everything and every movement can occur precisely when it should, her big iron bed with its footboard of square metal tubing on which he cuts his thigh, making it sting and blood trickle down over his knee, to the right the big wardrobe, dusty-green or dark-blue and bulging open from inside by her vast assortment of clothes, in all of which she always looks the same, but which will turn him, who is anybody, into almost anyone else, toreador, doll, hooker, captain, and in the bed behind him under crumpled duvets they both lie naked or half un- or dressed, day and night, through dusk and dawn, it’s as if they’ll never get out of that bed and get going with life, and the mother comes in and says it’s already late afternoon, Stina! in her slightly strident warm animated and cultured voice, you’ll end up pregnant! and then she laughs and disappears, and the girl gets pregnant, of course she does, but not now, not until later when “the endless summer” comes to an abrupt end, he opens the double door and steps into the large and it being February icy-cold room, where forever sitting in the armchair to the right in the glow from a floor lamp is Aunt Janne, even while living her life with her American professor of philosophy, “Uncle Bob,” on the other side of the Atlantic in Massachusetts, and even while seeing him for the first time, in a long line of vestment-clad young priests on their way in through the vast expanse of St. Peter’s Basilica, as he turns his face away from the order of the line and sees her standing to the right of the entrance in the crowd in front of La Pietà, and even while coming to a halt straight-backed with responsibility and lightning destiny in front of him in the little room in the maternal grandmother’s apartment on the second floor of a yellow building built in the nineteen-fifties in the town of Bogense, she sits forever here in the armchair in the glow from the floor lamp and makes something that sounds like a late-nineteenth-century speech, from Queen Victoria’s day, a speech in her father’s spirit about duty and morality and responsibility and future, manners, shame, and the dignified life to the two sitting on the sofa on the other side of the low coffee table holding hands and looking at her in astonishment, the girl boiling with respect and rebellion and him not knowing whether to swoon or laugh and not daring to look at the mother, who is sitting with a luminously aristocratic straight back to the left of her older sister and perhaps at this very moment is looking at him with the expression that will either save him or annihilate him, to white noise and dust. But not yet, none of what is going to happen is yet possible or even imaginable, there is just the night and the farmhouse, “the white farmhouse,” the empty icy-cold rooms in which he has never met a living soul, nor does he now, when all the dramatis personae are asleep and only he and their personae and white flickering shadows move through yet another room and out into a sort of conservatory, empty except for a light-gray carpet of the type only usually found in municipal schools built in the nineteen-seventies, and on the carpet, one late afternoon or evening, the younger of the little brothers is sitting with a drum kit, a selection of upside-down cardboard boxes, and he kneels down and picks up the sticks, which are probably just bits of wood or back-to-front wooden spoons, and shows the boy various simple rhythms, and the boy bangs away and he tells the little boy that he’ll learn alright, as long as he practices, every day, play the drums for at least a quarter of an hour, and he promises the boy and himself to make it a habit, twice a week they’ll sit here, first with the cardboard boxes and later with real drums, one fine day they’ll play together in their own little band, and then he stands up and turns his back to the boy and never returns, neither to the cardboard boxes nor the conservatory, none of the things he promises himself or dreams about will ever come to anything, while all the things he has never wished for or promised himself will happen and amount to all there has been, his life, he opens the door to a kind of scullery and walks through it into the kitchen, the actual stage in the house and the entire farmhouse, now empty, dark and deserted, like the proscenium stage in a village hall the night after a Monday in February, a faint cold smell of supper hanging in the air and following him out to the entrance hall and on up the stairs to the second floor where the only toilet in the house is located. He stops for a moment there in the darkness, the door to the two little brothers’ room behind him, and straight ahead, just two or three meters away, the door leading into the inner sanctum, the bedroom, in which he will never dare set his bare feet, but just once, just one single time in his life, with bated breath, he will look into it, but not now, not until “the endless summer,” to which he is at this very moment standing on the threshold, a time that isn’t a time but the opposite of time, time’s annulment, in which everything, just like nature, the leaves on the trees, the lilac, and the clouds of cherry in Jardin Villemin, will open up and let him look into and smell the dream that the mother will suddenly live out, now with a completely different man, the only one who will ever measure up to the stallion, a young Portuguese, an artist like Caravaggio, who with his mute lips (and teeth) will make his marks in the mother’s skin, marks for the indecent, that which is beyond the shame and the taboo, the mark of the beautiful, the sublime, and impossible (just a young man, a year or two younger than he is, in every respect: the impossible), and many years later, when he has long since been an old woman and has no other urges than language and death, he will think that it isn’t life that is a dream, it’s language, narrative, this whole story is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying . . .
The Endless Summer Page 4