Down by the train station life is in full swing. Drunken men stagger around singing with their arms around each other’s shoulders, and out of Café Charles rolls a fat man whose bald head strikes the pavement a couple of times before he lies still at our feet. Two officers come over to him and kick him emphatically in the side, which makes him get up with a pitiful howl. They pull him roughly to his feet and push him away when he once again tries to go into the den of iniquity. As they continue down the street, Ruth puts her fingers in her mouth and sends a long whistle after them, a talent I envy. Near Helgolandsgade there’s a big crowd of laughing, noisy children, and when we go over there I see that it’s Curly Charles, who is standing in the middle of the road, putting the steaming horse droppings in his mouth. All the while he’s singing an indescribably filthy song that makes the children scream with laughter and give him shouts of encouragement in the hope he’ll provide them with more entertainment. His eyes roll wildly. I find him tragic and horrifying, but pretend he amuses me because of Ruth, who laughs loudly along with the others. Of whores, however, we see only a couple of older, fat women who energetically wiggle their hips in an apparently vain attempt to attract the favors of an audience driving slowly by. This disappoints me greatly, because I thought all of them were like Ketty, whose evening errands in the city Ruth has also explained to me. On the way home, we go through Revalsgade, where once an old woman who owned a cigar store was murdered. We also stop in front of the haunted house on Matthæusgade and stare up at the fourth-floor window where a little girl was murdered last year by Red Carl, a stoker my father worked with at the Ørsted Works. None of us dares go past that house alone at night. In the doorway at home, Gerda and Tin Snout are standing in such a tight embrace that you can’t tell their figures apart in the dark. I hold my breath until I’m out in the courtyard because there’s always a rancid stench of beer and urine. I feel oppressed as I go up the stairs. The dark side of sex yawns toward me more and more, and it’s becoming harder to cover it up with the unwritten, trembling words my heart is always whispering. The door next to Gerda’s opens quietly as I go by, and Mrs Poulsen signals me to come inside. According to my mother, she’s ‘shabby-genteel’, but I know that you can’t be both shabby and genteel. She has a lodger who my mother contemptuously calls ‘a fine duke’ even though he’s a mailman and supports Mrs Poulsen just as if they were married; they have no children, however. I know from Ruth that they live together as man and wife. Reluctantly, I obey the command and step into a living room exactly like ours except that there’s a piano that is missing many keys. I sit down on the very edge of a chair and Mrs Poulsen sits on the sofa with a prying look in her pale blue eyes. ‘Tell me something, Tove,’ she says ingratiatingly. ‘Do you know whether many gentlemen come to visit Miss Andersen?’ I immediately make my eyes blank and stupid and let my jaw drop slightly. ‘No,’ I say, feigning astonishment, ‘I don’t think so.’ ‘But you and your mother are over there so much. Think a little. Haven’t you ever seen any gentlemen in her apartment? Not even in the evenings?’ ‘No,’ I lie, terrified. I’m afraid of this woman who wants to harm Ketty in some way. My mother has forbidden me to visit Ketty anymore, and she only goes over there herself when my father is not around. Mrs Poulsen gets nothing else out of me and lets me go with a certain coolness. Several days later a petition goes around in the building and because of it, my parents have a fight when they come to bed and think I’m asleep. ‘I’m going to sign it,’ says my father, ‘for the children’s sake. You can at least protect them from witnessing the worst filth.’ ‘It’s those old bitches,’ says my mother hotly. ‘They’re jealous because she’s young and pretty and happy. They can’t stand me, either.’ ‘Stop comparing yourself to a whore,’ snarls my father. ‘Even though I don’t have a steady job, you’ve never had to earn your own living – don’t forget that!’ It’s awful to listen to, and it seems as though the fight is about something totally different, something they don’t have words for. Soon the day arrives when Ketty and her mother are sitting out on the street on top of all their plush furniture, which a policeman, pacing back and forth, is guarding. Ketty looks right through all the people, full of contempt, holding her delicate umbrella up against the rain. She smiles at me, though, and says, ‘Goodbye, Tove. Take care of yourself.’ A little later they drive away in the moving van and I never see them again.
9
Something terrible has happened in my family. Landmands Bank has gone under and my granny has lost all of her money. Five hundred kroner saved over an entire lifetime. It’s a nasty business that only strikes the small investors. ‘The rich pigs,’ my father says, ‘will see that they get their money.’ Granny cries pitifully and dries her red eyes with a snow-white handkerchief. Everything about her is clean and neat and proper, and she always smells like the cleaners. The money was supposed to be used for her funeral, which she always seems to be thinking about. She pays money into a funeral coffer – she never can forget that I once thought this was the same as a coffin. It still makes her laugh whenever she thinks of it. I’m very fond of Granny, not at all in the same terrified way as I am of my mother. I’m allowed to visit her by myself, because that’s what she wants and my mother doesn’t dare go against her will. She told me Granny was very angry with her when she was expecting me because, since they’d had a boy, there was no reason to have any more children. Now Granny doesn’t know how she’s going to get a decent burial, since we don’t have any money and Aunt Rosalia with her drunken husband doesn’t, either. Uncle Peter is certainly very rich, but with his proverbial stinginess, no one dreams of him contributing anything for his mother-in-law’s funeral. Granny is seventy-three years old and she herself doesn’t think she has long to live. She’s even smaller than my mother, slight as a child and always dressed in black from head to toe. Her white, silky-soft hair is pinned up on her head, and she moves as nimbly as a young girl. She lives in a one-room apartment and she only has her old-age pension to live on. Whenever I visit her for coffee, I have rye bread with real butter, which I scrape back with my teeth until it’s all on the last mouthful; it tastes better than anything I ever get at home. Since Edvin started his apprenticeship, he visits her every Sunday. Then she gives him a whole krone because he’s the only boy in the family. My three cousins and I don’t get anything. Every time I’m at Granny’s, she asks me to sing in order to see whether I sing a little less off-key than last time. ‘That’s almost right,’ she says encouragingly, even though I can hear that the tones coming from me don’t sound like the ones I want to produce at all. You can’t speak to her without being addressed first, but she herself likes to talk and I like to listen to her. She talks about her childhood, which was awful because she had a stepmother who practically beat her to death every other minute for the smallest trifles. Then she became a maid and was engaged to my grandfather, who was named Mundus and was a coach builder before he began to drink heavily. ‘The Bellowing Drunk’ they called him in the building, and when he hanged himself, Granny had to go out as a washerwoman in order to keep the wolf from the door. ‘But my three little girls got a start in life,’ she says with understandable pride. Once I let slip that I would have liked to have known my grandfather, and she says, ‘Yes, he was handsome right up to the end, but a heartless scoundrel! If I wanted to, I could tell you things…’ Then she presses her lips tightly together over her toothless gums and won’t say any more. I think about the word ‘heartless’ and am afraid that I’m like my dreadful grandfather. I often have a nagging suspicion that I’m not capable of really feeling anything for anyone, with the exception of Ruth, of course. One day when I’m at Granny’s and have to sing for her, I say, ‘I’ve learned a new song in school.’ And with a false and quavering voice, I sit on her bed and sing a poem I’ve written. It’s very long and – like ‘Hjalmar and Hilda’, ‘Jørgen and Hansigne’, and all of my mother’s ballads – it’s about two people who can’t have each other. But in my version, it ends less tragically wi
th the following verse:
Love, rich and young,
bound them with a thousand chains.
Does it matter that the bridal bed
is found on country lanes?
When I’ve gotten this far, Granny wrinkles her forehead, stands up, and smooths down her dress as if defending herself from an unpleasant impression. ‘That’s not a nice song, Tove,’ she says sternly. ‘Did you really learn it in school?’ I answer affirmatively, heavy-hearted because I thought she would say, ‘That was very beautiful – who wrote it?’ ‘One must get married in a church,’ says Granny mildly, ‘before having anything to do with each other. But you couldn’t know that, of course.’ Oh, Granny! I know more than you think, but I’ll keep quiet about it in the future. I think about a few years ago when I discovered with astonishment that my parents were married in February the same year that Edvin was born in April. I asked my mother how that could be possible, and she answered briskly, ‘Well, you see, you never carry the first one more than two months.’ Then she laughed, and Edvin and my father frowned. That’s the worst thing about grownups, I think – they can never admit that just once in their lives they’ve acted wrongly or irresponsibly. They’re so quick to judge others, but they never hold Judgement Day for themselves.
I only see the rest of my family together with my parents, or at least with my mother. Aunt Rosalia lives on Amager like Granny. I’ve only visited her a couple of times, because Uncle Carl, whom they call The Hollow Leg, is always sitting in the living room, drinking beer and grumbling, which isn’t good for children to see. The living room is like everyone else’s, with a buffet along one wall, a sofa against the other, and between them a table with four high-backed chairs. On the buffet, as in our apartment, there’s a brass tray with a coffeepot, sugar bowl and cream pitcher that are never used, just polished bright and shiny for all special occasions. Aunt Rosalia sews for the department store Magasin and often visits us on her way home. Over her arm, in a big alpaca wrap, she carries the clothes that she’s going to sew, and she never puts it down while she’s visiting us. She’s only going to stay ‘a minute’, and always keeps her hat on as if to deny she’s been here several hours when she finally leaves. She and my mother always talk about events from their youth, and in that way I find out a lot that I shouldn’t know. Once, for example, my mother hid a barber in the wardrobe in her room because my father unexpectedly came to visit. If my mother hadn’t gotten him to leave again, the barber would have suffocated. There are lots of stories like that, and they laugh heartily at them all. Aunt Rosalia is only two years older than my mother, while Aunt Agnete is eight years older and wasn’t really young with them. She and Uncle Peter often come to play cards with my parents. Aunt Agnete is pious and suffers from it whenever someone swears in her presence, which her husband does frequently just to annoy her. She is tall and wide and has a Dagmar cross resting on her bosom, which Uncle Peter calls the balcony. If I were to believe my parents, he is evil and cunning incarnate, but he’s always friendly to me, so I don’t really believe them. He’s a carpenter and never out of work. They live in a three-room apartment in Østerbro and have an ice-cold parlor with a piano, and they only set foot in it on Christmas Eve. It’s said that Uncle Peter inherited an enormous sum of money that he keeps in various bank accounts in order to fool the tax authorities. Sometimes the employees at the shop where he works are invited to visit other companies, where they are hosted free-of-charge. When he went with them to Tuborg, he drank so much that he had to be taken to the hospital and have his stomach pumped out the following day. And when he visited the Enighed Dairy, he downed so much milk he was sick for the next week. Otherwise he never drinks anything but water. My three cousins are all older than me and rather ugly. Every evening they sit around the dinner table, knitting furiously. ‘But they’re not too bright,’ says my father, and there’s not so much as a single book in that whole big apartment. My parents make no bones about saying we’ve turned out better than those girls. Uncle Peter was married once before, and from that marriage he has a daughter who’s only seven or eight years younger than my mother. Her name is Ester, and she’s a great hulk with a wriggling, bent-over walk. Her eyes look like they’re about to pop out of her head, and whenever she visits us she talks baby-talk to me and kisses me right on the mouth, which I despise more than anything else. ‘Sweetie pie’ she calls my mother, whom she goes out with in the evening, much to my father’s dismay. One time they’re going to a masquerade at Folkets Hus and I hold the mirror while they put on their makeup, and I think my mother is fantastically beautiful as ‘The Night Queen’. Ester is a ‘coachman from the eighteenth century’, and her arms stick out of the puff sleeves like heavy clubs. They have to hurry because my father will be arriving soon. My mother stands there in all of the black tulle, which is covered with hundreds of shiny sequins. They fall off as easily as her own frail happiness. Just as they’re going out the door, my father comes home from work. He stares my mother in the face and says, ‘Ha, you old scarecrow.’ She doesn’t answer, just slips past him without a word, on Ester’s heels. My father knows that I heard him, and he sits down across from me with an uncertain expression in his kind, melancholy eyes. ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ he asks awkwardly. ‘The Night Queen,’ I say cruelly, because here is that ‘Ditlev’ who always has to spoil my mother’s fun.
10
I’ve started middle school and with that the world has begun to widen. I was allowed to continue because my parents have figured out I still won’t be much more than fourteen when I finish school, and since they’re giving Edvin training, I shouldn’t be left out. At the same time, I’ve finally gotten permission to use the public library on Valdemarsgade, which has a section with children’s books. My mother thinks that I’ll get even stranger from reading books that are written for adults; and my father, who doesn’t agree, doesn’t say anything since I come under my mother’s authority and in crucial matters he doesn’t dare go against the world order. So for the first time I set foot in a library, and I’m speechless with confusion at seeing so many books collected in one place. The children’s librarian is named Helga Mollerup, and she’s known and loved by many children in the neighborhood because whenever there’s no heat or light at home, they’re allowed to sit in the reading room right up until the library closes at five o’clock in the evening. They do their homework there or leaf through books, and Miss Mollerup throws them out only if they start getting noisy, because it’s supposed to be completely quiet, like in a church. She asks me how old I am and finds books she thinks are right for a ten-year-old. She is tall and slim and pretty, with dark, lively eyes. Her hands are big and beautiful and I regard them with a certain respect, because it’s said that she can slap harder than any man. She’s dressed like my teacher, Miss Klausen, in a rather long, smooth skirt and a blouse with a low white collar at the neck. But, unlike Miss Klausen, she doesn’t seem to suffer from an insurmountable aversion to children – on the contrary. I’m placed at a table with a children’s book in front of me, the title and author of which I’ve fortunately forgotten. I read, ‘“Father, Diana has had puppies.” With these words, a slender young girl fifteen years old came storming into the room, where, in addition to the councilman, there were…’ etc. Page after page. I don’t have it in me to read it. It fills me with sadness and unbearable boredom. I can’t understand how language – that delicate and sensitive instrument – can be so terribly mistreated, or how such monstrous sentences can find their way into a book that gets into the library where a clever and attractive woman like Miss Mollerup actually recommends it to defenseless children to read. For now, however, I can’t express these thoughts, so I have to be content with saying that the books are boring and that I would rather have something by Zacharias Nielsen or Vilhelm Bergsøe. But Miss Mollerup says that children’s books are exciting if you just have patience enough to keep reading until the plot gets going. Only when I stubbornly insist on having access to the
shelves with the adult books does she give in, astonished, and offer to get some books for me if I’ll tell her which ones, since I can’t go in there myself. ‘One by Victor Hugo,’ I say. ‘It’s pronounced Ügó,’ she says, smiling, and pats me on the head. It doesn’t embarrass me that she corrects my pronunciation, but when I come home with Les Misérables and my father says approvingly, ‘Victor Hugo – yes, he’s good!’ I say didactically and self-importantly, ‘It’s pronounced Ügó.’ ‘I don’t give a damn how it’s pronounced,’ he says calmly. ‘All those kinds of names should be said the way they’re spelled. Anything else is just showing off.’ It’s never any use to come home and tell my parents anything people said who don’t live on our street. Once when the school dentist requested that I ask my mother to buy me a toothbrush and I was dumb enough to mention it at home, my mother snapped, ‘You can tell her that she can darn well buy you a toothbrush herself!’ But whenever she has a toothache, she first goes around suffering for about a week, while the whole house echoes with her miserable moaning. Then, out on the landing, she asks the advice of another woman, who recommends that she pour schnapps on a wad of cotton and hold it against the infected tooth, which she spends several more days doing, with no results. Only then does she get all dressed up in her finest and venture out to Vesterbrogade, where our doctor lives. He takes his pincers and pulls out the tooth and then she has peace for a while. A dentist never comes into the picture.
The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood ; Youth ; Dependency Page 4