The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood ; Youth ; Dependency

by Tove Ditlevsen

  Youth

  1

  I was at my first job for only one day. I left home at seven-thirty in order to be there in plenty of time, ‘because you should try especially hard in the beginning’, said my mother, who had never made it past the beginning at the places where she’d worked in her youth. I was wearing the dress from the day after my confirmation that Aunt Rosalia had made. It was of light blue wool and there were little pleats in the front so that I didn’t look quite as flat-chested as usual. I walked down Vesterbrogade in the thin, sharp sunshine, and I thought that everyone looked free and happy. When they’d passed the street door near Pile Allé, which would soon swallow me up, their step became as light as dancers’, and happiness resided somewhere on the other side of Valby Bakke. The dark hallway smelled of fear, so I was afraid that Mrs Olfertsen would notice it, as if I’d brought the smell with me. My body and my movements became stiff and awkward as I stood listening to her fluttering voice explaining many things and, in between the explanations, running on like an empty spool that babbled about nothing in an uninterrupted stream – about the weather, about the boy, about how tall I was for my age. She asked whether I had an apron with me, and I took my mother’s out of the emptied school bag. There was a hole near the seam because there was something or other wrong with everything that my mother was responsible for, and I was touched by the sight of it. My mother was far away and I wouldn’t see her for eight hours. I was among strangers – I was someone whose physical strength they’d bought for a certain number of hours each day for a certain payment. They didn’t care about the rest of me. When we went out to the kitchen, Toni, the little boy, came running up in his pajamas. ‘Good morning, Mummy,’ he said sweetly, leaning against his mother’s legs and giving me a hostile look. The woman gently pulled herself free from him and said, ‘This is Tove, say hello to the nice lady.’ Reluctantly he put out his hand and when I took it, he said threateningly, ‘You have to do everything I say or else I’ll shoot you.’ His mother laughed loudly and showed me a tray with cups and a teapot, and asked me to fix the tea and come into the living room with it. Then she took the boy by the hand and went into the living room her high heels clacking. I boiled the water and poured it into the pot, which had tea leaves in the bottom. I wasn’t sure if that was correct because I’d never had or made tea before. I thought to myself that rich people drank tea and poor people drank coffee. I pushed the door handle down with my elbow and stepped into the room, where I stopped, horrified. Mrs Olfertsen was sitting on Uncle William’s lap, and on the floor Toni lay playing with a train. The woman jumped up and began pacing back and forth on the floor so that her wide sleeves kept cutting the sunshine up into little fiery flashes. ‘Be so good as to knock,’ she hissed, ‘before you come into a room here. I don’t know what you’re accustomed to, but that’s what we do here, and you’d better get used to it. Go out again!’ She pointed toward the door and, confused, I set the tray down and went out. For some reason or other it stung me that she addressed me formally, like a grownup. That had never happened to me before. When I reached the hallway, she yelled, ‘Now knock!’ I did. ‘Come in!’ I heard, and this time she and the silent Uncle William were each sitting on their own chair. I was bright red in the face from humiliation and I quickly decided that I couldn’t stand either of them. That helped a little. When they had drunk the tea, they both went into the bedroom and got dressed. Then Uncle William left, after giving his hand to the mother and the boy. I was apparently not anyone you said goodbye to. The woman gave me a long typewritten list of what kind of work I should do at various times during the day. Then she disappeared into the bedroom again and returned with a hard, sharp expression on her face. I discovered that she was heavily made up and radiated an unnatural, lifeless freshness. I thought her prettier before. She knelt down and kissed the boy who was still playing, then stood up, nodded slightly toward me, and vanished. At once the child got up, grabbed hold of my dress, and stared up at me winsomely. ‘Toni wants anchovies,’ he said. Anchovies? I was dumbfounded and completely ignorant of children’s eating habits. ‘You can’t have that. Here it says…’ I studied the schedule, ‘ten o’clock, rye porridge for Toni; eleven o’clock, soft-boiled egg and a vitamin pill; one o’clock…’ He didn’t feel like listening to the rest. ‘Hanne always gave me anchovies,’ he said impatiently. ‘She ate everything else herself – you can too.’ Hanne was apparently my predecessor; and besides, I wasn’t prepared to force a lot of things into a child who only wanted anchovies. ‘OK, OK,’ I said, in a better mood now that the adults had gone. ‘Where are the anchovies?’ He crawled up onto a kitchen chair and took down a couple of cans, then he found a can opener in a drawer. ‘Open it,’ he said eagerly, handing it to me. I opened the can and put him up on the kitchen counter as he demanded. Then I let one anchovy after another disappear into his mouth, and when there weren’t any more, he asked to go down to the courtyard to play. I helped him get dressed and sent him down the kitchen stairs. From the window I could keep an eye on him playing. Then I was supposed to clean house. One of the items said: ‘Carpet sweeper over the rugs.’ I took hold of the heavy monstrosity and navigated it onto the big red carpet in the living room. To try it out, I drove it over some threads which, however, did not disappear. Then I shook it a little and fiddled with the mechanism so that the lid opened and a whole pile of dirt fell out onto the carpet. I couldn’t put it back together again; since I didn’t know what to do with the dirt, I kicked it under the rug, which I stamped on a bit to even out the pile. During these exertions, it had gotten to be ten o’clock and I was hungry. I ate the first of Toni’s meals and fortified myself with a couple of vitamins. Then came the next item: ‘Brush all of the furniture with water.’ I stared astonished at the note and then around at the furniture. It was strange, but that must be what was done here. I found a good stiff brush, poured cold water into a basin and again started in the living room. I scrubbed steadily and conscientiously until I’d done half of the grand piano. Then it dawned on me that something was terribly wrong. On the fine, shiny surface, the brush had left hundreds of thin scratches and I didn’t know how I was going to remove them before the woman came home. Terror crept like cold snakes over my skin. I took the note and again read: ‘Brush all of the furniture with water.’ Whatever way I interpreted the order, it was clear enough and didn’t exempt the grand piano. Was it possible that it wasn’t a piece of furniture? It was one o’clock and the woman came home at five. I felt such a burning longing for my mother that I didn’t think there was any time to waste. Quickly I took off my apron, called Toni from the window, explaining to him that we were going to look at toy stores. He came upstairs and got dressed and, with him in hand, I raced through Vesterbrogade so he could hardly keep up. ‘We’re going home to my mother,’ I said, out of breath, ‘to have anchovies.’ My mother was very surprised to see me at that time of day, but when we came inside and I told her about the scratched grand piano, she burst out laughing. ‘Oh God,’ she gasped, ‘did you really brush the piano with water? Oh no, how could anybody be so dumb!’ Suddenly she grew serious. ‘Look here,’ she said, ‘it’s no use you going back there. We can certainly find you another job.’ I was grateful but not especially surprised. She was like that, and if it had been up to her, Edvin could have changed apprenticeships. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but what about Father?’ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘we’ll just tell him the story about Uncle William – Father can’t stand that kind of thing.’ A light-hearted mood possessed us both, like in the old days, and when Toni cried for anchovies, we took him with us down to Istedgade and bought two cans for him. A little before four o’clock, my mother and the boy went back to Mrs Olfertsen’s, where my mother got back the apron and the school bag. I never found out what was said about the damaged grand piano.

  2

  I’m working in a boarding house on Vesterbrogade near Frihedsstøtten. It would be just as unthinkable for my mother to send me to another part of the city as to America.
I start at eight o’clock every morning and work twelve hours in a sooty, greasy kitchen where there’s never any peace or rest. When I get home in the evening, I’m much too tired to do anything except go to bed. ‘This time,’ says my father, ‘you have to stay at your job.’ My mother also thinks that it’s good for me to be working, and besides, the trick with Uncle William can’t be repeated. The only thing I think about is how I can get out of this dreary existence. I don’t write poetry anymore since nothing in my daily life inspires me to do so. I don’t go to the library either. I’m off every Wednesday afternoon after two o’clock, but then I go straight home to bed too. The boarding house is owned by Mrs Petersen and Miss Petersen. They are mother and daughter, but I think they look like they’re about the same age. Besides me there’s a sixteen-year-old girl whose name is Yrsa. She’s way above me, because when the boarders eat, she puts on a black dress, a white apron, and a white cap and bustles back and forth with the heavy platters. She’s the serving girl and waits on the guests. In two years, the ladies promise me, I’ll also be allowed to serve and get forty kroner a month like Yrsa. Now I get thirty. It’s my job to see that there’s always a fire in the stove, to clean the rooms of the three lodgers, the bathroom, and the kitchen. Even though I rush through everything, I’m always behind with it all. Miss Petersen scolds, ‘Didn’t your mother ever teach you to wring out a rag? Haven’t you ever cleaned a bathroom before? Why are you making faces? For your sake I hope you never encounter anything more difficult than this!’ Yrsa is little and thin, and she has a narrow, pale face with a snub nose. When the ladies take a nap before dinner, we drink a cup of coffee at the kitchen counter and she says, ‘If you didn’t always have black fingernails, you’d be allowed to serve. That’s what I heard Mrs Petersen say.’ Or, ‘If you washed your hair once in a while, the guests would be allowed to see you, I’m sure of that.’ For Yrsa there’s nothing in the world outside of the boarding house and no higher goal than to rush around the table at every mealtime. I don’t reply to either her or the ladies’ remarks, which come like pellets from a slingshot and never really hit the mark. While Yrsa and I do the dishes and the ladies cook in the big pots on the stove behind us, they talk about their illnesses that drive them from doctor to doctor, because they’re not satisfied with any of them. They have gallstones, hardening of the arteries, high blood pressure, aches everywhere, mysterious internal pains, and gloomy warnings from their stomachs every time they’ve eaten. On Sundays they march past the Home for the Disabled on Grønningen in order to get into a better mood by looking at the invalids; and in general they put everything and everyone down with nasty pleasure. They have something in particular against each boarder and they know everything about their private lives, the intimate details of which they discuss while they dish out the food on to Yrsa’s platters, complaining about how much those people can eat. Sometimes I think that their low, mean thoughts penetrate my skin so I can hardly breathe. But most of the time I find this life intolerably boring and recall with sorrow my variable and eventful childhood. In that narrow strip of the day when I’m awake enough to talk with my mother a little, I ask her about what’s happening in the building and in the family and greedily devour every refreshing bit of news. Gerda is working at Carlsberg now, and her mother stays home to take care of the baby. Ruth has begun to go around with boys. ‘You could have expected that,’ says my mother. ‘You should never adopt other people’s children.’ Edvin has lost his job and has started to come by the apartment again. ‘But you shouldn’t feel bad about it,’ says my mother, ‘because now he doesn’t cough so much.’ It still shakes me a little, because my father always said that skilled workers could never be unemployed. ‘My God,’ says my mother excitedly, ‘I almost forgot to tell you that Uncle Carl is in the hospital. He’s terribly sick, and it’s no wonder, considering how he’s lived. Aunt Rosalia is over there every day, but it really will be best for her if he dies. And margarine has gone up two øre in Irma – isn’t that steep?’ ‘So it costs forty-nine øre,’ I say because I’ve always kept up on the prices, since I’ve either gone shopping with my mother or by myself. ‘If only Father can stay at the Ørsted Works,’ she says. ‘Now he’s been there three months – even though it’s no fun working at night.’ Her chattering voice spins softly around me in the growing darkness until I fall asleep with my arms on the table.

  One evening I wake up as usual from this position at the sound of the clinking cups and the smell of coffee. As I sleepily raise my head, my eye is caught by a name in the newspaper: Editor Brochmann. I stare at it wide awake, and slowly I realize that it’s an obituary. It hits me like the lash of a whip. It never occurred to me that he could die before the two years were up. I feel like he’s deserted me and left me behind in the world without the slightest hope for the future. My mother pours the coffee and puts the pot down over his name. ‘Drink now,’ she says and settles herself on the other side of the table. She says, ‘Pretty Ludvig has been put in an institution. His mother died, you know, and then they just came and took him away.’ ‘Yes,’ I say and again feel that we’re infinitely far from each other. She says, ‘It’ll be nice for you when you can get that bicycle. There’s only two months left.’ ‘Yes,’ I say. I pay ten kroner a month at home, ten are put in the bank for my old age, and the remaining ten are my own. At the moment I couldn’t care less about that bicycle – about anything. I drink my coffee and my mother says, ‘You’re so quiet, there’s nothing the matter, is there?’ She says it sharply, because she only likes me if my soul is resting completely in hers and I don’t keep any secret part of it to myself. ‘If you don’t stop being so strange,’ she says, ‘you’ll never get married.’ ‘I don’t want to anyway,’ I say, even though I’m sitting there considering that desperate alternative. I think about my childhood ghost: the stable skilled worker. I don’t have anything against a skilled worker; it’s the word ‘stable’ that blocks out all bright future dreams. It’s as gray as a rainy sky when no bright ray of sun trickles through. My mother gets up. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘we’ve got to go to bed. We have to get up early, you know. Good night,’ she says from the door, looking suspicious and offended. When she’s gone, I move the coffeepot and read the obituary again. There’s a black cross over the name. I see his kind face before me and hear his voice, ‘Come back in a couple of years, my dear.’ My tears fall on the words and I think this is the hardest day of my life.

  3

  I sank into a long-lasting stupor that robbed me of all initiative. ‘You’re going around asleep,’ said the ladies, whose reproaches made less of an impression on me than ever. I lost the desire to talk with my mother, and one evening when Edvin came with an invitation from Thorvald, I said no. I had no desire to go out dancing with that young man who had liked my poems. Maybe his father knew another editor who would also die before I was old enough to write real, grown-up poems. I’d gotten cold feet and didn’t dare expose myself to any more disappointments. Summer had come. When I went home in the evening, the fresh breeze cooled my stove-flushed cheeks like a silk handkerchief, and young girls in light dresses walked hand in hand with their sweethearts. I felt very alone. Of the girls in the trash-can corner, Ruth was the only one I knew now, and she always yelled ‘Hi’ to me when I went through the courtyard. I looked up at the front building’s wall, flooded with life and memories, my childhood’s wailing wall, behind which people ate and slept and argued and fought. Then I went up the stairs in my red dress with blue polka dots and puff sleeves – the only summer dress I had. Sometimes Jytte was sitting in the living room, smoking cigarettes, which she also offered to my mother. My mother smoked awkwardly and ineptly and always got smoke in her eyes. Now Jytte was working in a tobacco factory. My father said that she stole the cigarettes, but my mother didn’t care. She always had to have a girlfriend who was much younger than her, because she was so youthful. But there were gray streaks in her black hair and she had put on weight around her hips. That’s why she often went to t
he steambaths at the public bathhouse on Lyrskovgade, and when she came home, she gleefully told us about how terribly fat all the other women were.

  One evening the boarding house’s kitchen doorbell rang, and when I opened the door, Ruth was standing outside. ‘Hi,’ she said, smiling, ‘are you going home now? There’s something I want to tell you.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘just wait outside.’ I poured out the last of the dishwater, took off my apron, and slipped out to her, as if she were a secret contact that no one must discover. What did she want with me? It was a long time since anyone had wanted me for anything. She had on a white muslin dress with a wide, black patent leather belt around her waist and short sleeves. She was wearing lipstick and her eyebrows were plucked like my mother’s. Even though she was still slightly built, she seemed to me very grown-up in appearance. We didn’t speak until we reached the street, but then Ruth began to chatter on as if there’d never been any question of a separation between us. She told me that Minna had finished school and now had a live-in job in Østerbro. ‘In Østerbro?’ I repeated, dumbfounded. ‘Yes,’ said Ruth, ‘but she’s always had a screw loose.’ It didn’t fill me with the joy you would have expected. I just thought that Ruth never missed anyone. She had written Minna off with a shrug of her shoulders, just as she presumably had written me off a year ago. There was no room for deep or lasting feelings in her heart. When we reached Sundevedsgade, where I usually turned off, we stopped. ‘But you know,’ said Ruth, ‘you haven’t even heard what I wanted to tell you.’ Reluctantly I continued on with her, because now my mother would have to wait for me in vain, and if too much time passed, she’d go over to the boarding house and ask for me. Then when she found out that I’d left, she would be sure that some accident had occurred. But Ruth radiated faintly some of the old magic and power to get me to do things that I never would think of myself. Ruth said that she had a sweetheart, a boy sixteen years old, whose name was Ejvind and who lived on Amerikavej. He was an apprentice mechanic and someday they would get married. He had taken her virginity, and it was ‘damned great’. And then she’d gotten to know a very rich man who was an antiquarian bookseller and lived on Gammel Kongevej. It was him that she wanted me to visit with her. She had visited him alone but he’d tried to seduce her, and that, she said, she wouldn’t do to Ejvind. The rich man was named Mr Krogh, and his best friend was Holger Bjerre, whom he was going to persuade to make Ruth a chorus girl. ‘You too,’ she said, ‘he’s promised me.’ ‘Me?’ A gleam of hope streaks through my soul. A chorus girl is onstage dancing every evening, and in the daytime she can do whatever she wants. I know, of course, that they’d never permit it at home, but the world is never totally real when I’m with Ruth. ‘And you know what,’ she says eagerly, ‘he’s very old and he’s sick, too. When I was over there, I thought he was going to die of a heart attack, he coughed and puffed and gasped so much. He lives all alone and if we’re really nice to him, maybe he’ll will us everything he owns, and then Ejvind can get his own workshop.’ She looks up at me delightedly, with her clear, strong eyes, and the crazy plan puts me in a good mood. I know very well what it is Ruth wants of me, and I say, ‘I won’t do it, but I’d like to meet him.’ Ruth laughs and holds her hand in front of her mouth while wiping her nose with her thumb at the same time. She says that he looks horrid, but I should think about the money and our future as chorus girls. Mr Krogh lives on the top floor of a building that doesn’t at all look like it houses millionaires. When we’ve rung the bell, we hear a violent coughing on the other side of the door. ‘There, you can hear he’s not long for this world, by God,’ whispers Ruth. After a lengthy rattling with security chains and keys, the door is opened a crack and Mr Krogh’s face appears. He looks at us suspiciously for a moment, then he loosens the chain and lets us come in. ‘Oh,’ I exclaim, ‘what a lot of books!’ The living room is practically wallpapered with books and large paintings like I’ve otherwise only seen in museums. Mr Krogh doesn’t say anything until we sit down. He looks at me intently and asks kindly, ‘Do you like books?’ ‘Yes,’ I say and look at him more closely. He’s not as old as Ruth said, but not young either. He’s completely bald and has plump, red cheeks, as if he were out in the fresh air a lot. His eyes are brown and a little melancholy like my father’s. I like him very much and sense that he likes me too. He makes coffee for us and Ruth asks whether he has spoken to Holger Bjerre. ‘No … I’m afraid he’s on vacation right now.’ When he looks at Ruth, his glance slides searchingly up and down her body, but luckily he doesn’t seem to be interested in mine. He offers us cakes and talks about the fine weather and about the city’s young girls who spring up from the cobblestones like flowers. ‘It is,’ he says, ‘a refreshing sight.’ Ruth is bored and kicks my legs under the table. I say, ‘Do you think I could be a chorus girl too, Mr Krogh?’ ‘You!’ he says astonished. ‘No, you’re not suited for that at all.’ ‘Yes, she is,’ protests Ruth, ‘if she gets a permanent and makeup and things like that. She’s pretty without clothes on.’ I blush and for the first time in my life I feel irritated with Ruth. Mr Krogh looks from her to me and says, ‘How in the world did you two ever find each other?’ I ask if I can take a look at his books, and when he hears that I prefer reading poems, he shows me where they are. I take out a volume at random and open it. Delighted and happy, I read: