The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood ; Youth ; Dependency

by Tove Ditlevsen

  One night shortly after Master’s funeral, my mother wakes me up. ‘Come,’ she says, ‘I think it’s about to happen.’ Her face is totally unrecognizable from crying. My aunt has tensed her body into an arc and cast her head back so the hard sinews of her neck look like thick ropes under the yellow skin. Her throat rattles eerily and my mother whispers that she’s unconscious. But her eyes are open and roll around in their sockets as if they want to get out of them. My mother says that I should go and call the doctor. I dress quickly and borrow the telephone in the café on the corner where Bing and Bang play noisily in the background. The doctor is a kind man who stands for a long time, looking sadly at my aunt. ‘Should she be given the last one?’ he says as if to himself as he draws the syringe. ‘Yes,’ pleads my mother, ‘it’s terrible to see her suffer like this.’ ‘All right.’ He injects her in her bony leg and a little later all of her muscles relax. Her eyes close and she lies back and starts to snore. ‘Thank you,’ says my mother to the doctor, following him out without thinking about her wrinkled nightgown. Then we sit together by the deathbed and neither one of us thinks of waking my father. Aunt Rosalia is ours and only a minor character in his life. Late into the night, my aunt stops snoring and my mother puts her ear to her mouth to see if she’s breathing. ‘It’s over,’ she says. ‘Thank God she found peace.’ She sits back on the chair again and gives me a helpless look. I feel very sorry for her and I feel that I ought to caress her or kiss her – something completely impossible. I can’t even cry when she’s looking at me, although I know that someday she’ll say that I didn’t even cry when my aunt died. She’ll mention it as a sign of my heartlessness and maybe it will happen when I move away from home soon. I’ve never told her that I’m going to. We sit close to each other but there are miles between our hands. ‘And now,’ says my mother, ‘just when she was going to enjoy life.’ ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘but she’s not suffering anymore.’ In spite of the late hour, my mother makes coffee and we sit in my room drinking it. ‘Tomorrow,’ says my mother, ‘I’ll have to go over to tell Aunt Agnete. She’s only visited her three times in all the time she’s been lying here.’ When my mother begins to be outraged at other people’s behavior, she’s temporarily saved from the deepest despair. She talks about how Aunt Agnete has never come through when it mattered – even when they were children. Then she always told on the other two and she always had to be a little better than them. I let my mother talk and don’t need to say very much myself. I’m sorry that Aunt Rosalia is dead, but not as much as I would have been as a child. That night I sleep with an open window in spite of the ruckus from Bing and Bang, and I look forward to having the rotten, suffocating stench seep out of the apartment. Death is not a gentle fall- ing asleep as I once believed. It’s brutal, hideous, and foul smelling. I wrap my arms around myself and rejoice in my youth and my health. Otherwise my youth is nothing more than a deficiency and a hindrance that I can’t get rid of fast enough.

  15

  ‘It was all for your sake that we moved,’ says my mother bitterly. ‘So that you could have a room to write in. But you don’t care. And now your father’s unemployed again. We can’t do without what you pay at home.’ My father sits up and rubs his eyes. ‘Yes,’ he says fiercely, ‘yes we can. Things are pretty bad if you can’t get by without your children. You sacrifice everything for them and just when you’re going to have a little pleasure from them, they disappear. It was the same with Edvin.’ ‘It was a different matter with Edvin,’ says my mother. ‘He’s a boy.’ She says it out of sheer contrariness, and I breathe a little easier, because now it’s become a fight between the two of them. We’re sitting in the dining room eating dinner. It’s become a habit that, because of my father’s varying work schedule, we eat a hot meal at noon, even though it doesn’t make any difference now. Because I’m unemployed too. I was laid off from the office two weeks before my birthday. But I’ve found a new job that I’m to start the day after tomorrow, and I’ve also found a room. I’m moving there tomorrow, and I’ve told my parents. While I carry the plates out, they argue about it. ‘She’s heartless,’ says my mother crying, ‘like my father. The night Rosalia died, she sat stiff as a board without shedding a single tear. It was really spooky, Ditlev.’ ‘No,’ snaps my father, ‘she’s good enough at heart. You’ve just brought these children up all wrong.’ ‘And you,’ yells my mother, ‘haven’t you brought them up? To be socialists and dry their snot in Stauning’s beard. No, since Rosalia died, and now that Tove is moving out, I have nothing more to live for. You’re always lying around snoring, whether you’ve got work or not. It’s deadly boring to look at.’ ‘And you,’ says my father furiously, ‘you have nothing but your family and royalty in your head. As long as you can run off to the beauty salon every other minute, you don’t care whether your husband is starving.’ Now, fortunately, my mother is sobbing with rage and not with sorrow over my moving. ‘Husband,’ she howls, ‘it’s a hell of a husband I have. You don’t even want to touch me anymore, but I’m not a hundred years old, and there are other men in the world!’ Bang! She slams the door to the bedroom and throws herself onto the bed, continuing to sob so that you can probably hear it all over the building. I take the tablecloth off the table and fold it. Since we’ve moved to a better neighborhood, we don’t use Social-Demokraten as a tablecloth anymore, and I don’t have to look at Anton Hansen’s gloomy drawings from Nazi Germany. My father rubs his hand hard over his face, as if he wants to move all of his features around, and says tiredly, ‘Mother’s in a difficult age. Her nerves aren’t good. You ought to consider that.’ ‘Yes,’ I say uncomfortably, ‘but I want to live my own life, Father. I just want to be myself.’ ‘That’s what you have your own room for, you know,’ he says. ‘There you can be yourself and write all the poems you want.’ I despise it when they mention my poems – I don’t know why. ‘It’s not just that,’ I say on my way behind the curtain. ‘I want to have a place where I can invite my friends.’ ‘Well, yes,’ he says, rubbing his face again, ‘and Mother won’t allow that. But at any rate, you take good care of yourself.’ ‘Yes,’ I promise, slipping at last into my own room. There I pack up my few possessions, but I have to wait to empty the dresser drawer in the bedroom until my mother has gone into the dining room again. I’ve rented a room in Østerbro because I don’t think moving would be complete if I stayed in Vesterbro. I don’t like my landlady, but I took the room anyway because it cost only forty kroner a month. I’m paying off my winter coat and my dentist bill, but I’ll have enough money to get by, because at the Currency Exchange I’ll get a hundred kroner a month. My landlady is big and heavy. She has wild, bleached hair and a dramatic demeanor, as if something catastrophic were about to happen any minute. In the living room there hangs a big picture of Hitler. ‘Look,’ she said when I rented the room, ‘isn’t he handsome? Someday he’ll rule the whole world.’ She’s a member of the Danish Nazi Party and asked me whether I wanted to be a member too, because they wanted to include the Danish youth. I said no, I didn’t have any sense for politics. And it’s none of my business what she’s like. The main thing is that the room is cheap. I move out there the next day. I ride over in the streetcar with my suitcase and my alarm clock, which won’t fit into the suitcase. It starts to ring between two stops and I smile foolishly as I turn it off. It’s a very temperamental alarm clock that only I can operate. It’s crabby and asthmatic like an old man, and when it gets too sluggish and creaky, I throw it onto the floor. Then it starts ticking, all gentle and friendly again. The landlady greets me in the same loose-fitting kimono that I saw her in the first time, and she looks just as dramatic too. ‘You’re not engaged, are you?’ she asks, pressing her hand to her heart. ‘No,’ I say. ‘Thank God,’ she lets out her breath, relieved, as if she’s avoided a dangerous situation. ‘Men! I was married once, dear. He beat me black and blue whenever he’d been drinking, and I had to support him too. Things like that aren’t allowed in Germany. Hitler won’t stand for it. If people won
’t work, they get put in concentration camps. Does that alarm clock ring very loudly? I have such trouble sleeping and you can hear every sound in this house.’ It rings so a whole county can hear it, but I swear that it’s as good as soundless. At last she leaves me and I can calmly look over my new home. The room is quite small. There’s a sofa with a flowered covering, an armchair in the same style, a table, and an old dresser with crooked, dangling handles on the drawers. There’s a key in one of them, so I can really have something all to myself. In one corner there’s a curtain with a rod behind it. It’s supposed to serve as a wardrobe. There’s also a chipped wash basin and pitcher. Furthermore, it’s ice-cold here, like in Nina’s room, and there’s no stove. When I’ve put my clothes behind the curtain, I go out and buy a hundred sheets of typing paper. Then, with my last ten kroner, I rent a typewriter, which I place on the rickety table when I get back. I pull the armchair over to it, but when I sit down in it, the seat falls apart. All that I wanted for my forty kroner was a table and chair, but maybe you have to go up to a higher price category to get that. I go out and knock on the door to the living room where the landlady is sitting listening to the radio. ‘Mrs Suhr,’ I say, ‘the chair broke. Could I borrow an ordinary chair?’ She stares at me as if the news were a real misfortune. ‘Broke?’ she says. ‘That was a perfectly good chair. It dates all the way back to my wedding.’ She rushes in to inspect the damage. ‘You’ll have to give me five kroner for damages,’ she says then, putting out her hand. I say that I don’t have money until the first. Then she’ll add it onto the rent, she says angrily. I follow her when she goes out again, begging her for an ordinary chair. ‘It’s highway robbery,’ she huffs, massaging her heart again. ‘It doesn’t pay at all to rent out rooms. You’ll probably wind up dragging men into my home, too.’ She sends Hitler an imploring glance, as if he personally could throw out any men who might appear. Then she goes into the other room where there is a row of stiff, upright chairs along one wall. ‘Here,’ she says crossly, as she selects the most worn of them, ‘take this one, then.’ I thank her politely and carry it into my room. It’s a good height for the table. Then I begin to type up my poems, and it’s as if it makes them better. I’m filled with calm during this work, and the dream that this will someday be a book develops with stronger and clearer colors than before. Suddenly my landlady is standing in the doorway. ‘That thing,’ she says, pointing to the typewriter, ‘makes a horrible racket. It sounds like machine guns.’ ‘I’m almost done,’ I say. ‘Otherwise I only type in the evening.’ ‘Well, all right.’ She shakes her yellow-haired head. ‘But not after eleven. You can hear every sound here. Say, wouldn’t you like to hear Hitler’s speech tonight? I listen to all of his speeches – they’re wonderful. Manly, firm, resonant!’ She gestures enthusiastically with her arm so you see her voluminous bosom. ‘No,’ I say alarmed, ‘I … don’t think I’ll be home tonight.’ But I am home because Nina has a visit from her forester, so I don’t have anywhere to go. I sit and freeze even though I have my coat on, and I can’t concentrate on writing because Hitler’s speech roars through the wall as if he were standing right next to me. It’s threatening and bellowing and it makes me very afraid. He’s talking about Austria, and I button my coat at the neck and curl up my toes in my shoes. Rhythmic shouts of ‘Heil’ constantly interrupt him, and there’s nowhere in the room I can hide. When the speech is over, Mrs Suhr comes into my room with shining eyes and feverishly flushed cheeks. ‘Did you hear him?’ she shouts enraptured. ‘Did you understand what he said? You don’t need to understand it at all. It goes right through your skin like a steambath. I drank every word. Do you want a cup of coffee?’ I say no thanks, although I haven’t had a thing to eat or drink all day. I say no because I don’t want to sit under Hitler’s picture. It seems to me that then he’ll notice me and find a means of crushing me. What I do would be considered ‘decadent art’ in Germany, and I remember what Mr Krogh said about the German intelligentsia. The next day I start my job at the Currency Exchange typing pool and Hitler invades Austria.

  16

  ‘Can you dance the carioca?’ I look up from my shorthand and say no. I look at the secretary who I’m taking shorthand for; he’s really handsome, but he doesn’t take his work seriously. He sits lazily leaning back in the chair, now and then taking a gulp of the beer at his side. He yawns noisily without holding his hand in front of his mouth. ‘Well,’ he says tiredly, ‘where were we?’ We’re sitting in a large room on the top floor. Here there are lots of desks with many secretaries. Whenever they need a typist, they phone down to our office and the supervisor sends one of us up. I like this work, but the secretaries bring me to despair. They would rather talk, and in the meantime the case lies in a blue folder on which it says ‘urgent!’ in red letters. There are applications for all kinds of things, and with each application there’s a compelling letter implying that refusal of the enclosed will lead to suicide. Every single applicant writes about pressing, strictly personal reasons why he should be allowed to import his goods. I can dance the carioca just fine, but this is company time and I’m getting a high salary now, more than I’ve ever gotten before. ‘Stop frowning,’ says the secretary smiling, ‘the wrinkles will end up being permanent.’ I run down all the stairs and into the office to type up the letter. It’s a rejection, and I try to make the tone of the letter kinder and less businesslike, just like I changed the letters to the brothers, but it isn’t allowed here. I have to type it all over again and am requested to hold myself to the shorthand. There are about twenty of us young girls in the office, which looks like a schoolroom. There’s a girl at every desk, and the desks are in three long rows. Farthest forward sits the supervisor, facing us like a teacher, and when the noise gets too intense, she hushes us sternly. All the other girls are very chic, with tight dresses, high heels, and a lot of makeup on their faces. One day one of them decides to make up my lips, my cheeks, and my eyes, and they all think I look much better that way. They say that I should wear makeup every day, and I start to borrow Nina’s cosmetics when we go out in the evening. After I’ve typed up all of my poems, I can’t stand sitting in my room with my teeth chattering from the cold. So I continue my nightlife with Nina, and even though it’s rather monotonous, the days and nights fly by during this time, like a drumroll just before something’s about to happen onstage. The terrible years at I. P. Jensen have passed; I’m eighteen; I’ve broken away from my family. One evening in the Heidelberg, I dance with a tall, blond young man who isn’t like any of the usual young men and doesn’t talk like them, either. He asks if he can treat me to a sandwich. I say that I’m with my girlfriend. He says that doesn’t matter – then all three of us can have a sandwich. Nina looks at him approvingly and a little astonished when he introduces himself. His name is Albert and he’s better dressed than the others. Maybe he’s even a university student. We have sandwiches and beer, and I fumble with my knife and fork and watch to see how the others use the utensils. At home we cut up the food with the knife and then eat it with the fork. Albert asks me where I live and what I do. He asks me how much I earn and whether I can live on that. It’s nothing special, but the other young men have never talked about anything but themselves. I have a tremendous desire to tell Albert everything about myself and my life. ‘Maybe,’ I say, ‘I’ll soon be able to earn more. I write poems, you see.’ I don’t like to say it, and especially not here, where there’s so much noise, laughter, and music. But I don’t feel that I can wait any longer and I don’t know whether I’ll ever see Albert again. ‘Oh,’ he says surprised, ‘I didn’t expect that. Are they good?’ He smiles at me from the side, as if he’s privately amused at me. That annoys me and I can feel that I’m blushing. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘some of them are.’ ‘Can you remember one of them by heart?’ he says, munching. ‘Yes, I can,’ I say, ‘but I don’t want to say it here.’ ‘Then write it down,’ he says calmly, pushing a napkin over to me. He takes a pencil out of his pocket and hands it to me. Which verse shou
ld I write? Which is the best of all? I feel that it’s enormously important what I write, and after chewing on the pencil for a while, I write: