But sometimes as earthy as the stableman’s daughter, and sometimes she mocks herself. When the agent mentioned the havnefart, the harbor tour that periodically comes up the canal, the English implications of the word struck her and she giggled. And when we were sitting talking, later, she noticed Ruth’s shoes and cried out, “Oh, those tiny American feet!” and in frank envy stuck out her own number eights for contrast. She has a smile that would melt glass.
I watch them lean from the quay to inspect the plucked chickens held up by the man in the produce boat from Skagen moored at the dead end of the canal. They take one, then a slab of cheese, then six eggs that the Skagen man wraps individually in newspaper. The countess opens her purse. Ruth will not let her pay. Good.
Rain dimples the still canal. The cobbles shine, the deck of the Skagen boat is dark wet. Up and down it from bow to stem and back again runs a splendid black poodle, intensely interested in the life four feet from him on the quay. A sign hung from the rail amidships says Hunden Bider—the dog bites. Ruth, of course, animal lover and non-reader of Danish, reaches a hand across to pat him and is confronted by a raging mouthful of fangs. Hurt, she falls back, the countess volubly explaining. Really she is a handsome woman, and a true Dane: her cheeks glow in the rain like shined apples. They pass out of sight below me. In three minutes they will be at the door.
But I will bet that shortly we will have tea and then a drink together. Even money they will take that chicken into the kitchen and make a shared dinner of it. It’s too wet and raw to go out, and can you see us letting her take her tray into her room, while we revel in the dining room over a poulet rôti and a bottle of Niersteiner natur? And tomorrow, in spite of my feeble efforts not to fraternize too much, this woman who spent her youth adorning royal balls and being ogled in theater boxes will share the second-row balcony with her new American friends, while thousands cheer.
I am just enough of an American democrat to get a kick out of the idea. Who dat tall extinguished-lookin’ genman wid de testicle on his right eye, urinatin’ up an down de aisle wid de countess?
Later:
As a prophet, I bat a thousand. We’ve had a gay dinner. The countess is good company, a giggler, full of stories, and when she dresses up in something besides her tweed suit she could be a princess in a fairy tale by the brothers Grimm. She is related to every castle in Denmark and most of those in Sweden and North Germany. Her family’s estate is on Lolland, but she has spent a lot of time at Waldemarslot on the little island of Taasinge, and at a relative’s herregaard on Fyn, near Odense. She used to see a lot of the royal family because her father was Hofjaegermester, master of the hunt, and an important business of his Lolland castle was growing hares, pheasants, grouse, chukars, and deer for the King’s fall hunting parties. Another relative is Karen Blixen, who writes under the name of Isak Dinesen and who is the one person in Denmark I would like, out of sheer admiration, to meet. The countess says she will arrange it Fraternizing like mad, we plan a lot of expeditions together as soon as our Rover arrives from England. See a lot of castles.
I gather that this leftover aristocracy has about lost its function and has been losing its lands for decades. They all marry their cousins for lack of anybody else suitable. Men mainly drunks, the countess suggests, and the women all witches. She herself has powers. Several times she has had second sight. She has a gift for quieting unruly or maddened horses, and once, while visiting relatives near Kassel, in Germany, she cured a boy of warts.
I learn from her how to skaal the lady on my left; until she has been skaal’ed she is not supposed to touch her wine. Look the lady deep in the eyes, hold the glass at the third vest button, raise it and drink, still holding her eyes, and then, still holding them, lower to the third vest button. It is an astonishingly intimate ritual. It taught me that I practically never look anybody that steadily in the eyes, especially a good-looking, amused, and amusing woman.
Coincidence department: Ruth mentioned that my mother came from Denmark. Oh, from where? asked the countess. I said some village named Bregninge. Bregninge? She said. Bregninge on Lolland? Oh, how funnyl If it is that Bregninge, it is on our estate, where I grew up. Great, I said. That’s another expedition for us when the car comes. Want to go back to Lolland?
But a cloud has come over our dinner party. The countess does not get along with her brother, hasn’t seen him or written to him in years. It agitates her, obviously, even to talk about him. On the other hand his wife, who is Swedish and sad, is very nice. And the countess’ grandmother is still alive, nearly a hundred years old. What if she wrote to Manon, her brother Eigil’s wife, to see if she will invite us for luncheon or tea, so that the countess can see her grandmother and show us the castle, without running into her brother? We could stay at the little inn in Bregninge, on the shore.
Fine, sure. But notice one thing. The countess has a hundred stories, but none about herself, and she mentions every relative including some like her brother Eigil whom she won’t speak to, but never her husband. And why haven’t any of these rich castle-dwellers rescued her? Why does she have to take in lodgers?
People’s private lives strike me as none of my business, and I have never developed the habit of fishing for them. I wait for the countess to volunteer something about her personal problems, but so far she has not. Doesn’t she trust us, after we have gone out of our way to be nice against her?
April 10? 11?:
This journal is already getting spasmodic, though it’s the only halfway disciplined thing I do. Continue to feel lousy. Maybe, as Ruth keeps saying, I ought to take my ekg’s down to some Danish doctor to see if the heart infection is really gone, as they assured me in New York it was. Every now and then she looks at me hard and asks me if I’m all right, and the mirror tells me I have a color like a two-week corpse.
Nevertheless I rather enjoy the routines we are developing and the sense of being totally out of touch with everything known. Up about seven (headache, backache), pick the milk and the countess’ yoghurt off the back stairs, put the ice sign in the kitchen window, shave, and go out the front door, noisily enough so that the countess will hear me and get her clear shot at the bathroom.
The iron courtyard gates are already open. In the street the air damp and chilly. For a wonder not raining this morning—dim dawn under the clouds. Up the quay the Bomholm boat is unloading. Yawning people, bicycles, suitcases. At the corner, plasterers are mixing mortar on a square of plywood. Soon the apprentice will be sent for the first round of Tuborg grøn or Carlsberg Hof. During the day he will go out seven or eight times. In the U.S.A. this would be called drinking on the job.
At the bakery I take a number and stand in line with maids and housewives for brioches and snegle. Then back, carrying the warm fragrant sack through the thinning Bomholm crowd. The sun has burrowed into the overcast after one look at Denmark. A freighter comes up the canal, the Knippelsbro is rising, bicycles on the Amager side back up ten abreast.
New and fresh. Maybe living on the East River would be a little like this, but there wouldn’t be the smell of warm baked goods and the scaled sheen of cobbles, and Gristede’s would be no substitute for the clean little one-purpose Danish shops, each with its medieval symbol for a sign—bull’s head for butcher, pretzel for baker, and so on.
We breakfast at the Empire desk by the front windows. When I laid the snegle down this morning and went into the kitchen to put the coffee on, I found the countess in her tweed suit—no robe-and-slippers sloppiness for her, even at seven-thirty—spooning brown sugar onto a bowl of yoghurt. Her back was toward me; somehow it looked depressed. I have hardly seen her since the night of the opera. That was Friday, this is Monday.
“Har De sovet godt?” I said.
She whirled, her face sharp and startled. Then her thousandcandlepower smile came on and lit up the gloomy kitchen. “You sounded so Danish!”
“The one-word Dane,” I said. “Et eneste ord.”
“You see!” Since our first
meeting she has taken the position that I am a linguistic prodigy and learn Danish with miraculous speed. (Danes in general are resigned to the fact that nobody can learn it except Danes.) She forgets that I heard it some in childhood, and she doesn’t know that in college I was made to study Anglo-Saxon, which is curiously close in some ways. Also, when I learn a word I don’t hide it under any bushel. “Et eneste!” she said in admiration. “Already you are saying a thing like that which some would never learn.”
Our eyes splintered against each other, or against some common unspoken embarrassment, and she edged by me, brilliantly smiling, with her tray. Almost persuasive, the smile glowed back down the hall at me through the closing crack of her door. I saw it as a shield turned to cover a retreat.
A few days ago I was worried that we’d have her in our hair more than we wanted to. Now I wonder if we’re to see her only in these strained, disappearing moments, like Emily Dickinson fleeing the sound of the door knocker.
What has the woman done? Why, in this city where she has been known and conspicuous all her life, did not one soul speak to Astrid Wredel-Krarup in the theater the other night? She expected it, we expected it. I had some idiotic notion of a brilliant procession of old friends and acquaintances. I was braced for introductions. I suppose it was some such consideration that led us to dress up beyond the seats I’d been able to get—the ladies in long dresses, me in black tie. Moreover, the seats in the front row. ahead of us were unoccupied. We were as conspicuous as if we had been in a box.
Nothing. Not a visitor, not a flutter of fingers, not a smile. Eyes, yes. Heads leaning to whisper, yes. We were watched in the ten minutes we sat there before the lights went down. We were watched at intermission; and none of us wanted to get up and circulate. We were watched as we edged our way out with the crowd at the end, and I distinctly saw one couple note us and put people between us so that we wouldn’t meet at the doors.
The opera was that Honegger thing, Joan of Arc at the Stake, in which the female lead neither says nor sings a word, just stands tied to a post in the middle of the stage, waiting for the dawn and the fire. It opened with an ominous line: En hund hyler i natten —a dog howls in the night—and because I was uneasy about the chill we seemed to have created, and wanted to kid things back to normal, I leaned toward the countess and whispered, “Hey, I understood that!”
In the dusk her eyes were large and brilliant. It was almost like skaal’ing the lady on your left. But she was not smiling. She gave the back of my hand a little pat. “You understand everything,” she said.
But the fact was, I never understood another mumbling word. I didn’t understand the woman beside me, or the people I caught trying not to be seen looking our way when the lights came up, any more than I understood what was going on on stage, where strange monsters out of some bestiary crept out of the woods and frolicked or mourned around Joan at her stake.
Neither of the ladies wanted to go to the D’Angleterre for a bite and a drink after the show. We walked home, talking more animatedly than we felt about the opera, and when we were back at the apartment the countess very soon said her thanks and good night and shut her door. For quite a while Ruth and I lay awake wondering what we had witnessed. Ruth had the impression that we had been stared at with hostility, simply because of the woman we were with. Mystery. The Danes are notably uncensorious, yet here is a woman whom all of Copenhagen cuts dead. We recollect that since we moved in with her nobody has rung her doorbell.
April 13:
Our Rover is on the free port dock. I spent the day persuading six thousand three hundred and eighteen petty bureaucrats that I don’t intend to sell it in the black market but will guarantee to export it to the United States when we leave Denmark. And what is your business in Denmark, Mr. Allston? Tourist? Yes. And how long will you stay? Three or four months? Mmmm. The question stuck out of them in embossed letters: why? I told one particularly nosy gentleman that I was writing a book about Danish democracy, and that corked him.
April 17:
Two days lost to a raging migraine. I find myself thinking about the office. Homesick, the forsaken fire horse. This suspended life, this waiting for decent weather or for me to feel better, gets more tedious than I would have believed. A visit to one of the local specialized medics (a pleasant man, I must say, and a cultivated one, not just a mechanic who has studied medical Latin) assures me that my ekg is indeed back to normal. Can’t lay any blame on the ticker. So I develop a migraine. Cunning of me.
The countess is our only drama. For a couple of days we didn’t catch more than glimpses of her, because she had got a job doing some interior decorating and supervising the purchase of furniture and pictures for a French Embassy couple named La Derrière. She came out of her sober mood enough to giggle over that, and kept referring to them as Mrs. and Mrs. Behind. But mostly, when she hasn’t been out, she has been shut up in her studio, presumably sketching and working. It seems unnatural and unfriendly to keep so separate. We wonder if she is being scrupulous about intruding on us, or if she is avoiding us because of that night at the theater.
This morning as we were having breakfast by the windows we heard her go down the hall to the kitchen and looked at each other. Shouldn’t we ask her to join us? But I had barely pushed back my chair when her steps returned, positive and fast, and her door clicked shut. Such is our human complexity, we felt snubbed, at least I did. In her room the radio came on with its gobbledegook Danish news, most of which these days is about Senator McCarthy, a constant rebuke to our innocent assumption of American prestige in the world.
After lunch Ruth drove us (I was over the migraine, but feeling pale) up to Dyrehaven to try out the Rover. Though the sun was out, it was chilly. No leaves yet, and no flowers except some tulips. I begin to understand the disbelief of Danish bureaucrats when I tell them we came of our own free will to live in this country for several months.
We had come back and were having a cup of tea to warm up when the doorbell rang. Surprised looks, raised eyebrows. Thinking the countess must be out, I answered. There stood an elegant gentleman with his gray Homburg in one hand and his gloves in another. His head was baldish, but well brushed: the hat had creased the smooth fair hair above his ears. He had striking blue eyes, and the handsome regular features I will always associate with the Arrow Collar men of my youth. And he had a well-repaired but unmistakable harelip.
For a second I thought he must be some close relative of the countess’, her brother maybe, and then I knew who he was. But he didn’t know who I was. He was not prepared to see me. His eyes got hard, and popped a little, and he said something abrupt in Danish.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Do you speak English?”
He did, perfectly, with a slight nasal cleft-palate whine. “Isn’t this the apartment of the Grevinde Wredel-Krarup?”
“Yes,” I said. “My wife and I share it. I’m not sure the countess is in.”
But she was in. Her door opened and she stood in it, stiff and smiling. Her visitor made a return smile. “God dag, Astrid.”
“God dag, Erik.” Automatic as a traffic light, her smile turned on me. I doubt that she was aware of me as a person, she simply meant that traffic should move on. I stepped back, she opened her door wider, the visitor went in, the door closed, and I shut the outside door and returned to Ruth and my cooling tea.
She made her mouth soundlessly round. “Who?”
Just as soundlessly, I said, “Her husband.”
“Oh-oh.” We sat on, uncomfortable because their voices were audible through the double doors that connected her studio with the drawing room. After only three or four minutes Ruth said, “We’d better take a walk.”
I said, “Ruthie, I’m pooped, I don’t need a walk,” but we took a walk, up to the Nyhavn and back around through Kongens Nytorv. There we had a beer and a reje sandwich in a sidewalk cafe where only the infrared reflectors in the canopy kept us from freezing to death. When we judged it was safe, we shuddered back
home. No voices. But we had hardly got our coats off and highballs in our hands when there was a tap on the connecting door, and the countess’ bright voice said, “Are you busy? May I come in?”
“I remember that evening,” Ruth said. Her hand went slowly and regularly down Catarrh from his nose to the end of his tail. Without opening his eyes he arched against the petting. A purr like a snore broke out of him and ended in a glottal stop. “It was when we first began to find out something about her.”
“Yes,” I said. “But now that we know, don’t you find all this a little long-winded?”
“Oh no, no, not It brings it all back. It’s as if it were happening to somebody else.”
“I sometimes get the feeling my whole life happened to somebody else.”
Ruth said, “I think you only get that feeling because you don’t like to remember. You put things away and never look at them again. I want to hear every word of this.”
“You don’t expect me to read through the whole thing like some schoolmaster doing his annual rereading of Dickens?”
“I thought that’s what we were going to do.”
Rain like sand pattered at the window. I heard the clogged downspout by the door overflowing a heavy stream onto the bricks. I would have to get the leaves out of that before the next rain. “You want your pound of flesh,” I said.
“Oh, Joe!”
“I told you, this isn’t going to give either of us much pleasure.”
“I didn’t think that was the purpose.”
“No?” I said. “What was the purpose?” But after a second or two in which we looked at each other with that baffled, stubborn expression that people who have been a long time married often wear when they are reading each other’s minds, I started reading again. My problem was the opposite of what I said it was. In our relationship with Astrid Wredel-Krarup, and in the recollections that the diary brought back, I wasn’t quite spectator enough.
The Spectator Bird Page 8