“Of course. But you are not writing stories, I take it.”
“No.”
“You expect some revelation? You think you may recognize something? You expect that closing a link with your mother’s past will make you feel safer in some way?”
“I’m not so compulsive about it as we’re making it sound. I’m just sort of curious.”
“You don’t expect to reverse your mother’s emigration and come back to Denmark to live?”
“Oh no.”
“Why not?”
She caught me out. I said honestly, “I guess I’d find it too small and tame.”
When she smiled widely, her wrinkled cheeks puckered up into pleats of brown skin. Under the floppy hat her eyes looked black, without pupils. “But very safe,” she said. “Denmark is full of retired sea captains growing roses. It is full of people like me. But you won’t find Bregninge like that. That whole estate uses the past to create the future. Astrid’s father was a man of great talent, and her brother has inherited a good deal of it.” She glanced at the countess with affectionate malice. “I leave Astrid out of it. Her talents are different from theirs.”
“Karen, please, it is not funny,” the countess said.
“The old count was the Doctor Faustus of genetics,” Karen Blixen said. “Trees, flowers, hybrid fruits like those of your American Burbank. Also game and hunting dogs and much else. It was said of him that if he needed dogs with long legs and webbed feet for running in swamps, he could start with a pair of dachshunds and in a little while produce you hounds as tall as giraffes, with feet like paddles. It is good that Eigil has inherited his father’s gifts, because some of the experiments involved species that do not breed quickly like mice or guinea pigs, and so take many years. How would you go about a genetic experiment with elephants, say? It is not quite like fruit flies.”
The countess had grown obviously sullen; she did not like this talk about her father and brother at all. Karen Blixen studied her, lightly smiling, her expression about fifty-fifty malice and affection. “Astrid is sensitive about some of this science, and she can tell good from evil, she thinks—that is one gift her brother lacks. As I grow older I wonder who is right. I do know one thing. Evil, if it exists, is not all lumpy and ugly like a toad. It is often more attractive than what people call good. Eigil disgusts his sister because he follows their father’s practice of seducing peasant girls. It is naughty of him, surely. But is it evil? Who would say that for sure except a virtuous sister? The fact is, Eigil could not be uninteresting if he tried. If you were to meet him, you might find him fascinating.”
“Alas,” I said. “He won’t be at home when we call.”
The witch woman was rubbing the rune stone along the side of her nose the way I have seen pipe smokers polish the bowls of their pipes. Abstractedly she studied the childish scratches of the runes. Quick as mice, her eyes darted to the countess, who was sulky, and to me, who was uncomfortable. “Your mother was from Bregninge. Tell me about her.”
“Nothing much to tell. She was an orphan. She lived with a peasant family and did farm work—thinned sugar beets and cleaned cow byres and so on.”
“How old when she emigrated?”
“Sixteen.”
Raised eyebrows. “That young. Why?”
“I don’t know. It wasn’t in character for her to do such a thing. She wasn’t really adventurous. When I’d ask her, she’d put me off. Said she just wanted to see something new.”
“She was not, as they say, in trouble?”
“Oh no, I’m sure not.”
“But she was running away.”
“I used to wonder if she wasn’t. She would never say.”
“From the old count, do you suppose?”
Now there was a thought.
“Karen,” the countess said furiously, “this is simply unkind!”
“My dear, look on it as a story,” her cousin said. To me she said, “It pains Astrid to hear these things spoken of, but they are part of a story, and stories are part of the accumulation you think will tell you something. Stories last better than the people who lived them. Hamlet is only a tattered shadow up here in Helsingør, but on Shakespeare’s pages he is immortal. Now. What I am saying isn’t as fantastic as it sounds. Sixteen-year-old Danish peasant girls don’t run off to America for nothing, and she lived on the estate of a man famous for chasing peasant girls, as for much else. But since she ran away, and escaped, there is not much of a story. I would turn it around if I were writing it. Suppose she didn’t have the courage or the money to do what your mother did. Suppose she was trapped, or suppose even that she found the old count irresistible—and why wouldn’t she? Suppose she didn’t quite escape, or escaped only after she had been seduced and was pregnant. Then you, though born in America, would come back here hunting for your safe place, as Astrid says, and find that you were Astrid’s half brother, and a sort of cousin to me. It takes only a little twisting to make your return take on possibilities and become part of a Gothic tale.”
“I give it to you.”
She nodded, holding the rune stone to her cheek and smiling the smile that showed no teeth. “For Astrid’s sake I will decline it. She has always been terrified that I will write about her family.”
“There’s a catch, too,” I said. “I wasn’t born until four years after my mother landed in America. There goes my only hope of a distinguished pedigree.”
The countess stood up, and as she did so, the stork left its nest and flapped off low over the tops of the trees. We watched it go. “Well!” said the countess with her brilliant smile. “If we are to go on to Ellebacken we must begin.”
Karen Blixen didn’t try to keep us. But she held my eyes a moment, her smart wrinkled face like the smiling face of a Greek kouros, and said, “If you find it possible, come and see me again after you have been to Ørebyslot. I am curious to know what a returning pilgrim would find.”
We had driven all the way to Helsingør and beyond, and were looking through the Ellebacken cottage and throwing open windows to air the musty house, and wondering if the sound was warm enough for a swim, before the countess was quite herself again. It is a place that expresses her—ten acres or so of wood and pasture, a clearing of unmown grass, a walk guarded by cypresses, a half-timbered thatched cottage as picturesque as something in a drawing. As a matter of fact, I had seen it in a drawing, one of hers. This was the place, apparently, where she and her husband used to be closest and happiest. She said he liked to play at mowing the grass and chopping wood, like the Kaiser at Doom. Before the war, they spent many weekends here. Since her life blew up, she has managed to come only two or three times a year. She offered us the use of the place, an offer which I took to be a transparent hope that we will come and bring her with us.
A swim in the sound, very chilly. But a new side to the count ess. For one thing, when reduced to a bathing suit she is more seductive than I would ever have guessed; the plain clothing and the erect bearing are a form of disguise. For another thing, she was not kidding when she said she lives in her body, not in her head. She frolicked in that ice water like some Valkyrie, and she swam out until her head disappeared in the chop of little waves. She could have swum to Sweden, I suppose. As for me, I got blue and goose-pimpled and had to come out. So of course Ruth and the countess worried about me, and built up a fire in the fireplace, and made tea, and clucked over me like a pair of over-healthy hens.
Long past time to quit this. Very, very late. A long time ago I heard all the clocks in Copenhagen strike two, each making its own guess. It took the hour about fifteen minutes to ricochet from the Raadhus tower to the last lost church steeple out on Amager. Ruth sleeps in the other bed like a tired dog, and here I sit in my backbreaking oriole’s nest, wide awake in spite of the pill I took at eleven. If I take another one soon, I may get three or four hours of sleep.
This day, though the most interesting we have spent in Denmark, has been too long. I have a beaut of a sunburn—n
ose, skull, forearms, back of the neck—but it’s nothing to some of the cases we saw on the way home, when fifty thousand Danes were retreating through a red sunset in complete disorder, a Dunkirk.
Notice: just thinking the word “beach,” I think disaster. When I should be sleeping, I am dragged back to that grubby van in that dusty arroyo near La Jolla where Curt lived with his silly surfboard and his dreary girl in his raffish community of streak-haired mind-blown demigods and demigoddesses, disciples of sun and kicks. Intent upon what? Rebellions? Repudiations? Apathies? Boredoms? Fears, panics, terrors? Or just on Now, on the galvanic twitches of the eternal pointless present? What is that life style (that jargon term) except a substitute for a life?
And what is mine, that is what troubles me. Curt’s repudiations let the air out of my confidence that I know what my job, my principles, my vote, my admirations, my friends, and my marriage are all about. I am as unsure of myself as I ever was of him. And I know why. In rejecting me he destroyed my compass, he pulled my plug, he drained me. He was the continuity my life and effort were spent to establish. I have been guilty of making first Ruth and then Curtis into barricades behind which I could take shelter. But why couldn’t he have understood the hunger and love and panic, the trembling and the cold sweats and the sleeplessness, the times when I looked at him sleeping, as a child, and was overwhelmed by my responsibility to him and his dearness to me? Who broke it, he or I?
Fell or let go? Did he eventually bore himself with the aimlessness to which, maybe, my anxious demands on him drove him? Did he try for too big a wave, and if so why? To show me something?
Christ, even in my regret I can’t leave him alone.
It is a pitful, grubby little story any way you read it. The saga of an immigrant family, a succession of orphans, that began in flight on the island of Lolland in 1901 and ended fifty-two years later (in flight?) on the beach at La Jolla, on the western or suicide edge of the New World. Fifty-two years from wooden shoes and hope to barefoot kicks, fear, and silence; and in between, Joseph Allston, the bright overachiever, his mother’s joy and treasure, his son’s alien overseer.
Safety, Karen Blixen says in scorn. She resents rusting un-burnished when she wants to shine in use. She pretends to think her life in words, which has made her an international figure, is meagerer than the life of action she once lived. Nevertheless she came home in the end. Echoes of the turtle and snail persist even in her, she carries her safety on her back. Safety is a legitimate human desire—isn’t it?—and home, says old wise man Robert Frost, is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. Safety is a mutual matter. Do I hate the thought of Curt’s death more because he never fulfilled himself, or more because he never fulfilled me? Did he know how gladly we would have opened our door, how carefully we would have avoided making his return a humiliation of his pride? And do I know for sure that I could have been wise and open? Do I think right now that I could have kept my temper and my tongue? Which is deeper, a father’s love or a disappointed father’s contempt?
The Danes have a name for the energy and ambition that they ridicule in the Americans and fear in the Germans. Albuer, elbows. They call our overgrown cars, with their toothy chrome grilles, Dollargrins. Of course they speak from weakness and probably envy; their humor is underdog humor, a put-down of what is more powerful than they. I wonder if it was an underdog world, a small-power world where little could be expected of him, that Curt was hunting when he spent a summer here in Copenhagen a few years ago? Or was it only the tales of how compliant the Danish girls are that drew him? Why did he live in a furnished room on the Nyhavn, supposed to be the roughest waterfront in Europe? Was he hunting safety in that cave, a place where he fitted in? Who is the waif and orphan here? And do I really think there is something reassuring I might find in this mousehole of a country?
What should a little Kafka animal do? Hide in the hole and hear the Enemy digging toward him, or run out of the hole into the fearful open? What did the Europeans gain by Columbus? The illusion of freedom, I suppose. But did they gain or lose when they gave up the tentative safety of countries and cultures where the rules were as well known as the dangers, and had been tailored to the dangers, and went raiding in a virgin continent that was neither country nor culture, and isn’t yet, and may never be, and yet has never given up the dangerous illusion of infinite possibility? What good did it all do, if we end in confusion and purposelessness on the far Pacific shore of America, or come creeping back to our origins looking for something we have lost and can’t name?
No sooner do I ask that than I have to admit that what brought my mother and a lot of others to the New World was precisely the hope of safety, not any lust for freedom. What do I want, a drawbridge between the continents, across which the cultures and hence the generations can meet, and pass, and meet again?
The fact is, I don’t know what I want, or should ever have wanted, and I don’t ever expect to know. What I would settle for right now is the ability to fall asleep.
3
That was the end of the second notebook. I had read right through the breast-beating part, instead of skipping it as I had done the night before, and I think I did so because I wanted Ruth to listen to it, I felt the compulsion to declare myself unmistakably, no matter how it troubled her, no matter how it troubled me. For a while after I stopped, we sat there. She turned her face toward me, her serious, still pretty face with its pert unfaded eyebrows under the white hair. She is as lucky in her skin, which doesn’t wrinkle, as she is in her figure, which hasn’t changed two pounds’ worth in forty years. She is one of those whom old college friends would recognize at once; I am not. We looked at one another, and then she looked down and picked absently at a knot in the mohair throw that covered her. With her eyes on the knot she said, “You’ve never got over it.”
“No, I guess not.”
“Why not, Joe? It’s been over twenty years. I loved him, too, I thought I couldn’t bear it when he died. But I have. It’s the only way. It’s not healthy to go on grieving forever.”
“You’re forgetting I wrote this journal only six months or so after.”
“I heard how you read it.”
“Yes? Well ... sure it bothers me. It was the worst thing that ever happened to us. If you can finally bear it, all that proves is that you’re a born survivor and I’m not.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I don’t know. Nothing. Maybe just that women are more durable, they’re made for surviving and holding things together. Anyway it’s not his death, or not only his death.”
“What then? Do you still feel guilty about all the clashes you had?”
“That, sure. I don’t suppose I’ll ever get over blaming myself. I should have been wiser, somehow. But that’s not all of it, either.”
“Then what?”
She is ever one to talk it out. What? Good God, what not? But it was I who had provoked this dialogue.
“The way the world wags,” I said. “The difference between what we’d like to be and what we’re able to be. How to respect myself when I know I’m confused and cowardly. How to respect a world where nothing I believe in is valued. How to live and grow old inside a head I’m contemptuous of, in a culture I despise.”
“You mustn’t,” Ruth said, ready to cry. “Even if it was as bad as you say, you have to go on living, and you can’t blame either yourself or him just for the way things are. He agreed with you, don’t you know that? He despised it, and himself too, as much as ... You taught him to.”
“So don’t tell me I’m not to blame for anything. The hell of it is, I despised his way of despising it more than I despised it. If he’d really fought against the things he hated, some way or other, do you think I wouldn’t have been with him? But he just quit. He turned belly up. And he was on the side of the future, his way won. In twenty years everything he stood for has taken over. He was prophetic. The counterculture. The pleasure principle. Now. Wow. Junk everything good
along with the bad. History is an exploded science, civility is a dirty word, self-restraint is not only unhealthy, it’s a laugh. Manners are hypocrisy, responsibility means you’ve sold out, adolescence lasts into the seventies, or will. And it’s okay to lush on the money civilization so long as you hate it. So then the money civilization gets the word and adjusts itself to the new market and sells itself in a new package to its despisers and lushes.”
“He’d have come around.”
“I wish I thought so.”
“Anyway, what is it you’re complaining about? You used to say the world is at least fifty-one per cent in our favor or we couldn’t live in it.”
“Sometimes fifty-one per cent doesn’t seem quite enough. Also, sometimes it’s all you should take. My problem with Curt was that he wanted to take eighty-five per cent while keeping his right to gripe. It doesn’t do any good to pretend that he didn’t lush. He never learned the responsibility of giving something in exchange for what he took. If I come down out of the hills with foxtails in my beard, crying, ‘Woe, woe unto this people!’ I have to include him among the enemy. I can’t see any other possibility.”
“You could forgive him.”
“I forgave him long ago.”
“Did you? He might have had something to forgive us for, too.”
“Ah, Ruthie.” We looked at each other across fifteen feet of our last mutual sanctuary, she in the bed one or both of us will probably die in, I in the chair where the survivor will sit and wait to wear out. “What do you think?” I said. “If he’d lived, would he finally have joined us? If he’d been alive these last twenty years would we have made it up, and been friends?”
“I think so,” Ruth said. “I have to think so.”
“Maybe you’re right,” I said—I just dropped it, I didn’t want any more of it. I stood up, and found that I was so stiff I almost couldn’t stand. My toes, ankles, knees, hips, ground bone against bone. My finger joints were sore and hot to the touch as I casually washed them in air. Ruth watched me until I went to the bathroom, where out of her sight I took an allopurinal and an indocin. She watched me in silence as I went through the bedroom on my way to the kitchen to get a glass of milk to counteract the corrosiveness of the painkiller. I came back, and she watched me in silence as I undressed. I went to bed gloomy.
The Spectator Bird Page 11