doubt mightily relieved, indifference.
So there they were, late in the evening, and after their
Buster Keaton entrance we humped all Willadsen’s chat-
tels up the stairs. It wasn’t as though his belongings
amounted to much—at any rate no more than the rest of
us possessed, but he was that much older: somewhere
between forty and fifty, very thin and grey and wrinkled
and worn as he lay there on the bed. We got the door
unlocked to a very small room, the smallest in the house:
his, where his table, bed, chair, and chest of drawers (all
dilapidated stuff, as worn as the man himself), together
with some piles of books, an old typewriter, a radio, and a
few boxes of clothes, china, and a medley of other stuff, all
managed to fit in.
There were some odd things amongst them. Odd
things which showed up bit by bit as we carried them
upstairs in the balmy darkness of a summer’s night. The
chest of drawers was full of small lined boxes which in turn
were full of small speckled and mottled eggs—and most of
them, nearly all of them, cracked. There were a lot of
notebooks, thick and scarred and stained, with wobbly
utterly illegible handwriting outside and in. And curiously,
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/8/2014, SPi
86 n Dan Turèll
amongst his otherwise shabby standard baggage there
were several binoculars and a set of photographic equip-
ment with expensive looking lenses. And the very few
books were odd too, special, scientific—and written in
several languages, definitely French, English, German,
and Spanish.
We dumped the lot in there—Peter and Jeanette, the
removal man, Kirsten and me—then went to our own
room and had a beer and chatted a bit about it all. Later,
after the removal man had gone, we put Willadsen to bed,
in his own bed, with his possessions stacked up around
him—there wasn’t much else to do—and went to bed
ourselves.
And all night I dreamt about the thin, grey, worn,
almost invisible man with the bony face and the many
boxes of eggs.
2
Over the next days we got a little closer to him. He came in
person to apologize—in a terribly mild and polite
fashion—for being so ‘indisposed’ at the time of moving
in. He thanked us for the help . . . He had lunch with us.
His hands shook so much he dropped most of his food
while trying to eat.
He began to sort out his stuff and threw out the cracked
eggs. We talked with him quite a lot (I don’t think any of
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/8/2014, SPi
Willadsen n 87
us were working at the time), and bit by bit more or less
managed to piece together his story, at least assemble the
bare bones of it from the snippets he unintentionally let
drop from time to time. It transpired he was divorced from
his wife, wife number two, but was still hopelessly in love
with her—no children, she was ten years younger, and he
was paying for some sort of training for her. It transpired
he was a chronic alcoholic—that was why his hands kept
shaking, and why at times he would lose it and just keel
over in a coma like the evening he moved in—or true to
form was moved in, like part of his own worldly goods. It
transpired he seemingly didn’t really have ‘anything to live
for’, and was just a very lonely man somewhere between
forty and fifty, with no wife, no ‘family’ in any sense of the
word, far removed in time and space from the friends and
society he must once have frequented—and at present
unemployed and thrown out of the house he’d been living
in because the people there were fed up with his drinking
and his comas, and thrown into our house since that was
the place where the owner (the future very notorious
property shark Jacques Bassan) gathered most of the
dregs, or to put it as he so inimitably did in his cynical-
cum-charming way: the place where the most tolerant of
his lodgers lived.
It transpired that Willadsen had been or was an orni-
thologist (the birds’ eggs, the binoculars, the photographic
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/8/2014, SPi
88 n Dan Turèll
equipment), and that a good many of his boxes contained
yellowing periodicals like The Ornithologist or The Field
Ornithologist of which he kept stacks lying about, years’
worth of copies. Also that he had taken countless measure-
ments and studied the migration and flight paths of birds
in every possible way, and that for many years he had been
working on an enormous opus about his favourite bird,
Rex regulus, King of the Birds—working at it on and off
between his worst alcoholic bouts (the notebooks). And
that in addition he was writing a ‘treatise’ about something
as weird and abstruse as Gundsømagle Lake and its
‘limno-ecological changes’ over the past twenty years—
which he therefore must have measured or observed
or what the fuck else you do when investigating ‘limno-
ecological changes’. (The words are still etched in my
mind, they were the precise words he used—and he sat
very quietly in his little room surrounded by his battered
furniture and dented suitcases talking about these things
slowly in a drawling monotonous voice while sucking on
an ancient eternally juicy pipe, drinking beer all hours of
the day and listening to his radio softly playing assorted
dance music till the end of time . . . )
Day by day that summer disappeared, the summer of
1965, I think it was. The sun shone like crazy, a drowsy
heat hugged the houses and hedges of Lyngby. Everything
was waiting just around the corner, Peter and I wrote
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/8/2014, SPi
Willadsen n 89
poems no one wanted to print, and the world was very
beautiful.
And Willadsen drank beer for as long as he had money,
very often dropped whatever he was holding, got a little
greyer and more haggard inside his dry skin, spoke less,
and less coherently, and his eyes stared out from ever
deeper sockets.
When he ran out of money—wherever the devil he got
it from—he’d start to sell off or pawn his binoculars and
photographic gear to the tobacconist and the grocer, or at
the very least deposit them as security for his purchases—
chiefly Danish fruit wine. He did this very calmly and
politely, like when he apologized the day after moving
in—as if deeply regretting having to inconvenience the
shopkeepers in this fashion, but seeing unfortunately
there was no other way . . . They nearly all agreed to what
he asked, and stored his things at the back of the shop.
I spoke with the tobacconist about it—how you could
see, no, smell rather, how tormented Willadsen was, how
even the way he moved his hands showed how thoroughly
sick he must be. And we spoke about how at the same time
you could always see by his face that he knew what he
was doing, and that there was no other way open to him.
We both realized he was in another world, way out there: he
would never have hurt anyone, no one but himself—for the
world around him didn’t actually exist for him that much.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/8/2014, SPi
90 n Dan Turèll
All of us had the feeling that all we could do was wait
and see what happened. And we learned a few things from
it. Through Willadsen we learned that a good many alco-
holics convert to fruit wine if they are skint but still too
grand or too choosy to touch meths or wood alcohol.
Danish fruit wine was then selling at 9 kroner a bottle,
cheaper than anything else (this was before the era of
cheap plonk from supermarkets like Irma)—and still with
a hellishly high alcohol content. Sticky stuff . . . Through
him we learned how the alcoholic suddenly goes under,
how he can sit for hours and clearly not be anywhere, just
be away, far away from everything. From him we learned all
over again, in a new variation, how Fate—what we would
later call Karma—can mould people after its own image.
We saw the disciplined way he sold off his binoculars and
books, and knew and could tell (as he himself later con-
firmed, needlessly) that he had done this many times
before—that he knew the routine and it was a regular
routine. Right down to the bottom until every penny and
every pawnable valuable is gone, then up again and start
over, recoup the gear and get a job and drink nothing but tea
and coffee—until after a while it’s back first to the beer and
finally the fruit wine, long pendulum swings to and fro
lasting a year or six months, with ever fewer and shorter
intervals between the spells.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/8/2014, SPi
Willadsen n 91
3
The days passed in their divinely obscene way as they have
done since forever right until now, ten years on, and we
were all doing our ‘own thing’ or at least whatever chance
seemed to hold out for the moment. At the time Peter was
a proofreader at Berlingske Tidende, the daily paper, Kirsten
was working at Bleggaarden dry cleaner’s, and that summer
I was a window cleaner. The days passed, one thing and
another happened, the summer drew towards its inevitable
close, and one day Peter and Jeanette left for Odder and
moved into a house there. They went from Bagsvaerdvej 65
in Lyngby to ‘Solbakken, Ballevej, Odder’, and were lost
from sight.
And just as Peter and Jeanette were moving out Will-
adsen finally cracked up and asked us to help get him
admitted to hospital, so that all at once it felt like the whole
of that summer’s second floor was falling apart in the early
autumn—falling apart and, like flecks of dust, forming a
different pattern elsewhere. Departure was in the air, wild
and unsettling, ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ as Dylan
was singing in New York more or less at that very moment . . .
And so Willadsen asked to be admitted. He had come
full circle now, he said—there was no other way. He
needed to be admitted to Rigshospitalet, the state hospital,
and he knew he couldn’t manage it on his own and there
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/8/2014, SPi
92 n Dan Turèll
was no one else to ask, simply no one else to ask, so he had
to beg us to go along with him and get him admitted. He’d
reached the end of the line, social services had finally given
up on him, and there was no point in dragging it out.
Tomorrow we must get him admitted, he said over the last
bottle of fruit wine. Tomorrow we must get him admitted
to Rigshospitalet and have the Salvation Army collect his
things, so he could ‘start afresh’ when he came out. When
he came out and had kicked the habit and had work again
he would get it all sorted. We must promise to get him
admitted the very next day, even if he happened to change
his mind in the night . . .
The very next day we got him admitted, and it did in
fact take a day. From the early morning, when he was
shaking and just needed a little drink, and then a little
more, and then just needed to wait a little and sort
out a few little things, and then change his shirt (three
times . . . ), and then have a little bit more to drink—and so
on . . . When we were out in the street and on our way (he
still with a bottle in his hand), we just had to make a little
detour to look up his friend Skov, his one and only friend,
to say goodbye to him. And Skov lived in the same house
Willadsen lived in before coming to our place, the one out
on Ordrup Jagtvej on the edge of the wood, near the
racecourse—and anyhow it was on the way to Willadsen’s
doctor who we had to call on for the referral chitty.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/8/2014, SPi
Willadsen n 93
So we set out on our way, moving along like a weird
caravan right from Lyngby to Ordrup with Kirsten and me
on either side of Willadsen. And the birds sang like crazy
that day, sang like crazy all along the long stony suburban
streets with their long fancy driveways. And at last we
came to Skov’s place, and Skov and Willadsen said good-
bye, and Skov thought it was very smart of Willadsen to
quit his boozing.
And Skov suffered from a persecution complex. He
told me how a conspiracy had been got up against him.
He had been a jockey at the race course, but had fallen off a
horse and hit his head, and from that moment on he had
been persecuted, partly by the doctors and the psychia-
trists at the county hospital (though in effect by doctors
and psychiatrists everywhere), and partly by a whole series
of top people from Prime Minister Krag to ombudsman
Hurwitz, and even high court supremo Carl Madsen. They
had all refused to help him, and were consequently in
cahoots with the doctors—and with the newspapers
which had never wanted—or dared—to relate the true
story about the conspiracy against him, Skov. And it
wasn’t as though he hadn’t tried to work up interest in
his case! He’d done everything! He produced letters from
Krag, Hurwitz, Bomholt, Ekstrabladet, Aksel Larsen, Vil-
lars Lunn, the chief of Gentofte police, the Lord Cham-
berlain’s office—all very similar sounding letters which all
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/8/2014, SPi
94 n Dan Turèll
regretted they were unable to do anything for him. He was
of the opinion I ought to write an article about him—if
I were really interested in some good stuff which—so he
said—‘could make my name’. (He carried on sending me
letters and documents about the case for a long, long time
after . . . )
; We managed to tear Skov and Willadsen apart and
continued on our way to the doctor—an extremely
brusque elderly man, straight-backed, tough and grizzled,
‘a southern gentleman’ they would have called him in an
American movie. ‘All a waste of time’, the doctor said to
Willadsen. ‘Waste of time, man . . . You know the drill . . .
You’ve tried it four or five times before . . . Useless’, said
the doctor. And to me, ‘Young man, you’re wasting
your time too over all this . . . But if he insists on being
admitted . . . I am not entitled to deny him, but I tell you
again: it’s a waste of time, it is a waste of time . . . ’
So we got the referral chitty and took a tram down to
Rigshospitalet—a tram I hadn’t ridden since we went to
the international against Sweden when I was in second
grade at school, and had to queue for six hours with a
packed lunch in high spirits and with placards saying
things like ‘Come on Jens Peter, make them sore / you
have beaten Swedes before’, and I lost myself in a fog of
memories on the tram . . . We smoked cigarettes that day,
and Hasse, he went and broke a tram window with his
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/8/2014, SPi
Willadsen n 95
elbow, oh man . . . My childhood . . . Tickets punched, off
we get and it’s straight into Rigshospitalet, through the
entrance and down the long corridors where Willadsen,
totally at home, finds the right ward in a jiffy and is met by
a doctor he knew from ‘last time’ . . . And it was the same
old story: ‘Waste of time . . . You know as well as I do . . . ’
and so forth, until finally they resigned themselves to
admitting him, and Willadsen—very small, grey, and
thin—waved goodbye to us from the doorway with a
nurse at his side shaking her head. The last glimpse
of him there, waving with a Chaplinesque melancholy
(if Chaplin had happened to be Slav), waving and waving,
so little and worn and disappearing into the big white
hospital corridor . . .
4
Kirsten and I moved to Vangede only a couple of weeks
later, when Bassan—not unexpectedly—threw us out of his
house because of an article I had written about his specula-
tions. Every so often we sent a letter and some tobacco to
Willadsen, and every so often got a letter telling us things
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