Copenhagen Tales
Page 9
were on the mend—he would soon be out and find some
work and ‘get everything back in shape a bit’. Autumn
set in, and it was late, dark autumn when Willadsen came
out and moved back into Bagsvaerdvej 65, into the same
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96 n Dan Turèll
room on the same second floor where now not one person
was left of the original occupants he had known.
He found a job, and a pretty fortunate job. It was in a
lab which worked for Brüel & Kjaer, qualified technician’s
work which he turned out to be good at—being half- or
three-quarters trained as a laboratory worker, as it tran-
spired. They were pleased with him. He drank less, man-
aged to pay some bills, got stuff back out of pawn. He
worked in the daytime, wrote his treatises in the evening,
and got up early every Sunday morning to see the birds
migrating.
Once in a while he rode out to Vangede on an old
moped, a recent acquisition, and would spend the evening
sitting and chatting, and seemed calm enough, although
his hands still shook. On such evenings he showed—in
brief, nervous flashes—what we had previously guessed at
through the alcoholic haze: that he knew an awful lot, that
he was well up on the most diverse subjects. You’d be
sitting listening to the radio, a jazz record which chanced
to be playing, and all of a sudden Willadsen would start
talking about what an incredible pianist Art Tatum was—
all of a sudden he’d be sitting there talking about Art
Tatum’s piano technique as though all he had ever done
was hang around digging Tatum. Almost no matter
what the topic of conversation, he would modestly put in
‘as you probably know’ and then go on in his mild and
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Willadsen n 97
unassuming fashion (yet tough and stubborn somehow,
enough at any rate for you to sense that once he must have
been strong and tough and stubborn)—and then go on to
say something scientific in a matter-of-fact way which no
one, obviously, had a clue about, but which for each of us
clearly breathed knowledge.
He would all of a sudden produce a treatise he’d had
printed ten years back—a treatise about why the cuckoo
was called what it was called in all the languages of the
world, and what the name meant in the folklore of the
various languages. He spoke or read many languages, or
snatches of them. He could talk anatomy for hours on end,
and had his own particular anatomical theories whose
points I didn’t understand, but which he planned to
work out in more detail once everything was back in
shape again and he had time to acquaint himself with
some of the literature in the field which he hadn’t yet
read or been in a position to buy.
He began to buy his books back from the second hand
book shops. He acquired more and more French and
German books about the King of Birds, fat volumes
about ‘limno-ecological changes’ (not many used the
expression ‘ecology’ in everyday conversation then, and
I heard it first on his lips), books on anatomy—weighty
tomes with graphs and plates and diagrams. He worked on
his book about Rex regulus, and he could show you several
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98 n Dan Turèll
hundred closely written pages, typewritten and in
pencil, with drawings, photos, and countless notes in the
margin . . . Many years’ work, absolutely fascinating even to
those still unable to distinguish between a Rex regulus and a
sparrow . . . He was paying off his debts and ‘sorting things
out’, or starting to anyway.
Then something or other happened, and I don’t know
what and was never told. Perhaps there was nothing that
‘happened’, as such . . . Perhaps nothing happened, and
the doctors and hospital staff were right: perhaps that’s
just how it was. Perhaps that’s just how it was for Svend
Willadsen Nielsen, there in his little dark room, between
forty and fifty years old, still so helplessly in love with his
divorced wife whom he never saw . . . Perhaps that was just
how it was, that he had to, he was doomed to start drinking
again. All of a sudden the weird alcoholic glow was back
again, like a blue mist before his eyes and all round his
body, a tent he lived in, a remoteness separating him from
all others . . . and all of a sudden he would again shakily get
up from his chair and say: ‘Excuse me . . . do you mind if
I pass out?’ in a pathetic, almost self-effacingly polite voice
(as though he was sorry to interrupt some fantastic per-
formance . . . ) before next moment collapsing on the floor
in a coma. And you would wonder how come, seeing he
had been there several hours and not drinking—until you
found an empty bottle or two behind the toilet, between
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Willadsen n 99
the toilet and the wall, hidden behind the pipe. So he must
have grabbed the booze out of his coat in the hallway and
taken it out to the john, discreetly, perhaps feeling vaguely
guilty . . .
5
Things got worse again. It was the same routine we had
seen once before, and we did what we could, and we
couldn’t do much. At any rate it wasn’t enough, and
maybe nothing would have been. Kirsten was pregnant,
we weren’t getting on very well at the time, and in reality
didn’t want the child. Kirsten stopped at home, pregnant
and on edge, at times crazy as hell, and I was working in a
bloody laundry—a ten-hour shift in piss-awful heat,
steaming hot premises that melted the brains out of you
and boiled up your thoughts, and I was so fucking frus-
trated with that job and all the hours boiling away . . . Oh,
I was a child. And Peter and Jeanette were stuck out in
Odder, in more or less the same situation, and in one of his
letters from Odder (Peter was constantly writing letters
then, endless letters ten or twelve pages long which always
made you very happy, for they were enormously liberating
and said so much about what you weren’t able to say
yourself, but could always see so well as soon as it was
said . . . ) Peter and Jeanette were stuck in Odder and all the
same never so very far away, and it was in one of those
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letters that Peter wrote: ‘If I wrote novels I would write
Willadsen, the novel . . . Willadsen is you and me, aban-
doned and alone . . . It sounds precisely as sentimental as
it is . . . ’
And I thought about ‘Willadsen, the novel’, an old
story—the Outsider’s story, or the Loser’s story, or the
Saint’s, the reluctant Saint’s story. The story of a person
who has totally given up on himself, and therefore has
; such sad, such distant eyes—a person who is as infinitely
and hopelessly, as unostentatiously lost as anyone can
ever be.
Things followed their course. Willadsen’s visits became
fewer and fewer, once more his work dropped out of the
equation, his books and binoculars and equipment van-
ished from his room, his correspondence became irregu-
lar, his handwriting more illegible, and he resorted to fruit
wine again. There came more and more blank stretches,
black hours, and you began more and more clearly to sense
how his consciousness was screwed together, and why
there were those kinds of big lacunae which were nothing
but empty—quite simply those periods when he drank all
day, or had drunk all day, and had no idea what else had
happened. Black zones—like when in the middle of a
political discussion it turned out that Willadsen knew
nothing of the Soviet occupation of Hungary in 1956,
which I myself vaguely remembered as something the
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Willadsen n 101
grown-ups talked about over the papers at the breakfast
table while you eyed front page pictures of tanks rolling by.
Willadsen knew nothing about Hungary 1956 and what
came after, because that was one of the empty stretches—
just one of them, and just one way of discovering them.
Black zones, and more were on the way.
He slowly faded away, vanished from sight. The
last time I saw him I drove him home late at night on a
motorbike in a snowstorm—the winter of 1966. The road
was devilish slippery, and Willadsen was enormously
drunk and had become almost disjointed, the way he
(and other alcoholics I’ve known) sometimes became
when a bout had reached its climax—as though his legs
couldn’t really carry him anymore, as though they folded
under his negligible weight, as though his arms couldn’t
even manage the simple movement of reaching out, as
though his hand would inevitably break if you put any-
thing in it. He was already in that state, numbly rubber-
ized, when he crawled onto the bike, and he flopped on
and off it and overturned it twice on the way down
Nybrovej, in the snowstorm, until I parked up the bike
and practically carried him home, shoved him onwards
through the snow, yard by yard. For he was desperate to
get home—there were too many people in our house, too
many he didn’t know, and the radio stood ready and
waiting to play the eternal dance music he always listened
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102 n Dan Turèll
to, the old radio stood ready for yet another night with the
bottle in the little dark room with the bed, the desk, the
chair and the chest of drawers with the last and latest birds’
egg collection, still intact . . .
He moved to the provinces and infrequent letters fol-
lowed from first one and then another town. For a while
there was something in Nykøbing Falster (I think), some-
thing vague about a girl there, a new note in the letters
(Peter wrote: ‘Willadsen is you and me . . . any one of us
without the others’)—but nothing came of it. Something
got in the way, or maybe something happened quite dif-
ferent to what we imagined, or maybe it was just Will-
adsen, who for a while thought something was happening,
or tried to convince himself it was.
In any case, shortly after this the letters petered out
entirely. And a while later, a couple of years after that and
in a roundabout way, we got to hear that Willadsen had
died.
6
Willadsen left nothing. Nothing, neither children nor fam-
ily, not even a will, and no one knows where his things are
gone. Not so much the bed or the chest of drawers with the
cracked birds’ eggs, not so much the German doctoral
thesis on anatomy or the old radio or his greasy coat,
those are not the things I’m thinking of—they’ve no
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Willadsen n 103
doubt wandered their sensible way to a second-hand shop
of an appropriate kind. But the 300-400 sheets with the
carefully handwritten and typed notes about Rex regulus
or the almost equally thick manuscript with the countless
maps and measurements of Gundsømagle Lake over
twenty years—no one knows what’s become of them.
Someone must have them, or have been given them,
just as Peter was given his collected Shakespeare when they
left, or as I was given his Bible the first time we got him
admitted—a large, beautiful, compact old bible which
I don’t have any more either . . . I was forced to tear it up
one winter’s night five or six years later, when a paranoid
dopehead we had taken under our roof turned out to suffer
from some sort of persecution complex regarding bibles,
and I had to tear all the pages out, one by one, to calm him
down (and I saw how this simple tangible action really did
liberate him . . . as though it really helped him to see how
something which had plagued and tormented him, some-
thing which had so evidently oppressed and dominated
him, could in that way, simply and symbolically, be ripped
to shreds, bit by bit . . . ) The handsome empty brown
leather binding was all that was left, and I later sent it to
the artist Henrik Have as a postcard, as a ‘Bible of Zen
Buddhism’, a friendly joke, and Henrik has very probably
still got it, for Henrik likes his possessions . . . But that was how Willadsen’s Bible disappeared, and that is most likely
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what has happened to most of his stuff, or something
much the same.
The last solid reminder of Willadsen was his old type-
writer, a big heavy indestructible one which I bought off
him back in 1965 for 30 kroner and a bagful of beers, and
used for at least five years and wrote my first books on, and
only last year gave away to my girlfriend’s sister (and now
she’s no longer ‘my girlfriend’ either . . . )
And I believe the way these things ended is how the
whole of Willadsen’s life had been. The way these things
ended their perambulations is I think possibly how
‘Willadsen, the novel’ might have looked. The way his
things kept wandering back and forth, and he himself
followed his own routines or his one routine, perfectly
resigned to whether they were with him or not pro
tem—and all the time was able to see his own situation,
see his own movements very clearly and concretely, see his
own movements mirrored in these things wandering off to
the pawn shop or getting sold, out for ever or back again
into the room, his little dark room on the second floor, or
perhaps the unknown room where he ended his journey,
perhaps still with fragments of his life’s permanently mov-
able possessions around
him . . . The unknown room in
some provincial town or other, the room in some hospital
or other or in an institution, where Svend Willadsen
Nielsen left for ever Gundsømagle Lake and that King of
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Willadsen n 105
Birds he must have loved with such a great and beautiful
and strange love . . . That room with that bed with the
white sheets where Svend Willadsen Nielsen, the thin
grey man with the sunken eyes finally died quite unobtru-
sively, at last ended his cycle and became invisible . . .
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Eggnog
Tove Ditlevsen
The child was standing on the back stairs with both hands
on the banister, leaning over, stock-still, listening to the
yard door opening down below and the far-off footsteps
she convinced herself were her mother’s right up until
the moment they halted a couple of floors beneath and
the slamming of a door crushed her hopes once more.
Now Hansen from the third floor was back home, and
Ketty from the soda works, and Fireman Henriksen’s wife
who worked at the Carlsberg factory together with Mum
and who surely would come up to tell her if anything had
happened. But perhaps she didn’t have the heart to, or
simply didn’t know. Nearly every day the ambulance drove
off tooting with someone or other—and it was, after all,
such an enormous factory.
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108 n Tove Ditlevsen
In her agitation she trod down on her toes, hard, and
held the position a long time to explain away her tears
which tumbled down in great drops all the way to the
basement. The same thing happened every day for shorter
or longer periods of time, depending on how much the
mother was delayed. The child was always there at her
listening post a little while before the mother could reason-
ably be expected back.
Her still, white face shone dully like a dimmed lamp in
the darkness. From behind the open kitchen door came
the soft bubbling of potatoes on the boil. In the small living
room the table was laid for two. The flowering begonia had
been moved to the centre of the oilcloth, which always
made her mother smile her habitual wan smile, for potted