plants belong in the window not on the dinner table.
Just as the child released her fierce grip on the banister
and sat down on the topmost step despairing of everything
and crying out loud now as if to persuade fate she had been
tried hard enough and deserved a little bit of good luck,
she heard the street gate opening, and the faintest indefin-
able little sound, perhaps only the scraping of a shoe on the
yard cobbles, which made her jump up and run into the
kitchen and switch on the light and turn off the potatoes,
in a fever of indescribable exultation: Mum’s coming! Now
she would be putting her bike in the shed, now running up
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/8/2014, SPi
Eggnog n 109
the stairs, nearer and nearer. The world filled with light,
her heart with peace.
She was standing with her back to the door, her hair
down her cheeks like two black wings, engaged in tipping
the steaming potatoes into a soup plate when the mother
came in and banged the door shut behind her.
‘Brr—its freezing out there.’
‘I’ve fried the meatballs, Mum, they just need warming up.’
Her voice was as husky as a boy’s in early puberty. She
was almost as tall as her mother, but lean as a sick dog
from having to look after herself all day long. Her face was
small and perpetually worried, with a pointed chin and
grey unhealthy skin. Only the eyes shone, large and deep
blue and serious in the small ugly face.
The mother made no comment on the mention of
meatballs. In fact not another word passed between them
before they sat down at the table, at which point the
mother with a little wan smile on her painted face set the
all-important begonia back in the window. As she sat back
down she chanced to bump against the naked bulb which
swung to and fro a while, sending shadows up and down
the faded wallpaper.
She ate quickly, with two deep furrows between her
thin plucked eyebrows. Her peroxide hair had roots of
some dark indeterminate colour without sparkle, like her
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110 n Tove Ditlevsen
tired near-sighted eyes. The days had been so much alike
in the past dozen years that she had hardly noticed the
changes wrought in her face. Red for cheeks and lips, a
dirty powder puff passed across it, and a little black brush
to rub over the sparse eyelashes: in front of a chipped
mirror in the grey morning light time seemed to have
stood still, each day identical to the one before. If the
rouge ran out she could buy another box, and there was
powder enough in the world to dust that ravaged face
white for all eternity, and there were enough thirsty men
in the world to ensure that the stream of empty bottles in
need of rinsing kept flowing down the remorseless con-
veyor belt for far longer than her nimble hands would be
able to grab them and rinse them clean. It could be called a
sad life, but when she complained it was less because she
acknowledged its bleakness than simply out of habit, and
because after all it was good form to complain about
everything. In its own way it was a secure life, because of
all the powder, and all those thirsty men, and sometimes
it was good because of the child to whom she had so little
to say.
All the time she was eating the child’s gaze never left
her face. The mother would be gone in the morning before
she was awake, and it was only in these precious hours
before bed they could be together.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/8/2014, SPi
Eggnog n 111
The child didn’t remember the father. A sailor is always
a visitor in his own home, and in any case she had been
barely three when she last saw him. Inevitably she har-
boured the same hatred for him as the mother. Perhaps
that too was a matter of convention and habit: ‘The lousy
swine’, said the women at Carlsberg and on the staircase,
and ‘He’d never dare show his face here again’, said the
mother, to go one better. But the child’s hatred was vaguer
and arose from the protective tenderness she felt for the
mother.
When they had finished the meal she cleared the table
and rinsed the plates. She always left the full washing up
until the following day when she got back from school.
Her mother’s purse lay open on the kitchen table, a few
coins spilling from it. The child’s relationship to money
was a mixture of awe and resentment. For the sake of this
money the mother was gone all day long; it was to blame
for the endless hours of work, fear, and loneliness. Each
coin taxed the mother’s strength a little more, and her
eyesight too, ruined as it was by constantly having to hold
bottles up to the light to check they were clean.
She hadn’t been so very old when she asked the mother
why she went to work when it was after all so much nicer
to be at home. So then she was told it was to be able to buy
food and clothes for them both, and on the Sunday the
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112 n Tove Ditlevsen
child had asked anxiously if they would be getting any
food that day, seeing the mother was home.
She wondered a moment why the purse had been
thrown down so carelessly on the kitchen table, and quickly
went to pick it up. She was putting the coins back inside
when suddenly she became aware that the mother was
standing behind her. It made her start, because she hadn’t
heard her coming. In her confusion she let go of the purse
and brushed her hair away from her face with her forearm
before meeting the mother’s hostile and suspicious gaze.
She flushed a deep burning red and stared back wide-eyed
and horrified, a look the mother returned with anger, then
defiance and uncertainty, until a glimmer of shame passed
across her face, and no longer able to bear that look of terror
she turned away with a shrug of mingled embarrassment
and irritation and went back into the living room.
The child remained standing mute and motionless next
to the purse and the dirty plates. Her breath came fast as
her thoughts tumbled over each other behind the pale hot
forehead: She thought I wanted to steal, she thought I was
taking money from her—maybe she thinks I’ve done it
before—as though I don’t cost her enough already—if only
her purse hadn’t been there—if only everything would go
back to normal—dear God, let everything be like it was
before—let it never have happened.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/8/2014, SPi
Eggnog n 113
‘What are you standing gawping at out there?’ shouted
the mother from inside the living room. Her voice was
irritable and hostile like her eyes had been, with a brittle
note of injury to guard against the self-reproach and
tend
erness she had never learned to express. She got out
a work bag from the sideboard behind the table and after a
while arranged a cloth over the bright bulb before sitting
down in front of the stained tablecloth and pulling a
stocking full of holes from the bag, after which she fell to
gazing at it as though baffled as to how a single stocking
can have so many holes. She listened out anxiously for any
sounds from the kitchen, with her coarse painted mouth
set in a pained expression. She could not acknowledge that
anything special had happened, but an unease grew in her
heart, as when an animal lifts its head on scenting danger
and cocks an ear in that direction.
Then she called the child by name in a queer soft voice
which sounded strange even to her own ears. The child
came in and sat down opposite her with a vague glimmer
of hope on her thin little face, not unlike when she stood
on the back stairs in the dark trying to convince herself
that the steps she heard were the mother’s, right up until a
door banged shut somewhere else in the building.
‘Now she has to say something’, she thought to herself.
The silence in the room was unbearable. She glanced
nervously at the clock ticking heavily as though the noise it
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114 n Tove Ditlevsen
made could hold back the unknown redeeming words
hovering on her mother’s lips. Obscurely, the child felt
these strange words never uttered before had to come from
the mother; not because it was she, the mother, who was in
the wrong, but because she couldn’t manage it herself. She
couldn’t say: I wasn’t stealing, partly because that would
make the thing so tangible and never afterwards could you
pretend that nothing had happened, and partly because
those were the very words a thief would use—no one could
prevent her using the same words if she really had stolen,
or had wondered about it. It was this utterly new as yet
unspoken truth which stopped her short and opened up
terrifying visions of future injustices which could ever after
be done to her.
Open-mouthed, she hung on the mother’s lips. Those
lips far too red and coarse which had seldom quivered with
tears, and whose lines had never been softened by tender
and loving words. A factory girl’s hastily kissed and for-
gotten mouth.
Still gazing at the stocking as though she has forgotten
what she is supposed to be doing with it, she feels the
child’s silence as a painful shattering of the established
order of things. She doesn’t quite know what has hap-
pened, but the child’s distress reaches her by unfamiliar,
secret paths. Helplessly, thoughts cross each other in her
brain. She doesn’t know we can always help the one we
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/8/2014, SPi
Eggnog n 115
love. She lifts her eyes and meets those of the child. And
her own eyes are beseeching and scared in the way of a
child whose clumsiness has toppled a precious vase to the
floor. Then she clears her throat and says softly:
‘You could fix yourself an eggnog.’
And she sees the pale pointed face relax and break into
a smile as the child leaps up and runs into the kitchen with
a bounce in her long straight legs:
‘I’ll make one for you as well, Mum, I’ll make one for
each of us.’
Then she calmly goes to work on the stocking.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/8/2014, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/8/2014, SPi
The Maids
Søren Kierkegaard
When summer comes and the maidservants set out for the
Deer Park, it is generally very little pleasure to behold. They
go there only once a year, and therefore want to derive
maximum enjoyment from it. They don hat and shawl
and comport themselves dreadfully in every possible way.
The merrymaking is wild, ugly, lascivious. No, then I far
prefer Frederiksberg Gardens. They go there on a Sunday
afternoon, and so do I. Here all is decorous and decent, the
merrymaking itself more calm and dignified. Indeed, any
member of the masculine gender who has no feeling for
maids loses more hereby than they do. The mighty army
of maidservants is really the handsomest militia we have
in Denmark. Were I king, I know what I would do—I
wouldn’t trouble to inspect the troops. Were I one of the
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/8/2014, SPi
118 n Søren Kierkegaard
32 members of the municipal council I would at once insist
on forming a welfare committee, which, with insight,
advice, admonition, suitable rewards, in every way endea-
voured to encourage maidservants to attend to their appear-
ance with good taste and care. Why squander beauty, why
should it go unnoticed through life, let it at least show itself
once a week in the best possible light! But above all, taste
and restraint. A servant should not look like a lady, in this
I agree with the esteemed paper Politivennen, though the
reasons they give are quite fallacious. If one dared to pro-
mote a desirable improvement within the class of maidser-
vants, would this not in turn have a beneficial effect on the
daughters in our homes? Or is it too bold of me to imagine a
future for Denmark which in truth might be called won-
drous? Would that I were granted the joy of being alive in
that golden year, then in good conscience I could pass all
day walking about the streets and lanes and delight in all
that meets the eye. How broad and bold my thoughts do
swarm, how patriotic! But that must be because I am out
here in Frederiksberg, where the maidservants come every
Sunday, and so do I.
First come the peasant girls, hand in hand with their
sweethearts, or in a different pattern, the girls all hand in
hand in front, all the lads behind, or in another pattern,
two girls and one lad. This company provides the picture
frame, they like to stand or sit by the trees in the large
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/8/2014, SPi
The Maids n 119
square in front of the pavilion. They are all hale and
hearty, their colours clashing only a little too strongly, in
their skin as well as their clothes. Next pass the girls from
Jutland and Funen. Tall, straight-backed, rather too stur-
dily built, their attire somewhat mismatched. The commit-
tee would have much work to do here. Never lacking is the
odd representative of the Bornholm division: capable
cooks, but it is not advisable to get close to them, whether
in the kitchen or in Frederiksberg, their manner being
rather haughtily forbidding. Their presence is therefore
by contrast not without effect, I would not be without
them out here, but rarely associate with them.—Ah, but
now here come the troops to quicken the heart: our very
own girls from Nyboder. Not as tall—buxom, fin
e skinned,
gay, happy, vivacious, talkative, a little flirtatious, and
above all bare-headed. Their attire aspires to that of a
fine lady, with just two notable distinctions, they do not
wear a shawl but a scarf, and no hat, at most a cocky little
cap, but by preference they go bare-headed . . . Well, hello
there Marie; fancy seeing you out here! It’s been a long
time since we last met. Are you still at the privy council-
lor’s?—‘Oh yes’—That must be an excellent position?—
‘Yes’—But you are here all on your own, no one to walk
with . . . no sweetheart, did he not have time today, or are
you expecting him? What, not engaged? That’s impossible.
The most beautiful girl in all Copenhagen, a girl in
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120 n Søren Kierkegaard
service with a privy councillor, a girl who is an ornament
and a model for all maidservants, a girl who knows how to
make herself so pretty and so . . . elegant. What a delightful
kerchief you have in your hand, made of the finest cam-
bric . . . and what’s this I see, with embroidered edges too,
I know it must have cost 10 marks . . . Many a highborn
lady does not possess the like . . . French gloves . . . a silk
umbrella . . . and a girl of that sort not engaged . . . It’s
truly an absurdity. If I am not much mistaken Jens was
rather taken with you, you know Jens, the broker’s Jens,
the one from the second floor . . . See, I hit the mark . . .
Why did you two not become engaged, Jens was a good-
looking fellow, he had a good position, perhaps with the
broker’s influence he might have made it to policeman or
fireman in the course of time, it wouldn’t have been such a
poor match . . . It must surely be your own fault, you must
have been too hard on him . . . ‘No! But I got to hear Jens
had been engaged once before to another girl, and they say
he didn’t treat her very nicely . . . ’ What’s this I hear, who
would have thought Jens such a bad chap . . . Yes, those
hussars . . . those hussar lads, they can’t be trusted . . . You
did absolutely right, a girl like you is really too good to
be thrown away on just anyone . . . You are bound to make a
better match, I vouch for that . . . Now how is Miss Juliane
doing? I haven’t seen her for a long while. My pretty Marie
can surely oblige me with some information . . . Just because
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