Copenhagen Tales
Page 20
I? It’s some other man’s wife who died and walks onto the
stage—what’s that got to do with me? I want to go!’
During this conversation the maid had been coming
and going, and never having been to the theatre she gained
an even more colourful notion of plays in general, and
‘Svend Dyring’s House’ in particular, than any other mor-
tal from the provinces. The mysteriously bloodcurdling
and infinitely enticing prospect increased, if that were
possible, when Madame Sass returned home accompanied
by Gitte and Avromche, while the sons were gathered to
receive her as if after a journey. As she came through the
door she called out proudly: ‘Did I faint? Did I feel unwell?
Tell them Gitte! Not once did I cry—what was there to cry
about? Though just for the sake of appearances I dried my
eyes and blew my nose when the others wept. Ah, but it
was wonderful—though to be in love the way she is—well,
I suppose they were in those days—but that bit about the
roast apple I didn’t get . . . ’*
‘Roast apple?’ exclaimed Avromche.
* Danish riste means both ‘to roast’ and ‘to engrave/carve’. The hero engraves magic runes on an apple intended for his beloved.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
236 n Meïr Goldschmidt
‘Well, mahnschten roasted, mahnschten toasted! Does
he not bake an apple? What happened to it? That never
came out . . . ’
From her sons’ awkward expressions and Avromche’s
twitching face she understood she had said something silly;
but she had no idea what it was, and her dignity as a mother
did not permit any dwelling on the fact that when she was
with her children she had her intelligence enriched at the
cost of her self-esteem, so the discussion moved on to other
things, the play, the costumes, the knights, the poor little
children, the wicked Guldborg, and the rest of it.
To the maid it seemed worth giving years of one’s life
to see something so wonderful; but how could that possi-
bly happen, how would she ever get in there? Just because
Avromche Natttergal had presented her with a Christmas
cake didn’t mean he owed her a ticket to the theatre. True,
she was in possession of his perilous secret, but she herself
was unaware of it; she had not heard or at least not
understood the deep significance of the difference between
Suss and Sass, and even had she known the secret she
would hardly have thought of using it, even to obtain a
ticket. But in Avromche the sense of his debt was not only
undiminished but had multiplied; mixed with the silver of
gratitude was the gold of love, though he did not know it,
mahnschten: never mind.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
Nightingale n 237
and so some nights later when again he was fortunate
enough to be alone with her as she lighted his way out,
he said: ‘Do you know what engraving is? Do you know
what it is to engrave runes? To riste them?’
‘Yes, it is to carve them.’
‘Not roast them, is it? Then you too can go and see the
play. Would you like a ticket?’
‘Oh, Mr. Nattergal!’ she cried, nearly dropping the
candle when she instinctively wanted to clap her hands.’
‘In actual fact my name is not really Nattergal. It’s
Pollok. But never mind. If you want to say Nattergal
then say Nattergal, though in fact it’s Pollok.’
Doubtless without realizing this represented a change
for the better, the girl said: ‘Forgive me! Oh Mr. Pollok,
how very good you are!’
And she said this with such fervour in her voice and
with such a look that had Avromche been a young man
and not developed according to the portrait his father once
painted of him, there might well have been cause to believe
that in her too the silver of gratitude was mixed with a
weightier metal. Avromche had no eyes for himself but
only for her, and with the words ‘We’ll talk about it further!’
he hurried away happily.
The matter proved fraught with difficulties, but the
very difficulties delighted Avromche more than can be
imagined. There was much to plan, more talks to be had.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
238 n Meïr Goldschmidt
Emilie could only come out every other Sunday, and she
barely knew where the theatre was, let alone the box. It
therefore fell out quite naturally that Avromche offered to
fetch her, to wait for her by the front door, and accompany
her both to and from the theatre. Her own mother, had she
lived, could not have wished her a more innocent escort—
and for Avromche it was a belated yet genuine assignation
with all its attendant secrecy and longing—he too was at
last young and happy!
Emilie had dressed as though for a ball, in a low-cut
dress made of fine lawn, though with a little silk necker-
chief knotted chastely about her neck. She looked so
pretty, almost lady-like, that Avromche glowed with
pride when he showed her into his box; but so that she
should not be too much in the public eye he placed her on
the second row bench whilst he remained standing behind
the third, bending down to her to explain the action and
preparing her for what was to come. Out of politeness or
gratitude for his attention, however wearisome, she turned
round to him as often as possible, and this movement
frequently caused the little silk neckerchief to slip to one
side, without her noticing in the heat of the moment.
Avromche, who felt that thereby something was exposed
to his eyes that for decency’s sake they had no business to
see, constantly and conscientiously and very gently set the
neckerchief back in its rightful place. This manoeuvre
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
Nightingale n 239
very soon came to the attention of a young person, or
gentleman, who was sitting in the neighbouring box right
beside Emilie and whose eyes were not as conscientious as
Avromche’s. At first he thought it was a jealous elderly
husband who had brought his young wife to the theatre;
but soon he recognized Nattergal, and the matter struck
him as incomprehensible, not to say piquant; she appeared
to be a pretty little flirt of a girl whom the ticket tout kept
covering up in uncalled-for fashion. When the curtain fell
he struck up a conversation with Emilie, and not wanting
to reveal that she did not belong among all these nice
people who looked like a grand company of friends and
acquaintances, she answered in a friendly and grateful,
even cordial fashion, which in turn was thoroughly mis-
understood by the young person. Avromche could not
forbid her to answer, no more than he could give her
advice or a signal, and besides he suffered all the agony
of jealousy over what the young person might be talking
ab
out with her, or gazing at. Fervently he wished for the
strength of ten men and the courage to strangle him, or at
the very least to throw him out.
The curtain rose again, and as the play progressed it
touched Avromche’s heart in a way that he had never before
suspected. Deep within him, a painful, abruptly awoken
poetic sensibility revealed to him the fact that down there
thrived, stirred, a sensitive and expansive spirit or mood—
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
240 n Meïr Goldschmidt
we call it romantic—which he had long grown out of, or
rather in which rightly or wrongly his soul had been denied
the right to share, and to which in the eyes of the world
Emilie and even the revolting young person belonged. He
felt this with inexpressible anguish, as though present at a
death sentence pronounced upon him, or at his own funeral.
Never had the stage acted upon him as it did now.
All the small pictures turned to the wall *
The knights and ladies and young lovers all suddenly
recalled his father’s words and said to him: ‘Why will
you be hissed off stage? Because of your hook nose and
your crooked mouth and your crooked legs!’ And how
they described him was how he saw himself, abhorrent and
alien in their midst, miserably repudiated. And yet the very
music he had scorned because it was not like ‘La Muette’
now possessed his whole being, lent him an artificial
youth, frolicked with him as though he belonged, though
he did not belong. Why should he not be happy? He could
marry the girl—yes, he would propose to the tanner’s
daughter! The community would repudiate him, but in
his soul he would not cease to be a Jew—and so what!
What had he ever had in his life other than clammy fog?
* A haunting line from the ancient ballad Agnete og Havmanden (Agnete and the Merman): all the holy images shun Agnete’s merman lover when he appears in church.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
Nightingale n 241
Whom did he have to thank for anything? If she who as a
blessing or a curse was after all the sole patch of sunlight in
his existence were to be torn from him now—the very
thought drove him to distraction. He would not need to
remain in Copenhagen, he could move to the country and
live with her in some suitable quiet out-of-the-way place.
He was after all a man of substance—what was that wind-
bag compared to him? He could be happy, he would be!
His resolution had only to be spoken to be irrevocable—
and then the curtain fell.
Where was reality—in the box with the girl and the
tenderness and jealousy she aroused, and where though
now so close to her he could not find one right word to say
to her but with disgust heard his own voice saying ‘Is it
good? Are you enjoying yourself? Do you like it?’ when all
he wanted to say was ‘Speak to no one! Look at no one! Be
my wife!’—or was it on the stage, where again the curtain
had risen, and again he suffered from old age and again
became young, and once more renewed his resolution?
The storm had truly engulfed Avromche Pollok! Ah, all
ye sympathetic hearts, you would have wept to see inside
him, and laughed to look at him.
After the play finished, bewildered by so many unfa-
miliar emotions, he guided Emilie downstairs as though
into a safe harbour from tumultuous seas. But the young
person stuck close to them, and in the dense throng on the
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
242 n Meïr Goldschmidt
last flight of stairs into the foyer where it clashed with
those streaming out of the rear stalls, that same person cut
in between Avromche and Emilie and offered her his arm.
Avromche uttered a shriek, a cry whose content can only
be explained by all he had so recently experienced in the
depths of his soul, though no doubt also he hoped to gain
sympathy thereby, proclaim his rights. He shouted: ‘Stop!
Help! He’s taking my wife!’ The young person slipped
away like an eel, but at the same instant several hundred
pairs of eyes in the foyer were now riveted on the familiar
figure of Pollok, or Avromche Nattergal: in that fleeting
second of silence he became a little story to take back to
the supper table, or elsewhere.
Moments later they were outside. Avromche kept silent
as they crossed the square: the moment had come, he had
to speak, and yet there were still so many people about; he
wanted to reach Vingårdsstræde and there obtain her
signature to the document to which he had already set
his seal. At the moment he chose to do so, and turned right
round to face her, he saw that she was crying.
‘What is it?’ he exclaimed, startled, ‘Why are you
crying?’
‘Because you shamed me by calling me your wife.’
He failed to understand that any young girl publicly
and against her will represented as married might feel
humiliated, and that the small-town girl felt keenly she
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
Nightingale n 243
had been dragged into a minor scandal. He took it instead
as a declaration that she considered marriage to him, the
Jew, to be something shameful, and all at once, if not
cured, he was at least pitched right out of his private
heaven. He said not another word, not even goodnight
when they parted.
He did not wish her goodnight, nor did he wish good
evening to the carpenter’s journeyman who, as was his
wont, appeared on the stairs and handed him the little
lamp—for according to ancient and strict custom no one
was permitted a naked light in or near the workshop, and a
journeyman had to be lodged up there as night watchman.
The moment Avromche was in his room he gave vent to
his feelings:
‘Ausgefallene Schtrof’! I must have sinned in my
mother’s womb to end up not only meschugge but mesch-
ugge metorf! To go and shout it out to all and sundry! Where
was my seichel? Have I ever had any? Was I born blind, deaf
and crazy? Schema Jisroel! This will be the death of me! How
can a person carry on living after behaving like such a
verschwärzter idiot? How can he? Oy! Oy! Oy! They all
heard it, and they’ll hear even more! By tomorrow I’ll have
also fathered children all over town! And how can I prove
Ausgefallene Schtrof: a punishment or misfortune falling like a bolt from the blue; meschugge: mad; crazy; meschugge metorf: stark staring mad; seichel: reason; Schema Jisroel: Hear O Israel; verschwärzter idiot: damned idiot.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
244 n Meïr Goldschmidt
it’s lies and schkorum, when I lied too? Fetch her out and
have her say all over again . . . sau m’hrulle, und sau m’hrulle!
No, one m’hrulle is even worse than the other . . . If only
she’d been willing! But I was the only willing one, hramor
; that I am, posche Jisroel that I am! And I must own up to it?
I can’t own up to it!—Avromche, Avromche, one minute
has made you an unhappy man! Oy! Oy! Oy und Weh! ’
At this point something remarkable happened: he
could feel his unhappiness and still not truly fathom it;
something in his head came close to breaking every time
he tried to conceive and grasp the full extent of the trick
fate had played on him: how happiness could have led him
to compromise himself before both the public and his own
community, how happiness had turned to unhappiness
and mortification, until all that remained was the spectacle
he had made of himself, which moreover grew and grew.
His thoughts tore in a circle about the deception, sought
out its centre, but shrieked in pain before penetrating so
deep, and fled to the circumference again. All this did not
take place in silence; through the thin wall the journeyman
could hear him storming up and down, talking at the top
of his voice, moaning and wailing, and since on the stairs
he had already noticed Nattergal’s look of suffering, he
schkorum: untruth; sau m’hrulle und sau m’hrulle: ruined one way or the other; hramor: ass; posche Jisroel: insulter of Israel; Oy und Weh: woe is me.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
Nightingale n 245
went in to him. ‘Is something the matter, Mr. Polack?’ he
asked, as he stuck his head round the door.
Avromche clutched his head and replied: ‘Toothache—
yes, toothache! Dreadful!’
‘Is it a molar?’ the journeyman asked as he came closer.
‘A molar? It’s worse than a molar! It’s a schikse!’*
Avromche retorted, relieved to be able to unburden him-
self to another human being without giving himself away.
‘So it’s a canine?’
‘Well, I wouldn’t know. But I’m as bad as a dog myself,
and suffering like a dog, oh, oh!’
‘But where does it hurt?’ asked the journeyman as he
lifted the lamp up to Avromche’s face.
‘It’s gout. We get older. I’m an old horse, a great ass,
and like every other old ass I should be hauled out to
Amager and slaughtered. And they really will haul me
out—just you wait and see!’
‘Yes, you do need to have it out; but you won’t be able
to have it done before tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow! Would that tomorrow would never come!’