come to meet him?’
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
Nightingale n 257
‘I don’t know, Pollok. It must have been k’sof. I was just
walking down the street, and all at once his eyes were looking
right into my eyes! I had never seen him before. It was
something quite new. It was as though he’d been created
that very moment, and I was created that moment too.’
‘One walks straight past a creature like that—an officer!’
‘And did I not walk past? I made so much room for
him it was like I’d be swallowed up by the house walls.
I became nothing, I became air, and I got past.’
‘Well, past is past. And now it’s all past—no?’
‘No. One day when I happened to be sitting minding
my own business, he was standing in the street and looked
up. I thought I’d fall out of the window. I couldn’t help it.’
‘Ausgefallene Schtrof ’!’ cried Avromche with a bitterly
ironic play on words. ‘Now I see—so you did see him again
in the street?’
‘I saw him again in the street.’
‘And what did he say?’
‘Um Gottes Willen, Pollok! How could he have spoken
to me? I would have screamed! I would have died! Speak to
an officer there in the street! . . . I never saw him again.’
‘Well,’ said Avromche with a faint smile, ‘if you didn’t
speak to him, and haven’t seen him—’
k’sof: preordained; Um Gottes Willen: for God’s sake.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
258 n Meïr Goldschmidt
‘Pollok, I am going to tell you the truth, that’s why
I came. I didn’t speak to him, but I thought about him, and
then when I saw him there I could feel that he knew.’
‘And you say you didn’t look at him!’
‘I didn’t look at him.’
‘Schkorum!’ muttered Avromche, half turning to the
wall.
‘I didn’t look at him, and I stayed at home, and I never
went out on my own.’
‘Very good. That’s very good.’
‘But he wrote to me.’
‘He didn’t speak, but he wrote! What am I hearing,
Gitte? Why put hei before vof? Just tell me everything
straight out!’*
‘But I did tell you: he wrote to me!’
‘What did he write?’
‘He wrote—well, what do you write to a young girl? He
wanted to see me, he wanted to speak to me, he wished to
meet me.’
‘That’s how they write to all girls. And people pay no
heed.’
‘And people pay no heed. Pollok, that time you took
me and Mother to the theatre to see “Svend Dyring’s
House”, and the theatre people down there talked about
* schkorum: a lie; put hei before vof: beat about the bush.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
Nightingale n 259
runes, I understood what was meant by runes; but you
didn’t understand, Pollok.’
‘Sie wasz viel!’ Pollok muttered to himself, and went on
after a moment’s silence: ‘Runes. She runs after him in the
play.’
‘I didn’t run after him. How could I? How could I leave
Mother and my brothers?’
‘That’s very true. You’re a good girl, Gitte. You stayed
at home. So then it really was finally over, in emmes over?’
‘Then one Friday afternoon I got a letter from him
saying he was leaving on Sunday morning, and now he had
but one last wish, like a man facing death, to see me just
once, and it was for me to decide what time I wanted to
come on Saturday evening. And I could too, for that
evening Mother was going to the theatre, and my brothers
were not coming to the house. And he begged like a man
facing death.’
‘Runes!’ said Avromche. ‘That verschwärtzter writing!
The damned runes! The Lord curse whoever first invented
them. Omein! Well, so then did you go?’
‘No, because when I was about to write to decree the
time and place it was nacht, and Mother had lit the
Sabbath candles, and then no one would dare to write.’
Sie wasz viel: Fat lot she knows; emmes: truth; verschwärtzter: damned; Omein: Amen; nacht: Sabbath Eve.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
260 n Meïr Goldschmidt
‘And so you didn’t write, you really didn’t?’ asked
Pollok, though he found it perfectly natural.
‘I had the pen in my hand, but as I was setting it to
paper and for the first time in my life about to be mekhalle
schabbas, my father rose up in his burial clothes.’
‘Really?’
‘Really. And Saturday night when I was tempted to
write it was too late to write, and it was all over, and
I thanked God.’
‘When did this happen? How long ago was it?’
‘It was when you proposed to me the first time, twenty
years ago.’
‘Twenty years!’ cried Avromche, and sat bolt upright
in bed. ‘Gitte! In the name of God almighty! I was in love
with a Christian girl, and that wasn’t even twenty days ago!’
‘You, Pollok? Poor Avromche!’
‘Can you forgive me, Gitte? It was on account of her
I wanted to hang myself. I was crazy, stark raving mad, but
it’s true—that’s why I’m lying here! But it is all over now,
Gitte. Can you make allowances and forgive me?’
‘Poor Avromche, my husband before God! Let us
remember the dead and keep together until Bal Hamoves
comes.’
mekhalle schabbas: breaker of the Sabbath; Bal Hammoves: the Angel of Death.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
Nightingale n 261
Some time after this Avromche called at his old lodg-
ings in order to move a lot of things into the new residence
which had been made ready for him. He looked much as
he had in the time before the great events, only still paler,
but more agreeably pale. The journeyman looked in to
wish him goodbye, and very nearly voiced his private
impression that he looked like he had been whitewashed
inside, but was too embarrassed, and Avromche felt just as
awkward. But in the end Avromche took the bull by the
horns, and said:
‘Well, I was crazy, utterly crazy, and wanted to do
myself in, and you saved me and cut me down—and yet
I’m still caught in a noose! Only now it’s the right noose!’
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
Amelie’s Eyes
Anders Bodelsen
While Jytte was lighting the candles on the dining table,
the two visitors carried their welcome drinks round the
living room. Leif followed them with an ashtray. The
guests stopped by the little portrait which hung so low
above the sewing table that they had to stoop to see it.
The guests were the newly appointed junior partner
Knut and his wife. She had introduced herself in the
hallway, but so softly that Jytte hadn’t caught her name.
But soo
ner or later it was bound to be said again.
Jytte cast an eye over the dinner table, then looked
across at the guests again. They were still standing side
by side, heads bowed studying the portrait.
‘Yes’, Leif was saying, ‘that’s actually quite an elderly
lady. In fact she’s Jytte’s great-grandmother.’
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
264 n Anders Bodelsen
‘Great-great-grandmother’, Jytte corrected him quietly.
‘Could we have a bit more light on it?’ asked the junior
partner’s wife.
Jytte went over to the three of them, but stopped a
couple of steps behind them. Leif redirected the work
lamp, which was clipped to the window sill, training it
like a spotlight on the little portrait.
‘Oh, that’s just so beautifully painted’, said the woman.
She turned round to Jytte. ‘Your great-great-grandmother?
Do you know who the painter was?’
Jytte shook her head.
‘Could I take it down?’
Jytte nodded just as the woman very carefully took the
picture off the nail and proceeded to turn it over. Her
husband moved behind her to peer over her shoulder.
‘Can you date it?’
‘I can try. My grandmother knew the little girl as a very
old lady. I wonder’—Jytte gave a fleeting thought to the
roast in the oven—‘I wonder if 1850 would fit? Grandma
told me the girl in the picture was seven. Her name was
Amelie. I used to ask Grandma lots about her, I was pretty
crazy about that picture.’
The woman looked at Jytte.
‘I can certainly understand that’, she said. ’It’s a won-
derful little portrait. Very pretty, but also very skilful, no?’
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
Amelie’s Eyes n 265
Jytte nodded. The woman sent her a bright smile, then
became absorbed in the picture again. We need to get the
place painted, Jytte quickly thought, seeing the wall where
the picture had hung. She went out to the kitchen, set the
oven door ajar, and then went back to the two guests who,
along with Leif, were still absorbed in the little portrait.
‘You have no idea who painted it?’ asked the woman,
signalling with a little movement of her head that she
wanted Jytte to come and look at it with them. ‘Was
there never any talk of the painter in your family?’
‘No. It was just Grandma and me who thought the
picture was anything special.’
‘It’s incredibly well handled’, said the woman. ‘Not just
anyone could capture the eyes in that way.’
‘Grandma had the same eyes. When I was the girl’s age
she used to say I had those eyes as well. But it was probably
just because I was so in love with the picture.’
‘Not just anyone’, repeated the woman. It took a
moment for Jytte to realize she meant the painter.
‘Oh no’, said her husband, smiling. ‘It must have been
someone. And someone quite special.’
The woman did not reciprocate his smile. Carefully she
turned over the picture, quickly tightening her grip when
she realized the canvas wasn’t very well fixed inside the
heavy gold frame. Jytte gazed at the woman’s fingers,
dirtied now from handling the picture. The woman peered
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
266 n Anders Bodelsen
a long time at the grimy and slightly dented back of the
canvas before she turned the picture round again, placed it
on the oval sewing table and pulled the work lamp right
down over the picture.
Leif caught Jytte’s eye and mouthed something, pre-
sumably ‘the roast’. Jytte nodded that it was under control.
And then the new junior partner placed both hands on
his wife’s tensed shoulders and said to Jytte and Leif, ‘My
littl’un is reading art history. Just for fun, she said when
she started four years ago. And blow me if she isn’t on her
way to doing finals now!’
‘One step at a time’, said the woman without looking
up from the picture.
Jytte glanced at the woman. Straight away she had
thought there was something different about her. The
chunky modern jewellery, for one thing. Also she had to
be a good deal younger than the junior partner who, Jytte
had thought in the hallway, looked just the kind of man
who would be called in to revamp failing businesses.
Except that kind of man wouldn’t normally call his wife
‘my littl’un’—or had that become fashionable?
The woman opened her handbag, produced a pair of
glasses, and after putting them on began to study the lower
edge of the picture.
‘Anything written there?’ asked her husband in a low
voice.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
Amelie’s Eyes n 267
‘Have a look yourself.’
The woman made room so that her husband could get
his face right down into the corner. For a moment it
seemed the two of them had forgotten their hosts.
‘By God, there is something there!’ said her husband.
He picked up the picture, held it out at arms’ length,
and passed it back to his wife.
She looked at it for an unbelievably long time.
‘Have you got a magnifying glass?’
Her husband cleared his throat meaningfully. She
glanced up at him.
‘I know’, she said, ‘I know. All the same . . . ’
Smiling, Jytte lifted the picture off the sewing table,
opened the lid of the table and took out a magnifying glass,
which she handed to the woman. The woman began
studying what might be a signature, but next moment
the magnifying glass was lying across Amelie’s eyes, and
Jytte for some reason stood there feeling there was some-
thing wrong about what was happening. Perhaps it was
just that the picture might get damaged, though there was
no fear of that, for the woman moved the magnifying glass
from one eye to the other with the greatest of care.
‘Should I carry my wife to the table?’ said the junior
partner.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
268 n Anders Bodelsen
Jytte shook her head. The woman became aware she
was standing with a magnifying glass in her hand, and put
it down.
‘It’s not really my field’, she said. ‘But definitely it’s
what we call Danish Golden Age, right?’
‘And if this happened to be a TV quiz, and you had to
guess?’ asked her husband.
‘Well luckily it isn’t. I just want to say: some day you
should get an expert to look at it.’
She closed the sewing table and set the picture on top of
it, as though she didn’t think it should go back on its nail.
‘Just for fun,’ she said.
‘And for the sake of the insurance’, said her husband.
‘That too.’
Jytte considered returning the picture to its nail before
they all sat down to dinner. Bu
t she let it be. During the
meal she realized why the junior partner called his wife
his littl’un: her name was Lillian. They talked of this and
that at the table, and towards the end Leif and the junior
partner started discussing the reorganization of the firm,
and conversation livened up; but Lillian appeared preoc-
cupied and barely reacted to Jytte’s two or three attempts
to speak about something else, across the men’s shop talk.
When all were settled on the three-piece suite with
coffee and a brandy, Lillian got up and went over to the
picture on the sewing table again. The men’s conversation
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
Amelie’s Eyes n 269
stopped. Jytte got up and went to join Lillian. After a while
the men came over and stood behind her once again.
‘Just say it!’ said the junior partner. ‘You reckon it’s one
of the really big boys! Am I right?’
She laughed and shook her head.
The junior partner cleared his throat, and then said
very softly:
‘Koebke?’
‘No, no.’
The junior partner broke into a grin.
‘Then they’d bloody well have to insure’, he said. ‘And
put in locks and alarms.’
‘And yet . . . ’ said Lillian. ‘And yet . . . ’
‘Say the name!’
‘Okay, pretend it’s a quiz. At the risk of making a
complete fool of myself, alright? It looks like Constantin
Hansen. Those very, very sharp eyes. The very sharp gaze.’
‘She’s looking straight into camera’, agreed the junior
partner.
‘Perhaps one of his pupils. Could I borrow the magni-
fying glass again?’
Jytte handed her the magnifying glass, and again Lillian
placed it down in the bottom right hand corner of the
picture.
‘Something’s written there’, said Lillian. ‘But the picture
needs a bit of TLC. A gentle clean.’
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi
270 n Anders Bodelsen
‘And now no doubt we’re all remembering what hap-
pened to Rembrandt’s Night Watch’, said her husband.
Lillian glanced at her husband and then once more
focused all her attention on Jytte.
‘Probably it would be best to start very carefully down
in the corner with the signature’, she said. ‘And now the
quiz is over, and the little girl goes back on her nail.’
She passed the picture to Jytte, and Jytte hung it back in
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