Youth

by Tove Ditlevsen

  8

  ‘Can you tell who I look like?’ Miss Løngren is staring at me with her bulging eyes, and I really can’t see who she resembles. She smiles, raising and lowering her eyebrows. Maybe she looks a little like Chaplin, but I don’t dare say that, since she’s easily insulted. Now she’s already frowning impatiently. ‘Don’t you ever go to the movies, young lady?’ she says. ‘Yes, I do,’ I say miserably and wrack my brain in vain. ‘In profile, then,’ she says, turning her head. ‘Now you can see it. Everyone says so.’ Her profile doesn’t tell me anything either other than that she has a crooked nose and a weak chin. In the middle of my ordeal, the phone rings. She takes it and says, ‘I. P. Jensen.’ She always says it in a high, threatening tone, so I don’t understand how the person on the other end dares state their business. It’s an order, and she writes it down, holding the receiver at her right ear with her left hand. After she has hung up, she says, ‘Greta Garbo – now you can see, can’t you?’ ‘Oh yes,’ I say, wishing I had someone to laugh with. But I don’t. In a strange way, I’m all alone here. I’m employed in the office of a lithographer’s shop. In the innermost room resides the owner, who is called Master. Whenever he’s in, his door is always closed. In the front office there are two desks. Carl Jensen, one of the sons, sits at one of them with his back to Miss Løngren’s chair. She sits across from me by the telephone and the switchboard, and at the end of our desk there’s a little table with a typewriter, which I’m supposed to learn to use. But all day long I have practically nothing to do, and no one seems to know why I was hired. There is an apartment upstairs above the offices, and this is where the other son, Sven Åge, lives. He is a lithographer and works across the courtyard in the print shop. Carl Jensen is thin and quick in his movements like a squirrel. He has brown, close-set eyes that are slightly crossed, which gives him a shifty appearance. He never speaks to me, and when he and Miss Løngren are both there, they act as if I were invisible. They flirt a lot with each other, and sometimes Carl Jensen turns in his chair, which can spin all the way around, and tries to kiss Miss Løngren. She swats at him and laughs loudly, flattered; I think it looks ridiculous because they’re so old. Whenever Master goes through the office, they bend low over their work, and I quickly write down some figures or words that I afterwards slowly and carefully erase. Carl Jensen is not there very often, and I feel Miss Løngren’s peering and attentive glance constantly resting on me. She comments on every move I make. ‘Why are you always looking at the clock?’ she says. ‘It won’t make the time go any faster.’ She says, ‘Don’t you have a handkerchief? That sniffing is getting on my nerves.’ Or, ‘Why is it always me who has to get up to close the door? You’re young, too.’ The word ‘too’ astonishes me. One day she asks me how old I think she is. ‘Forty,’ I say cautiously, because I’m certain that she’s at least fifty. ‘I’m thirty-five,’ she says, insulted, ‘and people even say that I look younger than that.’ Whenever I make an effort to be completely still and rest my gaze on a neutral spot, she says, ‘Are you falling asleep? You’ve got to do some work for those fifty kroner that you get a month.’ I happen to yawn, and she asks me with her manly voice whether I ever sleep at night. All day long I have to listen to these remarks and when I get home in the evening, I’m just as tired as when I was working at the boarding house. But I was the one who wanted to work in an office and I have to stay until I’m eighteen, even though it’s a shocking thought. I enter the work orders in a book and I’m finished with that in an hour. Miss Løngren doesn’t like me to practice on the typewriter because it makes such a racket. One day Master asks her timidly whether I could take care of the switchboard, and she says angrily that she doesn’t want to sit with her back to the customers. Behind me there’s a counter where the walk-in business takes place. Master seems to be just as afraid of her as I am. He’s a heavy little man with a blue, spongy nose, which Miss Løngren says he didn’t get for nothing. Whenever she has to find him, she always calls Grøften restaurant in Tivoli, which seems to be his permanent abode when he’s not in his office. Once in a while he calls me in and gives me some slips of paper that I have to type up for him. They’re letters and they all start with ‘Dear brother’ and are signed ‘With fraternal greetings’. Sometimes they’re about a brother who’s passed away, and as I write about all of his magnificent qualities, especially in relation to the brothers, I can be quite moved, and I think there’s a rare and beautiful closeness in that family. But one day when I venture to ask Miss Løngren how many brothers Master has, she breaks into loud laughter and says, ‘They’re his lodge brothers, all of them. He’s a member of the Order of Saint George.’ Afterwards, she tells the son about it and he turns his chair all the way around to see what such an idiot looks like. Every Friday evening I go around the print shop and hand out the pay envelopes. It’s something of an ordeal because the workers make witty or fresh remarks to me, and I can’t find a response right off the top of my head. I’m not one of them like in the nursing supply company. This job, my father says, is the best one I’ve had and I have no excuse for not staying there. Everyone is in the union – I am too. Master pays the dues, and I’m supposed to go to shorthand class, which Master will pay for too. I don’t know why I’m supposed to learn shorthand since I’m only allowed to write to the brothers. Miss Løngren writes the invoices and the business letters. I get the impression that she was against hiring me and now is keeping me from learning anything at all. I sit and stare at her from eight in the morning until five in the evening, and it’s hard and exhausting work. I’ve never met such a person before. Sometimes she’s friendly and asks me, for example, whether I’d like an apple. She gives it to me, but when I crunch it in my mouth, she wrinkles her brow and says, ‘Can’t you even eat an apple without making a racket?’ And if I visit the bathroom too often, she asks me whether I have indigestion. One day she says that her niece is going to be confirmed and she asks me whether I know anyone who could write a confirmation song. Just to surprise her, I say that I can, and she looks at me doubtfully. ‘It has to be good,’ she says, ‘like the ones you read in the kiosk display windows.’ I promise that it’ll be good, and reluctantly she lets me try. I write the song to the required tune, ‘The Happy Coppersmith’, and Miss Løngren is impressed. ‘It really is,’ she says, ‘just as good as the ones you pay money for.’ She shows it to the son and he says to her, ‘Well, I’ll be damned’, and ‘you wouldn’t have thought that of Miss Ditlevsen.’ He turns his chair around and stares curiously at me with his shifty eyes. To me he doesn’t say anything, as usual. ‘Yes,’ says Miss Løngren, ‘something like that is a gift.’ I find them both very stupid. Miss Løngren can’t even speak correct Danish. For example, she says ‘anyways’ and she says it often. Whenever she wants to give her words emphasis, she says, ‘I say, and I’ll keep on saying, that …’, etc. But naturally she doesn’t keep on saying it. I have to spend two more years in this pointless way, and I find the thought almost unbearable. When I get home in the evening, Jytte is almost always there, and it wears me out listening to her and my mother talking. Jytte is big and blonde and pretty, and she herself says that she’ll never get married because she so quickly tires of men. She’s had a long series of lovers and is always entertaining my mother with stories about the latest one. They laugh a lot about it, and here too I feel myself left out. My father snores loudly and I can’t go to bed until he leaves for work and Jytte has gone over to her own apartment. But I can’t understand why I can barely tolerate people or how they ought to talk so that I’ll listen willingly. They should talk the way Mr Krogh talked; when I’m walking in the street I always think that it’s him turning the corner or cutting across the street. I run to catch up, but it’s never him. They’re in the process of putting up a new building where his once stood, and I never look in that direction when I go through the passage on my way home. I know that I could look him up in the telephone book, but my pride stops me. I didn’t mean anything to him. I just amused him for
a moment – then he shrugged his shoulders and turned his back. But I’m withering in this existence, and I’ve got to figure out something. I remember a column in the Politiken classified section headed ‘Help Wanted: Theater and Music’. That would be something to do in the evening, and now I’m allowed to stay out until ten o’clock. Music is a closed realm for me, but I’d like to be an actress. In great secrecy I send in a reply to an ad looking for actors for an amateur theater. I get a letter from ‘Succès Theater Company’, which meets in a café on Amager, where I’m told to appear on a certain evening. I dress in my brown suit which, at my mother’s insistence, I bought instead of the bicycle, and take the streetcar out to the restaurant. There I say hello to three serious young men and a young girl, who, like me, is there for the first time. We sit at a table and the leader says that he is thinking of putting on an amateur comedy called Aunt Agnes. He has the scripts with him, and after a short, appraising look, he decides that I’m to play Aunt Agnes. It is, he explains, a comic role that I’m wonderfully suited for. The woman is about seventy years old, but that can easily be taken care of with a little make-up. In the play, there’s a young couple – the man will be played by himself and the girl by Miss Karstensen. I look over at the young girl and find her very beautiful. Her hair is platinum blond, her eyes deep blue, and her teeth white and perfect. I can easily see that I couldn’t play her part. Still, I hadn’t imagined my debut as a comic woman of seventy. When the roles are handed out and we’ve been ordered to meet again after we’ve learned our lines, we drink a cup of coffee and part. Miss Karstensen and I walk together to the streetcar. She asks if she may call me by my first name. Her name is Nina and she lives in Nørrebro. I ask her why she answered the ad. ‘Because I was dying of boredom,’ she says. She sways her hips a little as she walks, and I already feel happy in her company. Nina is eighteen and I’m sure that we’re going to be friends.

  9

  The leader of our theater company is called Gammeltorv. He is twenty-two and has a wife and child. We rehearse at his house, and his wife is mad because the noise wakes up the baby. ‘She doesn’t have any feeling for art,’ says Gammeltorv apologetically. But he does. When he directs us, he uses his head and arms and legs like famous conductors. He rages and yells at us and begs us, practically in tears, to put more soul into the lines and to throw ourselves totally into the roles. Aunt Agnes is a very silly and gullible person, constantly being made a fool of by the young couple; that’s the comic part of the play, because the lines themselves are not funny. They are few and brief. The climax occurs when the woman comes into the living room with a tea tray in her hands. When she sees that the couple is sitting in a tight embrace on a love seat, she drops the tray, claps her hands, and says, ‘God save us all!’ When she says that, the hall is supposed to roar with laughter, says Gammeltorv, and I’m saying the words as if I were reading them out of a book! ‘Again!’ he roars, ‘Again!’ At last I succeed in putting enough astonishment into the lines, and he says that it will work when there are real cups on the tray. These his wife refuses to supply for me. At home in our living room, I act out Aunt Agnes for my mother, who is very enthusiastic. ‘Maybe,’ she says, ‘you’ll be a real actress. It’s a shame that you can’t sing.’ Nina can – she has to trill a love-song duet with Gammeltorv, and in my opinion she does it very beautifully. The play is going to be performed in Stjernekroen on Amager, and Gammeltorv thinks there will be a full house because there’s a dance afterwards. Nina and I are really looking forward to it. Nina is from Korsør, and her fiancé, who is a forester, lives there. He’s coming to the opening. Nina works at Berlingske Tidende in the classified ad department, and she lives in a rented room in Nørrebro. It’s a depressing and unheated room, where we sit on the edge of the bed with our coats on and confide our future plans to each other while we can hear the fire roaring in the family’s stove on the other side of the thin wall. Some day Nina will marry her forester, because she wants to live her life in the country, but until that time she wants to have fun and enjoy her youth in Copenhagen. She says that when we’re not so busy with the play anymore, we’ll go to taverns and find someone to dance with. A girl can’t sit in a pub alone, but when there are two, it’s OK. I remember Mr Krogh’s remark that people always want to use each other for something, and I’m glad that Nina has some use for me. Since I’ve met her, I don’t think about Ruth as often. For that matter, she and her parents have moved away, so I never see her anymore when I come home in the evening. Nina grew up with her grandmother, who owns a hotel in Korsør. Her mother lives in Copenhagen with a man she’s not married to. She is poor and cleans house for people; Nina says that some evening I should come home with her to meet her. My mother has no desire to meet Nina. ‘Why does she live in Copenhagen,’ she says, ‘when her fiancé is in Korsør? Your girlfriends are always a bad influence.’ At the office, Miss Løngren says sternly, ‘You’ve been looking so happy lately. Has something nice happened at home?’ I deny it, terrified, and try to look less glad. I’m taking a course in shorthand on Vester Voldgade, and it’s lots of fun. Sometimes I think exclusively in shorthand symbols. One evening when I leave the office for home, Edvin is standing outside, looking very happy. As we walk home together, he tells me that soon he’s going to marry a young girl whose name is Grete and who is from Vordingborg. They’re going to be married in secret, and they’ve already found an apartment in Sydhavnen. I’m filled with a dark jealousy and have trouble sharing his enthusiasm. My mother and father are not to know until the wedding is over. ‘They’ll be furious,’ I say, and feel a little sorry for them. ‘You know Mother,’ he just says, ‘she freezes my girls out.’ I tell him that on that point I’ll have it easier, because my mother was delighted with Erling, even though she never got to meet him. He says that’s the way it is most places, and there’s nothing very strange about it. He asks how it’s going with my poems and whether I will try another editor. ‘They can’t all die, you know.’ I say that I’ve gradually begun to write better poems, but until I can do it well enough, I don’t want to try again. But Edvin thinks that my children’s poems are just as good as the ones you read in schoolbooks and newspapers, and I can’t explain the indefinable difference between a good and a bad poem, because I’ve just recently found out myself. We stand there talking in front of the doorway at home for a little while as we stamp our feet to keep warm. Edvin doesn’t want to come up with me because then my mother will suspect that we walked home together and she doesn’t like us to have anything together that she’s not part of. He hasn’t gotten over his old grudge against my father for the four hard apprentice years, either. ‘He’s the one I can thank for my cough,’ he says bitterly and a little unjustly. Edvin is twenty years old now, and around his jaw the skin is dark after shaving. His black curls fall over his forehead, and his brown eyes resemble my father’s and Mr Krogh’s. Some day I’ll marry a man with brown eyes. Then maybe my children will have them too; I think I’ll have the first one when I’m eighteen. Nina is completely horrified that I still have my virginity, and she thinks it’s a defect that should be remedied as soon as possible. She says she was afraid too, because you hear so many things, but in reality it was wonderful. Nina has bought a long, slinky silk dress for the dance at Stjernekroen. It’s cut low in the back, and she bought it on credit. It cost two hundred kroner, and I can’t understand how she’s ever going to pay for it. She laughs and says that of course she wasn’t crazy enough to give her real name. I’m impressed – as always when someone dares to do something I don’t. Over at Stjernekroen we’re busy getting dressed and putting on make-up. I’m wearing Gammeltorv’s grandmother’s black dress. It reaches to the floor and underneath I have a pillow bound around my stomach. On my head I have a wig made of gray yarn, and Gammeltorv has drawn black lines on my face. They’re supposed to be wrinkles. I have to walk bent over like a jackknife because I’m plagued by rheumatism in various places. We peek out through a hole in the curtain. We look down at our fami
lies and count to see if they’re all there yet. They fill only the first three or four rows, and the rest of the hall is almost empty except for a few young people who are sitting, yawning, totally uninterested because they’ve only come for the sake of the dance. Nina shows me her forester, who is sitting right behind Aunt Rosalia. He looks like he’s aloof from it all, but then Nina has told me that he’s very much against her living in Copenhagen. ‘What’s he mad about?’ asks Gammeltorv, who’s looking with us. Then the band strikes up and the curtain lifts. My heart pounds violently from excitement, and I’m not sure that my Aunt Agnes will make anyone laugh. But it’s an unusually receptive audience. They clap and enjoy themselves, and after every act Gammeltorv says that it can’t help but be a success; have we seen that man writing on a notepad? That’s a reporter from Amagerbladet and he’s obviously been sent over because it’s a big event. Finally the moment comes when, with the tray in my hands, I surprise the young folks on the love seat. I drop the tray, clap my hands, and cry out, ‘God save us all!’ At the same moment, a door is opened behind the stage entrance and the wig blows off my head. Horrified, I want to pick it up, but Gammeltorv shakes his head from the sofa because a hearty laughter swells up toward me from the hall. Laughter and clapping and stamping on the floor. Only Nina sends me an offended look because isn’t she the star? When the curtain falls, Gammeltorv takes both my hands. ‘You’ve saved the whole show,’ he says, ‘you’ll have the leading role in the next play.’ My family praises me too, and Edvin says that I have talent. He thinks he does too, but he’s never had a chance. He dances with me a lot, and I’m grateful to him for that. He dances well, and Nina gives him a sidelong glance as she dances past with her forester. He’s shorter than her and in general doesn’t look like much. Edvin also dances with my mother and with both aunts, and at twelve o’clock my mother says that we have to go home, so I have to leave my friends. The next time we meet at the café on Strandlodsvej, Gammeltorv shows me a clipping from Amagerbladet, where, among other things, it says, ‘A quite young girl, Tove Ditlefsen, was a great success as Aunt Agnes.’ Even though my name is misspelled, it’s a strange feeling to see it in print for the first time. ‘And here,’ says the enterprising Gammeltorv, ‘are the scripts for the new play, Trilby. Trilby is a poor little girl who’s in a magician’s power. He forces her to sing and she sings beautifully.’ ‘And who,’ says Nina coolly, ‘is going to play Trilby?’ ‘Tove is,’ he says, ‘and since she can’t sing, she just has to open and close her mouth. Then you stand in the wings and sing.’ Nina gets red in the face with anger. She takes her purse and gets up. ‘I won’t have any part of it,’ she says. ‘You can sing yourself while she opens and shuts her mouth. I’ve had enough.’ I stare at her, horror-stricken. ‘I don’t want any part of it, either,’ I say. ‘Nina is prettier than I am. So why should I play Trilby?’ Suddenly we’re all standing up. Gammeltorv pounds the table. ‘Is it your theater company or mine?’ he yells. ‘Ha,’ snorts Nina, ‘Succès Theater Company! Any idiot can put an ad in a newspaper and pretend that he’s somebody. I’m leaving!’ ‘Me too,’ I yell, and rush out on her heels. I have to run to catch up with her. Suddenly we stand still, as if by mutual agreement. We’re standing between two lampposts and the road is completely empty of people. There’s a touch of spring in the air. Nina’s narrow face wreathed with the fine halo of hair is still dark with anger, but suddenly she breaks into laughter and I do the same. ‘So you were supposed to be the star,’ she laughs. ‘Oh, how funny.’ We imagine how I was supposed to stand, opening and shutting my mouth without a sound coming over my lips while Nina sang with full voice, hidden from the audience. We laugh so we can hardly stop, and we agree that neither of us has talent for the theater. We’ll have fun ourselves instead of entertaining others. We’ll cut loose in the big, exciting city and find some young men we can fall in love with. Some young men who are nice to look at and who have money in their pockets. Now that we’re not going to spend any more evenings with the idiotic rehearsals for Aunt Agnes, we have lots of time. The only tiresome thing about it is that I have to be home at ten o’clock, but for the time being there’s nothing to be done about that.