Youth

by Tove Ditlevsen

  11

  Summer is over and fall has come. The wildly colored leaves blow through the streets, and it’s cold for me to go out in the brown suit. Since Edvin’s made-over coat doesn’t fit me anymore, I buy a coat on credit. It’s totally against my father’s advice. He says that you should pay everyone their due and make sure that you don’t owe anyone anything, because otherwise you’ll end up in Sundholm. We live on Westend now, on the ground floor, in number 32. My room is called the parlor whenever I don’t take outright possession of it, and it’s only separated from the dining room by a flowered cotton curtain. There’s a table with crooked legs, two leather armchairs, and a leather sofa – all bought used and quite worn. I sleep on the sofa at night and its curved back makes it impossible for me to stretch out completely. ‘Then maybe you won’t grow much more,’ says my mother hopefully. I myself often wonder how tall a person can continue to grow, but with me it doesn’t seem to have any end. I’ll soon be seventeen and I’m earning sixty kroner a month. My salary is according to union scale. I don’t get much pleasure from my room because if I go in there in the evening, my mother yells through the curtain, ‘What are you doing now? It’s so quiet.’ Usually I’m not doing anything other than reading my father’s books, which I’ve already read. ‘You can read just as well in here,’ yells my mother in a voice as if heavy steel doors separated us. When she’s in a good mood, she sticks her head in around the curtain and says, ‘Are you writing poetry, Tove?’ But usually I’m not home in the evening anymore, I go to the Lodberg or the Olympia or the Heidelberg with Nina, and we sit with our soda pop and watch the dancing couples in the middle of the floor – as if we haven’t come there to dance ourselves. As a rule it’s Nina who is chosen first. I smile at the young man who wants to dance with her, as if I were her mother, certain that now she’s in good hands. I continue to smile approvingly as they dance past me, and I also look at other people in the room with interest. I imagine that people will think I’m studying my surroundings with the intention of writing a book about them sometime. For my sake, people can think what they like, just not that I’m an overlooked girl who’s only out to get engaged. Once when I get up to dance with a young man who has taken pity on me, a man at the neighboring table mumbles, ‘Even an ugly duckling can find a mate.’ It ruins the whole evening for me. Nina says that it first gets to be fun after ten, and can’t I get permission to stay out until twelve? But my mother won’t hear of it. Nina also wants to fix me up a bit. Together we go out and buy a bra with cotton padding and a black and red cossack dress on credit. I don’t dare tell them that at home, so I say I got it from Nina. These items help a good deal, to my astonishment, since I’m still the same person, whether I have cotton padding or not. ‘The world wants to be fooled,’ says Nina, satisfied, because she really wants me to be just as big a success as she is. One evening a handsome and serious young man asks me to dance. He’s badly dressed, and while we dance, he tells me that the next day he’s leaving for Spain to take part in the civil war. He lays his cheek against mine as we dance and even though it scratches a little, I like his caress. I lean a little closer to him and I can feel the warmth of his hand on the skin on my back. I get a little weak in the knees and feel something that I’ve never felt before at anyone’s touch. Maybe he feels the same, because he stays standing with his arm around my waist until the music starts again. His name is Kurt and he asks if he can walk me home. ‘You’ll be the last girl I’m with before I leave,’ he says. Kurt has been unemployed for three years and he would rather sacrifice his life for a great cause than rot in Denmark. He lives on welfare. When he was working, he was a driver for a taxicab owner, and he’s never learned anything other than how to drive a car. He sits down at our table, and Nina smiles happily because I’ve finally found a young man I may be able to hold on to. We’ve agreed to keep away from unemployed young men, but it’s hard to find one who’s not. At ten o’clock, Kurt walks me home. It’s clear moonlight and my heart is rather moved. I’m walking through the streets with a man who soon will suffer a hero’s death. That makes him different in my eyes than all the others. His eyes are dark blue and almond-shaped, his hair black, and his mouth red like a small child’s. At home in the entryway, he takes my head in his hands and kisses me very tenderly. He asks me if I live alone and I say no. He himself lives in a room with a vile landlady who doesn’t let him have girls visiting. While we’re standing embracing each other, my mother opens the window and yells, ‘Tove, get up here now!’ We jump apart terrified, and Kurt says, ‘Was that your mother?’ I can’t deny it, and now we have to part. And Kurt has to go down by Trommesalen in order to get food from a sandwich store where it’s handed out at midnight, but you have to get in line a couple of hours ahead of time. I stand watching him as he walks down the almost empty street. He’s not wearing an overcoat and he has stuck both hands in the pockets of his jacket. He’s going to die soon, and I’ll never see him again. When I get upstairs, I make a scene over my mother’s interference, but she says that I can just invite the young men up so she can see that there’s nothing unsavory about them. She doesn’t want me to go around with people who can’t bear the light of day. And for that matter, she has other things to think about, because soon Aunt Rosalia is coming home from the hospital, where she’s now been several times. She’s coming home to us to die. That’s what the doctors have told my mother. There’s nothing more they can do, and there’s no room in the hospital for people that the doctors can’t do anything else for. Aunt Rosalia will lie in my father’s side of the bed next to my mother. So my father will sleep on the sofa in the dining room. ‘All of this,’ says my mother, ‘wouldn’t have been possible in the old apartment’, so it was as if an inner voice spoke to her when she begged my father to move.

  One evening when I come home without a cavalier, I meet my father in the entryway. He’s on his way out, as I’m going in. He looks enraged and bitter. ‘Edvin’s sitting up there,’ he says. ‘He’s gotten married without saying a word to any of us. He’s got a wife and apartment, and there’s probably a kid on the way, too. Ha! – and him we’ve sacrificed so much for. Goodbye.’ Before I let myself in (for now I have a key), I put on an astonished expression. ‘Oh,’ I say, ‘are you here?’ They’re sitting in my room because Edvin is a guest now, and that’s what you use a parlor for. My mother is bawling and Edvin looks very ill at ease. Maybe he regrets his pig-headedness, which also seems to me a little extreme. ‘It was to surprise you,’ he says meekly, ‘and so you wouldn’t have the expense of the wedding.’ That only makes matters worse. My mother asks, offended, whether he thinks they couldn’t afford a little wedding present, ‘but I suppose we’re just not fine enough.’ Then Edvin shows us a picture of his wife. Her name is Grete and she has a round face with dimples. My mother studies it with a frown. ‘Can she cook?’ she asks and stops crying. Edvin has no idea. ‘She doesn’t look like she can,’ says my mother. My mother herself is no great shakes in the kitchen, and everything edible that she makes has a cementlike consistency because she digs too deeply into the flour bag. While we drink coffee and eat pastry, she asks how much Edvin’s rent is and whether his wife is going to work as long as there aren’t any children. She’s not, and my mother wonders how she’ll manage to pass the time. It’s very clear that she’s already formed an unfavorable opinion of Grete that won’t change for the better through personal acquaintance. The clock strikes eleven in the dining room and Edvin gets up to go. ‘We’ll come on Sunday, then,’ he says dejectedly. When he’s left, my mother wants to talk, and I want to be alone. I want to be alone to think about Kurt, and I want to write down some lines that came to me as I watched him go down the street without once turning around. At the corner of Westend and Matthæusgade there’s a tavern where a band by the name of ‘Bing and Bang’ blares until two in the morning. Because of that, we practically have to shout at each other; it was far quieter in the old apartment. My mother asks me what kind of a young man I was standing ther
e kissing. ‘One I danced with,’ I say. ‘Other than that I don’t know.’ She says that I should always make a date before the young men leave. She suffers from a nagging fear that I’ll never get engaged, and is prepared to receive any young man royally if he’s just the least bit interested in me. ‘You’re too critical,’ she says point-blank. ‘You can’t afford to be that way.’ Finally she leaves and I sit down at the table with the crooked legs and take out paper and pencil. I think about the handsome young man who’s going to die in Spain and then I write a poem that is good. It’s called ‘To My Dead Child’ and has no obvious connection with Kurt. Still, I wouldn’t have written it if I hadn’t met him. When it’s done, I’m no longer sorry that I’ll never see him again. I’m happy and relieved and yet melancholy. It’s so sad that I can’t show the poem to a living soul and that everything still has to wait until I meet a person like Mr Krogh. I’ve shown Nina my poems and she thinks they’re all good. I’ve shown my father the poem I wrote in the attic with the metal boxes, and he said that it was an amateur poem and that things like that were a good hobby for me – like when he did crossword puzzles. ‘You train your brain with things like that,’ he said. I can’t explain to myself, either, why I want so badly to have my poems published, so other people who have a feeling for poetry can enjoy them. But that’s what I want. That’s what I, by dark and twisting roads, am working toward. That’s what gives me the strength to get up every day, to go to the printing office and sit across from Miss Løngren’s Argus eyes for eight hours. That’s why I want to move away from home the same day I turn eighteen. Bing and Bang roars through the night; drunk people are thrown out into our courtyard from the café’s back door. There they yell, swear, and fight, and not until morning is there silence in the courtyard and on our street.

  12

  Rumors of my poetic abilities have reached the print shop, and now orders come in every day. Carl Jensen receives them and brings them to Miss Løngren, who is still the only one I stand in direct contact with. I write songs for all kinds of occasions and when I go over to hand out the pay envelopes, the workers thank me, embarrassed, and just as embarrassed, I say that there’s nothing to thank me for. I write songs and in shorthand I take important messages to the brothers or obituaries of dead brothers. They’re printed in the Order of Saint George newsletter. All of this doesn’t have much to do with office work, but Miss Løngren won’t train me; when she was on vacation, everything was on the verge of collapse because I didn’t know the first thing about anything. When I turn eighteen, I’ll apply for a real office job and no longer work as a trainee. Then I can get a much higher salary. When I turn eighteen the world will be different in every way, and Nina and I will have the whole night at our disposal. Then I’ll also have to see about getting rid of my virtue – Nina is very set on that. She herself was only fifteen when the forester took hers. Whenever we go out in the evening, she takes off her engagement ring. She only goes to bed with those young men who are not unemployed, and I haven’t told her about Kurt. That’s an experience I want to keep for myself. If I had lived in a room, I would have taken him in. But I don’t know whether I would have taken in other young men who have walked me home and kissed me in the entryway. One day when Nina is pressuring me again because of my scandalous virginity, I tell her that I want to be engaged first. That’s not something that I’ve thought about before, but the decision relieves me. In reality there has only been one real prospective buyer for my virtue, and it’s a little embarrassing, because Nina talks as if everyone is out after it. Now that Aunt Rosalia is lying at home sick, my mother is a lot less concerned with what I’m doing. All day she sits in there by my aunt’s bed, talking and laughing, and in the evening she goes to bed early and lies there, talking on until one of them falls asleep. My father has become totally superfluous in her world, and I think she would be completely happy if my aunt wasn’t going to die. My aunt is yellow in the face and her skin is so stretched over her bones that you’re continually reminded of her skull’s existence. Her skin is so tight that she can’t even close her mouth all the way anymore. If she’s awake in the evening when I come home, she calls me in and I sit down by her bed for a while. I try to hold my breath the whole time because there’s a terrible smell around the bed, and I hope that my aunt doesn’t notice it herself. When she’s in pain, my mother phones from the café on the corner for a nurse, who comes and gives her an injection of morphine. It makes her hazy, and she often mistakes my mother and me for each other. ‘I’m going to die, Alfrida,’ she says to me one evening. ‘I know it. You don’t have to hide it from me.’ ‘No,’ I say unhappily, ‘you’re just sick. The doctor says you’ll be well soon.’ ‘It was the same with Carl,’ she says. ‘The doctor said that I shouldn’t tell him.’ I don’t answer, just put her emaciated hands underneath the comforter, turn off the light, and go into my own room where I can hear my father’s snoring through the cotton curtain. I would have liked to speak honestly with my aunt because I’m sure that it would have made her happy, but I don’t dare because of my mother, who acts out her sad comedy while my aunt pretends that she doesn’t know anything. I think that I would want to know the truth when I’m going to die someday. I also think that if I meet a young man I like, I can’t invite him up, as my mother always requests, because the smell from my aunt fills the whole apartment. We’ve all been out to Sydhavnen to visit my brother and his wife. They have a two-room apartment with a few pieces of furniture that were bought on credit, which made my father put on a foreboding expression. Grete is tiny and plump and smiling, and she sat on Edvin’s lap the whole time, while my mother looked at her as if she were a vampire who would suck all strength out of him before long. She hardly spoke to her, and conversation was difficult, too, since my mother carefully avoided addressing her directly. I’m so tired of my family because it’s as if I run up against them every time I want to move freely. Maybe I can’t be free of them until I get married myself and start my own family. One evening when we’re sitting in the Lodberg over our soda pop, a young man asks Nina to dance and steps onto the dance floor with her, and I sit as usual with my maternal smile, watching youth amuse itself. Then a young man bows before me and we step out onto the crowded dance floor. He hums in my ear to the music, ‘The young man from Rome, don’t count him out.’ ‘That’s Mussolini,’ I say. I happen to know that because my brother was outraged by the song that Liva Weel often sings. ‘Who’s that?’ asks the young man, and I say that I don’t know. I only know that it’s a man in Italy who’s just like Hitler, and that you shouldn’t write Danish songs that praise him. ‘Your girlfriend is dancing with my friend,’ he says. ‘His name is Egon. And I’m Aksel. What’s your name?’ ‘Tove,’ I say. Aksel dances well and he’s in no way fresh during the dance like most of them. ‘You dance well,’ he says, ‘better than most of the girls.’ I tell him that I’ve never learned to dance and he says that it doesn’t matter. I have rhythm in my body. It’s very rare that any of the young men say anything while you dance with them, and I like Aksel. We dance past Nina and Egon; I smile at Nina, and Egon and Aksel say hi to each other. When the music stops, Aksel asks if they can sit at our table and I say yes. Nina’s beautiful eyes shine with happiness when we reach our table. She asks, ‘Don’t you think Egon is handsome?’ and I say, ‘Yes, I do.’ ‘He’s a carpenter,’ she says, ‘and he lives in a house on Amager with his parents, and Aksel lives across the street with his parents. In a house too.’ Then they come over and sit down and I look closer at Aksel. He has a round, friendly face and everything about him reminds you that he was once a child. The light curly hair is a little damp on his forehead, the blue eyes have a trusting expression, and he has a deep cleft in his chin, which is only erased when he laughs. There’s a faint scent of milk about him. Egon is shorter than he is, dark, and apparently somewhat older. Nina asks him how many rooms there are in his house, and I can see that she’s far away in a dream about two rich men’s sons who will lift up two poor girls
into their carefree world. Maybe she’s even considering giving the forester the sack. I have the impression that he’s heavy and serious, and that Nina has a much too romantic picture of the future he’ll provide for her in the country. When she’s being very silly she calls him The Shrub, but no one else is allowed to. She’s with him every weekend and I’m not permitted to meet him. He’s not allowed to meet me, either, because she thinks that he’ll think I’m a bad influence, like my mother thinks Nina is a bad influence on me. ‘And what do you do?’ Nina asks Aksel as we drink the beers we ordered. ‘I’m a collection agent,’ he says, smiling charmingly at her. I don’t know what that is, but Nina looks disappointed. ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘you go around with bills and things like that?’ ‘Drive,’ he corrects her with a certain conceitedness. ‘I drive a van.’ Her face brightens a little and suddenly she suggests that we all celebrate our meeting. We drink to that, and I would much rather have had a soda pop. I don’t like beer. Since it’s past ten, I admit dispiritedly that I’ll have to leave. Aksel jumps up gallantly and buttons his jacket, which is very broad across the shoulders. He’s tall and extraordinarily knock-kneed. He takes me easily by the arm as we walk across the room together, and out in the cloakroom he helps me with my coat. As we walk through the cool streets, where the city’s lights outshine the stars, he tells me that he’s an adopted child and that his parents are quite old, but very nice. And to my astonishment, he asks me whether I feel like coming over to meet them someday. ‘Sure,’ I say. ‘I want so much to have a steady girlfriend,’ he says childishly and forthrightly. ‘And the old folks want me so badly to get engaged.’ At home in the entryway he kisses me according to program, but I can tell that he doesn’t feel anything special by it, not even when I press myself lovingly against him. He says, ‘The four of us can have fun together.’ ‘Yes,’ I say, and promise to come out to visit him next Sunday. He asks curiously if I’m a virgin and I admit that I am. He grabs my hand and shakes it heartily. ‘I respect that,’ he says warmly. Disappointed and confused, I go to bed. I think about whether you can get engaged to a collection agent. I have a suspicion that it’s just a nicer expression for bicycle messenger, except that he drives a van.