by Agnete Friis
Alex crawled out of the car, blinked into the bright light, and gazed through the grey-green haze of lyme grass. The wind was warm and dry and salty, and both the car and Alex seemed to be whirled in a waving, green sea below the fleeting sky. The dunes towered up around us, long-bearded and moss-grey with a bed of purple heather.
“Where are we?”
He was looking at me.
“This is our new house.”
“It doesn’t look very new to me.” He turned once around himself. “There’s fuck-all out here.”
“Watch your language.”
I trudged over to the front door and stuck the key in a lock that was rusty and unwilling, but finally it relented with a groaning oath of its own. I had to lean hard on the door to get it open, ducking instinctively on my way in so I didn’t bang my head on the frame.
“It stinks in here. It stinks of old, dead people.”
Alex pushed past me into the narrow entrance, demonstrably pinching his nose with one hand. He was right. The air was thick with dust and earth and mold and a hundred years’ worth of stale cooking vapors. A cane, a pair of worn galoshes and a pair of black shoes in size dwarf were lined up under a naked row of hooks.
I edged a little further into the narrow entrance that separated the house from the old stable. The walls were covered in floral-print wallpaper, but apart from that, no one had bothered with the decor. The floor was grey concrete, uneven, and ice-cold, despite the bright sunshine outside. To the left, a cold pantry with shelves from floor to ceiling lined with an indescribable number of dusty jars and glass containers. Pickled cucumbers and cooked pears that looked like the fetuses of small animals conserved in glass jars in a natural history museum. An odor that was at once sweet and sour.
Leading off to the right, there was a narrow washing room that consisted of a scratched counter with a large sink under a single cold-water tap. There was no warm water. Neither in the kitchen nor in the house as a whole. Water for dishes had to be fetched from the bathroom that was located at the far end of the kitchen. The bathroom had turquoise tiles, a bathtub, and a sink. A dried strip of fly-paper dangled above the greasy stove.
I pulled the letter out of my pocket and studied the high, angular handwriting. There were instructions for turning on the heat in the bathroom and the electricity in the house. Everything still works, it said. She had someone who came by to see to the place once in a while.
In all the other rooms—including the kitchen—a grey threadbare wall-to-wall carpet spotted with large, greasy stains covered the floors. The sand had penetrated all the way into the lounge, crunching under your feet when you walked over the thin piling. The living room was located between the kitchen and an additional room that could possibly be fixed up for Alex. Two of the panes in the timbered windows were cracked, but that could be sorted with a little cardboard and a couple of garbage bags. I was pretty creative with that kind of thing. After ten years on the dole, I knew that wonders could be worked with duct tape and various odds and sods to be found on dumpsters. But just then, I had difficulty believing that we’d still be there when the winter came around.
“Up here!”
Alex had run ahead up the stairs to the first floor. Judging from the rhythmical squeak of springs, he’d apparently found a real bed to jump on, and Rosa reluctantly followed me upstairs to the first floor. Here there were two rooms with leaning walls covered in the same floral wallpaper as in the entrance and an attic storage room crouched under the bare ceiling. Mountains of old magazines were stuffed in between the roof and the crumbling plates of plaster. Family Journal and Donald Duck. An unwelcome and most inappropriate image of myself, aged six, lying on a mattress in one of the mirage-warm, dusty rooms, masturbating frenetically with a pillow wedged between my knees. My grandmother had insisted I take afternoon naps, but I was too old for that kind of thing and came up with my own way of passing the time.
“Did someone really live here once?” said Alex, jumping off the old bed. “It’s not like a real house at all.”
“Define ‘real house,’” I said. “It’s got walls and doors and windows and a roof. What more do you want?”
All at once he looked very unhappy, standing there with his arms hanging listlessly by his sides. He hadn’t said much on the drive over, by turns sleeping or staring out of the window with a look on his face that made me wish I could put a glass to his skull, like kids put a glass against the wall to eavesdrop, and listen to his thoughts. Just like Hanne and I used to do at the Bakkegården Institute, when we were thirteen and wanted to hear if anybody was getting laid next door.
“It will grow on you,” I said, trying to infuse a little girl-scout optimism into my voice. “A new school, new friends . . . And then there’s the forest, and the sea . . .”
“There’s fuck-all out here, Mom.” He went back down the stairs and into the bathroom, slamming the door so hard behind him that the floor boards shook. When I came downstairs I could hear the running water through the closed door. He was washing his hands, I knew, and although the door blocked my view, I could picture him clearly. The lanky body bent over the sink, the slightly rounded shoulders, the dark, wispy fringe falling into his eyes. When he was through, he would get out his toothbrush. OCD, said the child psychologist. A number of things had gone wrong for Alex and me.
•••
I emptied the dust and dead flies out of the kettle and washed a couple of plates in the sink in the washing room. I made some instant coffee for Rosa and me and some packet soup for Alex. The cups smelled like mold and dish soap even though I’d rinsed them thoroughly, and it felt like having a tea party at a plastic table in a doll’s house that had been overrun by rain and spiders.
“You’ve got an admirer,” said Rosa, nodding towards the window. At the end of the garage a thin, bent figure stood staring at us through the window. He looked haggard. His head was bare, his movements shaky and unsure. When he realized we were staring at him, he turned abruptly and walked down the gravel path, his walking stick swinging in his hand.
“Creepy,” said Rosa. “You can still come back with me.” She was warm and more ruddy-faced than usual after having carried our bags and the bedding up to the first floor.
“It’s gonna be fine,” I said. “We’ll manage.”
She shook her head, got up, and started gathering her smokes, lighter, and phone. She looked tired, but then she hadn’t had the time to bring her pills. She’d made more than the average number of sacrifices that day.
We walked back to the car through the billowing grass.
“Yes, well, I guess this place also has its plus points,” said Rosa, blinking rapidly. “And I’ll bet there isn’t a single foreigner in town.”
Rosa had a thing about immigrants. The women took up too much space in the laundry room and they were arrogant as hell to boot. Especially the ones with the headscarves, she said.
“They say I’m a drunken old whore,” she liked to gripe. “They don’t say it in words. If they did, I’d sock it right back at them. No, they say it with their fucking headscarves. They say: we’re better and prettier than you are. And the men are a bunch of chauvinists, the children are cockeyed, each and every one. Inbred. Nieces and nephews and uncles. And we are the ones who have to pay for their handicap.”
Of course Rosa chose to ignore the fact that she herself never paid a cent for anything on behalf of anyone else and that, technically speaking, Alex himself was multiracial, the son of the Pakistani vanishing artist Amir; now you see him, now you don’t. All this was lost on Rosa in context. With her habitual, self-assured lack of consistency, she had loved Alex fiercely from the moment she met him while still continuing to hate all other ‘more Pakistani’ Pakistanis with a passion. The same went for Social Democrats and all people working for the social welfare services.
“You can always call . . . ” she said, rummaging for
something in her pocket. An extra twenty-kroner coin. “Let us know how you are getting on.”
“Yes, of course . . . thank you.”
She shrugged, mumbled something under her breath and slammed the trunk shut. There wasn’t much else to say. I watched the Volvo disappearing down the gravel road.
I pulled the letter from my grandmother out of my pocket again and stared at it. She was old now. At least ninety, if I remembered correctly, but I was sure somebody would have let me know if she’d died.
I know things have been hard for you because of what happened back then, but it is time you came back. Living without your past is like swimming on dry land, awkwardly, meaninglessly . . .
I refolded the letter and stood looking out over the dunes for a long time, trying to orient myself. The town and the harbor lay to the north, and, some place in between, was the house that used to belong to my parents. I could see the spine of the red roof and the chimney towering up over the hills of sand, and I knew that you could breach the distance in less than five minutes, if you cut through the dunes instead of taking the road.
I knew more than I had known two days previously, and I didn’t like what I’d learned. Once, a long time ago, I made a conscious decision to move forward without ever looking back, and I stuck to it. The decision had worked for me, so I wondered what I was doing there at all. I read the last lines of the letter again:
Living without your past is like swimming on dry land, awkwardly, meaninglessly . . .
She stood by him. She had always stood by him.
5
HELGI, 1994
The day was bewitched.
He sensed it from the early hours of morning when he’d gotten out of bed to see the marten dragging the neighbor’s cat away in its mouth. The fight to the death had been going on since dawn and he’d lain awake listening to the cat’s screams coming in through the window in the roof. At first he’d thought it was just a couple of tomcats pursuing a female in heat, but the screams kept rising in pitch, finally becoming a deep, guttural gurgle that no living creature would ordinarily produce. As he stood at the kitchen window he saw the enormous grey tomcat’s head bouncing heavily over the sand as the marten dragged it into the dunes. Scavenger devoured by scavenger. When two equally matched competitors go to battle, both parties risk losing their lives. A single rip of a fang could deliver the fatal blow, and nature doesn’t go to such extremes unless it’s a matter of sex or complete insanity.
And now it was raining. It had come out of nowhere, leaving the building site in a deserted chaos of flapping tarpaulin and ankle-deep puddles. The weather forecast had promised bright sunshine and blue, blue skies. But then it was May, after all.
He shot a glance at the prefabs and considered taking a coffee break with the boys. It couldn’t fucking go on like this forever. And yet he lingered, staying put under the eaves, indecisive, feeling the cold creeping up his pant legs and in under his drenched overcoat.
“Excuse me?”
A woman was standing by the fence. She was armed with an umbrella and a pair of shiny, red galoshes.
“Excuse me?” she called again, and this time he was sure she was talking to him.
He left the relative safety of the eaves and bounded between the puddles as agilely as his age and bulky construction boots would allow. Goddammit. It was really pissing down now. He’d pulled his shoulders up around his ears, but still the rain filtered in under his collar in cold rivers.
“Yes?”
He’d made it to the fence unscathed and could now see the woman’s face. Her eyes were dark blue, one slender hand was laced through the wire fence, her nails were long, and exquisitely painted; an exotic rarity in Thisted where the women cut practical figures both in their choice of clothing and their frame of mind. It couldn’t be easy washing dishes with those claws.
“It’s just that . . . ” She squinted up at the dark sky, then leveled her eyes to meet his gaze. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to drag you out into the rain, but I’m looking for the art museum, you see, and it seems I’ve parked my car too far away. Is the museum close by, or would it be better to get my car and drive there?”
“The museum is on the corner of the next parallel road.” He said, and pointed the way. “Are you going to see the Skagen painters?”
Rain water was pouring over his eyebrows, and he had to wipe it away with the back of his hand and blink rapidly in order to keep holding her gaze.
She laughed.
“Yes, I am. Have you been in to see them? Are they any good?”
He shook his head in answer to the first question. The thought of going to the exhibition had crossed his mind, it always did, whenever he saw one of the art museum’s advertisements. He could just go in and see one of those exhibitions. Do something completely different from what he usually did. He’d done quite a lot of drawings when he was a young man, and for a while there, he’d even toyed with the idea of going to architecture school in Århus. That was before Anna, of course, but he could’ve been an architect. His grades had always been decent, and he was good at seeing the world in lines and colors. The sketches he’d once drawn were still stored someplace in the garage. The church from every imaginable angle. The fishing boats. Mostly buildings and objects, but there had been a portrait or two. The feeling of once having owned a corner of that world had, strangely enough, never left him, but it must be at least twenty years since he’d been to a museum, and he was an excellent carpenter after all.
“Thank you.” She smiled and walked a few paces in the direction he had indicated. Her figure was exceptionally fine in that long, thin coat. Her hips swayed hypnotically from side to side. Her legs were bare in her galoshes, he noted. Fine, slender, suntanned limbs.
“Don’t mention it.”
The rain fell heavily between them.
“But . . . ” She hesitated, half-turning towards him. “Perhaps you’d like to come along? It doesn’t look like the rain is going stop any time soon.”
He should have said no, he knew he should have said no, but the day was—and already had been—bewitched.
6
After Rosa had gone Alex and I followed the road into town.
Apart from an all-purpose grocery store, the town center consisted of no more than a bakery and a few kiosks selling German newspapers, candy, ice cream, and inflatable beach toys. The houses were low-slung and newly painted in ochre and Skagen-yellow tones, the front yards trimmed and well-kept. Most of the folk on the streets were tourists, elderly people wearing sun hats, short-sleeved shirts, and khaki shorts. And among these milled young, broad-shouldered surfers who, for the most part, hung out at the point, where the wind and current whipped up waves that broke in a foaming white inferno you could ride all the way in to the beach.
We sat down on the broad steps on the harbor front beside a group of dripping wet guys to watch the surfers engaging in their battle against the elements. The sun colored the sky pink over the horizon.
“What do you think a surfboard costs?” asked Alex.
“I think they’re expensive.”
He nodded, letting a handful of sand run through his fingers as he squinted into the sky.
“You can get one second-hand for a couple of thousand kroner.”
One of the guys next to us smiled at Alex and rapped on his board. He’d zipped down his wetsuit, was resting his elbows on the warm cement surface. His fair chest was still wet with water and covered in goose bumps. His friends were talking to one another in Dutch and German.
“Okay, thanks.”
Alex looked at me quizzically, but I simply sent the guy a wan smile, and looked away.
I was painfully aware of how old and worn-out I looked next to these younglings and their ten-thousand-kroner kit. I was 28 years old, and a mother, with everything that went along with that in the way of stretch marks and worn
attributes. My shorts were too loose, bought at an H&M Family store on sale, my T-shirt had been washed at least a thousand times, too often with hand soap or dishwashing liquid, lending it an indefinable yellowish-grey-off-white hue.
My appearance wasn’t usually something that bothered me. Appearances lay a long way down the list of my priorities, but in the company of such a large group of young men, I felt their eyes on me—and saw myself through theirs. I hadn’t been with anybody for almost two years, and the she-wolf in me would gladly have murdered for just one lustful look from a man. Or, even better: a decent fuck on a regular basis with a guy who would brush the hair out of my face, kiss me deeply, and then preferably disappear immediately thereafter. Long-term relationships hadn’t interested me since Amir.
“My name is Magnus,” the guy said to Alex. “Do you think I could buy your big sister a beer?”
“No, you can’t,” I said, tying to smile politely, hoping he’d get the drift, but still understand that I appreciated the offer and the tad-too-thick compliment.
“Another time, maybe?”
“Maybe.”
I looked away, hoping he’d leave, but I could feel his eyes on me for another long, awkward minute before he finally turned his attention back to his beer-drinking friends.
I got up and brushed the sand off my thighs, Alex reluctantly followed my lead. The surfers moved on, in all probability with the flock of young girls of about the same age in tow. They sat a little way off, the girls creaming their butter-smooth, filly legs in after-sun lotion. They looked barely twelve years old, yet already equipped with a woman’s constant awareness of any attention zoomed in their direction. They cocked their heads to one side, laughed with their lip-gloss lips and shiny white teeth, scanning the turf for curious glances. Not a single twitch was left to chance.
One of them caught Alex’s gaze, and held it till he looked away.
“Can we walk home along the water?” he asked.
“Not today.”