What My Body Remembers

by Agnete Friis

  “So you sketch?”

  “Yes, I have my own studio just outside town. Perhaps the two of you would like to come over . . . It would only take half an hour to make a sketch, and perhaps take a few pictures. I’d be happy to pay the young man a hundred kroner for his time.”

  It was not as if we had better things to do, Alex and I. The long summer days stretched in a blank row before us, at least until a caseworker from Thisted Welfare Office had registered me in their system and started sending me window-enveloped letters with threats of job placement initiatives and pep-talks at the local job center. It would take time. There was a change of address to attend to and a transfer of files and papers. And, even armed with an artillery of files, Welfare would be obliged to send one of their own, probably overly-exerted, caseworkers to talk to me personally so he or she could file an independent evaluation of the case—and that at the beginning of the summer holidays to boot.

  So yes, we did have the time. It was Barbara herself I had a problem with. There was something at once aggressive and insecure in the way she had approached us. She was definitely some kind of social outcast, her artist existence a thin veneer for her pathetic life on the fringe of respectable society.

  But Alex was game. Barbara’s compliment had won ground with a boy’s pre-teen vanity. But it was more than that. Alex liked to draw as well. He had won a couple of art contests at school. It was mostly ninja warriors and skeletons armed with shields and a large arsenal of knives, swords, and fatal weaponry, but he was clearly keen to see what Barbara had done herself. Not to mention the hundred kroner—a sizable fortune that Alex rarely chanced upon for so little effort. His hopeful gaze rested heavily upon me.

  “Sure.” I forced myself to smile at Henna-hair. “It seems he’d like that very much.”

  “Yay!”

  The woman clapped her hands affectedly like a teenager in a Disney movie and we followed in the wake of her flowing robes to the beaten-up van in the parking lot. The sliding door was open wide and there was a sign propped up against the wheel. Die schönsten Urlaub Souvenirs wird gezeichnet. 150 kr. A couple of laminated portraits in A-5-format were stacked next to the sign. I threw a disparaging glance at the drawings. They looked like those sentimental sketches you find in Good Housekeeping, albeit an amateur rendition. Children with large, expressionless eyes, hair that looked as if it had been glued into place. The shadows were grey and smudged at the edges. The noses were asymmetrical, the lips over pronounced. There were also a couple of aquarelle landscapes of the sea and beach and fir trees and houses in mint green, yellow, and beige. In the back of the van a flea-bitten German shepherd looked on with weary, amiable eyes as Henna-hair packed up her things.

  “Did you draw all of these?” Clearly impressed, Alex nodded at yet another stack of laminated works in the back of the van.

  “Yes. Shall we go? It’s just down the road . . . ” Henna-hair flashed her chalk-white teeth once more and motioned vaguely in the direction of the highway. “You could always stay for lunch, if you like. It would be fun. I have a wonderful little place.”

  Free grub, I thought. At least that was something. My mood lifted a few degrees.

  “Just down the road” proved to be an understatement.

  We sped past the Welcome to Klitmøller sign and drove on for several miles without her showing any inclination of slowing down. On the contrary. The landscape flattened out into meadows and plantations of thin, sickly looking pine trees.

  “Are you on holiday or do you have your own place in town?”

  Our new best friend, Barbara, was smoking with her left hand nonchalantly resting on the rolled down window.

  “We moved here a couple of days ago,” said Alex. “We have a house in town.”

  “Marvelous.” She tucked a wayward strand of hair behind her ear. “This is a wonderful place to live . . . Isn’t the nature fantastic? It’s so peaceful. And you come from Copenhagen, I hear.”

  “Hvidovre.” Alex was squinting at the landscape rushing by. “Will we be there soon?”

  She nodded, pointing towards a barely visible gap between the pine trees. “I’m just over there.”

  The van bumped down a sandy road in the middle of a plantation and stopped in front of a house that resembled my grandmother’s to a T: crumbling and dilapidated, consisting of three ramshackle buildings. Several stray cats raced up to meet us, rubbing themselves up against the warm tires of the car. To the west of the house, in what once must have been an herb garden, there was a junk yard of three rusty cars with grass and sapling trees growing through their bodywork.

  Barbara followed my gaze.

  “They belong to my landlord,” she said. “The house is great, but he’s a lunatic. I’m only staying here till I find something else. But come inside, come inside.”

  She collected her shopping bags and led the way into the low-ceilinged kitchen.

  “If you have something that needs to be kept cool, you can put it in the fridge,” she said, pointing to the crouching monstrosity standing in the middle of the room. The extension wires were yellowed by age, and when I opened the lid, I was met with the sour whiff of decomposition. I found space for my milk cartons and chicken inside, banged shut the lid, and followed Alex and the woman into the lounge.

  “The light is good over here,” she said, motioning to Alex that he should stand in front of a man-sized, battered easel. Apparently she’d opted for doing a pencil sketch in a larger format than the drawings we’d seen in her van.

  “Now if you’d just take off as much of your clothing as you feel comfortable with,” she went on. Alex looked less at ease now. He’d probably envisioned something more in the style of the polo-shirted portraits of children he’d seen in the van. He glanced nervously at me.

  “It’s up to you, Alex,” I said. “We can just go home, if you’d prefer.”

  He shrugged awkwardly, tossed his T-shirt on the floor, and sat himself down in profile as Barbara had instructed him to. The sun was streaming in through the window and cast a warm glow over his body, the black hair and hooked nose giving him the air and aspect of an upstart Greek god. Barbara got to work.

  “Can you make a living on this?” I asked, looking around me. The coffee table at the opposite end of the lounge was overflowing with portraits, half-drawn sketches, cigarette ash, and dust.

  “Umm . . . ” Her hands were moving in rapid strokes behind the easel. “It’s probably more a question of living for than making a living from it. I make a little money in town and sometimes customers send me photos to copy in response to an advertisement I have in the local paper. For parties and grandparents, you know. But I only charge a hundred and fifty kroner for a picture and they take a long time to do.”

  I nodded. I didn’t know anything about art, but I noted that assembling arms, legs, and torso in some kind of orderly fashion made Barbara pull strained—bordering on pained—faces.

  “Of course I would prefer to work on my own drawings,” she said. “Landscapes. And portraits like these. I’ve had a couple of exhibitions at Hanstholm library . . . but people aren’t very interested in original art. They would rather have a print of Monet hanging over the sofa, you know? Seen from that point of view, we live in a poor country.”

  I suppressed a yawn. Barbara reminded me of my neighbors back in Hvidovre. There was a diffuse indictment of the entire world just below the surface of her words. I never get my just rewards. I would bet my next bottle of vodka that, at best, she had two paying customers per month, black market, of course, and that the remainder of her income consisted of a lousy pension from a social office that didn’t know what else to do with her.

  I had a sudden urge to get the hell out of there, gratis lunch or not. I got up abruptly. Half an hour had long since passed, especially if you included the drive in the calculation.

  “I think we’d better be going . . . ”


  Henna-hair narrowed her eyes and bit into her lip with those all-too-white teeth of hers. She had a grotesque amount of make-up on her face. A thick layer of foundation gave her complexion the same color and texture as clay. Her lips were just as fire-red as her hair.

  “Already? I was just getting started. Well then, I’ll just take a picture.”

  She took out her mobile phone, and, squatting on her haunches, took a picture of Alex from a frog perspective.

  “I work better from pictures anyway,” she said. “But won’t you have a drink while I make us a bite to eat?”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “Is that so?” She walked over to a yellowed pinewood cupboard and took out a nearly full bottle of vodka and two glasses. “And I thought we had something in common, you and I. Free spirits. There aren’t too many of us around here.”

  I froze. There was a code underlying her words. An aggressive one.

  “Alex, why don’t you go outside and play with the cats for a moment?”

  He hesitated, trying to catch my eye, but I simply nodded and looked away, so he put on his T-shirt and went outside.

  “What are you talking about?” I was having trouble hiding my annoyance. Under ordinary circumstances, this would have been my cue to leave, but the fishwife had driven us out to the middle of bloody nowhere and . . . and Alex had earned his fee. She owed us one hundred kroner.

  Barbara handed me a glass of vodka that I hesitantly accepted.

  “I saw you,” she said. “At the store. I saw what you did. We’ve got the same taste in liquor, you and I. No need to worry, you won’t hear any recriminations from me. I know what it’s like not having money for the basic essentials. Believe me. But it’s either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid to steal from the one and only store in town. You risk complete social exclusion. If someone had seen you . . . ”

  I shrugged.

  Social exclusion is a blessing if you’re not interested in talking to anyone, but I doubted very much that Henna-hair had a feel for the finer nuances of life in this regard. And I had Alex to think of.

  “What I’m trying to say is: I like you,” she said, tying her long, red hair in a loose knot in the nape of her neck. Her long, false nails scraped against her dry scalp. “You’re different.”

  I nipped at my glass. The liquor burnt pleasantly down my throat, but couldn’t quell the sensation of something crawling over my skin.

  “You don’t know me at all.”

  “But I know who you are,” said the fishwife. “Everyone in town is watching you. Poverty is embarrassing, and your story is . . . infested. It’s not easy moving to a place like Klitmøller. I came here myself from Århus five years ago. The houses are cheaper, but it’s a closed community. You are either in or you’re out, and right now, you’re out, just like me. C’mon, Ella, stay for lunch. The drawing is not nearly done yet.”

  We ate hard-boiled eggs, sundried tomatoes, shrimp, and rye bread for lunch and sunbathed in tired garden chairs in the yard. I could feel I was getting sunburned on my nose, but after the second glass of vodka I didn’t give a shit. Barbara got her German shepherd, Lupo, to shake hands with his paw and roll over in the sand, making Alex laugh, a Faxe Kondi soda clutched in one hand.

  We drove home in almost complete silence, Barbara with a fresh smoke hanging out the window, intermittently gazing into the setting sun. She had written her mobile number on the back of a bus timetable to Thisted and given Alex the hundred kroner she owed him.

  “Great place,” she said, when she dropped us off in the yard in front of my grandmother’s house. “Like I said: the nature is fantastic; it’s good for the soul. Call if you need anything. You know where I live.”

  12

  ANNA, 1994

  Ring . . . ring.

  Anna looked up at the clock even though it wasn’t necessary. It was seven o’clock, just like yesterday, and the day before. Whoever was calling her, was as regular as clockwork.

  Anna dried her hands in her apron and slowly approached the phone. Ella was up in her room and Helgi wasn’t home yet. She lifted the receiver and listened to the faint rush on the other end of the line.

  “Anna?”

  The voice was soft, her name sounded more like a sigh than a word, but she gripped the receiver firmly. Today she would say something.

  “Leave us alone,” she said. “I don’t have anything to do with you—any of you—anymore.”

  There was nothing but silence on the line, silence and a rapid intake of breath that sounded like suppressed laughter. Anna tried to imagine Birgit as she had been when she was twenty years old and Anna’s world, as she knew it, came apart at the seams. Her sister, perfect as always, sitting at the dinner table with her fiancé, Torben. They were holding hands—above the table, of course, never below. Every now and again Torben caressed Birgit’s hand. They were talking about the house they wanted to buy just outside Thisted. Talk of that house was endless; the floors were to be sanded and oiled-treated, the attic renovated for later, when the children were born. Their enthusiasm and faith in the future was impressive, especially considering the immanent destruction of the world, and the fifteen-year-old Anna sat writhing uncomfortably in her seat. Wanted to protest and deny their obvious deceit. Neither of them actually believed what was said in church. Not really. For if they did, they wouldn’t be talking about houses and children and holidays in Austria—not to mention the color of their couch; if the world was really on the brink of destruction, they wouldn’t care what color that couch should be. They would just take a seat, wait for the horror, and go mad in the process.

  But Anna didn’t say anything. Just sat there, dead still, picking at her potato salad while Birgit’s eyes weighed heavily upon her. It was a cold, contemptuous, and triumphant gaze. Birgit had known all along that she would get everything right and that Anna would get everything wrong. And Anna could feel an all too familiar chill through the receiver.

  It was summertime, but at any moment the meteor could hit the earth and suck all oxygen from the universe; in a moment, everything and everyone could be gone. Anna clenched her fists, tried to block the surge of childhood fears. She didn’t believe any of it. Not anymore.

  “Just die.”

  The person on the other end of the line sounded angry and impatient, she thought. The voice was slurred, reaching out to her through a layer of thick, glittering silk. Then the line went dead.

  She stretched her limbs, kneaded her muscles in an attempt to expel the unease from her body, but the barb had stuck, propelling her into motion. She went up the stairs to the first floor, where she could hear Ella listening to music in her room at the end of the corridor. The Animals of Hillbilly Wood, “The Mouse That Sang for Mikkel the Fox,”, and Ella was humming the tune. Anna knew Ella would be lying on the floor, drawing, her pencils spread out in a fan about her. Right now, she was caught up in her princesses and horses. It helped to think of Ella’s drawings; something so completely ordinary, something to remind her that she didn’t have to feel so alone.

  Up here she wouldn’t hear the phone if it rang again.

  Anna turned into the bathroom and closed the door behind her. Helgi’s overalls were dumped on the floor. They smelled of wind and sawdust and metal, only faintly of Helgi himself. A comforting smell, which never changed.

  She emptied his trouser pockets.

  The usual tidbits. A couple of receipts from a diner in Thisted, a few loose twenty-kroner coins, his favorite pencil-stub. But in one of his back pockets she found a brochure for an art exhibition in Thisted. The Light of Skagen. The brochure was doubled over twice in the middle, its glazed paper surface worn so thin that she had difficulty unfolding and reading it at all. The exhibition had been running since the middle of May; there had been a single painting by Hammershøi, one by Anna Ancher, and a selection of correspondence between the arti
sts from the Skagen Period.

  Helgi slammed the front door behind him in the entrance and Anna hurriedly refolded the brochure in a wash of scattered panic, suddenly feeling as if she’d been snooping around in his things.

  “Anna!”

  He called up the staircase, and as she opened the door she smelled the pall of charred sauce downstairs. Helgi was banging with the pots on the stove, whistling under his breath.

  He was happy when she wasn’t nearby, she couldn’t help but notice. Much happier than he had been in years. He played with Ella more wildly than ever, threw her up in the air, swung her round till they were both dizzy and his legs got all wobbly. He was also better looking physically. He’d lost some weight and bought new shirts, jeans in a stylish cut, and a pile of boxer shorts.

  Around her, he was silent and morose, and he hadn’t touched her in months. Not even to put his arms around her in bed, half asleep—this much he had always done.

  He was going to leave her. He had already left her. The certainty punched her like a blow to the stomach. She had been a fool for too long.

  At night she dreamt she was standing in an annihilated village by the sea. There were other people milling around her, a small group that had survived by fishing and collecting saplings they had found in the slowly rotting fields.

  But something evil was near.

  This they could tell from the dead animals being washed onto shore; enormous sperm whales and turtles shrunken into their shells. Evil was lurking somewhere out there, where the water met the end of sky. But there was more. When they ventured deeper inland all sound disappeared, and darkness fell. A pale, doll-like girl appeared out of the dark. The doll dug her long, needle-like nails into Anna’s chest. Anna knew who the child was, and she knew what to do. Gathering her strength, Anna pushed the girl down into the ground, finally kissing her porcelain-white forehead.

  “You’re an angel,” Anna whispered, and the child closed her black eyes, and let go.