What My Body Remembers

by Agnete Friis

  “The first kiss was for coming,” she said. “And the second for being in such a foul mood.”

  “I was at work when you called,” he said with a sigh. “It’s really hard to find an excuse to leave a building site when you’re the one who is supposed to be in charge. And then driving all the way out here . . . ”

  He looked around. The church was perched on a lonely hilltop without a trace of a town anywhere near, and he had taken two wrong turns before finding the church on the hill.

  She shrugged. “I missed you, and there’s something important I want to show you.”

  She took his hand again and threaded her fingers in his as they walked. The graveyard was thick with the smell of flowers, like in a flower shop. Everything was in bloom. Even the heather that was planted haphazardly along the stone wall presented itself in its most beautiful, dusty lilac splendor.

  “I come here as often as I can,” she said. “You’re always saying you don’t know enough about me. But now you know this.”

  “And you have . . . family here?”

  He swept an arm over the graveyard, taking in the rows of gravestones, suddenly feeling a violent, unfathomable tenderness for her. It felt larger, different than the kind of tenderness he felt for Ella, and it had no semblance to anything he had ever felt for Anna. It felt like a need to fold his body around her, to protect her from evil, sorrow, and death. At night he dreamt of single-handedly warding off an army of furious men; then he folded her into his arms, plunged deep into her soft, inviting cunt, and this was exactly the way it should be between a man and a woman.

  It was a ridiculous thought, he knew this perfectly well. He was a middle-aged man—not a warrior.

  “Here we are.” She had stopped in front of an unknown grave. “This is where I come to think about my boys,” she said. “They were four and five years old, when it happened.”

  He frowned. It hadn’t crossed his mind that Christi could be the mother of two children, nor that she could have suffered such a loss. That her children were dead. She had never mentioned it, and now she did so with the same matter-of-factness as if she were talking about a misplaced purse. His immediate impulse was sympathy, followed hotly by a grotesque jealousy. That she’d had a life before him, that she’d kept this life from him, that he would never be a part of it. He tried to pull himself together.

  “Was it an . . . accident?”

  She bent down and gathered a handful of small stones in her hand, slowly let them seep through her fingers. A thin layer of dust remained on the surface of her long nails.

  “My father got in a car accident. They were sitting on the back seat. They were gone in an instant. But, it’s irrelevant how I lost them. The damage done is the same. First they were ripped out of my body, then they were ripped out of my soul. I had this done when it happened.”

  She pulled her flowing skirt up high enough for him to see the lower part of her inner thigh and that tattoo he had caressed hundreds of times: two thin matchstick-boys holding hands.

  “Touch me,” she said, and it struck him that there was something extreme in her need to transform sorrow into sexual desire. It seemed as if it could never be wild or risky enough. Once she even called to him from the dunes when he was on the beach with Ella. When he reached her, he could see that she’d been crying, but she refused to tell him what was wrong. Just pulled him down on top of her with one hand while unbuttoning his pants with the other. Despite the fact that there were other people on the dunes, and despite the fact that Ella was alone on the beach. He had pulled himself free, and the whole episode couldn’t have taken more than a few minutes, but when he got back to the beach, Ella was standing alone on the shore, shaking, and there were deep cuts on her hands and knees. Things could have ended badly that day. Christi scared him. And what was worse: he scared himself when he was with her.

  “Not here,” he whispered, carefully pulling her skirt back into place. “We’re in a graveyard, sweetheart.”

  She narrowed her eyes and focused on a point in the sky just above the crown of hanging birches. Then she strode up to the church and opened the heavy grey door to the transept. He followed after with a deep sense of having done something absolutely unforgivable.

  As yet, they had not seen each other without having sex. Not even the first time at the museum. She had touched him ever so lightly on the hip as they looked at the painting by Laurits Tuxen entitled Naked Woman Sunbathing in the Dunes in Skagen. Her touch was like talking without having to say a word. Afterward she jerked him off in the car till he came.

  Christi walked to the front of the church and sat down in the front pew. He slipped onto the bench next to her.

  “I come here every week,” she said. “I sit here in the church and think about my boys. Every week. For at least two hours every time. I know each and every curl on the altarpiece up there. Each and every word . . . ”

  Were those tears in her eyes? Her face was bathed in colored beams of light from the mosaic window above them, her eyes were mere dark shadows, but there was a wavering in her voice that made him think of Anna, just before she started crying.

  He sat dead still.

  He felt mute and lamed, just like he always did when a woman bared black holes eating at her soul. He could build houses and garages and brick walls. He was a rock, as Anna liked to say. But a rock defined itself by being strong, calm, and silent in the whirl of a woman’s ever-tilting sea of emotions. Anything other than that he neither could nor wanted to provide, and a spiritual or religious life was just as hopelessly unfathomable to him as a woman’s intricately tangled feelings of loss and sorrow and love.

  “So, you’re . . . into all this?”

  He tried to keep his voice light, sweeping a hand in the direction of the altar. Could not even pretend to understand any of it.

  “In a way.” She brushed a tear off her cheek with a trembling finger. “This is where I think about the family I once had. If you believe in God, then you believe it’s Him who took my sons away, so I talk to Him about everything that has happened. Try to understand it.”

  He looked up at the figure of Jesus over the altar. His head lolled to one side, a stream of caked blood protruding from his crown and hands. This guy had definitely seen better days, and he looked the way Helgi felt. Wretched.

  “Have you ever wondered whether it’s even necessary to understand everything that happens to us?” he said gently. “I don’t think there is a master plan for anything. We just live here on this earth, and we have to try to make the best of what we’ve got, right?”

  The corners of her mouth were strained. She was definitely on the verge of tears now.

  “I don’t know . . . ” She shook her head and sniffed a little. “I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in justice, and somebody has to pay for me losing my boys. I have to be able to hate someone! Otherwise I’ll fall to pieces, Helgi.”

  He put an awkward arm around her shoulders and wondered whether he should try saying something, or whether he should just let her talk herself calm—just like Ella could when she was feeling sad. But he needed to get back to the building site soon. Being in the church and the story about the dead children had made him restless.

  “Why did you bring me here?”

  She shifted a little closer and leaned against him.

  “I never thought I would ever want to have a child again. But I do now. I want to have a child . . . with you. Before it’s too late.”

  He stiffened. What she had just said was the most touching— and absurd—suggestion he had ever heard.

  “Say something,” she breathed against his neck.

  “You’re too young for me,” he mumbled, realizing that he was saying this more for his own benefit. It was so hard not to follow the impulse she had planted in him. The thought of the two of them together, in a white house with big windows and a view over the
never-ending meadows. Their double bed was broad and the bed-covers were just as blindingly white as the walls and the furniture, and between them lay a small, plump baby. Their child. A son. He had always wanted a son. The image inspired a vision of the future that transformed into a whole new life in which he was twenty years younger—and could start everything over.

  There was space for Ella in that house. She would have her own room, and she would grow to love Christi and the little boy. Anna, on the other hand, was dead, or, at the very least, out of the picture. Perhaps she had found another man.

  He shook his head and looked at Christi.

  “It’s not possible.”

  “I’m not too young for you,” she said, nipping him playfully on the neck. “I’ve got an old soul, haven’t you noticed? I’ve lived a thousand years just to meet you. I love you.”

  “And I love you . . . ” He gently brushed the long hair away from her face. “I don’t know what to say. It’s not that easy when you’re already married, when you have a child with someone else. And there are things about Anna that you don’t know. She’s fragile. It will destroy her if I leave her.”

  “Just say yes.” Her voice had taken on a pleading tone now, and for a moment he thought that she had started crying again. It was only once he felt her tugging at his belt, saw her sliding down onto her knees in front of him, that he realized what she was doing.

  “Now? Here?”

  His cock swelled under her practiced hands, and in a torment of lust and horror he watched her eagerly working mouth.

  A door slammed, hushed voices could be heard coming from the port outside, and this is what finally made him pull himself free.

  “Not here,” he said in despair. “Have you gone insane? We are in a church, by your children’s . . . ” He zipped up his pants and fastened his belt, watched her kneeling on the floor, her head still bent down.

  “Don’t call me that,” she spat under her breath.

  “What?”

  “Don’t call me insane.” She looked up at him with blank eyes, and he felt wretched, immediately contrite. How could he have spoken to her so harshly?

  “I’m sorry.”

  He took her hands in his and helped her to her feet.

  “We can go to your car,” she said. “We could drive out to the forest.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t want to, Christi. I need to think. But I’d be happy to drive you home.”

  “There’s no need. Thank you.”

  She turned round and walked away from him. Perhaps she expected him to follow, or perhaps she really wanted to be alone. He was reminded how little he understood about women. How he had always gotten it wrong.

  “So long,” she called, and, without turning round, lifted a hand in an ambiguous salute.

  16

  Barbara dragged a mattress into the room downstairs with the broken panes and put a basket in the kitchen for Lupo. “Just until you’re feeling better,” as she put it.

  It was obvious that Alex didn’t like her. Far too many middle-aged or aging women, advisers and psychologists, had already raked through his soft psyche; they had picked, prodded, and poked, searching for traumas, signs of abuse and developmental disorders. He kept Barbara at arm’s length and dodged her awkward embraces. On the other hand, it was patently clear that he was a lot more relaxed now that there was an adult in the house who could take care of me.

  A semblance of calm fell about the house.

  Alex fished or strolled along the beach with Lupo following at his heels, and together they looked for amber and beautifully shaped cockleshells. Barbara provided more than just new-age spiritual healing and fresh supplies of vodka in the fridge for the evenings; when she wasn’t working on her drawings, we cleared up the living room, and we dragged my grandmother’s old couch and chairs out onto the windy lawn, where we beat the dust out of them till they smelled of nothing but sun and sea. We stripped the old carpet off the living room floor, and, to my absolute delight, we found beautiful, untreated wooden planks below that I scrubbed with a thick solution of suds. Afterward we rewarded ourselves with fresh rye bread, liver pâté, and pickled beetroot. There had been some money from Thisted social services, and the sum total of my fortune in the bank peaked at 1,183 good Danish kroner. I felt rich.

  But the best thing about Barbara’s arrival was her old CD-player, which she ceremoniously handed over to Alex. He and I went to the public library together to borrow books and CDs. Now we had Bob Marley, Coldplay, and a whole stack of recordings of Billie Holiday and Fitzgerald, and the jazz music, replete with accompanying scratches and hollow recordings, blared in the background as we worked, played cards, or just chilled in the yard with plastic garden furniture, smokes, and blue, blue windswept skies above.

  I had seen Magnus a couple more times since that day in the dunes. The first time he came by in his car, and we did it in a parking lot up near Hanstholm. Another time, he smuggled me into the summer house he was sharing with Dutch surfers and the increased available space gave him ample opportunity to prove that he was more than competent with his tongue as well as his hands. We pretty much didn’t talk at all, but I liked him. Young men were bound to be arrogant idiots, but often revealed small cracks and human vulnerabilities in their souls. Like the story about a scar on his knee, the fleeting caresses on the back of my hand in the car on the way home, the open expression on his face when he came, that revealed that his happiness, at least briefly, lay caught up in another person. In me.

  After the third time, I had to remind myself to stop before I began kidding myself that all these little things amounted to love.

  “Who is he?”

  It was raining, and Barbara and I had been trapped in the house for several hours. I was reading one of my grandmother’s books, a crime story with yellowed pages and a thin plot. Barbara was drawing at the kitchen table with all the lights switched on. I followed her gaze and caught sight of Bæk-Nielsen’s emaciated figure on the road. He stood hunchbacked in the rain, staring at the house, but made no motions to approach.

  “Bæk-Nielsen,” I said curtly. “He’s been looking after the house for my grandmother.”

  “And why is he standing out there on the road?”

  Barbara’s pencil had poised in midair over her sheet of paper. The drawing she was doing didn’t resemble the big-eyed children from the photographs, but appeared to be an “elaboration”—as she called it—of a mural called The Jaws of Hell. A picture of the original was spread out on the table before her. It depicted a devil ramming a burning torch up a woman’s body while a second grinning devil caught the woman’s vomit in a bowl. Barbara’s version had a deeper perspective, and the figures were more rounded out, more realistic. The woman’s mouth was open, and her tongue stuck out between grotesquely large teeth. The devil with the torch was overweight, almost flabby, with horns sticking through a red baseball cap. He looked like a guy you could run into on the street in Hvidovre.

  “He probably just wants to see how we are getting on,” I said.

  Barbara narrowed her eyes. “I assume he’s in regular contact with your grandmother?”

  I shrugged, and got up to boil some more water for coffee. Alex had gone down to the beach with Lupo, and I missed his company. Barbara had been following me like a shadow for days.

  “I’m going outside to get rid of him,” she said, abruptly getting up. “You don’t need people peeking in your windows.”

  I stood by the window and watched her determined march across the yard. The wind drove the rain horizontally into her body, and she hunched her shoulders against it. When she reached the old man, she straightened up and stood before him with her arms crossed over her chest, her wet hair flying in the wind. She said something that made him shake his head. Then he pointed a half-crooked finger at the house and threw his arms out to the sides. His thin, dark-blue windbreaker w
as soaked black with rain, his sharp eyes blank behind his steaming glasses. I felt sorry for him. Barbara was not a tall woman, but what she lacked in centimeters she made up for in vitality. She was younger than Bæk-Nielsen, and she was stronger. Next to her, he looked like a stooping scarecrow that would be carried away on the very next gust of wind. The old witch of Thisted must have her claws dug particularly deep into him if he was prepared to chase after me in this kind of rain.

  Barbara delivered what looked like her final volley of verbal attack, before turning her back on the frail shape and striding back to the door, her wet red hair clinging to her cheeks and forehead.

  “Good Lord,” she said, walking past me into the bathroom, our designated smoking room when it was raining. I heard her opening the window, the click of her lighter. By the time I came into the bathroom as well she was leaning on the window sill, watching her smoke rings shatter in the rain. I sat down on the toilet seat and fished out my own pack of home-rolled smokes.

  “What did he say?”

  Barbara turned her head and watched me through half-closed eyes. “That your grandmother would very much like to see you,” she said. “I thought she was dead. And I thought you said you didn’t have any contact with anyone out here.”

  “I don’t.”

  “She’s your grandmother. You’re living in her house.”

  “That’s got fuck-all to do with it,” I said. “She doesn’t know me, she never has. It wasn’t me she chose. She wants me to forgive my father. That’s all she ever wrote in her letters.”

  My throat closed painfully, producing an involuntary croak as I spoke. My father shot my mother. Her brains were splattered all over my galoshes. Given half a chance, I would have scraped his marrow from my bones and drained his blood from my body; when I was about sixteen and the suspicion dawned on me that my nose bore some resemblance with his, I made sure it got broken in two places the next time that witch Mathilde picked a fight with me. The stupid bitch got reassigned to a different institution and I got an aristocratic crook in the bridge of my nose. Win-win.