by Dorthe Nors
praise for dorthe nors
“Nors’s reinvention of experimental fiction is marvellous”
Guardian
“Dorthe Nors is a writer of moments – quiet, raw portraits of existential meditation, at times dyspeptic, but never unsympathetic”
Paris Review
“There’s something about the deceptive simplicity of Dorthe Nors’s stories that floors me”
Red
“One of Denmark’s most inventive and acclaimed contemporary writers”
Bookanista
“Nors has found her own space away from Copenhagen’s literati… Her words whip along, each idea cascading into the next. It’s like having a window into someone else’s thoughts”
Independent
“Dorthe Nors knows how to capture the smallest moments and sculpt them into the unforgettable”
Oprah
“Nors manages to condense the essence of life”
Spectator
You can always withdraw
a little bit further
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
In a Deer Stand
Sun Dogs
Hygge
By Sydvest Station
Between Offices
The Fairground
Compaction Birds
Pershing Square
Honeysuckle
On Narrow Paved Paths
Inside St. Paul’s
The Freezer Chest
Manitoba
Wild Swims
About the Publisher
Also by Dorthe Nors
Copyright
IN A DEER STAND
IT’S A QUESTION OF TIME. SOONER OR LATER, SOMEBODY will show up. Even dirt tracks like these can’t stay deserted forever. The farm he passed when he entered the area must be inhabited. The people who live there must go for walks sometimes. And the deer stand is probably the farmer’s, and it’s just a question of time before it starts raining. The vegetation on the ground is dry. Some twiggy bushes, some heather too. To the right, a thicket; to the left, the start of a tree plantation. The dirt road must go in there for a reason, so someone comes here now and then. Take him, for instance, he came this way. Just yesterday, even if it feels longer. The circumstances make it feel longer. It’s likely that his ankle’s broken, though it’s also possible that it’s just a sprain. The pain isn’t constant. There is some swelling. Now he sits here and he has no phone. She must be in pieces back home. He can imagine it. Walking around with his phone in her hand, out in the utility room. She’s standing there with it in her hand. She curses him for not taking it. He supposes the police will be involved soon. Maybe they already have been for some time now. It’s probably been on the local radio; that he’s forty-seven, that he drives a BMW, that he left home in a depressed state. He can’t bear the thought of them saying those last words. She just wasn’t supposed to win every battle.
Last night there was screeching in the forest. Some owls, foxes perhaps. Someone has seen wolves out here, and no doubt Lisette has come by the house. Lisette’s probably sitting on the couch with her wide eyes, eating it all up. He’s so tired. His clothes are damp, and last night he froze something terrible. There are black birds overhead, rooks he thinks, and she’s pacing around in the yard, restless. He painted the eaves last spring. It’s a nice house, but she wants to sell it now. He really likes the house, but now she wants something else. When she wants something else, there’s nothing he can do. As recently as the day before yesterday, he had an urge to call his brother, but he’s lost that battle. Lisette’s welcome to visit. Lisette often stands in their kitchen-dining area and calls up her network. Lisette’s got a big network, but mostly she hangs out with his. And in principle, he’s only got the kids left. It’s a long time since she took part in the gatherings on his side of the family. There’s something wrong with his parents, she says. Something wrong with his brother’s kids, his brother’s girlfriend, and especially his brother. She says that his brother sows discord. That’s because his brother once told him he ought to get divorced. And because he loses all battles, he went straight home and told her: “My brother thinks I should get divorced.” So this isn’t the first time he’s driven out to some forest. He’s done it a fair amount over the years. Sometimes to call up his folks on the sly, or his brother. He also calls them when he’s down washing the car.
He’s sitting in a deer stand, and something’s happened to the light. A mist is rising. It creeps toward him across the crowberry bushes. Which means that evening is closing in again. He wanted to be alone, so that’s what he is now. He stepped on a tussock wrong, in the strip between the wheel ruts, some seventy-five yards from the deer stand. First the pain, then off with the sock. Did he shout for someone? Well, he shouted a bit the first hour, then darkness began to descend and he set about reaching the deer stand.
He adds up the distances between towns. It must be about seventy-nine miles home. That’s how far he is from the utility room, where she’s standing and staring at his phone, though no doubt Lisette’s there. Lisette’s playing the role of comforter, co-conspirator, and slave, yes, Lisette’s her slave too, but a slave with privileges. While he heard something shrieking in the forest last night. Probably a fox, but wolves have been sighted here too. The hunters set up game cameras to get a glimpse of the animals they hope to shoot. Or else it’s farmers wanting photos of whatever’s eating their turnips, usually red deer, he supposes. Then one morning this wolf is standing there, staring straight into the camera. He’s seen it in the newspaper, but wolves can’t climb, and it’s just a question of time before she sits down next to the washing machine. Her hands cupped over her knees, and he hasn’t seen her cry in years. She didn’t cry when her mother died. Her face can clap shut over a feeling like the lid of a freezer over stick insects. He had some in eighth grade, in a terrarium, stick insects. They weren’t much fun, and then his biology teacher said that putting them in the freezer would kill them. He peered at the insects for a long time before he placed them in the freezer. They stood there rocking, looking stalklike. When he took the terrarium out the next day, they stood there stiff. They didn’t suffer, he supposed. Thinking back on them now, they looked like someone who’s achieved complete control over a stage illusion—and she’s been successful that way too. Maybe she doesn’t have feelings at all. She’s got lots of hobbies, but it isn’t clear that she has feelings. He has the distinct sense that Lisette’s standing in the kitchen area at this very moment. Lisette sits in the bedroom on the edge of the bed, she’s there for the kids’ graduation parties, she joins them on vacation, and for several years she drove their daughter to handball. Lisette’s got short legs and a driver’s license, and by now the police must have been brought in. It’s been more than a day since he drove off. In a depressed state of mind, though that’s not true. He just wanted the feeling of winning, and now he has a view of a landscape at dusk. His trousers are green from moss and something else, extending high up his legs. The boards he’s sitting on have been attacked by algae. If she saw this sort of algae on the patio, she’d have him fetch the poison. What hasn’t he done on that house? And now she wants to move into something smaller, though it’d be good to have an extra room. “An extra room?” he asked. “For Lisette,” she replied, and then he took the car and left his phone behind. His family’s grown used to his absence, and besides, he isn’t the same any more. Something has clapped shut over him. First she won all the battles, then he positioned himself squarely on her side. In that way, he stopped losing, and she tired of scrutinizing him. That was the logic, but now he’s sitting here. A mist has risen, the night will be cold, and a wolf has been sighted.
SUN DOGS
IT’S A LONG TIME AGO NOW, BU
T ONCE I LIVED IN A cabin in Norway. It was Olav who mentioned the place to me, at the start of our relationship. He told me it had been the summer cottage of the Norwegian author Knut Terje Aasbakken. Now it was a writer’s retreat, and a narrow lane led up to it from the village Olav came from. As a boy, he’d go up there sometimes to spy on the writers who lived there. They seemed so secretive, he said, and dove into me.
The spring that our relationship began to get complicated, Olav invited me to the King’s Garden. I didn’t take it lightly, I begged, but he would not relent. As July drew on I became a wisp, and a friend suggested I go away somewhere. So it was I remembered Aasbakken’s cabin. The one in Norway, on a mountainside, in a forest.
I applied, got the cabin, left at the beginning of September. A woman from the general store drove me up from the village. She talked about the area as we crept up the mountain in her little Golf. On the way we passed the community center. She said it was customary for whoever lived in the cabin to give a reading at the center. I gazed down on the river in the valley, and then she dropped me off with a key to the woodshed.
Evenings, I would take a chair out in front of the cabin and try to stay in it till I was shaking from the cold. In the mornings, I read over the notes I’d brought along, wrote nothing. Late in the day I would take a walk, usually on the path down to the village. I read the nameplates on the doors I passed, and then one day I found myself at a standstill in front of the community center notice board. bunads, the heading read, and under it the name of Olav’s mother. She was called Halldis and taught the locals how to sew their own folk costumes.
The days lasted an eternity, and at night the cold moved in. I walked around Aasbakken’s house and picked paint from the cabinet doors. Out in the forest the mushrooms poked up, and it was impossible to escape the reading event at the community center. The chair of the library club came by several times and pressed. One evening in October, I positioned myself against a large loom-woven tapestry, read aloud and talked. During the coffee break, a woman with short dark hair and a face with Inuit features came over to me. She said, “I think you’ve met my son. He lives in Copenhagen.” I must have stared. “I’ve got an article he’s written about you,” she said. “Who’s your son?” I asked, and the answer was obvious.
That was how I became a friend of sorts with Olav’s mother, Halldis. We agreed to go on some walks together. Later we also went out riding on her Fjord horses. She talked about the landscape, the kinds of tracks animals left, and how the winter we were entering would feel. We never spoke of Olav. I didn’t mention him, and she was private. I had the impression that she was a strong person, but at regular intervals she would worry about whether I’d write about her.
One day in early November, we took the horses out into the forest. When we came to a clearing, I said that the vista there would make for a good opening scene. Then she said, “Yes, that’s what I’m so afraid of.”
She looked at her hands grasping the reins, and I thought of Olav, his face and hers, and that might have been the day she invited me home for coffee. In any case, I remember that we let the horses loose in the pasture and sat in the kitchen. There were pictures of Olav and his wife on the bulletin board, and I’m sure that I gave Halldis a hug when I left. At least I remember that something felt difficult about the parting.
Despite the awkwardness in our relationship, we kept seeing each other. One day when we were in the kitchen after a hike, Olav’s father came in. He was reluctant to sit down at the table, as we probably didn’t want to be disturbed. Halldis found him a coffee cup, and of course he was disturbing us. I recall him saying on several occasions that he didn’t care for well-educated people. He was a carpenter, Olav’s father. Said that the hand’s labor was important and pointed to the table. I praised the table, and then I had to go and see his workshop.
We walked out to it, all three of us, and what I remember most clearly about the room was that he’d stuck up a photo of a naked woman with a thumbtack. He’d pinned her up over the door to the room where Halldis worked on her costumes. That meant that Halldis had to walk under the naked woman anytime she went in to do her sewing. You never know about other people’s relationships, but I thought to myself that it was their marriage Halldis didn’t want me to write about. It seemed complicated to me, though I think it seemed healthy to her. Every day she passed beneath the naked woman who hung over the door with her legs slightly spread, and had hung there so long that Halldis no longer noticed her. She was no doubt thinking of her son in Copenhagen. His wife was beautiful and industrious. He himself interviewed famous authors. And now one of them was living in Aasbakken’s cabin.
The cabin had no phone, so of course I ended up getting a letter. I have it still. He was angry, Olav. “I wouldn’t have thought it of you,” he wrote.
In that sense, he wasn’t like his mother, and I can recall another time we rode out together. It was a clear fall morning, and she mounted easily. On the outward part of our route, we rode past a lake. To me, Norwegian lakes feel bottomless, the landscape unknowable. Such uncertainty must leave its mark on the locals, I thought. Later we went in among the trees, where it smelled of fungus and rot. When we came to the clearing, I said, again, “This scene would lend itself to a story,” and I pointed at the animal paths crisscrossing the terrain. “That’s also what I’m afraid of,” she said. “What are you afraid of?” I asked, and she replied, as always, that she was afraid I would write about her.
As we rode on, we talked about how the forest looked lovely in its decay. I told her she reminded me of an Inuit in some ways, and that Olav must have gotten his features from her. She smiled at that, and there were birds of prey aloft, and moss upon the massive trunks of spruce. “Look over there, the moss,” she said, and I drank in everything I saw.
But then one day, when we were drinking coffee in the kitchen and her husband came in, wanting attention, she actually began to tell a story. She looked at Olav’s father, asked him, “Do I dare to tell this?” and he said, “Yes, just tell it.”
At first I thought she asked him whether she should tell the story because it was his, or because he decided which stories could be told in their relationship. In any case she began telling it, and at regular intervals she’d put a hand over her mouth. “No, I don’t know if I dare,” she said, glancing from her husband down into her cup. “You really don’t have to,” I said.
The story she was telling concerned her cousin who had been married to a bad man. Then he died, and it wasn’t until then that the cousin discovered just how bad he’d been. It came out in certain letters found with the estate. “But you mustn’t write this story,” she said, “that’s what I’m scared of.” I said that she shouldn’t be worried. “Your cousin’s husband wasn’t so out of the ordinary.” She asked, did I know such men? I said that now and then I ran into one. She asked if I wrote about them. “Sometimes,” I said.
I have the impression that during the time we spent together, she managed to read my books. She mentioned one in particular during a hike. It had become winter, we were in the forest, and the surroundings creaked with snow and ice. She’d read the book but didn’t quite know what to think of it. She found the indecisiveness of the female protagonist especially hard to bear.
We crawled over an old stone wall. The sun was shining, my eyes hurt from all the whiteness, and recently I had seen an old photo from the gold-mining town of Yellowknife, near the Arctic Circle. It was a picture of an Inuit and then the sun, and it wasn’t alone. It had company. It’s an optical phenomenon—the sun’s light is refracted by ice crystals and two bright points appear, one on either side. Under the picture it said that the sun had been joined by its rivals, the ones that in the language of the prairie were called sun dogs. As she stood there, Halldis, with her hood covering her ears, she could have been taken for such a figure. Strong in profile, yet still fragile.
“What exactly are you afraid I’m going to write about?” I asked her then. “I don’
t know,” she said.
She stood there and the light went right through her, that’s the way I remember it. How the sun caused her physical form to cease. On the broad white expanse she cast a sharp shadow and I stood opposite her, not alone.
“Halldis?” I said.
She tugged at her mittens, nodded.
HYGGE
THEN WE WERE SITTING THERE, LILLY AND ME, AND she had made coffee and baked one of those chocolate cakes that are soft in the middle. That afternoon she’d also vacuumed and cleared the dead leaves off the windowsills. The budgie was no longer chattering in its cage but had been put to rest under a dish towel, and on the TV there was some show we could guess along with. When I’d come by in the afternoon, it hadn’t been so nice. We’d had a falling-out about her behavior, about the way she’d act up when we were at the senior club, her jealousy and her sweetness, which just seemed vulgar. And then she’d said that business about my face—that she didn’t like it. “You and your big professor mug,” she’d said, and the floor in the bathroom had been littered with laundry. She hadn’t made the bed either, and there was that sweetish smell of urine. I know that smell from Aunt Clara’s, back when she could no longer see and fumbled around and knocked everything over, especially herself. It was as if something dead had taken up permanent residence in her cells, and now it oozed out during her trips to the toilet. It settled into the wallpaper, and the odor was there when we would sit down to enjoy the fruit drink that I’d mix up out in her kitchen. Those long afternoons with flat fruit drink, peppermint candies, and Aunt Clara, who no longer fit her teeth. There are some things you never forget. The way we sang from the songbook, for instance, and her transcriptions of the King’s speeches on New Year’s Eve, and I’ve never understood why Aunt Clara’s loneliness required my involvement. I was just a boy, and while I sat there and had King Frederik’s words placed in my mouth, I suppose my folks were at the movie theater. “You’re so clever in school,” they’d say. “That sort of thing needs stimulation,” they’d say, and then Aunt Clara would be there with her fingers on my neck, the bowl of sugar cubes up in my face: “Take one, my boy, take two, eat!”