Wild Swims

by Dorthe Nors

  Later, when I was checking in, I noticed the big river I’d seen from the air. It flowed along the foot of a slope here, north of the hotel. “Oh, there’s the river,” I said to the desk clerk, because I like a friendly atmosphere between me and a hotel. She looked at me suspiciously and said, “Yeah, the Mississippi,” and I said, “Really? The Mississippi?” And she said, “Yes sir, the Mississippi.” And I said that that came as a surprise, that I hadn’t had a clue. In my mind, the great mythic river ran through a sweaty Southern lowland. “This far north?” I asked the clerk, who handed me a key card. “Even the Mississippi has to start somewhere,” she said.

  I’d wanted to take a rest but busied myself instead with finding a map. It turned out that the clerk was right. It was the Mississippi that ran behind the hotel. Its headwaters were in Northern Minnesota. From there it ran for a while almost parallel to the Canadian border and on through Lake Winnibigoshish, whereupon it succumbed to gravity and flowed south, past my hotel window. I usually have a little lie-down after a branch visit, but I was feeling refreshed, so I slid my suitcase in front of the closet, where it would remain standing for the most part unopened, took the elevator down again, and there it was, the Mississippi. Wide and mighty, and with a curiously tidy waterfall a little to the north. I gazed at the foaming water, and then I spotted a bridge with a rust-red railing. It was early dusk, the air was humid, and I could hear​ cicadas. When I got out to about the middle of the bridge, I positioned myself with my face to the north. Somewhere up there the Mississippi began, and I thought about the round-about path I’d seen the river take on the map. It was as if it couldn’t make up its mind at its origin, and then surrendered anyway to the immense downward route.

  I’ve been so many places now that it doesn’t matter, I thought. Everything’s shifted, but when I was a kid, the best thing I knew was working with poultry. I stuck my hands in among them. Then I might steal the eggs and give them to Mom, until Mom decided to yield to her infections. Dad kept exotic pheasants for a while, and the silver pheasant was hotheaded and easy to tease. When I placed my boot soles up against the fence, it’d come straight over. Its powerful talons against my rubber boot, its beak in a vicious attack. One summer day, when I was walking around barefoot in the grass, I challenged the pheasant. I placed my naked foot against the chicken wire and shouted at it to bring it on. It did. It only wished me ill, but it felt like solicitude, and then I sat down by the wire netting. I gazed into its black eye. I told it that it had barely nipped me. I explained that its attack felt just like being tickled. That it was welcome to try again, it could just attack me, I said. “Attack me,” I said again and again, but it just stared back with its black eye, until it seemed to give up. Then it went away.

  When I reached the far side, I found a small set of steps down to the Mississippi. The bank consisted of large rocks, and gravel, and tree trunks lay barkless and stranded in the shallows. It smelled of fresh water. My black shoes were glossy in the evening light, and I thought of Mom. Between offices, I​ try above all not to be touched. I keep disinfectant gel on me, I never dry my hands with cloth towels or air dryers. I bring Kleenex, sneeze into the crook of my arm, rarely stay more than a single night. The Mississippi is no doubt polluted, and the current is strong in a southerly direction. It winds along easily up against the border before gravity takes hold. I would have sunk into it but it would have borne me in the wrong direction, so I just sat there. Later on I lay down. When I’d lain there awhile, the bird came.

  THE FAIRGROUND

  THERE’S A STUBBLE FIELD IN FRONT OF THE RENTED house. Over by the side of the small wood is the country fairground, trampled and singed. A fox might make its rounds there, but otherwise it’s deserted. Her bare feet are stuffed into the clogs she found in the closet. Both fairground and field have been baking all day in the late-summer sun. It’s September now, and when she walks around the field, the stubble scratches her ankles. But now she’s standing still, in her trench coat and clogs. The moon’s on the rise too.

  She thinks a lot about what she did to deserve his silence, which tempted her to assume things that weren’t true. And then came the rejection. She’d grown panicky and he’d become cynical, she thinks, gazing across the field to the fairground. They must have had a tombola there, maybe a merry-go-round and roller coaster.

  For a time he’d been everything; she supposes it was a kind of obsession. Whatever he did, and even what he thought, haunted her. She read signs in offhand remarks, she researched his past, his possible sorrows. One evening she hid behind the beer taps at a party because his best friend came through the door and looked at her. That face, as horribly unpleasant as foil between one’s teeth, was impossible to ignore and she’d hidden behind the kegs. There was a sweet smell of warm grass and public opinion, and it felt as if she were spinning slightly.​ Like a suckling pig, she thought. Well spitted, and with an apple jammed in her jaws.

  It’s September, and she’s driven down from the city to the rental. She knows something strange had taken up residence in her. It’s something she’s known a long time, but the silence gives her no peace. She takes walks along the slopes that drop to the sea, trying to enjoy the sight of cormorants on gillnetting stakes, then heads home to drink tea. The idyllic surroundings provide no relief. On the far side of the stubble field and the wood, the fairground draws her eye. There’s a special light over there. The wind raises dust from the field; everyone left the site back in June. The grounds lie there awaiting next year’s fair, and such emptiness calls for something.

  I must have been sick, she thinks. The thought occurs to her now and then, even though it was a case of love, just not the love she’d been promised as a child. Back then, she’d imagined that love was just like running through a sprinkler. It tickled, you laughed and felt silly and beautiful at the same time. You were charming and adorable and wove flowers in the wire mesh of the rabbit hutch and won praise for it. No matter what you did, the chosen one would think you were amazing. The happiness was as sweet as peppermint, and it endured. You were extraordinarily dear, and it was the other person’s job to make sure everything ended well by not being able to resist the sweetness.

  But what she’d been through as an adult belonged to another world entirely. If it wasn’t reluctant, then it was dramatic, and in the end the drama became encysted in her. Kept hidden from the world’s light, it wreaked havoc, and at some point she convinced herself that it was because he needed love​ that she had such a great store of it. Yet for him it was merely a flirtation, a matter of discharge, nothing more, she understood that now, and it was actually risky of him. A spark and a merciless drought can set a continent ablaze. He ought to know that. Just take Australia, where civil defense crews wait on tenterhooks in choppers with fat water tanks slung beneath their bellies, anxious and virile, always ready to fly out and stop the craziness from spreading, and now here she stands.

  Over on the fairground, the fox prowls at night. It must, for there are always mice in the grass. In the patch where the beer tent stood in June, the ground is pounded down, and when she walks over, she can still catch a whiff of stale beer, and then she sees the rental on the far side of the stubble field. There it squats, reduced to its essence of walls and whitewash. That’s the place I’m renting, she thinks. From there I can see everything plainly, yet the house says nothing to her, and then she walks back to it and gazes out toward the fairground. There the mood feels familiar. Maybe it’s the empty lot’s defenselessness, she doesn’t know, but late one night at a party she’d pressed him into a corner. She’d said that they could always be friends. “Friends?” he’d said. “So you want us to be friends?” He didn’t say anything else before going out into the hallway and putting on his winter coat, it was snowing, she could see that when he opened the door. Afterward, she thought that he could just as well have said, “Burn in hell,” and then she was slowly revolving, trussed up with hooks, while down at her feet a little motor kindly saw to her rotati
on. Beneath her, the lawn and the beer tent atmosphere. The kids frolicking on the fairground, coltish and clueless, and behind them the wood with its dark chill.​

  We put flowers in the wire mesh around the rabbits we exhibited behind the fairground, she recalls. We decorated our doll carriages with sweet william, roses, whatever else we could swipe from our mothers’ flower beds. Then we paraded through the village and out to the fairground. What were we, six seven eight in our prettiest dresses, and the grownups applauded, some of them on the point of tears. A woman and love, she thinks, and it feels honeyed on the tongue, and she stands at the edge of the stubble and spits. She looks across to the fairground, spitting. The fairground interests her more than the walks above the shore, the cormorants, the beech forest, and it’s dawned on her that while it lasted, she was really two people at the same time. One who was as if possessed by love, and one who walked alongside, silent and observing, and sometimes the two would have arguments that the observer always lost, because love bears all things, endures all things, but if I have not love, the lover screamed, I am clanging brass, a sounding cymbal, and the observer made a mental note that horror vacui might be what gets the country’s church bells to ring.

  A stray ice cream wrapper, over there on the lot, and now a ringdove worming its way through the grass. Empty, she thinks, and I who am so full of things. My doll carriage was pigeon blue, and I decorated it with daisies. We started at the school, and then we marched in procession to the fairground. It smelled of barbecue and dry grass. The parents and teachers ran after us with their cameras, while the boys from school stayed away. I wonder where they were, the boys, as we walked there, a model of compliance. Were they playing soccer, or throwing abandoned bikes into the creek?​

  She cocks an ear to the evening sky, listening. No boys in the bushes. No boys on the fairground, they’re gone, and she tries to make herself taller in order to see it more clearly. The fox is not there, and it’s good that the ringdove flies off, for now she is standing on the brink. It’s September. In the yard hang apples and black elderberries. Someone’s placed a good chair under the chestnut, she could just sit down, but she’d rather stand here with the gas can. It’s so quiet, now that everyone’s gone home.

  COMPACTION BIRDS

  EARLY SATURDAY MORNING I DROVE UP THE COAST from the border, toward Thy. I drove past meadows with flocks of game birds. The geese don’t want to migrate anymore. They think it’s just as easy to stay in the farmers’ fields, so now they hunker there through the winter by the thousand, feeding on winter wheat and old corncobs. They trample, they compact the soil and make it hard.

  As I stood on the ferry, crossing the Thyborøn Channel, I was thinking that it was a long way to drive for a woman I’d only spent a single night with. But Anja had been nice when she was waiting on us during the seminar in the national park. She’d wanted to join the dancing after dinner and seemed eager as we walked through the crowberry. She didn’t want to do it in the hotel, but there’d been primitive shelters in the area. My performance hadn’t been that impressive, yet now her ex-husband had the kids for the weekend. And she had the family summer cottage.

  “Come,” she’d whispered on the phone.

  There’s a powerful riptide in the Limfjord. I had to grip the railing tightly on the trip across. The fjord looked as though it were a river flowing toward the North Sea, and up on the Agger Isthmus I saw how everything that no longer had to fly away lay pooling in the lakes, and if she hadn’t been standing​ in the lyme grass by the driveway to a cottage a little farther north, I might well have stayed.

  “But here I am,” I said as I stepped into the dunes to greet her.

  She wore a light-colored dress with small sun-yellow flowers. It was a pretty dress, and she said I looked just like she remembered, and that she was awfully sorry. There’d been some sort of double booking. She’d forgotten that her mother was coming, among others. “I’m awfully sorry,” she said, and said it was too bad I’d had my cell phone switched off.

  Within the cottage stood a woman in blue, with brushed bangs. She was standing with one of those cast-off mugs you find in summer cottages. It was the mother. In front of her, Anja’s sister was gesturing, and behind her sister, a niece sat in a creaking wicker chair. Out on the dunes, her brother-in-law and nephew were kicking a ball.

  “The party slipped my mind. My aunt’s turning eighty,” Anja said, rubbing her forehead. There was a luncheon at a nearby inn. She had to go, she explained. For a couple of hours at least. I could stay and enjoy the cottage. “You’re very welcome to join us,” Anja’s mother said, and stepped closer. “In our family, there’s always room for one more at the table.”

  I shook her mother’s hand, then I shook her sister’s. I said hi to the niece, and to the brother-in-law when he came in the door with the boy. “Anja says you work at the Society for Nature Conservation,” he said. “What are you doing about the barnacle geese?”

  I never managed to answer, because Anja pulled me out onto the porch. She said she understood if I’d rather go home now. She was sorry she’d mixed things up so badly, but she was tied down. I said that she looked pretty with those​ freckles on her nose. She said her aunt had been recently widowed. Then she poked a forefinger into my palm, and I clutched at it.

  There was some lighthearted confusion a little while later when Anja kissed me back by the outdoor shower. It wasn’t a good kiss. The yellow flowers on the sleeves of her dress seemed to be elsewhere beneath my hands. “I’m so embarrassed,” she whispered, and behind the clapboard wall the others were talking about driving to the inn together. There wasn’t enough room in her brother-in-law’s Audi, so I ended up in the passenger seat of Anja’s car, her mother behind me with her hands on my headrest.

  We took the main coast road north, trailing her brother-in-law. We drove like this for a while through the national park. From the backseat, Anja’s mother spoke of the view and the place names, and she wanted to know exactly where I lived. “Tøndermarsken,” I said. “By yourself, right?” she asked, and I confirmed that I was a widower. I also mentioned that my wife had been a pastor, but that seemed to land awkwardly. Then Anja’s mother gave a recapitulation of some article she’d read in the weekly paper. It had to do with wolves and how they communicate across long distances by howling. “They’re social creatures,” she said.

  In this way we drove along behind the brother-in-law until he turned into a rest stop. Anja conferred with him, while her mother worried about not getting there in time for the first course. As for me, I was looking at the flowers on Anja’s dress and the clusters of game birds lifting off from the vegetation. In the winter they would stick around: compaction birds.​

  What had happened was that the brother-in-law had gone north by mistake, and after a half-hour excursion in the wrong direction, we arrived at the inn well into the first course. There was a burst of applause and general merriment when we crossed the floor. If I’d known who the other guests were, I would have attempted a bit of clowning, but Anja’s was the only face present that was somewhat familiar, and she wasn’t looking up.

  Seats had been set aside for the family. I sat down in the only available chair at a table that wasn’t the head table. To my left was a little man who introduced himself as a cousin from the other side of the family. He explained that it was his wife’s place I’d taken. “She never goes anywhere anymore,” he said, and then I turned to my right, where a bearded man was seated. After that, a fish landed on my plate. “Cheers!” exclaimed a wrinkled face across from me. It belonged to a woman. “It’s a good thing you made it.”

  I patted Anja’s hand every time it rested on my shoulder in passing. “I’m terribly sorry about this,” she whispered, and at such moments there were eyes upon us, so Anja stopped doing it, and I didn’t feel I could go over to her.

  In this fashion, the luncheon proceeded. Now and then I went to the restroom to make the time pass, and it was when I was trying to urinate again t
hat a man stepped into the stall next to mine and unzipped. A profuse pissing commenced. I finished up discreetly, flushed, and opened the stall door, but not fast enough to escape the brother-in-law.

  “Oh, it’s you!” he said, coming over to the sink. “Now we’ve pissed together.” I said it was almost as good as being blood brothers, after which we returned to the party, where the coffee had been served.​

  “What are you people planning to do about those barnacle geese?” he asked, pulling me down at the deserted end of a table. “And the whooper swans and the pinkfeet? I’ve had to resow my fields. My neighbor too.” I glanced around for Anja, who was being detained at the head table. “What do the ag associations suggest?” I asked. “Can you spray for them?” he said, and laughed.

  I have this conversation every day, and I pointed out that it was really due to climate change. Then he wanted to know if it was also the climate’s fault that the wolves had come north to harass his cows. I explained, as I usually do, that wolves have adapted to a Europe at peace, and he maintained, as no doubt he usually does, that he didn’t want to let his kids play in the tree plantation anymore. Finally he said, “I hope you have a great view from your ivory tower, but you should know that we’re rather fond of Anja. Why don’t you try a widows’ ball down in Southern Jutland instead?”