Wild Swims

by Dorthe Nors

  The first time they did it, him and Annette, was in her room next to the kitchen in Hasle. Nobody else was home, but she wanted the lights off, so it was lucky it was summer. He was able to push her far enough to the left on the pillow that the light from the window struck her. There she lay like a pale blotch in the midsummer night, and he removed her glasses. The stripped, absent face excited him, and while her gaze fluttered about trying to locate him, she told him she’d never done this before. Then he stroked her hair, until a faint expression of gratitude appeared on the face below. A small picture of the effect of his caress, and it made his erection so hard, he was forced to raise himself on one elbow. Then his hand down in her panties. Then the fuck. And he fucked her till her mouth became a gaping O and her black hair crackled with static against the striped bedsheet.

  No, she didn’t really have a face until he engaged her, and she didn’t really have a face afterward. Yet somewhere in between there was a sweet blossoming, an identity squeezing its way out, a wet mouth, tears, passionate pain. He granted her a will, trained on him, and later he biked home through Aarhus, satisfied that he would keep her. And thus the years passed. He’d kept her, and God he had fucked her often. Sometimes when he was sitting under the honeysuckle in their yard in Risskov, watching her stare blindly at the robot​ mower, her face a bit flushed and swollen with fluid, yet still quite anonymous, it would hit him just how many times he’d fucked her. It was incredible that her face still seemed to exist only with his help. Her speech had improved, no doubt about that. Her attempts to act independently in the world, and the sudden fits of weeping that could drive her from the table, were both signs of individual character. But the rest of it, he thought, was a continuum.

  ON NARROW PAVED PATHS

  THE FIRST OF JUNE, EINAR WAS DIAGNOSED WITH cancer. The second of June, Alice rang up their circle of friends and told them that Einar had been diagnosed with cancer, and to judge by his emaciated state he had nothing to bring to the fight, so it must be terminal. In any case it would be best if Einar, who had no wife or children, was admitted to a hospice as quickly as possible, that was Alice’s opinion. Her own husband had died in the hospice, “And those were his best days,” she said on the phone when her listeners had sat down heavily, on the sofa or in a kitchen chair, with a “Poor Einar.”

  On the fifth of June, Alice walked along the neighborhood’s narrow paved paths to Einar’s, where the door was never locked. She went through the yard and into the kitchen, and here she found the invalid with a schnapps and a cheroot. The invalid appeared anxious and apathetic, and Alice met him with warm thin hands and a steady gaze. Then they smoked together, while Alice told him how to deal with a serious illness. Her father had been a dentist and there was nothing to be done but take things as they came, yet Einar had a faraway look in his eyes. He stared at the birdfeeder outside the window and said, “When Mother died, a robin appeared at the feeder. It kept coming back that entire winter. It was Mother who was​ visiting me.” That same evening, Alice rang around and said she feared that Einar’s cancer had metastasized to the brain.

  The tenth of June, Einar went to a doctor’s appointment with his sister to discuss treatment options. It was in the morning, and what the doctor said was that as long as he drank schnapps, they couldn’t treat him. In the evening Alice called everyone and said that the sister had found empty schnapps bottles and flattened boxes of wine in the invalid’s home, but not much in the way of food. “You can’t be cured if you don’t eat,” Alice explained, that’s what her father had always said. That’s also what she’d always said herself, back when her son was little. “You’ve got to have something to bring to the fight.”

  The next day, Alice went along the neighborhood’s narrow paths to the invalid, who sat askew in a chair in the kitchen and talked about all the years he was looking forward to. The future unfolded itself for Einar, and he spoke of it in hazy images. On the table were some tranquilizers the doctor had prescribed. He fingered them and expounded on what was to be planted in the kitchen garden next year. He also spoke about how he was now going to be cured. A woman he went to croquet with on Tuesdays had dropped by with a guide to eating yourself free from cancer. Lemons and baking soda in particular were known to work miracles. The woman had also brought provisions. Alice could have a look herself, and she did: Einar’s refrigerator was full of lemons and baking soda, but Alice easily swept the contents into a garbage bag. Afterward she sat beside him and laid a thin hand over his. “My father was a dentist,” she said, “and the only thing baking​ soda can save is a cake.” Later, Alice went home and called up the woman with the lemons. She asked her straight out to pack it in, though she needn’t have sounded so harsh. That’s what she thought afterward, before she called the others. After all, the invalid had chosen the schnapps over the lemons, and the prescribed tranquilizers lay on the table like mints. To judge by Einar’s condition, he wasn’t able to figure out his doses. “We just have to hope he manages to get into a hospice,” Alice told everyone who was following Einar’s last days, and then she went to bed and slept like a rock.

  Every day from the twelfth to the nineteenth, Alice went over to see Einar. He was lying in his bed more often now, which made his feet easier to get at. She removed his socks and massaged his feet, lumpy as they were, because it felt so nice, she knew it did. As she sat there at the foot of Einar’s bed and talked about her father, who’d been a dentist, about her devoted years as a schoolteacher, about her deceased husband, and about her son, who’d been sweet as a child, her fingers were busy pinching and patting. The big tom that always hung about Einar was easy enough to shoo off the bed. Then it stalked around beneath the bed and glowered at Alice, while up on the bed she spoke of the future. “I for instance have my funeral completely sorted,” Alice told Einar, who floated in and out of a schnapps fog. “I know precisely which songs they’ll sing,” and Einar opened an eye with difficulty and said, “But I still have long to live.”

  That’s what he said on the nineteenth of June, but the next day he had an appointment at the hospital. Alice only received a​ summary, because it was his sister who accompanied him to the doctor. And the doctor said there was nothing they could do, that Einar should go home and make the most of his remaining time. Those were his words, according to the sister’s summary, and in the evening Alice called around the circle and said, “Now we have to hope he manages to get a hospice place.” Afterward, when she’d hung up the phone, she sat for a while staring out into the midsummer darkness, and without realizing it she hummed, “I get so happy when the sun is shining.”

  A few days later, Einar stopped drinking schnapps. He had no more thirst for schnapps but he wanted his cheroot, and the anti-anxiety drugs. So he sat, with cheroot and water glass, skin and bone, in his kitchen, looking from the dear cat to the feeder outside the window while his sister tended to his daily needs. Alice appeared at regular intervals in the front doorway, dressed in a black turtleneck sweater, menthols in her purse. Her hair was neatly gathered at her nape, her feet large, a bit like a crow’s, thought Einar, when the Midsummer’s Eve bonfires left only Alice to help him use the bathroom. He had to pee all the time, and here’s what she said the next morning: “Everything runs right through Einar.”

  On the twenty-eighth of June, Einar had a birthday party, propped up in an armchair with some outdoor cushions. He received presents and wishes for the future, he received a piece of layer cake, and from a distant acquaintance whom Alice had called up, he received a preprinted card with the word congratulations on the front in gold glitter. I understand that you’ve been struggling with your health, the acquaintance had​ written on the card, but I’m sure it’ll all turn out fine. Doctors nowadays are so clever. Einar read the card and tucked it under the glass of water that later would run right through him.

  In the days that followed, Einar slept lightly most of the time, to the sound of rain on the roof. When Alice stood unannounced one morning in the hall
, the sister told her that now they needed quiet, no more visitors. Everyone on the phone list picked up, and Alice said, “We’ve started sending unannounced visitors away, no more callers!” Not counting the woman with the lemons, everyone said it was good that Einar had Alice. Alice did not dispute this. She hoped to have someone like herself with her when, someday, she was dying, even though she would prefer to enter a hospice. It was so pleasant to be in a hospice, and that night she dreamt she could fly, lustrous in her black clothes, free, she felt, and eternal. Beneath her the plowed fields, the sand beaches, the freeway verges, all of it now and forever her domain. Yet on the first of July she woke weighted down by a bronchitic cough.

  On the fourth day of July, Alice met the sister on one of the neighborhood paths, and the sister said that it wouldn’t be long now. She asked Alice to go home and wait, and Alice went home and announced, “It won’t be long now.”

  Late that evening, the family gathered with Einar’s comfort and joy, his cat, at his deathbed. Hands were held, a psalm was sung, and at four o’clock in the morning, Einar died in his sleep in the firm belief that he had a future before him.

  ∙ ∙ ∙

  On the seventh of July, Alice had a great deal to see to. She needed information about the funeral, she needed to order a wreath, and she also needed to iron her black gabardine pants. She was in the grocer’s several times, where she had to tell the same story again and again, about how the entire thing had ended so peacefully. As for Einar’s beloved tomcat, rumor had it that it sat at the dead man’s feet, meowing. The rumor caught up with Alice by the revolving door of the supermarket, and the family shouldn’t have to worry about that cat. It was past noon when Alice turned up at the dead man’s house with a carrier. The sister seemed red-eyed and relieved, and Alice said, “From now on, the cat officially lives with me,” and the mortician who poked his head out from the dead man’s bedroom also seemed relieved. It wasn’t easy getting the cat stuffed into the carrier, it snarled and scratched her. But once she was home she put it in the bathroom and called the vet. He had an open spot late in the afternoon, and the cat got its needle and died in its sleep in the belief that it had a future before it.

  On the eleventh of July there was a funeral. It was held at two o’clock in the afternoon, and people came in good time. They drifted into the church to secure themselves seats, as the deceased had been well liked. The nearest relations sat in one of the front pews, and at 1:35 p.m., Alice slipped through the people arriving in the church porch, stepped confidently across the memorial sprays and wreaths, and made her way to the pew closest to the coffin. Then she sat in front of the family with folded hands, looking at the large arrays of lilies with their silk sashes.

  ∙ ∙ ∙

  It was a suitably depressing funeral coffee, with rolls and cold cuts, kringles, a dram for those who required it. There was smoking in the yard, and here Alice explained to the circle what had happened in Einar’s last days, and what they should remember to be thankful for: that it went quickly, that he’d been free of pain, that the cat had found a new home. Then each of them departed, ready to face their everyday cares once more, and around eleven on that first evening of Einar’s everlasting life, Alice plopped down in front of the window by her kitchen table and felt empty inside. A small wren bobbed in the yew beneath the windowsill, and Alice felt as if she were hungry. But no snacking now, she told herself, and then she took out her notebook, wrote Einar buried, the cat put down, good one can be of assistance, and turned out the light.​

  INSIDE ST. PAUL’S

  SUN AT THE ZENITH ABOVE ST. PAUL’S, AND HE GAZES at a black Madonna, while she bakes in the sunshine out on the square. He’d even read up on the churches, back home. The dome is majestic, and his plan had been for them to experience it from the inside. The black Madonna’s nursing her infant, her nipple moist with saliva. It’s a video installation, and the lighting in here is soft, like in a forest. You’re not allowed to take pictures. That doesn’t matter to him. She’s the one with the camera on her phone, and she’s sitting out there with sunscreen on her face, staring into it.

  He wants to go down into the crypt, to Lord Nelson, and it’s simple enough to find his way there. The crypt is arranged so that, sooner or later, you end up down by Lord Nelson. He lies in his own chamber: black sarcophagus, high plinth encircled by white columns. He’s been granted his very own starry vault and coronet, Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount. You can walk round and round his mighty sepulchre, and that’s what people do, most of them with headphones on in the midst of an audio tour. But he has an urge to touch it, and he rests his hand on the tomb.

  It surprises him to find the sarcophagus slightly warm; he thought it would be cool. Out on the square the sun is broiling. There she sits, even though it’s shady in St. Paul’s. Nelson lies inside with his one arm, and he’d imagined a chilly place of preservation. Like a larder. Or at least a temperature like under the bleachers. It’s cold there; he knows. As a boy, he always went to the rink with his father and older brother. While they sat up in the bleachers, yelling slogans at the starting forwards, he found his way down beneath them. The players skated in wide, confident circles behind the blue line. They slammed into the boards so hard that the plexiglass shook, and he got a couple of coins from his father for candy during each intermission. Then he could stand in the line by the candy counter and figure out what he’d buy during the next intermission. He really liked the intermissions. The Zamboni would drive around and transform the scuffed rink into a shiny sheet of ice. Once the game started up again, he’d disappear beneath the bleachers. It was extra chilly down there, and he’d expected a similar temperature at Nelson’s tomb. Or at least a temperature where you might expect that his cadaver would be well preserved; that he wasn’t lying inside cooking. Once on TV he watched a 400-year-old corpse being lifted out of a sarcophagus. It had been subjected to temperature conditions so ideal, the body had simply dried out. Like one of the mice you find under the eaves, intact. The conservator took a knife and opened up the body. Then he began to fish out the corpse’s desiccated excrement. It looked like a beach pebble. A large beach pebble, or a hockey puck for that matter. At home his brother would dribble the puck out on the patio. On occasion he was allowed to borrow a stick and try to steal the puck. He struck his brother with the stick once, it might have been by accident. Then his brother threw himself on top of him, pinning him to the paving stones with a knee on each arm. He let the threat of a loogie dangle above him, till​ he tried to spit back up at his brother and the spit landed in his own face.

  Beneath the stands he could see everything that the men and their girlfriends with the blue eye shadow threw down through the gaps between the benches. He studied the objects piece by piece, and if you walked all the way to the left or the right, you came to one of the places where the ice stuck out under the boards, at the round corners of the rink. On the small triangles there he could slide and skate in his sneakers without getting in anyone’s way. A little triangle of ice up against the boards and swoosh he glided forward, swoosh he glided back, while they thundered against the plexiglass: lumpy gloves and visors, jockstraps and shoulder pads, spitting, sweating, and swoosh he’d disappear beneath the bleachers.

  It feels curious to picture himself standing so close to Lord Nelson. That he’s lying in there, one-armed and one-eyed. He read up on the Battle of Copenhagen at home. He knows that Nelson sailed south of the Middle Ground shoal on Maundy Thursday in 1801, and that the ships of the British fleet had marvelous names: Elephant, Defiance, Ganges and Monarch, Agamemnon and Désiree. He built models of Nelson’s ships as a boy. In the kits, the cannons were so small he had to use tweezers. Once he lost one of the tiny cannons in a glass of fruit drink and got the notion to swallow it. So that’s what he did. It was such a tiny cannon that he never felt it in his throat, and if it didn’t lodge in his tissue, he must have passed it in the bathroom. He didn’t tell her, out on the square, the bit about the fruit drink, t
hough he did rattle off the names of Nelson’s ships. She wasn’t interested. He nudged her a little, asking her if she’d heard about the time Nelson put​ the telescope to his blind eye. Then she looked at him, and he raised his fist to one eye, adjusting an imaginary spyglass. “I do not see the signal,” he said.

  He said it to be funny, but then she had to visit the restroom, and he had to watch her phone. She’s been playing this game where you pop balloons, and now he’s standing here beside Lord Nelson. He’s got a finger on the sarcophagus. He’s probably nothing but a skeleton with clothes on. A weakling to look at by now, and his brother used to play hockey with a spindly boy. When he came over and stood in their kitchen, he was no more than a brushstroke in the air, but hockey gear can optimize anything. The question is whether you dare to body-check. Beneath the bleachers, it smelled of the damp and the dark and ice on concrete. Lord Nelson would’ve been better preserved there, yet here he is. Dead, and easily defeatable. In life he was impressive, and the sarcophagus is imposing. It’d be nice if she were standing next to him now. There was a time when they always visited churches together. Ten years ago, she would have been standing at his side. In her bag she’d have juice cartons, disinfected hankies, chapstick. There was a time when she never left home without fruit in her purse. He’s given her children, and they’ve never wanted for anything. The last thing he saw outside was her biting into an almond croissant, washing it down with scalding coffee, and reaching for her phone. Who can drink coffee in this heat? he wonders, closing his eyes for a moment. He sees the rink’s little surplus triangles. He watches his sneakers gliding across the ice. He leans up against the boards and here they come, the players, hammering into the plexiglass. They fight with sticks and shoulder pads. He can smell the ammonia,​ and he’s so small that no one can see him. Then he forms a gob of spit behind his teeth. He leans in to the boards, and then he spits. It’s a paltry gob and not exactly epic as it slides first down the plexiglass, then the marble. Nope, it’s not exactly epic.