Wild Swims

by Dorthe Nors

  THE FREEZER CHEST

  WHEN I THINK ABOUT IT, THE FREEZER CHEST, IT’S WITH a sensation of the ferry rocking and the North Sea beneath us, black because it was January, and then the artificial lighting of the lounge where they were sitting, Mark and the others—Starling, Henrietta, Poul, and Susanna—and where I was also sitting, with our English teacher, Bo, who found me interesting to talk to, for, as he said, “One would never know that you were so young.” But in any case, they sat together over in a corner and it was 1989, the DJ had left, no one wanted to dance, it was late and a long way to Harwich, and then he went to bed anyway, the English teacher, and I was actually friends with Henrietta, so I wasn’t sure what to do, but it was then that he called me over to the group, Mark did, and said he wanted to tell me the story of the freezer chest.

  I should have seen it coming, for he made no secret of not liking me. Once he’d said it in the middle of the cafeteria, and he’d said it straight out: “I don’t like you.” It had been a simple statement, and the place had grown quiet, even though Henrietta was there too, and I thought she’d protest because you couldn’t just say things like that, we weren’t twelve anymore. This was high school after all and I was eighteen, most of us were, but there were a few older students who had dropped out to see the world, or to learn a trade, and had now taken up their schoolbooks again, and Mark was one of​ them; I think he was twenty-five. But she didn’t say a word, Henrietta, and so I said it myself, that you couldn’t just sit there and say that sort of thing, but then Mark looked at me and said you certainly could, somebody ought to. He was sitting there with a classmate who was preparing for teachers college, while Henrietta ate her potato salad and got herself a Coke, and the would-be teacher never said boo.

  But then Mark was coming along on the study trip to London, and I knew that it would prove difficult, because not only did Mark not like me, but all the others liked him a lot, and even though I was friends with Henrietta I’d have to hang out with the English teacher, who claimed that he’d once flown with the Royal Canadian Air Force, and as he was telling me how he’d ended up there and how age-related farsightedness had come between him and reenlistment, I looked over at the little group gathered around Mark. Henrietta was there too, laughing every time he said something, but then when the English teacher had gone to his bunk, he called me over, Mark did, and told me the story of the freezer chest.

  It began with him explaining how he’d once been a talented guitarist with a promising career stretching out before him. He was in demand among solo performers, and the reason he was the oldest person in our school was that he’d had a life beforehand, on the road with his guitar. It had been an exciting but hard life, with all the late nights at small clubs, he said. Did I believe him? I shrugged my shoulders. He was difficult to fathom sometimes and you never knew what would come next with him, that much I had learned, because once Henrietta and I had gone to visit him up in his flat. Henrietta had been wanting to visit Mark privately—she’d talked about it a lot,​ just as she talked a lot about incest, since it was around that time that it first became okay to talk about it, the fact that it existed. Henrietta had seen something about it on TV, she said, and she said it should be dealt with severely. She used the word broken—the broken child, she’d say, the child would never be normal, the child was broken—and I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t a nice thing to say about anyone, especially a kid, but on the other hand I really liked Henrietta’s manner when she said it. She became clearer, in a way, and I’d gone with her up to Mark’s.

  He lived in a small one-bedroom flat on the edge of town, and he had a girlfriend whose name was Majken but whom everyone called the Switchman’s Shanty, because that’s what Mark called her. She was such a desperate type, Henrietta said, riding the bus in from the country every day, but when we got there it was the would-be teacher who opened the door, and when Henrietta asked for Mark, he said that Mark would be out in a little while, we could just have a seat, and so we did. I sat and wondered how long we’d be sitting there, and then Mark emerged from the bedroom. He came out and said that he’d just popped into the Switchman’s Shanty, “And now I’m all yours.” Then they laughed, Henrietta and the would-be teacher, and the Switchman’s Shanty also laughed when she appeared a little while later.

  I didn’t know if I ought to laugh too, or how long we were supposed to remain seated, and since this was after the business in the cafeteria, I really shouldn’t have been sitting there at all. But then we were drinking beer, and I could tell it would be only a matter of time before the wind shifted. And then here it came: “Mette,” I heard, as Mark went over to a wall​ where he’d hung up a bunch of curios from a trip to Morocco. “Mette,” he said, taking down an oblong object a good yard in length. It looked like beef jerky, and he threw it in my lap and asked if I knew what it was. “Yeah,” I said, “it’s a dried bull pizzle,” and then Henrietta howled with laughter. The would-be teacher laughed too, and the Switchman’s Shanty was apparently out in the kitchen, but Mark’s eyes grew still. Still, but not frozen. More like one of those places that leases farm machinery, after closing time—the plowshares, the leaking grease fittings. Then he said that he hadn’t reckoned I’d know. “Nice job,” he said, and hung the pizzle back up on the wall, while Henrietta laughed so hard that she almost couldn’t get it under control. I looked parched in my face, she said. “You look simply withered, Mette.” A little while later I wanted to go home, and then the Switchman’s Shanty wanted to go home too. We walked to the station together, and I remember her telling me how funny Mark was when they were alone. He was a real teddy bear, she said, breaking twigs off the hedges we passed. I thought of Henrietta, her laughter, I thought of the would-be teacher, his unmoving features, and what sort of person brings a pizzle home from holiday. That isn’t normal, I thought, and then it was right after New Year’s and we were headed to England, and on board the ferry Mark told me about the freezer chest.

  He told me that he’d been a good guitarist once. “Do you believe me?” he asked, and I could tell I was supposed to say yes. I didn’t actually care, but there was a mood around the table that expected me to say yes and so I said yes. We would be in London for a week, I was already feeling homesick, and Henrietta was sitting next to me, so I said that yes, I believed​ he’d been talented on the guitar. Mark smiled, and I smiled, and he smiled back at me, and I thought how much easier it was this way. For all I cared he could have been a virtuoso. He could have been Eric Clapton or someone. It didn’t matter. What mattered were the others, and I thought I needed to leave it open. I had to allow him inside, even though one time, out in the hallway by our classroom, Mark had said, “Mette isn’t chubby, she’s fat,” so that everyone could hear. Henrietta had been there that day too, Henrietta and the would-be teacher, but sometimes you have to eat shit, I thought, and said, “Yes, I believe you when you say you were a talented guitarist.” I said it so that everyone could hear, and then he got to the freezer chest.

  He said that unfortunately, he’d been robbed of his great talent, because one day he’d been rummaging around in his grandmother’s freezer chest, whose hinge mechanism turned out to be broken, and just as he was standing there about to grab some cinnamon kringles, the freezer lid had slammed down on his fingers. The freezer chest had crushed them. “See for yourself,” he said, waving his stumpy fingers in my face. “See, I’ll never barre a chord again.” There was a silence, Henrietta smiled, and I said, “That’s really a shame,” and he said, “You think so?” “Yes,” I said, “I do think so,” and then he paused deliberately, before saying, “But it’s all just bullshit, you little fool.” He said it easily, and then our corner dipped as the ferry to England hit a wave, and Henrietta, with her special insight into evil, could barely keep her seat.

  It was as if a heavy lid had slammed shut within me. That’s how I recall it, a great lid, and beneath it a frozen darkness that was all my own. While Mark held forth on my naïveté for the others, I
fell back into the dark and thought of things that were impervious—cement floors, plexiglass, ice packs—and that the safest way to avoid people like Mark was to seal yourself off, and then, when you were sealed off, it was about your face and getting it back in position, getting it to close over the darkness and everything you have stored inside. So when he raised his beer with the others, I said that if he thought I was so dumb we could make a bet about who’d score highest on the graduating exams, and he said, “Sure, no problem,” and I said, “All right then, no problem,” and he laughed, saying, “Fuck yeah,” and I got to my feet, and he said we’d bet a pizza, and I said, “No problem.” He wanted to shake on it. I slapped my hand against his chubby outstretched fingers and walked straight out onto the deck, and I’d like to think I stared out toward England. It was in any case ocean that I stared out over, and there isn’t much more to say about that week in London other than that I spent a week in London when I was eighteen.

  It wasn’t very hard to do better on the finals than Mark. I just got up every day and took care of my schoolwork and took care of myself. I also let Henrietta think what she wanted to whenever she said that if you compared the story about the freezer chest to something like incest, I was being hypersensitive, and then she’d look self-important, while one month led to the next and in June we graduated. I got the second highest marks in the school, while Mark did well enough that he was going to go to teachers college. Henrietta told me that as we rode around on the back of the decorated flatbed truck from one set of parents to the next, little Danish flags waving in the wind, most of us drunk from all the drinks they served us, and it was at one of those receptions, when everyone had had enough and someone finally turned down the stereo, that Mark came over to me.

  He tapped me on the shoulder and said that a man was a man and that he was a twit. He wanted to admit that he’d lost our bet. I’d actually gone and done really well on the finals, he said. I didn’t say anything, but somebody clapped, and he said, “There was something about a pizza, wasn’t there?” and I said, “No.” And he said, “Yes there was,” that he wanted to spring for a pizza, and I said I didn’t want a pizza. “Yes of course you do,” Henrietta said, but I didn’t want a pizza. “You can take your pizza and stick it up sideways,” I said, and I said it so everyone could hear, for at that point I’d already found the room in Copenhagen, university lay ahead and Jutland behind, so fuck what they thought. It got quiet. Mark said that well, if that was the way I felt about it. “That’s the way I feel about it,” I said, and Henrietta said, “Now stop it, Mette, of course that’s not the way you feel,” and Mark said that I was obviously bearing a grudge, and Henrietta said it was embarrassing, and Mark said something about small minds, and Poul said well he’d be happy to eat a pizza, and Starling turned the stereo back up, while somewhere on the periphery our English teacher put his glasses on. I placed my hands on my knees and gazed at them, my fingers had glossy nails, blue by the cuticle, and what I remember most after Mark left was Henrietta leaning over me. “Shame on you,” she said, and I’d like to know if she ever did anything about it, the incest.

  MANITOBA

  THERE’S A FAINT GLOW BEHIND THE MAPLE, BUT IT’S probably no one. The road is wet, drizzle, they’re sleeping now. It’s one in the morning, and he can see his face indistinctly in the living room window. They came last week, pitched camp across the road, pup tents and a large common tent. They’re fourteen or fifteen, and they’ve brought leaders with them. But late in the evening they run around on the road, or they stand over there and scream. It’s high summer. He can hear everything; it’s the neighbor’s field. The neighbor owns the ground down to the river and insists on his property rights. “It’ll be nice with some youngsters,” the farmer’s wife said when she stood in his hall and briefed him on their coming.

  They showed up on the sixteenth of July and set up their tents in a pattern that appeared deliberate. He stood on the corner of his lot and observed the little society take shape. The youth stand in knots between the tents and jostle each other. They shout when they walk to and from the portajohns. He has the sense that the village regards them as a miracle, but the miracle is noisy. When it’s time for it to sleep, it runs around on the dirt roads, it hides in the bushes and undergrowth. It stands about rooting around in its mouth on the path to the school and whispering in the light of smartphones. Already on the second evening, he stood in the dark and listened to their animal sounds. Their shrieking echoed among the farmer’s​ pig barns, and they didn’t stop making noise till almost eleven. Then he stood on the edge of the field and watched the light from their phones flickering in the tents.

  There’s a place out on the flats, a small cabin. The summer deer season’s over, he could go out there. It’s a hunting cabin, no doubt, but he doesn’t know whose, and the locals insist on their property rights. They don’t understand that he’s alone either. It’s a pity he can’t find someone, they think. But the person that you pity is a person in your power. He knows that, and now they’re screaming. Other people’s kids, teenagers. One of them appeared in his driveway the night before last. He was standing up by the garage when the kid, a girl, turned up with her head tilted to one side. “Who are you?” she asked, to show she was brave enough to be impudent. He could easily have answered, but he didn’t. Then she kicked the gravel, disappeared.

  He isn’t being overrun, but it’s hard nevertheless to keep people away from his door. In the beginning, when he was first living here, a woman with a little dog would come by now and then. She’d find some pretext to stop in front of the house. Mona, she was called. She came by with peeled windfall apples and recipes for venison. Once he gave her a cup of coffee in the kitchen. She said he had a nice place and examined the walls for portraits. Then she said there was a community dinner the following Thursday, and would he come? He couldn’t, he said.

  That wasn’t true. He could have, but he didn’t want to. Even during his short marriage, his eyes were usually fixed on the door to the office. He corrected essays in there, or watched the traffic down on Tagensvej. The young people biking to and from school, their thin hair rustling under knit caps. It was nice to sit there and watch them from above, and once in​ a while over the years there would be a girl in his class, one of those with potential. She would make something out of her essays. Often she’d be standing nearby when he came out of the teacher’s lounge. Her eyes would be large with questions, and in the end she’d vanish. Now there are scouts across the road, but out on the flats there’s a hunting cabin. It says manitoba in black paint on a length of driftwood, up on the gable. Two mugs have been set on the windowsill, a teaspoon in each. So two people sit out there at regular intervals. They sit and watch the roe deer, the foxes. If it were him sitting out there, he’d be relishing the fact that you can always withdraw a little bit further.

  When that woman, Mona, was in the house, she said, “But then your kids must be in Copenhagen, right?” He didn’t owe her an answer. Her children were spread out, but they were grown now, she said. She took the dog on walks, of course, and now he’s got the sense that people pity him. There’s nothing to pity, even if it cost him the marriage. But a divorced man who isn’t being looked after is a man in free fall, plunging into a swamp of his own making. That’s how they see it, so he keeps the gravel and the driveway tidy. Each morning, he raises the blinds. The young farmworkers who live around town never think to raise their blinds. That’s a woman’s job. It isn’t until the farmworkers get a girlfriend that the blinds go up. But he raises his own blinds, so he’s probably gay. He used to be a teacher and have to deal with other people’s kids. And that’s what he did, until she was standing there with her lunchbox. It was during lunch hour, by the bike shed. For a long time he drove a Lada, but then he switched to a bike. She stood quietly next to his luggage rack. From a distance it looked as if she wanted to ask about an assignment. Up close, the skin of her face was thin and alive.

  Enough already, but they�
��re screaming, and he wishes he were sitting in Manitoba. If he were, he would wait for sunrise, lens trained on the reedbed. This spring the bittern sounded like a foghorn in the landscape. As if it knew everything. It would have been easier if he’d been a widower, he thinks, because then an aversion to death might keep them from his door, and there’s a glow over by the maple, behind the birdbath. Maybe there’s someone there. He’s not sure, but in the reflection from the living room window he resembles a normal man around sixty. He no longer has any wish to regulate his abnormalities, only to withdraw. If he walks southwest, he’ll have to cross a couple of drainage channels and a fen with beef cattle to reach Manitoba. He could take a sleeping bag, he thinks. If he’s caught sleeping in another man’s hunting cabin, he’ll have to put his house up for sale. Maybe that would be for the best. He should have bought a place at the end of a dirt road after all. They do agree on everything here. Property rights are holy, youth is a virtue, and the wolf that’s been sighted in the tree plantation should be shot. It’s only a question of time before it gets together with another wolf, has pups, and forms a pack. It’s happened other places and it’ll happen here too. They won’t stand for it. His neighbor’s got a Small Munsterlander. They walk around, out in the plantation, and look for the wolf. He’s got a deer stand out there. Then he can watch the animals from a slightly elevated perspective. His wife isn’t afraid of the wolf; there isn’t anything she’s afraid of. Yet she dislikes disorder, and now they’re providing the ground for a summer camp on their fallow field. The field stretches​ down to the river. During the day, the young people build rafts and towers from spruce poles. The other morning they woke the village with song. “Isn’t it lovely having some youngsters around?” asked the farmer and his wife afterward. “Yes,” he replied, “but they scream in the evening.” The farmer and his wife couldn’t hear them, they said, pointing at the farmhouse. It sat right behind the tent area. “They scream like wild animals,” he said, and now there’s that glow beneath the maple again. It’s by the birdbath, a figure. And now he can see her, a girl scout in the summer darkness with fever-white hair. He’s turned everything off in the living room, and she probably can’t see him. Her face takes on an odd luminosity from her phone. He can see her chewing her lip in concentration. Now she raises her eyes. It’s the girl from the driveway. She peers at the window, eyes wide. Quickly he shoves his face against the pane, pressing, opening his mouth. His teeth touch glass and her throat muscles tense, then she bolts like an animal down the bank, across the road, in her nightshirt.