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Wild Swims

Page 7

by Dorthe Nors


  At the moment there’s no hunting. They’ve just finished shooting the summer roebucks. He can walk wherever he wants, across the fen, along the thickets, over the flats with a sleeping pad. “Don’t expect to come here and change anything,” they told him when he moved in. Some good advice, they thought. “That’s really not my intention,” he replied, indicating his adaptability with a smile. He has a flashlight out by the fuse box. He goes out and puts it in his backpack. In the kitchen he turns the electric kettle on. He should have said that they shouldn’t expect to change him either, but that’s not how the song goes, and he grabs a screwdriver. The door to Manitoba is undoubtedly locked.

  WILD SWIMS

  IN THE EVENING, THE HEAT HUNG HEAVY IN THE APARTMENT. I sat down on the floor in my underwear, closed my eyes. Down on the street the ambulances drove to and fro, but I’ve learned not to chase sirens anymore. As I sat there, I visualized a vast chilly landscape. It was soothing for a while, but after midnight everything was sticking to me. I went for a walk, out toward the big houses around Carlsberg. The front yards there smelled of elder and peony, and it’s good to walk at night. I thought of Emilie as I looked at the sleeping houses. As kids we wore dresses with goldfish and pleaded for candy and kittens. I thought of the neighbor’s cattle back home, the brick transformer tower, the fjord, and in the direction of Vesterbro I kept hearing sirens.

  The next day I decided to bike to the beach, but instead I went out to Kastellet. I walked slowly around the fort, looking at the flowers and the water in the moat. It has its own geography, the water, and certain places were choked with duckweed. I saw swans and ducklings in the grass, while the coots grew agitated among the water lilies. It was a muted life. A swan flew across the scene, then a helicopter, then a couple of ducks, then another helicopter. The sky arched overhead, the geese grazed, and it wasn’t that the idyll was getting to be too much; it was more that it was there yet had vanished anyway, and then I was on the cusp of tears.

  On my way out I read the sign with the commandant’s regulations. It didn’t say anything about not swimming in the moat. Once in a while somebody must jump in, I thought. Wild swims are becoming increasingly popular across Europe. I’ve heard of a British woman, for instance, who managed to swim her way up through a large lake system somewhere in the middle of England. Every midsummer night she was out swimming, and I imagine her fighting her way up salmon ladders and into still waters.

  Once when we were little, Emilie and I, we gripped each other’s hand and waded out by Pigsfoot Spit. We ventured one step at a time and took turns leading. First Emilie wanted to turn around, then I did, then I got scared of the crabs, then she did. We squealed with delight and terror, until suddenly we stood on the edge of the old channel, a tar-black river of crabs and slime. Our feet had never seemed so white before. Emilie’s like snow, and my right foot with the birthmark; one step and we’d sink into the darkness. It was Emilie who tried to step away first. She tugged on me, and if she hadn’t, where would I have ended up? Someplace in the North Sea—Flat Grounds? Dogger Bank? Somewhere else, in any case, than where we are now, far from each other.

  It had been a knifing near Central Station, my downstairs neighbor said. A prostitute, probably. But the next night the ambulances were out again, and the heat kept me awake. I sat down on the floor across from the fridge. Nothing’s static, certainly not me, I thought. Then you’ve got to live. Then you’ve got to die. That’s the way it is, but it’s strange to imagine your own death, so I tried to picture Mom and Dad’s kitchen instead. The vinyl floor, the stove hood, the grandkids’ drawings. The wedding photo of my brother and his wife, she in white, he in something resembling an iron lung. Sunday afternoon in the country, and when I shut my eyes, what I saw was a distant relative, head down in the freezer chest, hunting for kringles.

  Nothing moved. Each time my skin touched another part of my skin, it stuck. If I were still the same as when I was nineteen, I’d bike out to Kastellet right now and go swimming, I thought, and opened the fridge, pulled out the crisper drawer, and stuck my feet in instead.

  The next morning I had an urge to go to the swimming pool. The last time I’d been to one, Emilie was there too, so it must have been elementary school. “Then it’s high time you went,” I told myself, yet even before I reached my bike, down in the courtyard, I was regretting my decision and didn’t want to go through with it. The alternative was to give up, and that’s one way we’re not alike, Emilie and I. I give up only reluctantly.

  Sitting in front of the pool building were two guys from the local drunkards’ bench. The one was fanning himself with a voucher from the city, the other scratching his skinny neck. They each had a beer in hand, and I could see they’d been in the showers, but also that their hair shone in the sun with a water-repellent sheen. “They never fix the sauna,” one of them said as I locked my bike, “but every time some schoolkid shits the pool, they shut everything down. Last week a little brown turd was swimming around down in the deep end. So they drained everything.” I stood still, leaning over my luggage rack. “They’ve changed the water, darling,” the skinny one said. “And you needn’t worry about us. We never get as far as the pool.”

  It was too late to turn back now, and in the long run it was cheapest to buy a ten-visit card, said the girl in the glass cage. So that’s what I did, and when I’d done that, I found the changing room full of women and scratched lockers. I can’t start anything I can’t finish. If I don’t finish it I feel weak, and if I feel weak, it just spreads. I rooted around in my wallet, my pockets, the bottom of my bag for a ten-krone coin for the locker.

  “Need change?” asked a woman’s voice. She looked like she might have been from India. “I’m not used to using the pool,” I said, and she said, “If you’ve got a twenty,” and she jingled two ten-krone pieces in her palm. We traded, and I didn’t know where to look while she took off her clothes. I started by removing my shoes, then my T-shirt, my skirt, and though I rarely fold my clothes properly otherwise, I creased and smoothed till I stood looking down at myself and thought, there you have me: Flat Grounds.

  I found a shower diagonally across from her. An older woman was scrubbing her body as if it were a plank floor. Meanwhile, the Indian woman had her own special system for washing herself: hands, feet, face. There was something ceremonial about it, also when she donned her bathing cap, and two showers down stood a woman with a lady razor. She was trimming her pubes, and she passed the blades across her labia as though the razor were a bow and her pussy a violin. When she turned her backside to me I could see she was called Amy.

  I wanted to go home, but I can’t walk backwards. I remembered how we were on the way out by Pigsfoot Spit. Emilie with knock-knees, and I with the birthmark on my right foot, which now found itself over a shower grate at Vesterbro Indoor Pool, distant in time and space, and it surprised me that my birthmark was still there, and still looked like the island of Anholt seen from the air.

  When the Indian woman put on her suit, I put on mine. When she walked out of the showers, I walked behind her. The door she opened, onto a set of stairs, I opened too. It was white and wet in the staircase, and it smelled of algae and chlorine. I walked a few steps behind the Indian woman, whose heels were cracked. She opened the door to the pool and I followed. She went calmly over to the lip of the shrieking water-hell, giving her bathing cap an extra downward tug. Then she stepped over to the ladder and started to climb down. When her body was ninety-five percent submerged in chlorine, she let herself be swallowed up. First she was a shadow in the water; then she popped up in lane three.

  I don’t like having my head underwater, so I walked over to lane four in the shallow end, eased myself gingerly into the pool, and swam out. I looked for feces in the water but didn’t see any. I glanced over at the pool toys and the noisy children. I caught sight of a hairy man who was standing in the shallow end of lane one. He had a snorkel on and dived underwater every time a woman swam past. I wanted to do ten la
ps, then I wanted to go home. I thought about rivers with distant sources. I thought of the carp at Kastellet, the light down there in the deeps. I thought of the water lilies, the geese, and the heavy organic chill. I wanted to block out the channel and tried to swim with my eyes closed, but when I did, I drifted over into the Indian woman’s lane.

  On the seventh lap my hands hurt. Through the deep end of the pool, a beef-colored figure suddenly glided along the bottom. I missed a stroke, got water in my mouth. Tried to find my footing, but of course there was nothing beneath me. My head went under several times before I grabbed hold of one of the flexible lane markers. I used it to get myself over to the end of the lane, beneath a diving block. There my feet found a narrow ledge to stand upon. The figure was gliding along the bottom of the pool in the direction of the diving board. I stared until the surface of the water broke. First the top of a wet head. Then two small hard eyes with a wet mouth at the bottom.

  I looked for the Indian woman, whose feet I saw disappearing up to the changing room. I clung to the edge of the pool and watched the beef-colored figure clamber out. I watched how, with his back to me, he rubbed himself briefly with a towel. Then he flung it over his shoulder and sauntered past above my head. White sodden trunks, half-stiff prick, swimming goggles. I’ve lost her, I thought, and glanced across the pool at the same instant the hairy man in the first lane dove because the woman with the shaved genitals was passing by, doing the crawl. And I looked down: my white feet on the narrow ledge, beneath me the deeps, clinical and descaled. Emilie’s hand in mine. A step, the suction, and then off to other realms.

  PUSHKIN PRESS

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  Pushkin Press publishes the world’s best stories, to be read and read again. To discover more, visit www.pushkinpress.com.

  THE SPECTRE OF ALEXANDER WOLF

  GAITO GAZDANOV

  ‘A mesmerising work of literature’ Antony Beevor

  SUMMER BEFORE THE DARK

  VOLKER WEIDERMANN

  ‘For such a slim book to convey with such poignancy the extinction of a generation of “Great Europeans” is a triumph’ Sunday Telegraph

  MESSAGES FROM A LOST WORLD

  STEFAN ZWEIG

  ‘At a time of monetary crisis and political disorder… Zweig’s celebration of the brotherhood of peoples reminds us that there is another way’ The Nation

  THE EVENINGS

  GERARD REVE

  ‘Not only a masterpiece but a cornerstone manqué of modern European literature’ Tim Parks, Guardian

  BINOCULAR VISION

  EDITH PEARLMAN

  ‘A genius of the short story’ Mark Lawson, Guardian

  IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE SEA

  TOMÁS GONZÁLEZ

  ‘Smoothly intriguing narrative, with its touches of sinister, Patricia Highsmith-like menace’ Irish Times

  BEWARE OF PITY

  STEFAN ZWEIG

  ‘Zweig’s fictional masterpiece’ Guardian

  THE ENCOUNTER

  PETRU POPESCU

  ‘A book that suggests new ways of looking at the world and our place within it’ Sunday Telegraph

  WAKE UP, SIR!

  JONATHAN AMES

  ‘The novel is extremely funny but it is also sad and poignant, and almost incredibly clever’ Guardian

  THE WORLD OF YESTERDAY

  STEFAN ZWEIG

  ‘The World of Yesterday is one of the greatest memoirs of the twentieth century, as perfect in its evocation of the world Zweig loved, as it is in its portrayal of how that world was destroyed’ David Hare

  WAKING LIONS

  AYELET GUNDAR-GOSHEN

  ‘A literary thriller that is used as a vehicle to explore big moral issues. I loved everything about it’ Daily Mail

  FOR A LITTLE WHILE

  RICK BASS

  ‘Bass is, hands down, a master of the short form, creating in a few pages a natural world of mythic proportions’ New York Times Book Review

  ALSO BY DORTHE NORS

  Mirror, Shoulder, Signal

  Karate Chop

  Minna Needs Rehearsal Space

  COPYRIGHT

  Pushkin Press

  71–75 Shelton Street

  London wc2h 9jq

  Original text © Dorthe Nors 2018

  English translation © Misha Hoekstra 2020

  Wild Swims was first published as Kort Over Canada by Gydendal in Denmark, 2018

  First published by Pushkin Press in 2020

  Published by agreement with Ahlander Agency

  ‘The Freezer Chest’ was published in the New Yorker, USA, May 2015

  ‘Hygge’ previously appeared in Longreads.com, USA, August 2015, and in Harper’s Magazine, USA, April 2016

  ‘By Sydvest Station’ previously appeared in Novelleforlaget, Denmark, 2008, and in Tin House, USA, June 2016

  ‘In a Deer Stand’ is published in The Dark Blue Winter Overcoat & Other Stories (ed. Sjón and Ted Hodgkinson, Pushkin Press, 2017) and in A Public Space, USA, 2018

  ‘Sun Dogs’ previously appeared on newyorker.com, USA, July 2018

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Danish Arts Council and its Committee for Literary Project Funding and the Danish Arts Agency for support in the writing and translation of this book – and to Hald Hovedgaard for a writing residency.

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  ISBN 13: 978–1–78227–551–0

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Pushkin Press

  Author photo © Petra Kleis

  www.pushkinpress.com

 

 

 


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