by Nils Schou
As a pharmacologist at the School of Dentistry he had access to all kinds of drugs and pills. He had a friend, a fellow professor, who was experimenting with LSD as a treatment for depression. Schroder invited me to join them.
The session took place at his friend’s apartment on Strandboulevarden, the same building Georg Brandes used to live in. There was a plaque on the wall commemorating it. By chance the building was only a stone’s throw from Nordisk Kollegium, the residence hall I was living in.
On a Wednesday evening at the end of November 1966, six of us lay down on mats in the professor’s living room. He gave us each a thin piece of paper on which he had placed a small dose of LSD. We were instructed to keep the paper under our tongue until it dissolved.
We each had a different reaction. Two had anxiety attacks, one remained lying down shaking with laughter, one felt sick and had to make a mad dash for the bathroom to vomit. In my case everything grew quiet and peaceful, with music and colours that seemed to last forever. I was greeted by schoolmates I hadn’t seen for years. None of them said anything, they just waved at me and disappeared. I took the train to Birkerod in my imagination. Ulla Ladegaard was waiting for me at the station. This was something that had never happened in reality. We walked through the town to her house. We sang together, something we had never done either. We sang tunes by the Mamas and the Papas with homemade Danish texts. The songs were about autumn, leaves falling from branches and bare trees against an autumn sky.
Ulla and I passed her house and went into the woods. In my LSD high the woods were just behind her house. In real life there was a school there and a ball field. In the LSD woods we met some of the fairy tale figures she and I had invented together and that I had slain with my sword, one by one. This time I was content to greet them as we went deeper and deeper into the woods and it grew darker and darker. We were deep in the woods when I realised that Ulla had fallen behind. I turned around and saw she was standing completely still.
‘Ulla?’ I called to her.
‘Keep going, Dan’, she said.
‘Aren’t you coming?’
‘No, there’s someone you have to meet and you have to go alone.’
I called to Ulla but she answered, ‘I’m going home to die.’
‘Die?’ I cried and started towards her.
She stretched out both hands towards me and told me to stay where I was.
‘My time has come Dan, and it’s time you met the most important person in your life from now on.’
‘Ulla! Come back! Stay here!’ She had disappeared into the dark and I was alone. It was completely quiet in the woods. The only thing I could hear was my own breathing.
I heard footsteps somewhere but I couldn’t see anything. The sound was being made by twigs snapping on the forest floor.
I could hear someone else breathing somewhere, someone humming. Was this someone I had met in one of my fairy tale adventures?
‘Welcome, Dan’, said a voice. ‘Finally we meet.’
‘Who are you?’
‘You know who I am.’
‘No.’
‘I am someone you have to meet, someone you invented yourself.’
‘A beast? A troll? Some creature I tried to slay?’
‘No, you can never kill me.’
‘Why not?’
There was the sound of laughter. ‘Because if you kill me, you also kill yourself.’
‘Is this some kind of guessing game?’
‘I’m your own invention.’
‘When did I invent you?’
‘Just now.’
‘Are you a man or a woman?’
‘Can’t you tell?’
‘How old are you?’
‘How old are you?’
‘Are you my age?’
‘Born the same year, the same month, the same week, the same time, the same place.’
‘And I invented you myself?’
‘You’re inventing me as we speak, Dan Moller, student of dentistry.’
‘Have you been following me?’
‘Always, every day, all your life.’
There was a peal of thunder and a flash of lightning lit up the woods. Standing in a group of trees I saw a figure. It was a woman, a woman I didn’t know, whom I had never seen before.
Lightning struck again twice and I got a good look at her.
She was slender with short hair and her eyes were hostile. She was dressed completely in black.
Another bolt of lightning lit up the woods.
She sneered, ‘Bit melodramatic, don’t you think, all that thunder and lightning?’
‘Did you order it? Is it you that’s being melodramatic?’
‘Dear little Dan, you still don’t seem to understand.’
‘What don’t I understand? That you’re a monster in a fairy tale like all the others and I have to kill you now?’
‘Do you want to commit suicide?’
‘I don’t want to, but I’ve thought about it a lot.’
She walked over to me and handed me a sword that she had been hiding behind her back. I took it. ‘Where did you get that sword?’ I asked.
‘You gave it to me yourself. Now decide if you want to cut off my head or stab me in the heart.’
‘Who are you?’ I asked
‘I’m Amanda.’
‘Amanda?’
‘Yes, that’s the name you’ve given me.’
‘When?’
‘Now.’
‘Amanda who?’
‘Just Amanda.’
‘What does Amanda mean?’
‘It means ‘She who shall be loved’.’
‘Should I love you?’
‘It’s up to you. You created me.’
‘Why should I love someone I don’t know?’
‘You know me. You know me as well as you know yourself.’
‘How well do I know myself?’
She laughed. ‘Only on a very superficial level. Like a stranger passing in the street.’
I felt I was being weighed down by a burden so heavy that I was brought to my knees on the forest floor.
Amanda quickly took two steps backwards.
‘Stop being so pathetic, Dan. Kneeling down before me? That’s really not my style.’
‘You were the one that made me kneel,’ I protested.
The pressure increased, forcing me down even further. I heard myself uttering words I hadn’t actually thought of. ‘Hey! I know who you are. You’re Depression. You’re my Depression.’
‘With a capital D, I believe?’
‘You’re the depression in one of Ulla Ladegaard’s fairy tales.’
‘No, I’m the depression in one of Dan Thorvald Moller’s fairy tales.’
‘Welcome,’ I said.
‘Thank you.’
‘What can you tell me about myself?’
‘Only what you invent yourself, Dan.’
‘Are you related to Ulla Ladegaard?’
‘Ulla is dead, Dan.’
‘Of course she’s not dead. She took me into the woods to find you.’
I heard the sound of footsteps running over the twigs on the forest floor. Amanda was gone.
Amanda’s disappearance coincided with my coming out of the acid trip. I was back in the apartment on Strandboulevarden in Osterbro.
My sense of time seemed to be out of whack. It felt like the trip had lasted for months. How long it had really lasted I didn’t know.
On the way down the stairs Schroder wanted to know if the LSD had had any effect on my depression. I told him about Amanda.
It was dark and windy outside when we reached the street. I walked him to his bus stop on Claessensgade.
Four days later I read in the paper that Ulla was dead.
Four months later Schroder committed suicide by checking into a hotel on Vendersgade and emptying two bottles of pills. He left letters to his family, friends and colleagues. To my surprise he had also written me a letter even though I was only a stu
dent lab assistant in his department at the Faculty of Dentistry.
He told me he had been studying depression for many years, his own and others’. If I was interested in reading his handwritten notes I should contact his daughter, Beate. He had left instructions as to where the notes were to be found, and had authorised her to let me read them. At the end of the letter he signed off: ‘All the best, yours devotedly, Ib Schroder. P.S. Say hello to Amanda! Give her the attention and love she deserves. She’s the way forward for you.’
The letter was in my mailbox at the ground floor entrance to Nordisk Kollegium on Strandboulevarden. I read it on the way up the stairs to my room, South Wing, nr 42.
The phrase ‘yours devotedly’ and especially the word ‘devotedly’ struck me with an almost physical force. No one had ever written ‘yours devotedly’ to me. It seemed a highly emotional way to close a letter. Later I found out it was how men of Schroder’s generation usually signed off.
The fact that he asked me to say hello to Amanda didn’t interest me much. After Amanda had entered my life as a permanent fixture, another woman had turned up who changed my life in ways I could never have imagined in my wildest dreams.
FOUR
The Feather Factory
Nordisk Kollegium residence hall was for male students only. It was sponsored by Nordisk Fjerfabrik. The feather factory itself was across the railroad tracks out by the harbour.
Living at Nordisk Kollegium was a scholarship; you had to get high scores on your initial exams to qualify. The residence hall consisted of two wings. The third wing housed the factory’s administration building, with the dormitory’s dining hall and student lounge on the ground floor. One of the provisions of the scholarship was that we were given two meals a day, served by women dressed in black with white aprons. Our beloved Mrs. Filt was in charge of the whole thing.
In the basement beneath the south wing was an indoor soccer facility. Every evening after dinner there were soccer tournaments. I was the regular defender on a team consisting of two dental students and three medical students. Not a talented soccer player, my only claim to fame was that I could keep going indefinitely. One Sunday I played 10 hours at a stretch. Soccer did not have an anti-depressive effect on me, but it did let me enter into my exhaustion and fatigue and come out the other side struggling into more fatigue and more exhaustion until on the verge of collapse.
I often kept going past the point of collapse and I would keel over on the playing field. Very few of my fellow players knew I suffered from depression.
One of those who did know was a medical student called Michael Bonnesen. He was doing a psychiatry internship at Rigshospitalet and had read my medical journal without knowing it was mine. We ran into each other in the hall.
I was sitting in the corridor nodding drowsily as I had been heavily sedated.
He sat down next to me. ‘Hi, I didn’t know you had depression.’
‘Well, I do.’
‘Couldn’t tell by looking at you. You hide it really well.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I’ll keep it to myself, of course.’
‘Thanks, Michael.’
Michael Bonnesen was the natural centre of attention wherever he went. The residence hall was full of people studying history and literature, and Michael’s friends seemed to have stepped right out of Danish history or Danish literature. He knew everyone worth knowing among the trendsetting, intellectual elite of the time: politicians, authors, resistance fighters, philosophers, university professors. He had sat on P.H.’s lap at the age of seven and smoked a cigar. He invited Mogens Fog and Elias Bredsdorff to the lectures and debates he organised in the passageway between the student lounge and the dining hall. Klaus Rifbjerg and Villy Sorensen often came and gave readings. Michael was on first name terms with all of them.
Now he was sitting next to me in the corridor of the Psychiatric Ward at Rigshospitalet. He was an eager sportsman with a talent for any sport he touched. Beside me he looked like a vitamin commercial. As for me I just sat there with my shoulders hanging. I could barely keep my head up. I looked and felt like a decrepit old man.
We had never talked alone before. Our relationship was limited to playing soccer, but you get to know people on the soccer field too. Michael was the same friendly, energetic guy playing soccer as he was at meals, parties, and debates, always well-mannered and considerate.
He was no different the day we met in the hospital corridor. I didn’t know whether his friendly interest was simply because he was being polite or because he was genuinely interested, but he had a way of asking questions that made me tell him everything he wanted to know about my depression. I was so heavily medicated I could hardly talk straight. Was it the medical student, the future neurologist questioning me, or was it my soccer buddy from the dorm? I didn’t care, I’d talk to anyone willing to listen.
When I told him about Amanda he jumped up so suddenly he spilled coffee all over his pants.
‘Amanda? Your depression is called Amanda?’
‘Yes, what’s wrong with that?’
‘Is she always with you?’
‘When the depression is there she’s there.’
‘And when the depression goes away?’
‘Then she’s not there. I don’t know where she goes.’
‘Do you talk to her?’
‘I talk to her and she talks to me.’
‘Is she there now?’
‘And how!’
‘Is she saying anything?’
‘Just a second, let me listen.’
I listened to what Amanda was saying. ‘She knows all about you and your family, Michael. She knows who your father is and your mother and your grandparents and your uncles.’
‘Hey, Dan, wake up, buddy. Dan, can you hear me?’
‘Of course. It’s just that my eyelids are so heavy I can barely keep my eyes open.’
‘Tell me something, Dan.’
‘Sure.’
‘You make it sound like Amanda knows something you don’t know.’
‘Right.’
‘Can you ask her something for me?’
‘Sure. I can ask her anything.’
‘Ask her what she thinks of me,’ said Michael.
I did what he asked. He fixed his gaze on me and I knew what he was looking for. He wanted to see if my lips were moving. They weren’t.
Then I told him what Amanda thought of him.
‘The key words for you are sympathy, affinity, affection. People like you. The opposite of sympathy is antipathy, aversion, dislike. Amanda is always going on about sympathy. She thinks about it a lot. I won’t bore you with everything she says about sympathy. She says it’s an endless concept, bottomless.’
Michael remained at my side until I fell asleep.
A few days later when I was back in the dorm he knocked on my door one evening and asked, ‘How would you like to meet my sister?’
I gave him my usual cold response. ‘Why should I want to meet your sister when I don’t even know your sister?’
Such trifles didn’t bother Michael. ‘My sister doesn’t want to meet you, she wants to meet Amanda.’
‘Amanda?’
‘Yes, Amanda.’
‘Does your sister know Amanda?’
‘Don’t you remember? You told me about Amanda over at the hospital?’
‘Sure I remember. ‘
‘I’m having a party in the kitchen on Saturday. Can you come?’
‘Sure. Thanks.’
‘See you there then. Want to play some soccer?’
‘Sure,’ I said.
The first time I saw Puk Bonnesen, Michael’s little sister, was when she walked into the kitchen passageway that Saturday night at 7 p.m. She looked like a parody of a well brought up, well-mannered High School girl even though she was 22. In the meantime I had gleaned some information about her from the lit students at the dorm.
She was a kind of prodigy. She had already written two collections of
poems and a novel that was very likely autobiographical. The novel was about a love affair between a 17-year-old schoolgirl and a man old enough to be her father.
I was not surprised that Michael had a sister who was a successful author. Everyone in his circle seemed to be successful at something. I was surprised though that she wasn’t more outgoing. When she gave me her hand she kept her eyes glued to the ground. During the meal she sat at another table with her back to me. A lot of beer and wine was drunk and most of us were drunk by the time we started dancing.
Towards morning a few of us were sitting around in Michael’s room when one of the med students asked me about my acid trip. I was in a state of pleasant exhaustion, the result of several drunken highs. I had reached the mechanical doll stage. Whenever anyone asked me a question it wound me up and got me going.
It felt as though I talked about Amanda for hours. I told them everything I knew about her, how whenever there was something I didn’t know, I’d ask Amanda and she would tell me. As usual I gave a precise and detailed account.
Then I buckled over onto the floor. Hands grabbed hold of me and carried me into my room down the hall.
When I woke I was nauseous and had a headache. Unlike other people though, I like having a hangover. When you’re feeling sick to your stomach and your head aches, depression seems to take a back seat.
The phone system at Nordisk Kollegium back in 1967 worked like this: First, the phone rang in the telephone booth downstairs in the student lounge. Then somebody went to your room and let you know there was a phone call for you. Then you went down to the phone booth from your own floor.
All this to explain that the trip to the telephone down the stairs from the third floor in the south wing to the phone was something I had done hundreds of times before. When I was told there was a call for me that afternoon in March 1967, I had no idea that it would change my life.
I picked up the receiver and heard a voice I hadn’t heard before.
‘Per Mortensen from Gyldendal Publishing Company.’
‘Yes?’
‘Am I speaking to Dan T. Moller? Dan T. Moller, studying dentistry?’