That is why I am not going to say how it happened or what it was, I can only tell you the external causes until it ceases to be a story.
I knew that he was waiting for me out in the kitchen, like the last time; I could hear him through the wall without listening, and I knew we would be leaving together. Then my half-hour was over and I put on my coat and shook hands with my organist and received my flower. And then the other was on his feet and preparing to leave, and we went out. It was just the same as the last time, except that this time he said absolutely nothing. He walked by my side without uttering a single word.
Say something,” I said.
“No,” he said. “I am walking home with you because you are from the north. Then I shall leave you.”
“Very well, then, my friend,” I said. “You can be as silent as you like; it gives me nothing but pleasure to listen to you being silent.”
Before I knew it he had taken hold of my arm and drawn me close to him and was walking me arm-in-arm; he walked me quickly, perhaps too quickly, but without haste; and silently; he was holding my upper arm and his hand was touching my side, right up against my breast.
“Are you used to walking with a man?” he asked.
“Not one with a vocation,” I said.
“Talk as if you were from the north and not from the south,” he said.
We walked on and on, until he said bluntly, “You’re cross-eyed.”
“Is that so, indeed?” I said.
“It’s quite true, so help me,” he said. “You’re cross-eyed.”
“Not one-eyed, though,” I said.
“It’s quite true,” he said. “If one looks at you closely, you’re cross-eyed. Sometimes I think you’re not, but now I’m quite sure you are. Listen, you’ve no idea how appallingly cross-eyed you can be.”
“Only when I’m tired,” I said. “On the other hand my eyes are much too wide apart, just like the owl that I am.”
“Never in my whole life have I ever seen anything so cross-eyed,” he said. “What am I to do?”
He said all this in a gruff monotone that never undulated, but was hot through and through, and something started up in me at hearing him speak; yet I was not afraid, however, for the difference between this one and the other was still locked in my own knees. And when we arrived at my house and I began looking in my handbag, there was no key there; not a trace of a key; and it was past midnight. I had been given keys to both the back door and the front door, and I had never forgotten to take these keys with me when I went out, knowing perfectly well that otherwise I would not get in; and their place was in my handbag; and now of course I had forgotten them, or perhaps lost them; or they had shed their substance and turned into nothing, through miracle or magic. I picked every scrap and tatter out of the handbag, turned it upside down, and searched the lining to see if the keys had crept behind it, but it was no use. I was out on the street.
“Can’t you rouse the people?” he asked.
“In this house?” I said. “Certainly not. I would rather spend the night out of doors than make such people open up for me.”
“I have a skeleton key,” he said. “But certainly I haven’t much faith that it would fit these locks.”
“Are you mad, man?” I said. “Do you imagine I would enter this house with a skeleton key? No, I’ll wait a little. One or other of the family may not be home yet and can let me in.”
He looked at me. “I could imagine you’d be in trouble,” he said, “You say yes and no to the same thing in the same breath. You had better come home with me.”
And that was how it came to pass. And it was not until dawn next morning, when I was leaving him to go home and had put on my coat, that I happened to put my hand in my pocket, and there of course was the key.
He owned nothing except a trunk; the bed, chair, and table went with the room; but the piano was on hire, for he was so far ahead of me in music that he could think of a piano when I could think no further than a harmonium. Everything was in neat order and array. There was a smell of soap. He offered me the chair to sit on, and opened the trunk and brought out a flask of schnapps, just like any other shrewd and provident country person.
“Perhaps you’re going to offer me a bite of tobacco too?” I asked.
“Chocolate,” he said.
I accepted the chocolate but not the schnapps.
“What else have you got?” I asked.
“Don’t be so impatient,” he said. “You’ll find out soon enough.”
LOVE
I could best believe that love was some sort of rubbish thought up by the romantic geniuses who were now going to start bellowing like cows, or even dying; at least, there is no mention of love in Njal’s Saga, which is nevertheless better than any romantic literature. I had lived for twenty years with the best people in the country, my father and mother, and never heard love mentioned. This couple begat us children, certainly; but not from love; rather, as an element of the simple life of poor people who have no pastimes. On the other hand I had never heard a cross word pass between them all my life—but is that love? I hardly think so. I think love is a pastime amongst sterile folk in towns, and takes the place of the simple life.
There was lived in me a special life over which I had no control, except to an insignificant extent, even though I called it me. Whether I was kissed or not kissed, a person’s mouth was a kiss, or at least half a kiss. “You are an innocent country lump, closely akin to the awfullest crime,” sang the atom poet when he saw me; and he came remarkably close to the truth, for if anything is wicked it is life itself, which goes in its own way in this moist honeycombed vessel called a body. Did I love this deep-voiced, straight, burning man? I did not know. On the other, the one who made my knes go funny? I knew even less. Why ask? At one level a girl loves all men without differentiating them into individuals; she loves the male. And that can be a sign that she loves no male.
“You are wonderful,” he said.
“That’s also what people say who meet in brief accidental embraces for a midnight hour in the middle of the roaring stream of life, and never meet again,” she replied.
“Perhaps that too is true love,” he said.
To walk home alone at night is a disaster, in novels. Some girls confuse the state of being in love and being lonely, and think they are the former when in fact they are the latter; in love with everyone and no one, just because they are without a man. A girl without a man does not know where she is placed. A man comes up to her one night as she stands preoccupied outside a house, and before she knows it she has gone home with him, where he confides to her everything: nothing. Was that love? No, she has only thrust a gag into the gaping jaws of a ravenous beast which was threatening to tear her apart, a dummy into the mouth of a thirsty unweaned infant: herself. The man was no more than an implement; and if that was wrong, then life itself was indeed the poet-singer’s awfullest crime.
Once some surveyors came from the south to survey waterfalls. One of them was wearing an enormous coat, with his scarf hanging out of his pocket, and he smelled slightly of drink. She was seventeen then. He kissed her in the parlor when she brought him coffee. Why did she go to his tent that night, even though he had whispered it to her? From sheer curiosity. She was of course hot and sweating and flushed all day, from having been kissed at the age of seventeen. His tent was pitched down in the gully beside the stream, and there he stayed on his own for three nights; and she with him. She never said a word to him, and how glad she was that he was married, or else she would perhaps have begun to think about him. Then he left; and as a result of this I first began to think about myself. In reality, he gave me myself, and in return I own him for the rest of my life, despite everything—if I want to.
The other time was a boy I got to know when I was at the girls’ college. First he danced with me for a whole evening, then he wrote me a letter, and finally he whistled outside my window. I sneaked out during the night. We had nowhere to go but we went none
the less, for nothing can thwart a boy and a girl. But there is one thing they do not like—that it should be discovered, that it should be spread around; this is ourselves, this we alone know, here is the point where experience ceases to be a story, where the story has no longer any rights. But by good fortune he had to go south after we had met three times, and from then on everything was quiet and no one was afraid in that dangerous place, the girls’ college, where immorality is defined ethically but not chemically.
And that was all that I had lived, a girl long fully grown, until the night I lost the key.
* A medieval Icelandic collection of Scandinavian heroic and mythological poetry.
10. I am dismissed
While I was filling the cups at the breakfast table, Madam asked me in a cold courtroom voice, bluntly, and without looking at me: “Where were you last night?”
“At a cell-meeting,” I replied.
First she gave a little gasp, but quickly controlled the twitching of her mouth; she made a squeezed, high-pitched sound and then said with remarkable calm, although her face had gone white: “Just so, indeed. And what matters were on the agenda there, pray?”
“The day-nursery,” I said.
“What day-nursery?”
“We need a day-nursery,” I said.
“Who needs a day-nursery?” she asked.
“I do.”
“And who is to build it?” she asked.
“The public,” I replied.
“The public!” she said. “And what manner of creature is that, pray?”
It was quite remarkable how icily ironical the blessed woman could be, considering how deeply she felt. But she could conceal her feelings no longer.
“Are you so shameless,” she began, “that you can tell me straight to my face that you have been at a cell-meeting; admit it in my own hearing in my own house; announce it at our table, in front of these two innocent children, yes, even go so far as to present Communist demands here at this table, demands that we taxpayers should start subsidizing the debauchery of Communists?”
“Come now, my dear,” her husband interrupted, smiling. “Who is demanding that? Thank the Lord, we subsidize our own debauchery first of all before we start subsidizing the debauchery of others.”
“Yes, is that not typical of you bourgeois political cowards to be always ready to side against your own class? To flourish only in an atmosphere of intrigue, in some morass of deceit? But now it is I who say, Here and no further! I and others like me who have given birth to our children according to the laws of God and man, brought them up on moral principles and created for them a model home—the very idea that we should start to pay for the debauchery of those who want to pull down the houses on our children’s heads!”—and here Madam rose from her chair, shook her fist in my face so that the bracelets rattled, and said, “No thank you! And get out!”
The little girl looked at her mother open-mouthed and had started to clasp her hands, but the little fat one filled his cheeks with air. The master went on eating his porridge, and puckered up his eyes and raised his eyebrows, the way people do at cards so as not to reveal what sort of hand they are holding.
Where could I have thought that I was? Had I imagined that this house was just a hillock that had come into being in the landscape by accident? That here one could talk about things with the frivolity of the poor? Had I imagined that in this house talk of cells was some sort of innocent family whimsy, a refrain one has grown accustomed to hum when the mind is blank? If so, I had made a grave mistake. I was thunderstruck. So hopelessly incapable was I of understanding better folk that I did not even know how to keep a servile tongue in my head. In a flash there appeared before my mind the difference between the two worlds in which we lived, this woman and I; although I was staying under her roof we were such poles apart from one another that it was only with half justification possible to classify us together as human beings; we were both vertebrates, certainly, even mammals, but there all resemblance ended; any human society of which both of us were members was merely an empty phrase. I asked, with a sort of idiotic grimace, if I was to consider myself no longer employed in this household?
“My dear,” said the man to the woman, “I think we shall find ourselves in difficulties. You are about to go to America. Who is going to look after the house for a whole year? You know that our Jona is more than half away with the Smaland-American gods.”
“I can get a hundred maids who are not impertinent to me to my face in my own house,” she said. “I can get a thousand maids who either have the grace to tell a lie, or at least say nothing, if they have been up to something the night before. This woman has given me nothing but insolence ever since she came into this house, full of some sort of northishness as if she were my superior. I cannot stand her.”
After a moment’s thought I realized that I had no further obligations in this house and walked up to my room to gather up my few belongings, determined to go out into the cold rather than stay in this place another minute.
I AM ASKED TO STAY ON
Just then footsteps came pounding towards my door, there was a violent knocking and the door burst open simultaneously; the little fat boy stood there breathlessly in the doorway.
“Daddy says you’re to stay until he’s talked it over with you,” he said.
“How nice it is to be such a chubby little daddy’s-boy,” I said and patted him, and then went on with my packing.
I expected him to leave when he had delivered his message, for he had always had little enough to say to me before, except when he sat on a wall with the Prime Minister’s children and the other better-class children of the neighbourhood, shouting at me, “Organist, Coal-bum, O my blessed countryside!” Now he waited and watched me folding my Sunday dress and laying it topmost on my trunk, until he said in a funny mixture of impudence and wheedling, “Can I come with you to a cell meeting?”
“You’ll get spanked, dearie,” I said.
“Shut up and lemme come to a cell meeting,” he said. “The damned Communists will never let a chap come.”
“You’re surely not thinking of becoming a damned Communist, a sweet little dumpling like you?” I said.
He bristled and said, “You’ve no right to say anything to me while you’re here in this house.”
“Now I can say both Yes and No in this house, for I’m leaving,” I said.
He dug into his pocket and pulled out a few crumpled hundred-kronur notes: “If I give you a hundred kronur will you let me come to a cell-meeting?”
“Do you think I’m going to make a damned Communist out of such a sweet little dumpling for a hundred kronur?”
“Two hundred,” he said.
I kissed him and he rubbed it off with his hand. But when he had raised his offer to the equivalent of a month’s pay for a maid I could no longer restrain myself and said, “Away with you now and think shame on yourself, my poor little thing. I really ought to take down your trousers and spank you. A mite like you, trying to bribe grown-up folk—I should like to know where you’ve learned that trick, and you with such a wonderful man for a father.”
“D’you think my father doesn’t offer bribes if he needs to?” said the boy.
I gave him a box on the ears.
“You’ll be put in prison,” he said.
“And who’s still got a bandage on his hand since the day he was slaughtering stolen minks?” I said.
“Are you stupid enough to think that anything will happen to me or my cousin Bubb?” he said. “We can do anything, and we can even be Communists if the damned Communists would allow it.”
“Communists only want to have good boys,” I said.
“I want to see everything and try everything,” said the boy. “I’m against everything.”
And then I took a look at this child. This was a twelve-year-old boy with blue eyes and curly hair. He stared back at me.
“Why do you always shout names at me when I walk down the street?” I asked.
“We’re amusing ourselves,” he said. “We get bored. We want to be Communists.”
Ready to go, I shook my head.
“Daddy says you’re to stay. To wait,” said the boy.
“What for?” I asked.
“Wait until Mummy leaves,” he said.
“Go downstairs and say that I have nothing to wait for,” I said.
I was busy for a moment turning the key in the lock of my trunk, for the catch had jammed. When I looked up again the boy was still standing there in the middle of the floor, with that silken hair, still staring at me with those clear blue eyes. He has stuffed the hundred-kronur bills back in his pocket and was biting his nails furiously; I had caught him at last in the act his nails bore witness to, always bitten down to the quick.
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