No one came out of any of the houses. This is a good neighborhood, and I know and like my neighbors, but as I stood there, thinking about you standing in your farmyard imagining an Iron Age settlement, I thought how private we have all become. How self-sufficient. Of course, we are all members of whatever society we live in, but not in the way the Tollund Man’s contemporaries would have been members of the community they lived in. They would have been cogs, wheels, brackets, levers, pulleys, each making their society work according to their skills and position. Now we are like ball bearings, complete in ourselves and joining other ball bearings only to form shapes that suit our purpose.
When I went back into the house, the phone was ringing and it was my daughter calling from Copenhagen. I have not told you about my children, I think. I cannot tell you about my children without first telling you about my wife.
My wife did not die of breast cancer, and I did not stop reading your earlier letter when you described the women who were friends because they had suffered this disease, but read to the end. You have a gift for finding joy in small moments, which is a thing I used to have, but have lost, and part of this is because of my wife’s story, which is a sad one. Perhaps if I share it with you now, we can continue with our correspondence hereafter in a more joyous strain.
My wife’s name was Birgitt. She was born in the city, in Copenhagen, but when she was five or six, her mother was no longer able to care for her. Birgitt remembered a time of half-light, of hunger and thirst, cold and damp. When her father came home from a business trip, so she learned later, he found her mother had gone to the park and was sleeping on a bench. Birgitt was locked in the flat, the curtains drawn. She had made a nest under the table, where the cloth hung down almost to the floor. There was no food in the house. The radio had been left on, tuned to a classical music station. She could never afterward listen to classical music, particularly the great symphonies, without crying.
Birgitt’s mother was sent to a home in which she died, almost at once—or so Birgitt was led to believe—without once coming home to the flat with the table or seeing her child again. Birgitt was sent to live with her father’s parents, on an island off the northeast corner of our country. Imagine the contrast. Just the view from the windows. All her life, she has seen other buildings and the tops of trees, with broken shapes of sky color in between. Now she can see only sky, and a flat landscape where nothing so large as a tree breaks the surface. Then her grandparents. Her mother had allowed no routine. She slept and ate, went out and came in, at times she chose. When she was awake, and not eating, she would create for Birgitt. I realize “create” in English is a transitive verb and needs to be followed by a noun (I had a very good teacher of English at my school), but it is hard for me to think of which noun to place after it. Games? Art? Food? Stories? All of these, but mostly she created a life that was not that of a mother and a six-year-old girl in a flat in Copenhagen.
The grandparents—Birgitt called them Ernst and Carla—had a life that was set hard. Every morning, they woke at the same time, went through the same steps to wash and dress, sat in the same seats to eat breakfast, and so on throughout the day. Children are supposed to like to have a routine; it makes them feel safe. But Birgitt’s routine had been to have no routine, and she was waiting all the time for something else to happen.
“When will it be different?” she asked her grandmother.
“Different from what?” Carla said.
“Just different.”
“Different in what way?” Her grandmother was a good and patient woman.
“Just different.”
It was not possible for them to understand that Birgitt did not know what alternative she was expecting. That was exactly the point. The unexpected.
The only unpredictable part of her new surroundings was the sea, and she became fascinated by it. Small as she was, she would trek over the rough grassland between her grandparents’ cottage and the shore. Her mother had had a passion for bright things, and all the child’s clothes were colors that were easy to see against the grays and greens and browns of the landscape, so Carla would let her go farther than we might expect, so anxious are we now for the safety of the young. Birgitt said that one of the comforting things about the sea, apart from its constantly changing patterns, was the sound it made. In Copenhagen, there was noise. Here, there was none except the wind when it blew (which it usually did) and the surf breaking on the shore.
In Denmark the children go to school at age seven, so Birgitt’s first experience of school was on the island. This was another form of orderliness and another shock. She had not met many children and she was puzzled by how they were like her and yet not like her. I suppose all children have a sense of themselves as distinct from other children, but most of them will also have an idea of their relationship with a family or a community. They will understand where they fit. Birgitt did not fit.
Carla walked with her to the school, which was a mile away, each morning, and returned to fetch her in the afternoon. One afternoon, Birgitt was not there to be collected. The teacher said she had not been to school that day. Carla had left her at the door, but Birgitt had not gone through it. It was Danish weather—you will know what I mean when I describe it, for I expect you would recognize it as East Anglian weather. It was cool and windy, and the earth was dwarfed by the sky, huge and blue with clouds in turmoil. The whole village turned out to look for Birgitt, tripping over the grass on the dunes, wiping the sand out of their eyes and their hair, calling, calling. Nowadays half the houses on the shore would be empty except in high summer, but then there were people living in them, and all those people came out, too, and searched outbuildings, looked under tarpaulins and behind sheds. Boats were launched and began searching the coast, the men and women holding the tillers looking fearfully at the surf and the breaking waves, as well as at the inlets and the safe, dry beaches. Darkness fell, and the child had not been found.
There are a number of small islands in that part of Denmark, no more than rocks sticking up out of the sea. One of these is split from top to bottom, like a rack for a single piece of toast. At the bottom, the slit widens to make a cave, or would you call it a cove? Sheltered, with a sandy floor. The searchers found Birgitt in this place three days after she had last been seen. She was alone. There was food and blankets. She seemed not to have been harmed in any way.
The story she told was that a merman had invited her to go with him and she had gone. Had they swum to the island? the adults asked. No, she said. He had rowed the boat, and she had guided him toward the rock. Every man who owned or could borrow a boat, and who was fit enough to row—that is, almost the entire male population of the island where Birgitt lived—was interviewed. The child would not describe the man except to repeat that he was a merman, a sea creature, and it was impossible to link any of the men with the blankets and food on the rock. The search continued across the nearby mainland, and many an innocent man in both communities had his innocence questioned and, maybe, was never quite believed to be innocent for the rest of his life. No one was ever arrested.
As an adult, Birgitt would admit that mermen do not exist and that whoever took her away in a boat was no more than a mortal with two legs. In her heart, though, she never believed it. This is not something she ever said, but I lived with her for thirty years and I loved her, so I feel justified in stating it to be so. She did not believe she was a part of the world as other people are a part of it. She was someone born to live alone, hidden away in small spaces, and the people who created these spaces were not made of the same matter as I am made of, or the rest of mankind. Her mother and the merman were real, to her, and the children and I were not. She played the game of happy families with us, but we were toys, props to help her pretend to be like us. When the game became too much for her, she would leave us, for a few days, a week, once for over two months. I never knew where she went, but I know what she was looking for. The door to the real world where the merman lived.
As she grew older, the longing became stronger.
A couple of years ago we were on a ferry between Gothenburg and Frederikshavn. We were returning from a little holiday to celebrate our wedding anniversary. It was a stormy day: wind, rain, rough seas. Despite all this (because of all this?) my wife told me she wanted to go outside onto the deck; she felt nauseous, she said, from the noise and the smells on the inside of the boat. I said I would go with her, but she said no, stay with the bags. As she left, she handed me her bracelet. She wore it always, but in her unhappiness she had become thin, and it was loose. She said:
“Keep this for me. It may slide from my wrist, and I do not want it to be lost.”
I never saw her again. Her body has never been found. She left my side as if all her life she had been dreaming and now she wanted to wake to a new day.
* * *
I am surprised to find that I have never told this story before, not from start to finish, as I have told you. I do not find it easy to speak of the things that affect me most deeply. But it is good to have told it. It is fixed now. A story that is over.
Your friend,
Anders Larsen
Bury St. Edmunds
May 12
Dear Anders,
I want to go back to the letter you wrote to me in March before I say anything about your latest letter, because I will find it easier to speak of it if I approach it in this way.
You talked, in March, about the difference in our lives—mine in the midst of the landscape and change, yours caught up with objects fixed by time—and you asked which is best and which would you have chosen if you had known you had a choice? I know you did not ask this question any more than I asked the questions you answered in your first letter to me (how to get to Silkeborg, evidence of genetic links to Iron Age man), but I am putting it as a question because that is, precisely, the question I meant to ask you, or ask Professor Glob, as I thought at the time, when we began this correspondence. It is astonishing, is it not, that after I have led you, all uncomplaining, round the slaughter of pigs and the death of my best friend, you should have uncovered the real substance of what led me into writing?
You asked whether I wake terrified. I am not easily terrified, but after Bella died, I found I could not stop thinking, by day as well as by night, about what had become of my life, and there were moments when I felt the enormity of the might-have-been. She died in a hospice. If you don’t have them in Denmark, you should. They make the going bearable for those who go and those who stay. You will understand, I see now, what a gift, what a boon that is. Her daughter, Alicia, was with her. So was I. Alicia is a girl with violent emotions. She shouts if she is angry (and she is often angry), laughs and sings and dances when she is happy, and is loud and physical in grief. I love her for Bella’s sake, but she is exhausting. On the day Bella died, Alicia behaved with dignity while the arrangements were made with the hospice staff, but as soon as we reached the parking lot, she became extreme. She ran round and round the parked cars, kicked the wall, all the time keeping up a wailing and a sobbing that must have been audible at Sainsbury’s, a quarter of a mile away. We were also in full view of the hospice windows, and I hate being a spectacle, so I sat in my car and waited for her to wear herself out.
There are moments, aren’t there, when you pull some buried thought up to the forefront of your mind and realize you have been thinking this, without thinking it, for some while, and the time and place when this realization occurs become a memory package, as it were, forever whole and capable of being recalled. Sitting in my car in the hospice parking lot, with Alicia racing back and forth like a pheasant startled by a dog, I began the process that led, in the end, to my first letter. Why had I led the life I had led, done so little, achieved so little? When my life is of such significance to me, how is it I could not claim any significance for it in the eyes of a disinterested observer? What life, if I had made a rational choice, would I have chosen? If I hadn’t gone to the Young Farmers’ disco and met Edward; if I had had less curiosity and animal appetite and had approached the business of sex more carefully? Though I doubt my choice would have been any more rational if I had known I was making it. The obvious difference between my life and yours is that yours is mainly indoors and mine is substantially outside. Did you think about that when you were young? No, nor me. I don’t know which I would have picked if I had put the alternatives to myself as a young girl. If I had recognized alternatives existed and I could select from among them. I know quite well that if I had led a life different from the one I have had, it would have been as the result of some urgent, momentary impulse as strong and as random as the one that made me Edward’s wife and Tam’s mother at the age of twenty. Who is to say that, whatever it might have been, that alternative life would not also have left me, as I sat in the hospice parking lot, with a sense of having been in the wrong room all my life, the room where nothing was happening?
Alicia stopped walking and sank down beside a BMW, sobbing like a child. I got out of the car, scooped her up, and took her back to the flat where Bella had been living. She went into the bedroom, lay down on the bed with her face in the pillow, and sobbed quietly but unendingly. The place was a mess, and I began to tidy up, as if it were a party that had just finished, rather than a life. I collected dirty crocks from round the living room and the kitchen and washed them up. I picked up and folded the clothes that had been hung on a rack to dry and were long since dry. Some of these were Alicia’s, rather than Bella’s, but I placed them on the pile in the order I picked them up, not separating the clothing of the living from that of the dead, as if their two lives would forever be layered and interleaved. Then I rounded up the books from the sofa and the floor and the kitchen table and put them back in the bookcase. Some of these were in Italian, Alicia’s first language, but most were books Bella had been reading. I knew this because, in the last days of her life we had discussed the books I was now restoring to the shelf.
When I had finished in the kitchen and the living room—wiped down the surfaces, plumped the cushions—I went into the bedroom. Alicia seemed to have fallen asleep, so I tiptoed round the bed, bending over to pick up armfuls of clothes. As I straightened up with my bundle, I found Alicia’s eyes were open and she was watching me, silently, and at the same time, I noticed there was a book, facedown, beside the bed, where a hand reaching out from under the cover would fall on it. It was The Bog People, by P. V. Glob. In a moment I was undone. I let fall the pile of clothes and, as Alicia had done in the parking lot, I sank to the ground and began to sob.
I became aware that Alicia was sitting beside me, patting my hand and murmuring to me in Italian. In her other hand she was holding against her cheek a purple embroidered jacket that Bella used to wear all the time, whether it went with the rest of her outfit or not. We sat on the floor until it grew dark, the book and the jacket sandwiched between us as we comforted each other with our memories. The next day, I wrote the first letter you answered. I hope you had someone to sit beside you, as you held the bracelet, someone to talk to about Birgitt.
I thought mostly of you as I read your wife’s story, how it must have felt to you. I never knew her, and I begin to feel I do know you. When I think of what it was like for you, left alone on the ferry, I wonder if I am being self-indulgent, letting myself go and wailing about whether my life has been worthwhile when I am, after all, still alive. Your loss was so much greater than any I have experienced, so abrupt and yet foreshadowed. As if Birgitt had been dying for years but it was never possible to admit she was, and there was never a moment when it became inevitable that she would. Until she did. Both the relationship and the manner of parting were so much more intense, in your case, than in mine. I regret having rattled on about Bella’s death, now. I need never mention her again.
My final thought on this is: whatever else you have done or failed to do, have experienced or missed experiencing, you have had that relationship with Birgitt. Something particular to you two, a closer, d
eeper relationship than many of us have a chance of knowing. I’m sorry you lost her. I’m pleased, for your sake, that she lived and you met her.
Thank you for telling me her story.
Tina
Silkeborg
May 22
Dear Tina,
As I write this to you, I have the contents of my briefcase on the desk in front of me. That is: my laptop, my phone, my lunch, the Copenhagen Post, and your letter. Before Birgitt died, these things, except your letter, would have been, every day, in my briefcase, but there would also have been something she had put there, different each day. It might have been a drawing she had done, or something she had read and copied out for me, or the recipe for whatever we would be having for dinner. If she had no energy for such things, she would put an earring in my briefcase, or a glove, or a photo. Whatever it was, I understood it meant she was still alive and intended to be alive at the time I came home.
When I returned to work after her death, I carried my laptop and my phone and my newspaper and my lunch in my pockets or under my arm, so I would not have to open my briefcase and see, again and again, that there was nothing there but these things. Of course, this was at first, when I could not manage my grief. Now I can carry my briefcase with me, and I do, every day. But each day, it is a sadness for me to remember, as I open it, that it contains nothing to make me feel hopeful. I have never hoped for anything much. It was enough to know that Birgitt would be there when I returned home. Now I only hope for a return to hope, or at least to the feeling I once had that there is satisfaction in the little things of life.
It was two days after our thirtieth wedding anniversary when she died, twenty months ago. In all that time there has been nothing in my briefcase except tools for work, food, and news about people I do not know and will never meet. Today, there is your letter.
Meet Me at the Museum Page 4