Meet Me at the Museum

by Anne Youngson

  I enjoy the enjoyment Tam and Edward have from the sport, if it can be called such. They are sober, hardworking men, and it pleases me to see them excited, insofar as they are capable of excitement, as they set off, and to hear the contentment in their conversation afterward, about the day they have spent. It is, after all, a ritual, and ritual gives a pattern to the season. Edward and Tam would reject this view, of course. If asked to justify the shooting of pheasants, they would cite the economics (the shoot pays us money), countryside management (the shoot controls predators), and social cohesion (it keeps men and boys off the streets and out in the fresh air). They would be reluctant to admit they do it because they enjoy it and that that alone might be justification enough.

  I should point out that the feather I sent was not from a bird killed by a shoot. All that is over for the summer, and the birds are wandering about, the survivors, pairing up and searching for food like ordinary birds do. I took the feather from a female hit by a car on the lane leading to our farm. I’m pleased you like it. Knowing this one feather is important to you will make all the other, similar feathers I see lying about more important to me.

  Yesterday, when I was picking the early raspberries, I was thinking about the way the Iron Age people expected to experience another life after the one they were living. Whenever I pick raspberries, I go as carefully as possible down the row, looking for every ripe fruit. But however careful I am, when I turn round to go back the other way, I find fruit I had not seen when approaching the plants from the opposite direction. Another life, I thought, might be like a second pass down the row of raspberry canes; there would be good things I had not come across in my first life, but I suspect I would find much of the fruit was already in my basket. You see, I am being much more sanguine since I first wrote to you, when Bella had just died. When we started this correspondence, I thought I would gain more from putting my thoughts in writing than I would in receiving your replies. But I was wrong. Your letters have become important to me. Do not worry about your English. It is perfect.

  Write soon.

  Warmest wishes,

  Tina

  Silkeborg

  June 23

  Dear Tina,

  I printed out your last letter, which, like all the rest, is important to me, and read it, as you asked, as if it had arrived in an envelope. Already I feel more connected to you, by seeing your name in my inbox. But please send by post anything you would like me to see and touch. That, too, is special.

  I have never picked raspberries, but I understand the point you are making. Unlike you, I feel I have overlooked far too many of the fruits in this life I have. Always looking down, as it were, at what is close to me, rather than at the top and bottom of the bush, in among the leaves. I have more reason than you to hope for another life when I would have the chance to find some of the harvest I have missed. (Now I wonder if the word “fruit” can be plural, but I will not interrupt myself while I am writing to you to look it up.)

  I think you are right to be tolerant of people who kill pheasants in the name of sport. It is, as you say, a ritual. In the same way the Tollund Man was killed, as a ritual. In his case, though, the ritual was part of acting out a myth, a story invented by men (and women, of course; I am using “men” to stand for “mankind”) to try and understand themselves and their world. The Tollund Man’s contemporaries made sense of life and avoided being terrified of death by inventing alternative, mythical worlds where the gods acted out dramas that affected the human condition by, for example, influencing the seasons and the fertility of the soil. Just telling a story is not the same as believing it, and believing it is not the same as acting it out. I am saying (with too many words, as usual) that ritual is a very important part of believing in a myth and that myths are very important for giving comfort and making sense of the world.

  You may say you did not mean “ritual” in quite the way I am using the word when you referred to your husband and son shooting pheasants, but it seems to me that part of the story they tell themselves about who they are has to do with the provision of food. Standing in the cold and the rain without any certainty of acquiring food, with the chance of escape for the pheasant and failure for them, is a way of acting out the purpose of their lives, as it were, at the extreme. As the death of the Tollund Man may have been seen by the whole community as acting out their own eventual deaths through the death of one man. We have an instinct for violence that has the approval of authority, and shooting a few birds is a better way of indulging in this than the alternatives—war, executions, human sacrifice.

  I have had these thoughts about myth often, over the years, because, of course, it was a myth that Birgitt had created in her own mind that governed her life. She saw the imagined world alongside the real one so clearly, and yearned to reach it, as I have said. It might have helped her to have had some rituals that brought those two worlds closer together, but she never worked out how to create the bridge, give herself a railing to hang on to. She had what other people would call odd habits, which did seem to give her comfort from time to time. I never used the word “ritual” to describe these, for fear of appearing superstitious. Superstition is such a scornful word, applied by rational people to anything that appears not to be a rational belief, not seeing there is beauty and meaning and purpose in putting aside everything that can be explained and imagining something quite miraculous in, for example, an unfurling fern frond.

  Back to Birgitt. One of her habits was picking things up. Stones, twigs, items left lying around in public places, like pieces of ribbon or safety pins. It did not matter if these were beautiful or not, if they were natural or manufactured; something would tug at her eye and she would pick it up and put it in her pocket. Some of these things I would never see again, but some of them I have still, in my house, sitting just where she put them, in the exact arrangement she put them in.

  She was fierce and determined when she had seen something she wanted. It was hard to divert her or turn her back. We had some moments of embarrassment. In a shoe shop once, when the children were quite small, we were buying shoes for them for the new term about to start. We were sitting in a row on a bench waiting for the assistant to bring the shoes we had picked out in the right sizes for the children’s feet. Erik saw a friend of his on another bench and got up and hopped over to him, one shoe on and one shoe off. Karin fell sideways to fill the space where he had been, feet still hanging down and kicking the front of the bench. Her hair became caught in the strap of my watch, and I remember feeling helpless and hopeless. They were good children, I know, well behaved, yet it all seemed too much: that Erik should run off; that I could not go after him because of Karin’s hair; that she would not sit up or stop kicking the bench, whatever I said. I think my mind was always on Birgitt, and so however small a distraction the children created, it was almost more than I could bear.

  I untangled Karin’s hair and went over to Erik, who was playing quietly with his friend. I knew the mother and spoke to her for a few minutes, and when I looked round, Karin had her feet up on the bench and was lying back with her knees in the air, holding the hem of her skirt above her head. Birgitt was gone. My first thought was to rush to the shop doorway as if my wife were a child not to be trusted outside on the street, but I heard her voice and found her behind a rack of shoes. She was holding a shoelace. It was long and striped, diagonally, in gold and green. It was new, and the woman she was talking to had obviously been explaining that it needed to go back into the box she was holding in her hand, with a pair of new shoes in it, only one of them with laces. Birgitt was telling her the lace was not meant to be shut up in a box. It wouldn’t be, the woman explained, when someone bought the shoes. She was calm and pleasant. I asked Birgitt if she wanted to buy the shoes, and she said no, of course not. Then I asked the woman if she could sell us a pair of the same laces. Unfortunately not, she said. They were only available with the shoes.

  “It was just lying there,” Birgitt said to me, “s
pare.”

  “You can’t have it, though,” I said. “It isn’t spare.”

  “I know,” she said.

  Later I asked what it was about the lace that had made her want it. The continuous pattern of it, she said, the shape-making properties.

  Another time, we were on a train and she became fascinated by a wisp of sea-green scarf a woman sitting near us was wearing round her neck. I knew what Birgitt was looking at because it was often things such as this scarf and the shoelace that attracted her—things that moved in the breeze, in odd colors, not solid or bulky but long and able to be re-formed into different shapes. We neither of us spoke of it, but when the woman stood up to leave the train, Birgitt followed her out of the carriage and came back a little later looking sorrowful.

  “She wouldn’t let me have it,” she said.

  None of the things I have left of Birgitt’s is like the scarf or the shoelace. What she kept tended to be more solid, and I wonder if she was seeking something that tied one thing to another, and never finding it. The wisp of material or length of string that would have made a connection between her two forms of reality always eluded her.

  I am making her sound childlike, in the way she reached out for things that were not hers to take, and I suppose she was. But meek, where a child would have been passionate.

  * * *

  I will end with another thought on shooting pheasants: it means a close relationship with nature. I am so far detached from nature in my habits. I have only two hobbies—playing chess and singing in a choir—and both take place indoors. My only exercise is swimming (in an indoor pool), and cycling to work. Since we have started this correspondence, I have paid more attention as I cycle. To reach the center of Silkeborg, where the museum is, I have to cross a lake. I notice the water, because it changes all the time and reflects the day; the color is gray on dull days, more blue on bright days; the surface is ruffled by the wind or (not often) quite still. But now I am reminding myself to look at the scenery, too, not to cycle with my head down, watching the road and the lake. There are woods around Silkeborg, and an old towpath alongside the river Gudenå. I think: I must go for a walk. Look for unfurling fern fronds. In the pursuit of a more joyful outlook.

  With all my good wishes,

  Anders

  Bury St. Edmunds

  July 1

  Dear Anders,

  I like the way you talk of what is so often spoken of as if it were simple, like ritual, and give it depth and meaning. Everything we do on the farm has a flavor of ritual about it. When the crops are sown, when the animals are mated, when the young are slaughtered. There is no superstition in this; there are practical, rational reasons for doing what we do—but we make it into a ritual with all the little ceremonies that surround it. Once, I was in Italy visiting Bella when harvesting of the main cereal crops started at home. I had forgotten to make, and leave behind, the fruitcake it is a tradition (there’s another word for ritual) in our family to eat on that particular day. The weather that year became unpredictable, after the harvest began. It rained at the wrong time. As well as reducing the yield, it meant the dryer in one of the barns was running, day after day, to bring down the moisture content of the grain, an audible reminder that all was not perfect. Edward said, making a joke of it, that the lack of the fruitcake was the cause of all this. An ill omen bringing misfortune.

  The whole business of farming does sometimes seem like a fight there is a chance we will not win, and the closer to losing we are, the more hard, physical effort involved in pulling us back from the brink, the happier everyone is. Except me. I enjoy being warm, dry, and idle following an afternoon battling sheets of plastic over a silage clamp in a snowstorm, but I don’t feel any sort of satisfaction at having tethered the sheet, saved the silage. Although I spend so much of my time in the kitchen, putting food on the table, providing food is not part of the story I tell myself of my life. I think the only myth I have to sustain me is the idea of the Tollund Man. He is, to me, like the gods he believed in: someone who lived before me and fought battles and now has wisdom he could impart to me if I could find a way to reach him. The constant planning to go and never going—that is maybe taking the place of a ritual. But thinking of it like that makes a decision to go seem even more significant, even more a step into something big, so I will not follow the thought through for fear of making it seem too great ever to be taken. I do still plan to come. It is still important to me to take this step; though Bella will not be with me, I know you would be there to greet me as I walked into the museum. But I do not feel I can say that tomorrow or next month or even next year is when this should happen. I am hoping I will know when it is the right time.

  Warmest wishes,

  Tina

  Silkeborg

  July 10

  Dear Tina,

  I am looking forward to standing beside you when you meet the Tollund Man for the first time. I hope it is soon, but I trust you to know when the time has come.

  I had a visit from my daughter, and I will tell you about it because it was a joyful occasion, though the joy was hidden inside it and I am finding it out now she has gone back to Copenhagen. I am hoping to find it out by writing to you. I fear this will be a long letter.

  Karin arrived on Friday evening, with food. I treat food carefully, in my solitary life. Every evening, I prepare what I am going to eat. I put out a mat and knife and fork and the glass for beer or wine or water, the pepper and the salt. I take the plate with the food I have cooked and sit at the table to eat it. Then I clear everything up and leave the kitchen as it was before I started. I do this because it is a version of the custom we followed when Birgitt was alive. Following this same pattern has felt important to me to keep the surface of my life from tilting and tipping me into a form of shameful despair. I am no cook, though. I eat sausages and potatoes, or chops and potatoes, or ham with salad and bread. I do not enjoy the food, not the preparation of it nor the eating of it. I know I need it, that is all.

  Karin is an adventurous cook. She lives, as I said, in Copenhagen, where there is a new culture of seasonal food, and food collected from the wild, which I do not understand. I cannot tell you what she cooked for me because I am not sure of the Danish words for the ingredients or the type of dish, so I have no idea what the English words would be. I should have asked for details, written it down for you. I only thought of this later. At the time, I was enjoying watching her doing the preparation and the cooking and the sort of conversation you have when one of you is occupied and the other is idle. We spoke of television programs we had watched, recent events. I am worried about the changes taking place in the world, but she is not. She is young enough to be relaxed about change. She knows she has a lifetime ahead of her, and she might regret the decisions some of the people or the politicians are making and think it may mean there will be economic or social troubles, but, still, there is time for things to improve again before she is old. Perhaps this has nothing to do with age, but is just because she is an optimistic person with a hopeful outlook on life.

  The food was delicious. Rich and earthy. As we ate it I told her about your pheasant shoot. Wasn’t that, I said, the sort of food she liked? Seasonal. Foraged. She was not so sure. There is a difference, she said, between harvesting a naturally occurring abundance and creating an abundance in order to harvest it—which is, of course, farming.

  “If I was in court,” she said, summing up, “I would prefer to be putting the case for pheasant shooting to be classified as a form of farming, rather than defending it as a form of foraging.”

  When we had the kitchen tidy and clean we went outside to sit in the summerhouse I have in the garden, and she told me what she had come to say. It was dusk and there are no lights outside, so I could see her only dimly; she could see me only dimly, and I think this was for the better. You said to me, in your first letter—the first one that was addressed to me rather than the first letter you wrote, to Professor Glob—that you were writing for
yourself and that I need not bother to read on. I am going to do the same thing now. I am going to write down the story Karin told me to help me decide what I feel about it. I am not going to say you need not bother to read it, because I know you well enough now to know you will. Also, I want you to read it because your opinion on it will help me to know you better still.

  For the last two years, Karin has had a partner called Lars, a man involved in various ways in the music industry—the pop music industry, that is. I have never understood exactly what he does because I do not understand how the industry works, but I believe he manages bands and is a disc jockey and maybe has other ways of making money. It does not matter now, because the first thing Karin had to tell me was that this relationship was over. I was not sorry. Lars is a big, untidy, cheerful man and so completely unlike me, which is often a reason for liking someone, but in this case, I thought it was a way he chose to present himself. I have no idea what sort of man he truly is, and I prefer people to be more direct. To be plain about what opinions they hold. I am afraid some of my distrust might have been because I am distrustful of the business he is in. I find it hard to judge the quality of modern music, so I am suspicious of it. Of course, it is not up to me to make this judgment. It is only up to me to decide if I like to listen to it or not, and if I do, the quality is as high as I need it to be. History will decide if I was right in the choices I made.

  Now Karin tells me it is over; she knew he was a man of large appetites, she said, and that he enjoyed satisfying them, but something had happened to make her realize there were no boundaries when she had thought boundaries existed. Here is what happened.

  Within Copenhagen there is an area called Christiania, which is a sort of commune, with a license to break the law. There are entertainments available there that the police do not bother to inquire into unless there is a disturbance, if someone is actually hurt, and even then, so I understand, the authorities are reluctant to enter. I have never been there. I do not disapprove at all; I believe it is a good thing for there to be such places where people bolder than I am can indulge themselves without harming others. It is somewhere Lars went, often, and Karin went with him. One night, about three or four months ago, they went to a bar in Christiania where Lars had arranged to meet some friends. The friends were not there and had not arrived when Lars looked at his phone and told Karin he had to go. There was a deal he was trying to do with a band, and they were also in Christiania that night, at another bar, and it was important he spoke to them. He would not be long, he said, and she could wait where she was for the friends to arrive.