Meet Me at the Museum

by Anne Youngson

  Daphne’s favorite topic is the failings of other people. It has taken me a little while to notice this, as she has a smiling, humorous way of talking, starting off with a laugh and a phrase expressing amusement or disbelief, such as: “Honestly, would you credit…” or “You’ll never believe this…” When she has finished telling me what she set out to tell me, she will end with a phrase expressing goodwill and tolerance, such as: “That’s life, I suppose,” or “Well, she probably can’t help it,” and she will laugh again, as if she is endlessly amused by the world even while it is frustrating her.

  She was telling me this morning about catching her mother’s caregiver drying the dishes with a roll of paper towels, instead of a tea towel. (“I mean, paper!”) The woman said she thought it was more hygienic to use paper and throw it away than to spread germs about with a dirty cloth. (“I ask you, what does she think washing machines are for!”) The caregiver is a fruitful object for such stories, and so is her mother, who—would you believe it?—asks for something one day and then can’t remember why she wanted it the next. But she is ready to throw in anecdotes about the ridiculous opinions or behavior of almost anyone and chats away about Lorna and Margaret and Judy when I really have no idea who these people are. All I know is, they are always saying or doing things Daphne would never dream of saying or doing, can you believe it?

  I have sat beside Daphne at parties, when her husband was still alive, in the company of other women—they might have been Lorna or Margaret or Judy—and they have been able to react with suitable outrage or laughter or humorous tolerance to the things Daphne says, and then to throw in some examples of their own. I have never been able to do this. I could tell her my opinion: for instance, that I can see the caregiver has a point and using paper towels to wipe the dishes dry is a sensible idea; that her mother is nearly ninety and should be allowed to let her mind wander. And sometimes I do this, and she looks at me as if I have failed to see the joke, so most of the time I smile when she does and let her think I agree with her, caught out by my own inability to face conflict.

  Now, of course, I realize that I am doing exactly what I am criticizing someone else for doing. I have complained at length about the failings of Daphne Trigg—that is, her lack of capacity to understand and empathize with the failings of others and her failure to find any topic of conversation except the failings of others. And what am I doing in this letter, then? I am ashamed of myself, but it is also making me smile.

  As the winter goes on I will grow used to the cold and Daphne will grow used to the books and I will stop going into the office and go back to doing the other things that fill my days: caring for the hens, cooking, cleaning, walking the dog, lending a hand whenever and wherever a hand is needed. This will be better for my peace of mind, and my character. I am planning to visit Mary and Vassily soon and I am looking forward to traveling to meet them, and to the mountains, but also to having some other, less pedestrian topic to talk to you about.

  Love,

  Tina

  Silkeborg

  November 20

  Dear Tina,

  I need you to keep telling me what you are doing and thinking. It has become important to me to have a connection with a life that is not mine, for I feel boxed up within my own life at this time.

  I remember you told me, at the beginning, that yours was a buried life. I feel now that mine is, too. I am working on the book and while I am digging up facts about figures dug up from the earth, I am also burying myself in their form and meaning. So much of this meaning is about wombs and childbirth, and while I concentrate on the screen, I am all the time waiting for the telephone to ring. Inside the space I occupy, physically, all is calm. There are no shocks, only the patient uncovering of facts, the business of relating those facts to other facts. Outside the space I occupy is all the uncertainty of childbirth. The figures I look at on the screen and handle at the museum are hard; Karin, in the image I hold in my head, is so soft, and softness cannot resist damage as hardness can. I am finding it difficult to reconcile these things in my mind as I work.

  The earliest of the fertility figures were no more than an upright shape, no breasts, no broad hips or big stomach. They can be identified as a representation of a woman only by the carving of a necklace round where the throat would be. This is also confusing me. I do not know whether to be comforted by the simplicity or angry at the simplification.

  You see, I need your letters to help me make sense of the world.

  I am thinking, as well, about becoming a grandfather and remembering, as a consequence, my own grandfather, my father’s father, that is—I never knew my mother’s father. He stands in my mind as the symbol for all grandfathers, as the goddess figures stand for all women. He is as far from the real grandfather I am about to become as the figure I have on the screen at the moment is from Karin. He was a man who was aloof and austere (I have looked these words up, I hope you like them) and I admired him greatly, from what I knew of him and from the stories told about him.

  My grandfather was a farmer, during the war. You must know that Denmark was occupied in 1940; at first the government cooperated with the Germans to preserve some neutrality, but it meant that almost everything the farm produced would have been shipped to Germany to feed the population, and times were quite hard here in Denmark. We are not a people who easily become subjects, I believe, and from the start there was resistance and sabotage. I do not know if my grandfather took part in this; he never spoke of the war.

  In 1943 things changed, and both the resistance activities and the control of the Germans increased. At this time, they issued an order to round up all the Jews and deport them to concentration camps. Before this could happen, almost all of them ran away from their homes and, with the help of the resistance and the Danish people, were evacuated to Sweden. My grandfather’s farm was near the coast, and he played a part in this evacuation by sheltering Jewish families as they waited for boats to carry them to safety. One night some Germans turned up at the farm; they had been patrolling the coastal area and found they had not enough fuel to reach their base. There was a Jewish family staying in the house: mother, father, and a child about three years old. My grandfather went out to the Germans and led them off to the barn where the fuel for the tractor was stored; my father, who was a teenager, went with them. But the little Jewish boy, not understanding the danger, escaped from his mother and ran out after them, into the barn where the four men—two Germans, my father and grandfather—were busy with the oil drum.

  At once, my grandfather picked the child up and began playing games with him, tickling him and swinging him over his head, making him laugh, to stop him saying anything that might give them away.

  “This is your son?” said one of the Germans, and my grandfather said no, it was the son of his brother, who lived with them now, since his father had been killed fighting for the Germans as part of the volunteer brigade, the Freikorps Danmark (which was of course despised by my grandfather and his family). All the time spinning the little boy about to stop him talking, while my father filled the container with fuel for the Germans’ car. At last it was ready, and my father carried it to the car for them, diverting them from the house. They gave him money, when they left, a tip, I suppose, and said what a fine young man he was. They gave a coin, too, to the little Jewish boy, for being the son of someone who had fought on their side. The way the story was told afterward, by the rest of the family but never by my grandfather himself, my grandfather carried the child back to the house and picked up the piece of bread he had been eating when the Germans arrived, as if nothing had happened.

  When I was a child I used to pretend to myself that I was the little boy my grandfather had played with; he was so calm, so remote, so grand a figure to me, it seemed a miraculous thing that he might play with me in this way. When my father grew old and bitter he would tell the story again, complaining about the fear he felt at the time and how his father had cared more for the safety of the fugitive
family than he had for his own wife and children. At his worst, he would say how unfair it was that his father, who had never played with his own children, should have just this once shown such playfulness to a stranger’s child.

  I cannot imagine that Karin’s daughter will have any such stories to tell of me, when she is my age. But I will try to be a person she thinks worth remembering. I am talking as if it were a certainty that Karin will have a daughter who will live to be my age, all the while listening for the ringing of the telephone.

  Write soon.

  Love,

  Anders

  Bury St. Edmunds

  December 7

  My dear Anders,

  Aloof and austere are good words. I like them. They do not apply to my own grandparents at all. The one I remember best is my mother’s mother, whom we called Nan. She was a gardener. Her husband, whom I don’t remember, was a market gardener—he grew vegetables for sale in the local shops and on his market stall—and she gardened alongside him, growing food to eat, but she also created a garden round their bungalow in Norfolk that was a wonder. There seemed to be no planning in it, and she never knew any of the proper names for the plants, never mind the names of the botanical families to which they belonged. Such things were of no importance to her. She could recognize the plants she grew and she had names for them that I think were often her own names that she chose to call them, rather than a label that would allow other people to know what they were. She put plants in where she wanted them to grow, and they grew. Or she put them in where there happened to be a space, and still they grew. It is her hands I remember most clearly. My mother didn’t like us eating any of the food Nan prepared when we visited, because her hands had soil so deeply ingrained in every crevice, they never looked clean. They looked as if they had gripped things—tools, weeds, watering cans—for so many years, they had formed into a permanent gripping shape, the knuckles raised in a ridge across the back and the fingertips worn away. She was always looking at what was close to her, right under her feet, under her trowel, or into the distance where the roses were in flower or the cherry trees fruiting; never into anyone’s face.

  There is a story of her, too, from wartime, which is often told in the family. The war never came near her—although there were air bases in East Anglia that were targeted, none was close to where she lived. But the district lost twelve young men, whose names are recorded now on the war memorial in the village. Each time news was brought of a death, she would plant something in memory of that young man, whether she knew him or not. She dug a hole on the verge beside the war memorial, which only had names from the First World War on it at the time, and planted whatever she had chosen, then marked the spot with a stick naming the person who had died. She asked no one if she could do this, although she had no right to be planting there, and she did not mention it to the families, but somehow everyone knew and no one minded. Some of the plants grew too big, over time, for the place where she had put them, and these have been moved to somewhere close, each still identified with the name of the person she was thinking of when she planted it. Or, if the plant was too big to move, cuttings were taken. Some of the plants are not long lived, and these too have been replaced with cuttings of the original or, if necessary, with a new plant of the same type. The families took cuttings, too, over the years, and the plants growing round the war memorial in the village can be seen in many of the gardens round about. Girls who were the sisters or the nieces or cousins of the young men had pieces of the shrub commemorating their relative in their bouquets when they married. There are girls called Rose and Rosemary and Laurel in the area, in memory of men who died seventy years ago.

  I owe my love of plants and gardens to Nan, but maybe also she is the original inspiration for my thoughts on the past and its links to the present, which is why I come to be writing this letter and, even more important, looking forward to the next letter from you.

  * * *

  Now, about your book. I am struck by the idea of the stick that represents a woman in a tangential way, without being whittled into a figure with a head, breasts, arms, and legs. I like the subtlety of it; the carving is there as a suggestion, but the man or woman holding it or running a finger over it may invest it with his or her own meaning, which is probably inexpressible. It is a female, but female in any way the person who sees or touches it understands what femininity is. So it would be if I were to have a conversation with a neighbor about what it meant to be British. I know what it feels like, to me, but it is too complex to articulate and, if I could put it into words, my feeling would be different from (but not completely distinct from) my neighbor’s. We could both hold the stick symbolizing Britishness and think, as we touched it, Ah, yes, that’s right, that’s how it is, while the unarticulated ideas in our heads are both overlapping and diverging. So it must be for you, knowing what it is to be Danish. The later figures, with breasts and hips and stomachs, look like cruder symbols, a formalization of woman as a means of reproduction, but in their very crudeness they have the scope to be more than they represent. They are exaggerated but incomplete; the gaps are there for whoever looks or touches to fill. I envy you the chance to look at and touch and draw meaning from these things. I can imagine these figures, being held, triggering thoughts going backward, forward, sideways.

  Now here I am chuntering on about fertility goddesses as if I know something about the subject, when I know nothing. I know only what Professor Glob has written about and shown me in the pictures in his book. But I cannot help being excited at all you will find out, all you will record and catalog; all the connections you will make between one figure and another, between the figure and the tribes who produced it. It is nearly Christmas (bear with me, this is relevant) and I am plucking and dressing turkeys and geese for the local butchers’ shops and farm gate sales, so at this time of year it is my hands that are busy. When I am not putting food on the table, I am working in the poultry shed, often until late at night, as the plucking and drawing come at the end of the process and the birds killed during the day have to be plucked while still warm. As I do this I think of you, with a desk lamp illuminating the pad on which you are taking notes, and the screen lit up with words and images in front of you; I see your fingers on the keyboard or picking up a pen; I imagine you pulling a book into the circle of light to check one fact or another, add a detail or two to what you have found out so far. And I look at my hands, red with cold and turkey viscera, and at the dead birds (or food for the table, depending on whether I choose to see what is before me as it was an hour ago or what it will become an hour from now) illuminated by the arc lights set up in the shed.

  Now I expect you are expecting me to begin wailing about how life could have led me to this feather-and-down-filled shed when it delivered you up to a quiet, warm study? But, actually, there is a more complex relationship between my feelings and the two situations. I have never minded doing the turkeys and the geese. Each of them presents as a self-contained task and each of them, finished, represents the successful completion of a task. Preparing the Christmas birds is a family event. Other people play Monopoly or charades; we kill, pluck, and draw the guts out of poultry. We have relays of soup and sandwiches, coffee and cake. We have the radio tuned to a station playing Christmas songs and carols. We have a collective sense of achievement that is better than a triumph achieved alone: not only did I do this, and do it well, but I was successful in filling my place on the line, my part in the overall production. Despite this, of course, I cannot help but imagine how much I would enjoy the task of finding out facts and creating a story around those facts, alone, in silence. Maybe one day I will sit at a desk, sifting the information in front of me. Planning and creating rather than plucking and drawing. Like the mountains and the missed raspberries, I will look forward to when it might be so. Meanwhile, I will enjoy the thought that it is so for you, and through you I can imagine this other life that you are leading on my behalf.

  Christmas is, as I said,
a busy time. I will go to Inverness after it is all over, the food eaten and the drink drunk and the decorations, which look so cheerful and festive when they are first put up, have all become so much debris to be cleared away. Maybe baby Birgitt will have been born by the time I leave. Then we will have two joyous letters. Mine about a journey. Yours about an arrival.

  Much love,

  Tina

  Copenhagen

  December 14

  My dear friend,

  If my English is not so good in this letter, I hope you will forgive me. I am so tired, but I need to write to you before I can sleep. It is become that I cannot understand myself properly unless I am talking to you.

  The night before last I was eating my evening meal when the phone rang, just as I had feared it would. It was a friend of Karin’s; his name is Jesper and he is married to Sofia. I think I have not spoken of them before. Karin had told me Sofia would be with her when the baby was born, so when he said, on the phone, “It is Jesper,” I thought the baby had come. It is two weeks before the baby should come. That is not so serious, I thought. But Jesper said the baby was not come and it was serious. Karin was in the hospital, and the doctors were doing everything they could, but Jesper did not know what that was. He did not know how serious it was. Sofia was with Karin, Jesper said.

  I left the house at once, and got into my car and drove to Copenhagen. It takes three and a half hours to drive from Silkeborg to Copenhagen. It was dark, of course, and there was nothing beyond the windshield but, every so often, lights by the roadside, lights coming toward me. Mostly, it was just dark. I drove in silence the whole way, stopping only once to buy coffee and fuel. I could not listen to the radio because what point was there to anything that might be playing at that time, if Karin was going to be taken from me? I could hardly bear to look at the other people in the place where I stopped because what right had they to be alive if I was going to lose my daughter? The only thought that kept me from despair during those hours was that if she left me, you would come. I would not have to bear the grief alone.