When I reached the hospital it seemed impossible to park and impossible to find the part of the building where Karin was and then to find the right room in that part of the hospital. At last, I found Jesper. He was folded into a chair in a waiting area. He is a very tall young man, very thin. He started to stand up when he saw me, and he did not speak to me until he was standing and it took him so long to straighten himself out, but at last he was able to tell me that they—Karin, Sofia—were in the operating theater and he was waiting for someone—Sofia, a nurse, a doctor—to come out and tell him what was happening.
We waited together. Jesper is not a man who chatters, and neither am I, so we waited, mostly, in silence. We might even have looked calm, to anyone passing by. I had my briefcase with me. I had left it in my car when I returned home from work and it was still in my car when I arrived at the hospital, so I picked it up and took it in with me. I do not know why. As we waited, I took out the feather from the wing of a female pheasant and held it in one hand, touched it with the other. It is nothing like the fertility goddess figures I am writing about, except that it is strong. It is also soft, as women are and the figures are not. I took out your letter and read it again, starting with your thoughts on symbols and carrying on through the poultry shed. My mind was disturbed by the image of the plucked bodies of birds, and at this moment, when the horror of what might be happening behind the doors in the corridor became more than I could physically bear, Sofia came through one of the doors and walked toward us.
She is a very pretty girl with curly hair and she was wearing earrings in the shape of little sea creatures. (I do not have my dictionary here so I cannot name them. They are søhest in Danish.) I could not look at her face as she came toward us, because if it was bad news I would know at once but if I waited until she was close enough to tell us, it could be she would never reach us and I need never know. So I kept looking at the silver creature hanging from her left ear and, at last, she did reach us and she said: “Alt er i orden,” which means everything is all right.
Sofia and Jesper both stepped up to me and put their arms round me and, so, round each other, and all of us cried.
Later, I went in to see Karin and she was white—white, and very weak. But she smiled at me and asked me to go and see the baby, who is in a special place for babies who do not bounce into the world ready to live. If Karin had not asked I would not have gone to look at the baby, with images of dead birds still in my mind. But I went, and a nurse took me to meet my granddaughter for the first time and she was lying asleep, a little parcel of arms and legs and fingers and toes, and of course I remembered how it was to see Erik for the first time, how at once I knew I would stand between him and anything that might hurt him, because how could he not be precious to me?
The nurse told me little Birgitt is in no danger, is only in this place so Karin can rest.
“I thought I might be going to lose them both,” I told her.
“Ah, but you know,” she said, “childbirth is so normal.”
“I know,” I said. “A good friend said this to me, but last night I could not quite believe her words.”
* * *
I went back to Karin’s room and stayed with her for a while, but she was asleep and also, so the nurse said, in no danger, so I came here to her flat and am writing all this to you before I try to sleep. When I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror, I did not recognize the man I am this morning. I have not shaved—I have not brought a razor—and my face looks like someone else’s face. Like my father, who was a sour, disappointed man. In old age he drank too much and cared too little for himself or for the people round him. It was strange, when I feel so full of love and joy, to feel it might be his face looking back at me. If I closed my eyes, I thought, and covered my head with a leather cap, I might look as much like the Tollund Man as my father. But with my eyes shut I would never know if I did.
I am making no sense now and must sleep. Thank you for letting me share this with you.
Happy Christmas.
Your loving friend,
Anders
Bury St. Edmunds
December 18
My dear Anders,
I am writing quickly. A short letter, amid the turmoil of Christmas. I am sorry I filled your mind with images of dead birds. I am filled with joy for you and for Karin.
Whenever babies arrive, to people close to me, I knit. It takes a few evenings to finish knitting things the size that babies wear. I could not knit for your granddaughter because it seemed too ordinary and too intimate. Instead, I am sending you a poem. This is from a book called Newborn, by Kate Clanchy. It is one of the books the volunteer in the Oxfam bookshop saved for me (her name is Laura; having introduced her into our correspondence it felt discourteous not knowing what to call her. She was pleased to be asked. She did not know my name, either, and it seemed absurd, to both of us, when we had exchanged so much in the way of feelings and ideas). The poem I have chosen says what I would like to say to you about the whole business of the coming into the world of a new child, but I do not know how to say it.
WHAT CAN I SAY
Like the Japanese tricks
you could buy for twopence
those tight lacquer seeds
which uncurled in water
then bloomed into red
tissue flowers, algal, alarming;
or those cellophane fish
that twitched on your palm
for “fever” or “lust”; like
those shit-coils of sand
a razor-fish shoots out
when it sink-drills itself
back to wet salt and you think
how can a shelled thing
be so fast and afraid: like
all things unfolding, tumbling
suddenly, catkins, fishing nets,
mainsails, sheets, like
the reel’s hectic spooling
when the salmon is hooked,
like a parachute abruptly
uncrushing, blooming
to skull-shape, jerking you
upright with that familiar crack:
this opening up of a person,
this bringing the new person out.
Of course, this is more intimate than a knitted hat or mittens. But it is intimate in a different way. The knitting says: I think I know what you like enough to know you will want your baby to wear this. The poem says: I think I know you well enough to know you understand how I feel.
Early in the New Year I am going to Inverness. I will write from there. If Karin wants something knitted, you must tell me.
All my love,
Tina
Copenhagen
December 20
Dear Tina,
I will write quickly, too. To say thank you for the poem. Karin also says thank you. I have read it carefully and slowly and cannot be sure yet that I understand it. Karin has understood it better than I have done and has asked a friend to find her the book. She also says if you would like to knit something for the baby that is not pale pink, she would be honored to receive it.
We are all here in Karin’s flat—Karin, Birgitt, Erik, and myself. It is very warm in the flat and it seems very full with objects for the baby. A cradle, boxes of diapers, a baby bath, shawls and rattles and so on. Most of these are much bigger than the baby is. She is still very small and takes up little space, but all of these objects and the three of us fill all the space there is.
I look at Birgitt and cannot believe that something so fragile can survive, but she is doing more than survive; she is growing and developing just as she should. (Karin has just looked over my shoulder to see what I am writing and tells me that this is exactly what the poem says. I will read it again.)
We, Erik and I, will leave tomorrow, and I think that will be good. It will make room for Karin and Birgitt to work out a way of living together. I will write again from Silkeborg.
Love,
Anders
Inverness
January 8
My dear Anders,
Here we are, sailed safely into another year. Our families intact and nothing to be waiting for, with dread or hope. Let us hope that the year will bring no sorrow. Is that a suitable New Year’s wish, do you think? Or am I wishing for nothing, only survival without pain, and is that worth wishing for? I didn’t intend to start this letter this way. I don’t know where these thoughts come from except that when I sit down to write to you it seems as if all the strings holding my conscious mind together come loose and let my subconscious leak out. I will recover myself and be blithe.
Here I am, in Inverness. I came by train. That was a joy in itself. The sequence of trains and stations was:
1. Bury St. Edmunds to Peterborough
2. Peterborough to York
3. York to Inverness
I am putting in the detail because I believe you would like it, and because you like it, I like it, too. The first train was full; I had booked a seat, but there was a young man already in it, fast asleep, and I did not like to wake him, so I was prepared to stand until the next station, but then a girl stood up and offered me her seat. I rarely go anywhere by public transport, so I was shocked to find I have slid over some line that marks out those young enough to stand from those who are owed the respect of the young and must be made to sit. I nearly refused but realized in time that would (a) make me look like an old curmudgeon and (b) rob her of the satisfaction of doing the right thing. So I accepted, with a smile. She smiled back and she had the sort of smile that is a pleasure to see.
I did a lot of fidgeting, on this first part of the journey, which was about an hour, trying to take my coat off because I was too hot, and to unscrew the lid of my thermos flask, which might have become a little rusty from lack of use. I was irritating the man with a laptop sitting next to me and, what with this and not being comfortable, I wished I had remained standing. But then I would have missed the girl’s lovely smile.
At Peterborough I had to clutch all my belongings and scamper to another platform to catch the train to York. This time I sat in my booked seat. I sorted myself out before I sat down and began to enjoy myself. I wanted the train to go a little slower, though, so I could have more time to speculate about the people living in the houses we went past, the people waiting on the platforms, walking their dogs, picking sprouts in their allotments. As well as watching all this happening through the window, I was listening to the voices in the carriage with me. As the train came closer to York, more and more of these had Yorkshire accents, and I love to hear people speaking in accents I do not often come across; the same words but set to a new tune that sounds more lyrical, more interesting, more cheerful than the tune I usually hear. Altogether I enjoyed myself so much I forgot to eat my lunch.
At York, which is a beautiful station, I had to scamper again to catch the train to Inverness. This time my seat was at a table, two people facing me, one beside me. I settled in and ate my sandwiches; then, because there was nothing but countryside outside the window—and I am too used to countryside for it to be exciting—I started knitting for baby Birgitt. It takes over six hours to travel from York to Inverness, not quite enough time to finish what I started, but I will send it in my next letter. It is a little bear, which I have knitted in moss stitch, wearing a blue sweater in stocking stitch. This will mean nothing to you, but moss stitch is nubby, stocking stitch smooth, so two different textures for the baby to feel. And more interesting to knit than using just the one stitch.
There was a man sitting next to me, a woman opposite me, and a man beside her. They all watched me knitting. I noticed this because, when I was just an ordinary no-longer-young, undistinguished sort of woman eating her beef sandwiches and an apple, I could tell I was close to invisible. They had other things to look at and think about. If I had left the train at the next stop they would not have been able to recall a single feature of my appearance by the time the train pulled out of the station. But as I began to cast on, they became alert to my existence. I knitted a few rows and, looking up for a moment, caught the eye of the woman opposite.
“What are you knitting?” she asked.
“A teddy bear for a friend’s first grandchild,” I said.
“My grandmother knitted me a beautiful dress, in a Fair Isle pattern,” she said. “I was only about five, but I can remember it so well. When I had my children, I tried to learn, but I never got the hang of it.”
“I can knit,” said the man sitting next to me. “Not Fair Isle or anything complicated, but I can knit.”
So we talked about knitting. The man opposite said no one in his family had ever knitted, and he sounded quite despondent as he said this, in contrast to the man beside me, who was positively proud of having finished two scarves, while his sisters had fallen at the hurdle of making a square. The woman had tripped over the same milestone and had given up when every square turned out, on completion, to be a rhomboid instead. The man who knitted admitted he had started a pair of gloves, never finished. He was sure his mother would have kept them; next time he saw her, he would ask, and maybe take them up again and, this time, finish them. The woman had a friend who knitted and thought she might make a last effort to learn from her. The man who had never knitted remembered a friend of his wife who had knitted a whole sweater using a technique called entrelac, which he understood was tricky to do. They all looked at me. Very tricky, I said.
They began to be interested in the detail of what I was doing. I explained the stitches and the approach to the construction (the bear will be sewn together rather than knitted in the round), the type of wool, the pattern. The pattern was particularly enthralling because they could not understand how I was able to translate the random numbers and letters on the page into a set of instructions. Like reading music, I said. Which I can’t do, but if I could, and I could play an instrument, which I also can’t do, I would see at once what a page of notes was instructing me to produce in the way of a tune.
Then the woman began to talk about her grandmother who had made the never-to-be-forgotten Fair Isle dress, and how she missed her. The man who never knitted had, as it happened, just lost his grandmother; she had been a woman it was hard to like, but he found he missed her, too, unexpectedly, if only because he had become so used to wondering what she would object to in his clothes, friends, occupation, topics of conversation, when next they met. Now he found he was becoming more critical of all these things himself, as if he didn’t have to bother while she did the job for him. The man who knitted had a grandmother who used to fly the Spitfires from the factory to the airfields in the Second World War.
When the topic of grandmothers was exhausted, the woman asked me about the baby whose toy this was going to be. I had never seen her, I said. She lived in Denmark. I had never visited Denmark. Only the man who didn’t knit had been to Denmark, and he had spent a year there. His knowledge of Denmark compensated for his lack of knowledge of knitting; at least I hope he thought it did.
The others, who had not been to Denmark, either, became convinced that they should go. By the time we reached Edinburgh, where they all left the train, they were certain they would be going, and soon. To hear them talk so easily of making the journey brought back the feelings of frustration that made me write to Professor Glob in the first place. Never to have been to Silkeborg. Despite having intended to since I was more than two decades younger than the woman sitting opposite me. I realized that writing to you has become a way of visiting the Tollund Man without visiting him. Maybe I am frightened to do it. Have always been frightened and am more frightened now.
After Edinburgh it was dark, and the train stopped again and again at places that sprang up, brightly lit, out of the darkness and then vanished again behind us. I knitted on until I became weary and then sat, doing nothing and thinking nothing, until the train arrived in Inverness and there was my lovely Mary, a slender pillar of calm in the hubbub.
I have had to wait until now, when i
t is daylight, to see the mountains. You are right, it is important to see mountains from time to time. They are so much more than it is possible to remember. Journeys to loved ones, too. You were right about that. I am at least starting the year by doing something I have never done before. Perhaps that should be my New Year’s wish. That I should carry on doing things I have never done before.
I will write again soon, and send the bear.
All my love,
Tina
Silkeborg
January 9
Dear Tina,
I begin to feel I can hear your voice, when I read your writing. I almost believe I can see your face. And I can tell, just as I would do with someone who was close to me and was sitting in front of me, what it is that you are thinking and feeling, whether you say it or not. I understand your last letter. I do not know, because you are not telling me, if there is anything I can do or say to help you make decisions. If there is, you must make it plain to me. I know what I want for this new year, and it is more than the avoidance of disaster.
To my news, then, which is all joyful.
Erik collected Karin and the baby and drove them to my house for Christmas. It was wonderful. We none of us spoke much, even Erik, who is more likely to chatter. We sat by the fire and took turns holding the baby. Erik and Karin cooked, and the food was rich and full of flavor. In the afternoon, we took the baby, well wrapped up, and walked round the lake where we had floated Birgitt’s ornaments away. This time—only two nights, one day—was like one long, thick, sweet, hot drink, comforting and satisfying.
Meet Me at the Museum Page 14