Reserved. A woman who shut her eyes. A woman who during the light nights let her hair slip down so that it covered her face. It was always hidden during the moments when they were nearest to each other. Or had he never really possessed her?
He got up and felt compelled to follow her, to lay his hand on her shoulder, to caress her cheek, to kiss her.
“You seem so restless, Ole.”
“It’s my hangover,” he said with a wry smile.
“Then I wish you always had a hangover. If this is what they do to you, I could love you for having them.” There was an excruciatingly erotic expression about her lips.
“My, but you’re a lovely girl,” he said.
“It isn’t very often you notice it,” she replied.
“My head certainly feels blown up, and look at my eyes. Aren’t they hideous?”
“I don’t mind, because now you’re fit to be with.” They heard Oluf coming into the hallway.
“Where’s the man who was here?” he asked, standing in the doorway with the front of his brown horse-trader’s coat bulging.
“Gone. Ps-st, and he’s gone!”
“Ho ho, Mother. The man’s gone ps-st. Ho ho.”
Jastrau lifted him into his arms and danced around the room with him. Idyllic—simply idyllic! But a hangover idyll, he thought spitefully. The idyll would not last unless something happened. A hangover idyll! A trace of self-contempt clouded Jastrau’s face. But then he drew the boy close to him and buried his face in his coat, hiding himself for a moment.
“Now look, Johanne, I have a hangover today,” he said gaily as he put the boy down.
“Yes, I know that,” she said, wrinkling her brow as if she found him delightfully impossible.
“And for that reason I can’t do anything. I feel like going places, celebrating. You’re going out for a drive with me, and Oluf’s going with us.”
“Yes, but we can’t afford it. The taxes and the light bill—”
“Don’t bother me with such trifles. I’m going to phone for a taxi.”
“But first I have to wash the dishes.”
“Dishes, dishes! Damned if I know why, but that’s the way it always is!” he exclaimed in a fit of irritation. “Dishwashing, always dishwashing—I do believe that’s what takes the joy out of life for you women.”
“It’s taken you a long time to make the discovery,” said Johanne with a tragicomic expression.
“Well, I’m going to call a taxi. It isn’t every day that I have such a delightful hangover as this. Look, Johanne—it’s springtime, damn it!” And he stamped his foot in a burst of enthusiasm. “You’d like to go for a taxi ride, wouldn’t you, Oluf?”
“Yes, daddy. Taxi ride! Taxi ride!” Suddenly he became infected by his father’s zest and, singing exuberantly, he began to run around, cutting figures of eight between his parents. “Taxi ride! Taxi ride!”
“I think you’ve both gone crazy!” exclaimed Johanne. But she did not have a chance to say any more before Jastrau had gone to the phone and ordered a cab. “Get here as quickly as you can,” he said.
It was all done in such a rush. And when they at last sat in the taxi, it was with the feeling that they had hardly had time to put their overcoats on.
“Oh, it’s terrible the way I let all those dishes stand,” Johanne said, laughing.
Little Oluf wriggled in between them until he found a position in which he could sit like a teddy bear with his feet stuck straight out in front of him and his arms slanting down toward his knees. “There,” he said with a sigh of satisfaction.
They swung across Vesterbro Passage with its Freedom Statue and on through Copenhagen’s “Wild West” quarter with its bazaars and wooden shacks. They sped across bridges and followed the railway cut, a course as devious as a detour, while the lower halves of business blocks, apartment houses, and the awkward contours of the Palace Theatre flashed by.
Jastrau disparaged everything he saw. He was in an exalted mood, and for the moment Copenhagen seemed to him a city that was hopelessly snarled.
“Is it any wonder that people get drunk in a town like this?” he exclaimed with a sweeping gesture. “Or perhaps the city is this way because we’re all stewed half the time. The history of Denmark is one big binge. Our fatherland has a red nose.”
But his mood became more serene as they drove through Farimagsgade. In Ørsted Park, the shimmering young leaves of the trees glittered like gold. The branches extended out over the tall iron fence, and the people on the sidewalk moved in flickering light and shadow.
“Yes, spring is here—that’s sure,” Jastrau went on. He could not stop talking. “It’s taken us by surprise again. Haven’t you noticed that the trees always burst into leaf behind your back, and then you turn around and everything is suddenly green?”
Johanne nodded, and he looked at her in amazement. This was a lady who sat beside him in a blue suit and golden hair. She looked so mature. The unaccustomed comfort of the cab—even though it was one of the stripped-down vehicles that had no cruising license—gave her a certain air of distinction. She had to feel happy once in a while. He smiled sardonically.
She was pretty and a bit commonplace, he thought.
“How wonderful you look today!” he exclaimed.
She turned toward him with a smile of satisfaction.
“I’m in a good mood today, too,” she said, reaching for his hand with a perfectly natural sincerity, so that Oluf found himself sitting behind a chain of hands. Swing, swing—swing and sing and all fall down—the prettiest roses all fall down, as the janitor’s daughter would say. She knew so many things. Oluf leaned forward against the swing.
“You weren’t too rough at all when you showed him the door,” Johanne said gently. “He was your evil spirit, Ole. Why, it was impossible to recognize you.” She squeezed his hand.
It was spring.
They drove along Frederiksborggade and over the Queen Louise Bridge. The broad open stretches of water shone brightly in the sunlight.
“Look, Johanne. See how the trees have leafed out on one side of the lakes and not on the other. Isn’t it nice? How I like to take the trees by surprise every year.”
And they looked out over the lakes with their neat stone embankments, at the trees along the shore, and at the streets and buildings behind them. How congenial—this effect of tall trees against five-story houses. There would be a place to live. A real nest. Like being a bird. Oh—humans who aspired to live like birds!
And far across the lakes, a lovely yellow background of color could be seen reflecting the sunlight—a color he had loved in his childhood. It was the walls of the houses on distant Østerbro at the corner of Willemoesgade. It was a color that one might see in a dream. That was the sort of horizon one should be able to look out on.
They had crossed the bridge and gone on into busy Nørrebrogade, then turned off and were proceeding along Fælledvej. They had reached the suburbs. The long Nørre Allé, with its massive trees—asphalt with a crown of light green overhead. When they bent forward and peered over the driver’s shoulder, they saw the long tree-lined thoroughfare stretching out before them like a view through a telescope—light green at the periphery, and far, far away, some buildings and a yellow streetcar.
“Our streetcars are the nicest-looking streetcars in the world. Have you ever thought about that?”
“I’ve never traveled,” she said sadly.
“But they are. Our streetcars, our policemen, our mail carriers, our mailboxes—they’re elegant, distinguished looking. They have the flavor of old Copenhagen. I love them.”
“One simply wouldn’t know you today.”
“Am I boring you?”
“No—no—not at all,” she said quietly.
Once they were past the grade-level railway gate, they left Copenhagen behind.
Then long broad highways flanked by villas and lawns. Suddenly, big fields that left the view unhampered. A solitary farmhouse, one wing of which exten
ded way out to a flagstone sidewalk. A straw-thatched roof and asphalt. Then more villas.
“Oh!” exclaimed Oluf, dreamily staring out of the window.
Out at Femvejen, they turned into Jægersborg Allé with its tall venerable trees. Straight trunks rising with an air of poise. Then more commuters’ villages where the houses seemed to shove the trees out against the curbstones.
Then over a railway bridge, a monstrous mass of concrete arches, and into the Charlottenlund Forest.
“Don’t you think we should get out and stretch our legs?”
Johanne nodded.
Jastrau rapped on the window with a five-øre piece and told the driver to stop the car. He told him to go on down to the beach known as The Flypaper because of the way people swarmed to it on Sundays. They marched off with Oluf between them. He looked up first at one of them, then at the other, and Jastrau felt faint at the sight of his blue eyes—a springtime faintness. Like sparkling rain puddles in which the sky was mirrored. Always so clear and bright in springtime. It was as if he were walking at the edge of them. Down there below him they were sparkling all the while.
Jastrau let his gaze wander from the boy’s round beaming face up to Johanne. His eyes followed the curve of her arm, the soft contour of her shoulder, and the line of her neck, which was pleasingly plump and dazzling white. And from the pink ear lobe, at which the brisk spring air was nipping, his glance traveled on to the mass of golden hair beneath her hat. It was difficult for him to look directly at her.
The tops of the trees had not completely leafed out. Against the reddish-brown and gray background of branches and twigs, the new foliage had the appearance of a strange green mist. But could it not also be visualized as so many blotches? The green was obtrusive. Why must spring always signify freshness and purity? A damp wall, a springtime forest. Jastrau felt he had to call Johanne’s attention to his fleeting thoughts. “It would be amusing to argue the thesis that spring is not so beautiful as we make it out to be,” he said.
“Oh, now you’re about to abandon your good humor again, Ole,” she said apprehensively.
“No, no. But there’s an element of fraud in all this stuff about spring, and I must see to it that it’s exposed.”
He laughed teasingly.
Johanne’s only reply was to nod her head toward the deeper part of the woods. There, on the ground, whole drifts of anemones shone like banks of summer clouds. It was precisely because the foliage had not yet shut out the sunlight that the woods had such a fresh candid look about them—not a dim, submarine luminosity or an occult, cathedral-like ambience, but all the clarity of an open plain. And anemones were open-air flowers; they did not thrive under a roof or in concealment. They were as free and easy, as unpretentious as a kitchen apron.
“Oluf, do you see the flowers there? They’re anemones,” Jastrau announced didactically, as he plucked one of them.
“Yes, but look, Father—there—over there—there’s a yellow anemone!” Oluf shouted, pointing.
“Right you are—a yellow anemone.” Like a teacher, Jastrau pronounced the name of the flower very distinctly.
Oluf suddenly compressed his lips and scowled.
Jastrau only laughed. The transition in the boy’s mood was so sudden that it was comical. Apparently he did not feel that he needed instruction. Jastrau ran over and picked the yellow flower, too.
“There you are. One white and one yellow. You’re not going to get any more, because we can’t plunder the whole woods. And by the way, I’ve never seen a blue anemone,” he added, addressing Johanne.
They walked on. The road through the woods curved as they neared the white stable of Charlottenlund Castle and then led directly down to the shore road. All of a sudden they could see way out of the woods and beyond the little artificial sand beach—The Flypaper—to Middelgrund Fortress and the blue waters of the Sound.
Jastrau wiped his brow. He was sweating. It was all the boozing he had done the day before—that and the excitement he felt. Yes, he was aware of what was going on. He knew he could have wretched hangovers and enjoyable ones. But if they were the enjoyable kind, something lively had to happen every minute.
“Now we’ll have coffee,” he said as they stood outside the restaurant called “Over the Stable.” The glass veranda was empty and the orchestra platform seemed to be sagging out of loneliness.
They had their coffee out of doors. A tablecloth was fastened to the table with metal clamps to prevent it from being blown away by the fresh breeze from the Sound.
“Why aren’t you always this way, Ole?” said Johanne gently, wrinkling her low, arched forehead. “When you’re like this, a person can stand to be with you.”
“If my hangovers were always like this one, it would be a pleasure to drink myself to death. But that set-to this morning—”
“Well, it’s good he’s gone,” she said with a sigh of relief.
“A yellow a-ne-mo-ne, a white a-ne-mo-ne,” they suddenly heard Oluf say with labored preciseness, as he laid the flowers on the tablecloth. Jastrau was on the point of laughing.
“No, you mustn’t, Ole,” Johanne implored. He kept still.
But the curly, childish head was bent over the flowers.
“A-ne-mo-ne,” the boy repeated to himself. Then he sensed he was being observed and directed a caustic glance at his father. “It’s an anemo-nee,” he said sharply. Offended, he picked up the flowers again, one at a time.
The trip back along the shore road was equally pleasant. There was something unshakable about Jastrau’s mood. And Johanne retained her faint smile of serenity. Even though it might disappear momentarily, a vestige of it would remain about her lips. Oluf sat with his fingers clasped around the stems of the two anemones which had begun to close their petals and droop their heads.
Thus they came back to their apartment.
It had been a refreshing trip. Their clothes were permeated with the cool spring air. And once they were inside, it seemed to spread through the rooms. Even the two withered anemones, which now lay on Oluf’s play table, exuded the atmosphere of spring.
Jastrau began to sing. He must certainly have his hangover remedy—a beer or two or three—before dinner. But now he read and found himself in a receptive frame of mind. He was perhaps a more appreciative reader today than he had been at any time in several months.
“It’s a good thing I never write when I’ve been out the night before,” he remarked as Johanne passed through the room. “Today it all seems good—whatever they’ve written. And that certainly would never do.”
It was as if happiness lay shimmering even in the light that pervaded the room. It seemed woven like a golden thread through the fabric of the curtains. And as they ate, the glow from the setting sun flooded the neighboring rooftop with an unusually soft and lovely light.
Jastrau frequently had to look out the window.
And when he looked at Johanne, he noticed the same agreeable light effect. He saw everything now in terms of light. It seemed to him that her face was different, not dull and lusterless like the faces of people one has grown tired of looking at. She was perfectly lovely, was she not? As he walked by her, he noticed the crisp freshness of her dress.
No, his feeling of happiness did not abate. He remained sitting with her in the dining room. She was embroidering, and he knew she was relaxed and at ease. Oluf had gone to bed. Altogether, it made such a cozy domestic scene that he had to smile with a mixed feeling of tenderness and irony. And several times during the course of the evening, he felt compelled to walk by her and bend down to kiss her hair. Like all women, she looked beautiful and humble while being caressed. Yes—she was his.
They sat up late. The lights were turned on. Each sat at one side of the table, and every time he glanced up from his book he encountered her placid glance. Obviously it rested on him all the time, and her eyes were a deeper blue than usual. How fortunate he was to have her! In the intensity of his feeling, he came close to believing that he
too was handsome.
Was it eleven o’clock? No, it was nearer twelve. Suddenly the telephone rang.
“Oh, if only that isn’t the paper calling,” she sighed, laying her needlework, a wreath of blue pansies on a background of yellow, in her lap.
He went and took the call. “Jastrau speaking.”
“Is that you, Jastrau? Well, this is the lobster shift. Do you suppose you could come over here for a moment? There’s something very interesting we’d like to show you.”
It was Vuldum, speaking in a subdued, glum voice. Jastrau’s hand began to tremble out of a feeling of impotence. All this intrigue about that review of Stefani’s book. Now he ought to come right out and demand an accounting, but—
“Oh, that’s it?” he asked uneasily. “Can’t you tell me over the phone what it’s all about?”
“Yes, but you won’t get much out of it that way. It’s a letter that the old man has written to H. C. Stefani.”
He could clearly distinguish the spurious sympathy in Vuldum’s voice—a tone of deliberate exquisite commiseration intended to torment his victim.
“Yes, but can’t you just read it to me?” he asked irritably. “I was just getting ready to go to bed.”
“No, I can’t. You see, it’s nothing but some fragments of the letter that Gundersen’s long limber hands fished out of the old man’s waste-basket, and we need an expert to make anything out of it.”
Jastrau could hear the lobster shift at work in the background.
“Yes, but listen, Vuldum—”
“Perhaps you’re not interested,” came the harsh reply.
“Yes, yes—”
There was a click. Vuldum had hung up.
Jastrau remained standing in the darkened room. Now he could feel how the last few days had worn him out. He felt his jaw quivering. The darkness shimmered. But the tone of Vuldum’s voice stayed with him—penetrated like a thorn. He spoke to Johanne, who was still sitting in the brightly lighted dining room.
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