“There’s no way one could ever know,” said Vuldum. He smiled hideously.
Father Garhammer did not see the smile, nor would he have understood it if he had.
“Yes, there is,” he said. “The tree’s time had run out. You might as well call it a rash act when God on Judgment Day separates the goats from the sheep.”
“Yes, but the story of the fig tree makes it seem as if Jesus was in a bad humor,” Vuldum persisted.
“But it was not a fit of temper,” replied Garhammer. “It was a parable. Jesus spoke in parables usually. But here he enacted a parable—er machte ein Gleichnis.”
Vuldum smiled as if satisfied.
“There’s a book by H. C. Stefani that made me think of that story,” he said apologetically.
“Oh—that book,” replied the priest, raising his hand. “It’s a really—a really bad book. You ought not to have written so favorably about it, Herr Jastrau,” he added.
“I didn’t write the review, damn it,” Jastrau said vehemently. But then he suddenly turned red in the face and said, “I’m sorry, Father. I beg your pardon.”
“Oh well, a colloquialism, isn’t it?” Garhammer replied in a friendly manner. “But now you’ll have to excuse me, for I have to leave.”
He arose and extended each of them a hand.
“And thanks. Many thanks for the book, and thanks also for the visit. Come again soon.”
Jastrau and Vuldum were silent as they again strolled along Vesterbrogade. Jastrau looked down at the sidewalk and sensed that Vuldum was observing him with a secret feeling of triumph.
At the Freedom Statue he wanted to turn off and go directly home to his empty apartment. He felt no desire to go up to the paper, no desire for anything.
“Are you going home?” Vuldum asked. Jastrau nodded.
“Lucky fellow. You have a home, whereas I have to go back to a boardinghouse,” Vuldum went on in a tone of utter dejection. Suddenly Jastrau saw him looking appraisingly at the same old one-krone piece in his hand.
“If only I dared ask you to loan me two kroner, I’d have enough for an after-theater snack and a beer.”
With an ironically melancholy expression, he held the krone so that the sunlight fell on it and it glistened in a woebegone manner.
“I could very likely arrange to pay the tip later.”
“Unfortunately, I haven’t anything smaller than a fiver.”
“Well, then, allow me to be content with that.”
As soon as Vuldum had gotten the money, he disappeared in the direction of the Town Hall Square. He walked erectly with a springy step, taller by a stiff hat than the crowd.
Jastrau’s eyes followed the St. Peter’s dome for a long time.
2
JASTRAU had kept himself shut up in the empty apartment the whole day. He had not answered the telephone, no matter how long it had rung. Nothing had been able to intrude upon him and disturb him.
But how strange it was. As long as he had occupied himself with his ephemeral critical writing, he had not been aware of the empty rooms. On the other hand, as soon as he had put it aside and pulled out a pile of written sheets, a novel that he had been working on for more than a year and had not picked up for the last six weeks, he had immediately been troubled by the emptiness of his surroundings. The fact that his wife was off with her brother on a car trip in North Zealand, that his son was being taken care of at her parents’ house, gave him no feeling of tranquility; it only made him listless. And instead of working he had lighted his pipe and begun to wander back and forth through the vacant rooms, enlivening them only with his own presence, while he smoked and hummed to himself. A self-indulgent conglomeration of dreams and thoughts, pugnacious, apprehensive, triumphant, reconciliatory.
It had already begun to get dark when he finally sat down at his desk. The dreary walls surrounding the courtyard outside the windows of his workroom were becoming lost in shadow. He doubtless should have gotten up and turned on the lights. But he put if off for some minutes longer—long minutes during which the darkness grew thicker.
He began half-heartedly to leaf through the written sheets. Yellowed sheets. In the obscurity of the room they took on a greenish tinge. The ink had an old, murky look to it. And he remained sitting, scrupulously examining the irregularities in the individual letters of the words he had written months before.
A piece of paper slipped out of the pile—a poem written by an unfamiliar hand. It was the poem Stefan Steffensen had forgotten to take with him. Only yesterday he had seen him with a young girl over at the Paraply. And he read:
DIMINUENDO
Tired of your embraces, feeling spent and happy,
I live but for a kiss against your mouth,
Feel your lips grow slack and your breath
Subside as you drift away into sleep.
Tired of your kiss, I caress your soft curves,
Breasts, hips, firmly with my hand,
Shape out of darkness a vase as fragile
As your body, as light as your soul.
Tired of a caress that reveals how clearly
Love’s calm aftermath has softened your form,
I see your face lost among the pillows,
Borne by hair tossed like seaweed after a storm.
Tired of seeing and feeling and loving you,
I forsake your bed and your tranquil slumber,
Roam through the room and finger its objects,
Feel you here in your peaceful abode.
Anna Marie, you live in these objects,
Anna Marie, so warm and so still,
Anna Marie, now I seek coolness
Anna Marie, near your windowsill.
In the semidarkness the words swam on the greenish page so that he felt his eyes grow heavy. He rubbed them and wearily shoved the poem aside. He did not care to think about Stefan Steffensen any longer.
How blue the sky was above the roofs and the shadowy chimneys. What a deep expressive color. But no, he could not rid his mind of the poem. He wondered how it would sound if Steffensen read it aloud. How would his coarse, derisive voice adapt itself to the words? To be sure, there were poets who never read their own stanzas aloud, but merely handed over a piece of paper with the words written on it—an odd, silent type of person with a wild rebellious look and a gloomy countenance. Jastrau knew the type well. But was Steffensen one of those?
It was probably impossible, this evening, to shut out the mental image of him—this tall, rawboned fellow whose jacket was always pulled aside so that his hands might remain planted in his pants pockets. And suddenly Jastrau perceived three words, as clearly as if they had been held up before him in print. Where? In the air? In his memory? In any event, he could read them: transmitter of infection. He could make out every letter. They radiated horror and brutality. And Jastrau wondered if this was why the image of Steffensen remained so ineradicably before him, as clearly delineated as a police record photograph of a criminal, in profile and full face, revealing even what went on behind the man’s skull.
Then the front doorbell rang.
Jastrau gave a start. The bell sounded frightful there in the twilight. His heart began to pound.
He got up slowly and went out into the hallway, where it was completely dark. He could detect only a dim light through the frosted panes and a shadowy figure outside.
He opened the door, and as he did so he gasped for breath. It was a tall stooped man with his hands in his pants pockets.
“This is really strange,” Jastrau exclaimed in the hoarse tone of voice that comes so easily to one standing in the darkness. “Is it you, Steffensen?”
“Yes. After all, your wife isn’t at home, so I thought I might venture up to see you,” Steffensen said in a peculiar whisper.
“Well then, come in.”
Jastrau forgot that he had once thrown him out of the house. But Steffensen’s long furtive stride as he stepped inside brought back fleeting memories.
“Did you t
hink I’d throw you out?”
“One can never tell,” Steffensen replied gently. He behaved almost like a tramp who had wandered into a better-class apartment. There was something subdued and mysterious about him.
“Do I dare sit down?” he asked, cautiously taking a position near one of the rococo chairs.
“Yes, yes,” Jastrau said, laughing.
“Uh,” Steffensen grunted, and sat down. “You wouldn’t have a cigarette, would you?”
“I have something better—a cigar.”
“That probably won’t set so well on an empty stomach,” Steffensen mumbled. A trace of a smile crossed his grayish face.
“Haven’t you eaten today?”
“No. I haven’t eaten for a long time.”
“But I saw you yesterday at the Paraply.”
“Yes, that was a real debauch,” Steffensen said with a grin. “I can still taste the coffee and that piece of Danish pastry, and I’m nourishing myself now by belching.”
Jastrau had seated himself on the sofa, where he leaned forward and watched him. It was as if Steffensen’s face were divided into two parts—a dark half on the room side and a light half turned toward the vanishing daylight let in by the windows.
“Oh, you can stand a cigar,” Jastrau said callously, shoving the cigar box and a match toward him.
“All right, then,” Steffensen said, letting out a guffaw. There was something imbecilic about his laughter, and when he had lighted the cigar the red glow from its tip revealed a clownish face still agitated by meaningless merriment.
An instant later the face was enveloped in a cloud of white smoke.
Jastrau remained sitting and staring at him in the semidarkness. How shabby Steffensen looked. His clothes were rumpled, as if he never took them off when he slept. They had crept up on him so that as he sat stoop-shouldered his chest seemed in danger of collapsing under the strain.
“Oh, how this cigar claws at my insides!” Steffensen groaned, doubling up and continuing to laugh like a dolt. “I went hungry this way during the winter, and then I had this Anna Marie on my hands besides.”
“Anna Marie—who’s she?”
“Oh, just a sad sack of a servant girl we had at home,” replied Steffensen, making a face. “She and I live together—in a manner of speaking.” He laughed again. “But it’s platonic—no love-making and nothing to eat. She’s got a disease, I might add, so she’s not for me.”
Jastrau gave a start. Suddenly he got up and went over to Steffensen. “You look like a sad sack yourself,” he said, keeping his voice pitched in a mild conversational tone.
“Oh, shut up,” said Steffensen, but less roughly than might have been expected. He laughed again, but this time the laughter sounded strained. “Yes, I’m in bad shape. And I’m hungry. And tomorrow we’re being thrown out on the street—dead broke. Uh—what a fix I’m in! Write home and get money and motherly advice—I did that all winter in order to get by. But now it doesn’t work any more. Now it’s all up with that—not a krone from home. Nothing but a letter from my father—full of moralizing. I should pull myself together and blah, blah, blah. I couldn’t take it, by God—not from him.” He shook his head. “But why are you standing there staring at me?”
“I was just thinking that there is some smørrebrød out in the kitchen,” Jastrau said, his eyes sparkling.
“What’s that? Oh, now—” Steffensen raised his arms beseechingly.
“I was over at the smørrebrød factory on Vesterbrogade this afternoon,” Jastrau went on. “You know, the one near the Freedom Statue—”
“Yes, yes, yes. Look, couldn’t I—?”
“But it all tastes alike. It makes no difference if the bread has ham or smoked eel on it. So I didn’t bother to eat it.”
“Do you want to torture me?” Steffensen cried out, sitting up straight.
Jastrau did not answer, but merely remained standing and staring down at him with the same flashing expression in his eyes.
“Yes, perhaps that’s what I want to do,” he suddenly burst out as he came back to his senses. “Now I’ll go out and get the smørrebrød.”
Steffensen looked at him uncomprehendingly as he left the room.
Soon afterward, Jastrau returned with several pieces of smørrebrød on a plate, which he placed on the table with a bottle of beer.
“I don’t care to turn on the lights,” he remarked.
Steffensen said nothing. Swiftly he drew up his chair, carelessly laid the lighted cigar on the edge of the table, and began to eat. Jastrau could hear him munching and could see his dark arms and only slightly lighter hands moving. He could barely distinguish the face—a faint oval patch with eyes like bits of tinsel. For now it was completely dark.
The wall between the two windows stood out like a broad black pillar against the flickering expanse of sky that lay revealed beyond the windowpanes. At the neighbor’s across the way a light was burning cozily behind a rolled-down blind. But above the rooftops the sky glowed fitfully with what appeared to be a form of self-illumination like the flashing of the northern lights, waning and waxing, waning and waxing, as the electric advertising signs above Vesterbro alternately went off and on.
“You must pardon me for what I did,” Jastrau said in a gentle voice that suited the obscurity in which they sat. He was sitting with his elbows on the table and followed Steffensen’s motions with his eyes.
“For what?” asked Steffensen, his mouth full of food. There was a note of expectancy, of anticipation, in the way he asked the question.
“Because I—tormented you.”
“Oh, is that all?” Steffensen laughed and went on chewing. “I thought you were begging my pardon for the time you let my poem be printed with the name Stefani under it. You were a real shit that time.”
“That wasn’t my fault,” Jastrau said softly.
“Not your fault!” Steffensen made a face and drank from the bottle. “It was a dirty trick, and you can be sure I’ll get even with you for it.”
“I can tell by the way you sound that you’re beginning to get filled up,” Jastrau replied with sudden acerbity. Steffensen chuckled.
“And since you have so much to apologize for, you might loan me some money,” he said, grinning.
“So that’s it. You apparently don’t remember that the last time you were here you got tossed out.”
They sat across from each other in the darkness and could not see each other’s expressions.
“Yes, I remember. But tonight your wife isn’t home.”
“How do you know that?”
“I heard it over at the Paraply. Ha! I dragged Anna Marie along with me so I could read the Paraply’s menu to her aloud. That way she could imagine herself having a feast, the bitch. And then I heard your voice behind the potted hedge. You were sitting there with that redhaired fellow. Incidentally, he’s tapped my old man for two hundred quid. Ha!”
“What’s that?”
“Yes, that’s what I said. It was nicely done. But, as I was saying, I heard you say your wife wasn’t home. Do you think I’d have come otherwise? No, not by a damn sight.”
“How much do you want?”
“Forty kroner.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Yes.”
Jastrau fumbled for the cigar box, found a cigar and lighted it.
“Are you disposed to let me have it?” Steffensen asked, watching him closely.
“No,” came the drawling answer.
“Then hand me another cigar, because now I’m in shape to smoke it.”
Jastrau held a cigar out through the darkness until it touched Steffensen’s hand. Then a match flared up, and Jastrau saw that the smørrebrød plate was empty.
“Well,” said Steffensen—only his mouth and nose were visible in the red glow from the end of the cigar—“then we’ll be tossed out in the morning. All right, but it’s a pity as far as Anna Marie is concerned.”
Jastrau said nothing, but lay back on the so
fa. Transmitter of infection! He saw the words before him—the printed letters. Steffensen kept sucking audibly on the cigar.
“As a matter of fact, you can have the forty kroner,” Jastrau said suddenly, blowing out a cloud of tobacco smoke. It billowed upward in the glow from his cigar.
The offer sounded positively insulting.
“Thanks. Let’s have it then, and I’ll get out of here,” Steffensen said scornfully. But Jastrau turned indolently so that he lay on his side.
“No. You might as well stay. As it is, you’ve ruined the evening for me.”
“Do you think I want to sit here in the dark and talk about the soul and stuff like that?” Steffensen protested.
“You’ll get forty kroner for it.”
“Get them! Ha ha. No, I’m borrowing them.”
“It amounts to the same thing.”
“All right. What sort of soulfulness shall we discuss?” Steffensen leaned back in his chair in a demonstration of patience.
Jastrau remained lying on the sofa without moving. But although he did not shift his position, he was now doubled up with excitement and every muscle was tense as he stared at the dark angular figure that exuded animosity.
“You forgot a poem the last time you were here,” he said gently as if he wanted to steal up on Steffensen and fling something soulful in his face like a wet rag.
“Do you want that for your paper, too?” Steffensen said spitefully.
Jastrau laughed. “No thanks. Thanks just the same. But do you write many of that kind? I suppose you do,” he added sharply.
“Are you perhaps thinking of helping me get out a collection of poems?”
“Well, that might be.”
“Ha! That’s nice of you.” Steffensen grinned. “Do you think I want to be a poet and make my living by writing made-to-order verses for special occasions and that sort of trash like the rest of you? What? Do you think I’m looking for a place in the history of literature?”
“One can never tell,” Jastrau replied.
“No sir! I don’t want any part of the intellectual life. It isn’t for me. I just don’t go for it. Just look at my father.”
Havoc Page 19