Havoc

by Havoc (retail) (epub)

  And just then, halfway down the room, greeted and acclaimed from all sides, came the eternal Kjær, looking ten years younger from his nap. He rubbed his hand across his smooth-shaven chin and smiled.

  The customers raised their arms in an ovation. Lundbom nodded in joyful acknowledgment of his arrival while he shook the shiny cocktail shaker between his hands so that the brittle ice could be heard crunching. And everything was conviviality and cheer.

  “Good-bye, then,” said Jastrau. He did not get to ask about Oluf, because it seemed as if his voice had rusted fast from a combination of drunkenness and grief.

  “Good-bye, then.” He got up and nodded to the little waiter. Now the phonograph could be set going again.

  7

  THE FORENOON was brilliant with sunshine after the previous day’s rainy weather, and the buildings on Reventlowsgade exuded a fresh coolness.

  Jastrau halted at the corner of Istedgade and looked pensively up at his fifth-floor windows. The windowpanes dreamily and innocently mirrored the clear sky, but the wall around them still had a clouded, ravaged look after the previous day’s rain. It was a dreary north wall with dissolute old windows that reflected a wholly undependable image of blue sky.

  Jastrau felt chilly as he looked at them.

  He did not want to stand there any longer in his two-day-old evening clothes, the white tie that hung drooping from his collar, and the crumpled shirt front with its inscription hidden behind the top-coat. He would attract attention if he stood there bareheaded and gaping. But those sky-blue window panes. What was it that had gone on behind them? Who had been there and told Johanne about him? Who? And what had he told her? She had sounded so tired, so sad, and at the same time so aloof over the telephone the night before, and it was not like her. It seemed that he had hardly been able to recognize her voice.

  How strange it now seemed to go in through the door again. The yellow walls had suddenly become invested with a significance, a historical significance, and the stairway had taken on a patina of an existence that now was a thing of the past. Even the hole in the windowpane, through which the breeze had blown unimpeded for an entire summer and winter, had become something more than a symbol of neglect. It was now a characteristic feature of the premises, an artful dimple on the face of the house.

  As Jastrau slowly made his way up the stairs, he could not refrain from whistling one of the jazz tunes he had heard over in the Bar des Artistes. Its rhythm had now taken hold of him because he had experienced so much during the hours that it had been droning into his ears, and he knew that it would remain with him all his life and that it would always signify divorce, the end of the life he had known. He had heard it all the previous evening until he had gone and tumbled into his hotel bed, and now he would never forget it.

  When he stood in the hallway outside his door, it suddenly dawned on him that he had no keys. Sometime in the far, far distant past, he had tossed them into the taxicab to Johanne. But he went on whistling calmly. That melody—“I wonder, I wonder, I wonder”—kept running through his head. It had become an obsession with him—a nemesis that kept haunting him. “I wonder, I wonder.” And calmly, as if in rhythm with the melody and with his fate, he bent over, moved the doormat, and found the keys beneath it. Johanne had been that clear-headed and prudent.

  But the sight of the apartment, the rooms, the furnishings that he had lived with for a number of years, took his breath away. There stood the two ill-fated rococo chairs with their yellow upholstery. And there on the table was the black Negro fetish, probably the one that had brought him misfortune. Who could tell what dark, ecstatic African influence had through the years become identified with that piece of wood, and what powers it could exercise? And there was the shiny telephone, more forbidding than all the other things in the room. Through it he had heard his son’s voice for the last time in this life. “Where have you and Mother been all this time?” And then a gurgling sound as if Oluf had drowned and disappeared. Yes, he had disappeared. Oh—these telephones. And last night. Johanne’s voice over the phone, the decisive words, and then she too had disappeared. Metallic echoes of voices, unrealities, and then they, the real persons, were gone. For what did it matter if one met them again, saw them again, talked with them? Now they had vanished and were submerged among all the people one met casually and chatted with. It was worse than death. It was a form of grief that one could not in decency weep about or wear mourning for. That sort of thing would be construed as hysterical weakness. A person was not permitted to indulge in that kind of grief because it was not decent.

  With heavier steps and heavier heart he wandered through the rooms.

  He passed his hand fondly over the tables and chairs, Oluf’s play table near the window, the big, glittering Shrove Monday rod that stood stowed away in the corner—it was exactly as tall as Oluf himself, he remembered. Once, a long time ago, he had amused himself by measuring Oluf against it—a long time ago. And he had to, simply had to, stroke all these things with his hand and mutter something or other in a voice choking with sobs. Finally, hoarsely and under his breath, the words took form: “Good-bye, all these precious things.” He repeated it again and again until his throat was dry: “Good-bye, all these precious things.”

  Even though he should continue to live among them, this would nevertheless be a permanent leave-taking, for he knew, he sensed, that soon he would not be the same person. Soon these things would not recognize him. He wondered if he would ever be able to feel sentimental about them again. Worldly belongings—that was all they were. Things that wore out, came apart, fell to pieces, and that a person ought not to get attached to at all. Worldly possessions—nothing but worldly possessions.

  He sat down at the end of the table, lonely in his four-room apartment. He had not yet removed his topcoat, for didn’t a person keep it on when sitting beside a ruin or in a dilapidated museum? At his neighbor’s across the way, the white window curtains flashed alluringly in the sunlight, and he felt that he was sitting in a dark room that faced north, a cave through the entrance of which came a bit of reflected light.

  His hand brushed against the newspapers he had in his coat pocket, and he took them out. They provided something to which he could direct his thoughts. There was Dagbladet from the previous day. The literary page had finally been printed, and this should have made him happy. He should have regarded it as a favor, but now it was too late. And yesterday’s Danmark, containing the interview with Professor Julius Geberhardt and the picture of him with his wild shifty eyes, dirty-looking face, and hair so rumpled that it looked as if he must be constantly tearing at it. There, too, was the answer he had given the interviewer, that unfathomable answer: “Sometimes a person is overcome by disgust at being an active participant in this world’s perverted affairs. I have been assailed so strongly by this feeling that I am withdrawing from the scene.”

  The words sank deeply into the pallid transparent calm, the bright glare from the neighbor’s curtains, and into Jastrau’s soul.

  No, no, he told himself. What sort of a conclusion was it that he was arriving at in the depths of his soul as a result of these fortuitous words uttered by a complete stranger?

  He shoved the chair back from the table and got up. Now something different had to happen. He could not keep on sitting there dreaming and letting erratic ideas take hold of him. But who was it that had spoken to Johanne about him? And what had the person told her? He had hardly been able to recognize her voice. She had not been her normal self. Had she not sounded as if somebody was with her? There they had been sitting—here in these rooms. And so their last, decisive conversation had been held with someone else present—he in a bar—she, she—?

  Back and forth, back and forth, he wandered. There were rooms aplenty—altogether too many. His thoughts ran in confused circles, impulses and sudden ideas popped into his head. There was no coherence to it all. Who had it been? And what? As mysterious as a murder. It gave him an eerie feeling to think that s
ome unknown person had been here with her, in these very rooms. Because that certainly was the case. Now he knew it for a certainty. Otherwise, her voice would not have had such a note of long-suffering. She sounded that way only when somebody else was present.

  In the sunlit bedroom he suddenly stopped beside Oluf’s empty iron bed. The featherbed and pillow were so small, and suddenly he could not bear it because they were so small. He was conscious of a pressure on his heart, and he had to kneel down, bend over the bed, and hide his face in the child-size eiderdown. He felt that he ought to weep, but nothing came of it except dry sobs. Why was he there on his knees? It was as if he saw himself in a ridiculous situation.

  Then he got up briskly and tossed his topcoat onto the made-up double bed. Yes, the bed had been made. The floor had been washed, too. She had performed her housewifely duty until the very end. Next he took off his tailcoat, necktie, and the crumpled shirt. It was a relief to be rid of that; there it lay with its blurred, derisive expression of gratitude for the beer. Now he was a free man.

  Once in his everyday clothes, he felt calmer. His body found comfort in their accustomed folds and wrinkles, and his soul began to straighten out. He stuffed the fool’s costume roughly into a drawer. It belonged to the past.

  Now he would get to work. Some reviews had to be written for a new literary page.

  But when he got back to the living room he began his restless wandering again. How was he to find peace in his study, which was as narrow and cramped as a corridor and looked out on a yellow firewall that stuck out to the right of the window like the face of a cliff threatening to topple over and crush him? There in the study everything was too barren and unmerciful.

  No peace anywhere, no rest.

  Back in the living room he suddenly began to move things around and tidy up. When he drew the brown portieres across the doorway to the dining room and shut the door to the study this room became inhabitable. The brown and yellow colors were restful. The ceiling was a simple quadrangle. Everything bespoke tranquility. And then with a resolute motion he went to take the photographs—the one of his mother and that of his son—but came to a sudden painful halt. They still stood with their backs out toward the room, an accusing reminder of a day in the past when, stricken with a guilty conscience and not daring to look them in the eye, he had turned them around.

  The past hung like blemishes everywhere about him. It became difficult for him to go on cleaning up. No, he could not stand it any longer. There was only the phonograph in the dining room. That alone might provide some solace—one strident jazz tune after another, sentimental or cynical, but in an unceasing dance rhythm. Was there any other way of exorcising sorrow? For it had to be exorcised. He must get over his present state quickly. I wonder, I wonder, I wonder.

  He put on the phonograph record, and then began an improvised dance designed for execution only in private—a dance that expressed his grief and his feelings about a life that now threatened to explode. The dance was a hodgepodge of a one-step, a black bottom, and a Charleston. Grief. Grief.

  He felt like a demented person who with complete lack of restraint lets himself be carried away by his impromptu, awkward, meaningless movements. And then the deep-throated lament of a saxophone triggered the release of all his pent-up emotion.

  Jastrau screamed.

  The scream echoed. He stopped, astonished at himself. The jazz melody droned on, the black record continuing to revolve, unconcerned. There was something diabolical about this mechanical movement, this mechanical outlet for grief.

  Just then the doorbell rang, and he turned off the phonograph.

  Who could it be? He felt his heart pound and was embarrassed because he had screamed. Had anyone heard him? Should he open the door?

  The scream had sounded so wild. He was still exhausted from it.

  When the doorbell rang again, he decided to open the door.

  Outside stood his brother-in-law, polite and correct, with a round-crowned hat and a shiny walking stick. Behind him was a small man with a face that seemed to be set askew. Even his mustache looked as if it had constantly been exposed to a wind from the right.

  “Do you have company?” asked Jastrau’s brother-in-law. “I thought I heard a phonograph.”

  Jastrau shook his head.

  “Well, then you’re obviously dispelling gloomy thoughts, what? That was quite a spree you were on. But look—could I step inside? I brought a moving man along to pick up the youngster’s bed.”

  Jastrau bowed hospitably, and his brother-in-law walked in, casting an appraising eye around as if to take inventory of the furniture. His pink, piggish face was beaming superciliously.

  “You can wait here,” he said to the moving man. “I’ll be only a minute.”

  He stepped farther inside, walked into the dining room where he laid his walking stick and gloves on the table, then sat down on the chair at the end of the table.

  “Yes, we have a few practical matters to discuss,” he said with a faint sigh.

  Jastrau shrugged his shoulders and sat down where he could keep an eye on the moving man in the living room.

  “Tch, tch, tch,” Smith-Jørgensen sighed again, looking straight ahead. He had kept his hat on. “So that’s the way things have gone. But of course, it had to happen. I could see that with my eyes shut.”

  “Is that so?” Jastrau remarked, irritated.

  “Yes, it wasn’t so damned hard. After all, my dear brother-in-law, you do lap up the booze in great style, and I don’t suppose you’ve denied yourself a bit of meat now and then, either.” He winked at Jastrau. “But I should be the last one to say a word about it to you—”

  “Oh, cut it out now,” exclaimed Jastrau. “If I must tell you plainly what’s in my mind, I haven’t the faintest idea why Johanne left.”

  As he said it he noticed, as through a fog, the moving man standing in the living room and making a face at the Negro fetish.

  “You don’t, really? After all, you did sit over in the barroom and complain in a loud voice about your marriage, and that she won’t put up with, for which nobody can blame her. The whole town is gossiping about it.”

  Jastrau squirmed in his chair.

  “How does she know that? Who told her? What is this—?”

  Smith-Jørgensen leaned back smiling, his hands in his pockets.

  “How the devil should I know?” he replied. “She came last night together with a well-mannered but impoverished young man, if I understood mamma correctly. But anyhow, the upshot of it is that Johanne won’t take it any longer. She says she isn’t going to be content with being your servant girl, and there isn’t anything one can say to that. May I offer you a cigar?”

  Jastrau had grown pale. He sat staring straight ahead. The moving man was in the act of sitting down cautiously on one of the rococo chairs in the other room. His hind quarters were not used to coming in contact with such elegant furniture. But this strange sight only fixed itself in Jastrau’s memory so that he remembered it later; for the moment his thoughts were tumbling about in confusion. It could only be Sanders. But no—a Communist, a comrade? Then he must have gone directly up here from the bar. A Communist, a comrade—no it couldn’t be? Absentmindedly, he accepted the cigar.

  “But to get down to practical matters, how do we divide the furniture?” asked Adolf, taking out a notebook.

  “Of course, it was your parents who helped us by giving us these things.”

  “Yes, that’s the way I feel about it too. So—”

  Jastrau smiled wearily. “The books and the table I write on, a chair and a sofa—more I’ll probably never have use for in this world.”

  “Well, then that’s that,” said Adolf, slapping the notebook against the table. “Incidentally, what’s this? Have you been reading about the professor? What a crazy fellow he is. You can’t imagine how we laughed about it down at the stock exchange.”

  But Jastrau had no desire to discuss the subject. “Shouldn’t we get these practi
cal matters disposed of first?” he said, putting the unlighted cigar in his mouth.

  “You need a light, don’t you? Here, allow me.” Adolf lighted a match. “Doesn’t it draw? Well, well—there we have it. And now I don’t suppose you have any objection to my sister staying with my parents, do you?”

  He said it in a conspicuously loud tone of voice, so that Jastrau could not help glancing in at the moving man. He seemed to be listening.

  “No,” Jastrau replied gently. “Now, I don’t suppose you’ve hired the moving man as a witness, have you?”

  He wrinkled up his eyebrows suspiciously.

  “No, no, no,” Adolf roared, his face growing flushed above his loose jowls. “How can you think of such a thing?”

  “You’ll have it in writing,” Jastrau said, taking the fire-insurance policy and some other papers out of his pocket.

  “Hadn’t I better look after that policy?” exclaimed Adolf, making a quick grab for it.

  “No!”

  And Jastrau slapped his hand down over it hard.

  “But the furniture—”

  “There are the books, too. Now, I’ll see that you get a written statement that Johanne hasn’t deserted her home, which, in fact, is what she’s done,” Jastrau said irascibly.

  “She informed you about what she was doing over the telephone.”

  “Who is there to testify to that?”

  “There was a witness.”

  “So there was someone here when I phoned her!” Jastrau exclaimed in a rage.

  “Yes.”

  “And you know who it was?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who was it, then? Who was it?”

  “That’s beside the point,” replied his brother-in-law. His watery blue eyes had a malicious gleam.

  “Well, then, let me get this written statement finished.” Jastrau sighed and took out his fountain pen.

  “And now we come to the matter of a maintenance allowance,” Adolf said harshly.

  “Hadn’t we better leave that to the lawyers? Otherwise we’ll only get into a quarrel.”