Havoc

by Havoc (retail) (epub)

  At Vesterbro Passage Jastrau and Steffensen remained standing on the corner of the broad sidewalk that juts out opposite Helgolandsgade like a point of land. The obelisk of the Freedom Statue rose darkly above the gleaming asphalt on which the glow from headlights and arc lamps fell, and in the distance, outlined against the blue of the summer night, were the two yellow faces of the Town Hall clocks, appearing as ovals in the perspective, and seemingly cross-eyed.

  “I feel such an urge to let myself go, to go on a perpetual binge,” Jastrau said with a sigh. The view over into the Town Hall Square with the few tall buildings irregularly blocking out segments of the night sky, the auto headlights darting over the asphalt pavement, and the shadowy swarm of people on the sidewalks filled him with an aching sense of longing. “But no—let’s go home and sleep. I’ve got to look as if I’ve had enough sleep when I have my talk with Editor Iversen in the morning.”

  “About what?” Steffensen asked abstractedly.

  “About the paper,” Jastrau replied evasively. He did not want to make himself ridiculous. Suppose he did not, after all, hand in his resignation. They walked down Helgolandsgade toward home with a feeling of firmness of character.

  “Look here,” Steffensen suddenly exclaimed, “—there’s an automat café on Strøget.”

  “Yes, but that’s closed now. We couldn’t get in there even if we wanted to.”

  “I’m talking nonsense. As a matter of fact, it isn’t there any longer. A shoe shop has taken its place,” Steffensen said irritably. “But I used to go there so often during my first years as a student.”

  “Aha! Youthful memories.”

  “Oh, cut it out. But you see, when you sat in a certain place over by the window in that café you had a mirror behind you and another one right in front of you—damned if that sort of thing shouldn’t be prohibited—and so when you sat and looked at yourself in the mirror there was an endless number of images, one within the other. Steffensen seen from in front and Steffensen seen from behind—my God, what a horrible sight! On into infinity, mind you. It’s something I’ve often speculated about.”

  Jastrau laughed and swung one leg playfully out over the curb. “Ha,” he said, “if it’s the Jesuit that’s bothering you, you can console yourself, for in recent years time has become a dimension, ha ha. Now even the Jesuits can’t make head or tail of it.”

  Steffensen walked along, sucking on his pipe.

  “You’ll see. There’ll be repetition—the same thing over again—even insofar as these new things that have been invented are concerned.”

  And in a sudden manifestation of rage, he spat on the sidewalk.

  *An anchorage outside Copenhagen harbor.

  4

  JASTRAU and Steffensen sat across from each other at the breakfast table. The phonograph belted out a jazz tune.

  “Now the money situation is soon going to be critical,” Jastrau said, thoughtfully crushing an empty eggshell.

  “And you aren’t doing a stroke of work,” Steffensen replied.

  “Are you moralizing?”

  Steffensen sat and stared at him with a faint, mute smile.

  Then Anna Marie came in with coffee. She put a new record on the phonograph. Her face was swollen, as if she had been crying. She looked run-down and miserable.

  Jastrau smiled at her, but it was a nervous, unhappy smile that she sent him in return, and as quickly as possible she disappeared to hide herself in the kitchen.

  Steffensen gulped down his coffee and said nothing. Then they both filled their pipes.

  How long could it go on? Steffensen could sit there, immovable and inviolable, for hours at a time without doing a thing. He was allowed to do so because otherwise the rooms would be empty, and in the barren apartment lay the threat of insanity. With the place empty, the feeling of degeneration would be too much to endure. Now, with people there, this feeling was tempered somewhat, as it was by the jazz from the worn and scratchy records on the phonograph. But this figure that sat leaning his chin on a hand, with a pipe dangling from his mouth, with his dirty collar and his positively malicious contempt—if he did not soon stir, make some movement, become a human being, then the feeling of emptiness would again assert itself, then he would be nothing but a lifeless object that could not keep it from asserting itself. And then hostility would break out.

  “When you sit there glowering like that, what are you thinking about?” Jastrau asked in a nervous, ill-natured tone.

  “I was sitting here and was about to have a thought.” The vagueness of the remark irritated Jastrau.

  “You were about to have one. Does that amount to anything?”

  “You bet. I’m sitting here thinking about a man with a derby hat.”

  “You’re very amusing,” said Jastrau. But why was there suddenly such a look of insecurity in Steffensen’s eyes? The immovable figure had begun to stir.

  “No, damn it,” Steffensen said hesitatingly. “Just imagine now that one could take the lid off a human skull the way one would a derby hat, and could look in and see the thoughts. Ha—what a world! I’ve heard it said that thoughts were reality. Ha!”

  Jastrau listened. There was a gruffness in Steffensen’s voice, as if he wanted to confide in someone.

  “Well, why not?”

  “Yes, why not?” Steffensen laughed dully. “I’m thinking of my old man, the respectable pharmacist in Aarhus. When he can’t go to sleep, the old beast, he lies and figures out how a person can commit a crime without being found out. It’s touching, isn’t it? The bourgeois intellectual life, what?”

  He was making conversation. Jastrau sat staring at him. It was simply awful, the number of teeth he had in his mouth. It was not a human mouth. But why was he talking this way? There was evidently something he wanted to gloss over. He wanted to shy away from it.

  “What are you getting at?” Jastrau asked sternly in order to pin him down.

  The shadow of a smile came over Steffensen’s rigid lips. Then he got up with the mysterious, soundless, vagabond-like movements that Jastrau had observed in him before, and went to the door to listen to what was going on in the kitchen.

  The phonograph had stopped playing. They could hear Anna Marie washing the dishes.

  Steffensen smiled craftily. Jastrau kept his eyes on him. He felt no sympathy for him, but was completely caught up by his mysterious movements. He did not know what it was that had driven this son of a bourgeois Aarhus family to his present parasitic existence, and he could only guess at it. But Steffensen had not come out of it untarnished. It was plain to see that he was not spotless.

  Steffensen had gone over to the sofa that Anna Marie usually occupied.

  “Have you seen this?” he whispered shrewdly and lifted the spread from the sofa. A hole had been burned in it.

  Jastrau shrugged his shoulders. “Well, what of it?”

  “She’s a slut to lie there like that, smoking cigarettes and tossing them away without watching where they land. She thinks it’s bourgeois to be careful about a thing like that.”

  Steffensen laughed. But Jastrau only looked at him unappreciatively. Why was he being so incoherent? His pale bony face had a sinister look. His forehead seemed naked and abnormally large.

  “I’d like to know if it amplifies the soul—isn’t that what you call it?—to commit a crime,” Steffensen went on dreamily. “Whether it really amplifies it, or if it’s the same with murder as it is with drinking. When a person has one, then he wants more, and so there we are again—back on the subject of recurrence—that damned repetition. Why haven’t I asked a murderer about it?”

  “Are you delirious, man?” Jastrau asked. He was getting perturbed.

  “No-o,” Steffensen whispered cunningly and made one of his vagrant gestures to shush Jastrau. “But suppose one strangled her and then set fire to the sofa and the whole mess. After all, she gets dead drunk and lies there smoking and tossing lighted butts around, doesn’t she? Who could prove anything? And as for hav
ing a bad conscience afterwards,”—he raised his voice and his eyes began to sparkle—“I’d like to know, damn it, what a guilty conscience feels like—if the feeling stays in your hands,”—he stretched out his big hands and held them up, curved, in front of him—“if your hands keep feeling her throat, I mean, or if you keep seeing her there before you. Hallucinations, you know. Or if you can’t stand to see the place where the murder took place, the furniture, the inanimate objects, or—”

  Jastrau followed his awkward movements, that were so much the more gruesome because they were made without a sound and were so in contrast to his customary immobility. But he could not really place credibility in what the whispering voice was saying, and he shook his head.

  “I really don’t have time to listen to your fantasies,” he said, getting up as if he wanted to shake off the impression that Steffensen’s words had left.

  “Fantasies? No, damn it—I’m serious.”

  Jastrau looked at him unbelievingly. “I have to go over to the paper,” he said.

  “But I tell you, I’m serious, damn it!” Steffensen exclaimed, taking a firm hold on his arm. “Can’t you understand? I thought you might. Not, of course, when I think vigorously and use logic—because then you don’t know what I’m talking about, or you couldn’t care less. But this business of thinking in concrete terms, laying one hard fact upon another, and then, yes, then always coming up against a weak spot—”

  “Listen, Steffensen—” Jastrau said. He suddenly realized that Steffensen had cracked up, and he stared at him.

  But Steffensen went right on. “A weak spot, you understand, and then something has to happen. I’m forced to go ruthlessly ahead, I tell you. You don’t know why, but there’s a certain logic about it, a logic that’s gone amok. And I must, I must find a solution—a solution that will take me out into the infinite.”

  “A solution to what?” Jastrau asked uneasily, glancing toward the kitchen door.

  “Yes, to her—that’s it,” Steffensen nodded.

  “I still don’t understand.”

  “Are you curious about it?” Steffensen asked spitefully.

  But then Jastrau gave up. “Listen, Stefan, I don’t have time for all this. I have to get over to the paper. And you’re not going to remain here. I won’t allow it.”

  “No,” came the hoarse, abrupt answer.

  “You come along with me.”

  Jastrau tried to collect his thoughts as they stood in the hallway. His felt hat. Now he was in earnest. And his walking stick. He smiled faintly. Now he was going over to have his talk with Editor Iversen.

  “Look,” exclaimed Steffensen on one of the stair landings as he tugged roughly at Jastrau’s arm, “I like you very much. I do, damn it, I do. But if you can’t understand me, then I feel there isn’t a soul who can.”

  “But what is it you want me to understand?” Jastrau asked cautiously. He suspected what it was.

  “No, you can’t. You’re respectable like all the others, and all you’ll do is laugh at me—or get maudlin.”

  He stood stock-still on the stairway.

  “Because I am ridiculous—completely ridiculous,” he suddenly burst out.

  Then, without waiting for Jastrau, he went on down the stairs.

  “I don’t care to go with you,” he said unequivocally as they went out the entranceway. Jastrau swung his stick in a show of indifference. But Steffensen was already making his way along Istedgade. Seen from behind, he looked like a waterfront roughneck.

  There was something provoking about his proletarian mannerism. It had been cultivated in imitation of some of the postwar artists and literary figures. It was a fashion.

  But with Steffensen it was more than a mannerism. It was an all-inclusive protest. And it was also an act he was putting on. But was it? Jastrau had grown uneasy. If he were really serious, then there was a crime that was germinating within him. But it was simply buffoonery—yes, it was buffoonery. Jastrau let his stick strike hard against the sidewalk as he walked toward Vesterbrogade.

  Wasn’t it an imposition to barge in on others with one’s private life and its problems as Steffensen did? Whether he had infected Anna Marie, or she him—Jastrau knew that was at the root of the trouble—did it make any difference? But Steffensen had been made an object of ridicule, and that he had not been able to bear. A typical case of a person going amok.

  But then, who wasn’t ridiculous? Take Jastrau himself. Here he was, having finally gotten a stylish hat on his head and a walking stick in his hand. Otherwise he would not be able to resign. The hat and the resignation went together.

  Jastrau began to whistle. The benches looked so nice and comfortable beneath the trees along Vesterbrogade. Only a few customers were sitting outside the Wivel. The afternoon had not reached its high point.

  The idea of resigning was by no means a new one. It had come into his head the very day he had gotten his job as chief reviewer for Dagbladet. Perhaps he had even mentioned it to one of his fellow workers. “I wonder when I’ll get the knife in the back?” It seemed to him that he had once formulated the words. Hadn’t there also been something about a thirty-year-old man in such an advanced position usually lasting four years? Had he not also quietly and cynically let such a remark escape? Of course. “So how will I manage to escape getting the knife between the shoulder blades?” Yes, he had once said that to Vuldum. And Vuldum had not reassured him—far from it. “The old men up there play us off against each other,” he had said.

  These four, five years. This feeling of insecurity.

  Suddenly Jastrau halted. Everything looked so nice inside Tivoli. Sparrows were hopping about on the asphalt paths.

  But this idea that to know and see things clearly gives one strength! Who was it that had perpetrated such nonsense? Was it not perhaps this very awareness that had made him unsure of himself and sterile as a poet? He had produced nothing in four years. Was it perhaps not this knowledge that sometime he might be thrown to the wolves, just as his predecessors had been, that gradually had undermined him? Suppose a person knew the date on which he would die. After all, he had had a wife and child—at that time. He had had to think of making a living.

  Was it not also this feeling of insecurity that was to blame for the way he was now drifting? Was it not the reason for his drinking? For he did drink, didn’t he? But then he smiled the same way he did when he went whizzing downward in the roller coaster at Tivoli. Well, yes, there were many reasons. And among them was the fact that he liked the taste of whiskey.

  But all that was unimportant. Now he had made up his mind. How he had come to the conclusion he did not remember. He had suddenly broken through a thick growth of underbrush and found himself on a cliff overlooking the sea. Was it false romanticism? Hans Christian Andersen—The Bell? But that was the way he had felt. It was the way he felt now. To put it into words: “He walked across the Town Hall Square in the bright sunshine, whistling ‘Come May, the mild month of May,’ and went up to Dagbladet and handed in his resignation.” With good and sufficient reason? Good, sufficient? He could give twenty reasons for his action.

  But he could also, at this moment, ten minutes past two, on this corner outside the Paraply café, decide to remain on as the chief reviewer at Dagbladet.

  How the sun could flash on the nickel-plated handlebar of a bicycle.

  Whistling happily and yet feeling sad, yes sad, he walked across the Town Hall Square. All the buildings looked lovely and transfigured. How beautiful they were. The red color of the bricks, the Town Hall, the Palace Hotel, the Bristol. The red chestnuts. He felt as much at home there as he did in a living room—his own living room. He felt pleasantly at ease, like a familiar figure who cut across the square every day—a Copenhagener. There goes Jastrau, damn it.

  Should he also take his leave of that? No, not today. But soon. And after many years he would come back and look at it with the eyes of a stranger.

  Dagbladet’s corner building became dear to him. Even
the letters up there on the corner. They were clear, unsentimental letters. Once he had looked upon them with a feeling of awe. Now, already, their form had become a memory. He could sense it by the way they looked.

  And the revolving door. And the staircase with the brightly polished railing. And the window with the view down into the asphalted courtyard that always was jammed full of bicycles. Flashing memories, all of them.

  He whistled more softly. To the accompaniment of the melody he would take in these sights for the last time. Quietly he slipped into the editorial department. Very much like an everyday occurrence. The door to Editor Iversen’s sunlit corner room stood open. Yes, he was there.

  And there he sat in the sunshine with his long, legendary back bent forward over the desk as if he wanted to embrace it, his powerful arms extended over manuscripts and papers while he addressed the surface of the desk in a hoarse whisper. At least that was the way it looked, for the hand that held the telephone receiver was resting on the desk so that he could slouch over it while he listened or coughed a few words into the mouthpiece. His elongated animal-like skull and rugged neck were sharply silhouetted against the light. His mustache hung as if dripping from his upper lip.

  Jastrau remained standing in the doorway. He cleared his throat, and one of the editor’s large hands raised itself like a snake’s head from the huge bulk of his body and motioned for silence.

  When the conversation had been brought to a whispered conclusion, his head finally bobbed up, he hauled in his arms, sank back in his chair, and regained his normal stature. The long arms and legs assumed a discreet posture.

  “Well, hee hee—if it isn’t Jastrau, my literary editor!” he exclaimed in a tone of comic alarm. His eyes were lusterless. “I trust that nothing is wrong. You look so solemn—as if you were a whole delegation coming to see me.”

  Jastrau laid his fedora on the desk, sat down punctiliously, and leaned on his stick.

  “Are you put out about something?” Editor Iversen asked with a trace of humor.