6
We move into a room at Ebbe’s mother’s house until the divorce is finalized, because we want to be together all the time. Ebbe spends the mornings at the State Pricing Advisory, where a lot of students kill time and earn a little pocket money. He sits with another economics student named Victor. Ebbe has as many friends as there are stars in the sky, and I will never meet all of them. When he and Victor arrive at work in the morning, they sing the psalm of the day from a hymnal booklet which they then use to roll their cigarettes. Finding tobacco is very difficult, and sometimes they roll their cigarettes with ersatz tea. Meanwhile, I’m writing my next novel. I have recently submitted the manuscript of a poetry collection called Little World. Ebbe thought of the title. He’s quite interested in my work. He wanted to get a degree in literature, but his father, who died two years ago, said that that was a peasant’s fantasy. So now he’s studying economics, which doesn’t interest him in the least. But he loves literature, and he’s always reading novels when we’re not talking together. He introduces me to books that I never knew existed. And every afternoon when he returns from work, he wants to see what I’ve written. If he critiques it, there’s always substance to his advice, and I follow it. I don’t see my family much these days. My brother has moved in with a divorced woman who has a three-year-old child. Ebbe and I visited them, but he and Ebbe don’t have much in common. Ebbe is an upper-class young man from the suburbs, and Edvin is a Copenhagen painter’s helper, who breathes cellulose lacquer into his damaged lungs every day because he has no other choice. My parents’ world is also very remote from Ebbe’s. Ebbe talks with my father about books, and with my mother about me, just like Viggo F. used to do. But there’s nothing condescending in Ebbe’s attitude to them. After we’ve finished eating dinner with his mother and Karsten, we lie on the bed in our room, talking about the future, about the baby we are going to have, about life, and about our past before we knew one another. Ebbe loves questions that have no definitive answer. For example, he has a theory of why Negroes are black, and another one about why Jews have hooked noses. Once he propped himself up on his elbow and stared at me with an expression of moral intensity. I’m thinking, he said solemnly, about joining the underground resistance. It’s not looking so good after the fall of France. I say that he can leave that to people who don’t have a wife and child to think of. He seems to forget about the idea. I feel good these days: I’m going to get married, I’m going to have a baby, I’m in love with a young man, and soon we’re going to have our own home. I tell Ebbe that I’ll never leave him, and that I can’t stand it when life gets so complicated, like it’s been recently. He lifts my chin and kisses me. It could be, he says, that if you’re complicated, your life gets to be like that too.
Finally the divorce goes through, and we rent an apartment on Tartinisvej, near Lise and Ole and Ebbe’s mother. The south harbor is at the end of long Enghavevej like a nail on the end of a finger. This neighborhood is also called ‘Music Town’ because all the roads are named after composers. The apartment buildings are not very tall, and most of them have little yards out front with grass and trees. Between the last road and open country lies the landfill, and when the wind is just right, the stench carries to the apartments, so we can’t keep our windows open. Across from the house where Lise and Ole live, on Wagnervej, there are lots of cabins where people live all year round. One of the cabin ladies cleans Lise’s house. And every Saturday, Lise takes the lady’s five children upstairs to the bathroom and soaps and scrubs them clean, so the apartment fills with their drawn-out cries. Lise does things like that without thinking twice, and she reminds me of Nadja that way. Nadja has moved in with a sailor who’s a communist, and now she’s constantly airing communist views, though she was very conservative back when she was seeing Piet. I know this from Ebbe, because I don’t go out in the evenings anymore. I’m too tired by eight o’clock because of my pregnancy.
Our apartment is a room and a half, and our full-size bed covers nearly the entire half-room floor. We got the bed from Ebbe’s mother. Ebbe’s father’s desk stands in the other room, along with a dining-room table we bought used, four chairs that we got from Lise, and a divan along one wall. Over the divan we lay a brown blanket, and in a moment of inspiration, Ebbe hangs another brown blanket on the wall behind it. He got a piece of red felt from Lise, and he cut a heart out of it. He glued the heart onto the hanging blanket and stood back to admire his work. In our house, he says, we’ll never have drinking parties. Out of consideration for his mother, we aren’t moving into our apartment until we’re married. Otherwise she would think our sinfulness was too overt.
We’re getting married on one of the first days of August, and we ride our bicycles to City Hall holding hands. We arrive too early, so we walk over to Frascati and have coffee. While we drink it, I sit there observing Ebbe’s face and I think there is something soft and naive about it, something defenseless, so I feel like protecting him. Suddenly I say: Your top lip really sticks out. I don’t mean anything hurtful by it, but he looks at me belligerently. It doesn’t stick out any more than yours, he says. Insulted I say, Mine hardly sticks out at all. Yours covers almost your whole face. His face turns red with anger. Don’t criticize my looks, he says. The girls in school were crazy about me. Lise only married Ole because I wasn’t interested in her. Irritated, I say, You are so conceited. Meanwhile I’m thinking in wonder: we’re fighting, and we’ve never done that before. Silently Ebbe pays the waiter. His dark jacket sleeves are too long; he borrowed his wedding suit from his brother. In the Lantern Club they don’t wear shabby clothes because they’re poor; it’s because being well-dressed is seen as ludicrous. Ebbe runs his index finger around his stiff collar, which is also too big, and he walks in front of me with long strides, back to City Hall, without saying a word. Then he stops and flips his hair back with a toss of his head. He says, If you don’t take back that thing about my top lip, I won’t marry you. I start to laugh. No, I say, that’s too childish. Are we seriously going to become enemies over whose top lip sticks out more? It can be mine then. I pull my top lip down over my bottom lip and try to stick out my eyes so I can see it. It’s a half mile long, I say. Come on, we’re going to get married.
And we do. We move into the apartment and we hire a woman to clean, because I’m starting to earn a lot of money. Her name is Mrs Hansen, and when she comes to interview for the job, Ebbe says emphatically, Can you peel carrots? She says she thinks she can. Ebbe explains to her that carrots are very healthy, considering so many things are unavailable now. Since then she has always been amused that there are never any carrots in the house. The days pass like a drum roll before a solo. I read books about pregnancy, motherhood and caring for an infant, and I can’t understand why Ebbe isn’t as interested in all of this as I am. He says he almost can’t believe that he’s going to be a father. He also can’t believe it when he sees my name in the newspaper. He doesn’t understand that he’s gotten married to a famous person, and he doesn’t know if he likes it. Twisting his hair around his fingers, Ebbe sits in the evening solving equations. He loves when they work out and he says that he probably should have been a mathematician. I tell him that Geert Jørgensen once said to me that no normal man would ever find me attractive. Ebbe says, So who’s normal? while he pats his pockets to find his notebook or his tobacco pouch or his keys. He is quite absent-minded and is always losing his things. He walks with his head bent back, as if he is trying to keep his eyes focussed and his chin up, so he frequently trips over things on the street. He often goes to parties at Ole and Lise’s, and he comes home drunk and wakes me up in the middle of the night. I get angry and brush him away, because I really need my sleep these days. He always apologizes the next day. Sometimes I go to visit my mother, or she visits me. I talk with her about giving birth, and she says that Edvin and I were born in a cloud of soap bubbles, because she tried to force us to come out by eating pine-oil soap. She says, I never liked children.
; The days pass, weeks pass, months pass. I’m going to give birth at Dr Aagaard’s private clinic at Hauser Square, and I have my check-ups with him. He’s a nice older man who eases my many anxieties about the birth. I’m told that I should come back when there are five minutes between contractions. But the due date passes and nothing happens. I bought a sealskin coat, and I have to keep moving the buttons farther and farther out until they’re dangling on the very edge of the jacket. Ebbe has to tie my shoes for me, since I can’t reach them. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a pregnant woman as fat as me. I’m afraid that I’m going to have a huge baby with water on the brain. I read about that somewhere. Often I borrow Lise’s little boy Kim and take him for walks. He’s sweet and laughs a lot, and I think about the poem by Nis Petersen: I collect the smiles of little children. In the middle of all this I get interviewed by Karl Bjarnhof for the Social-Demokraten. I get a shock when I see the headline: ‘I want money, power and fame’. Did I really say that? The entire interview gives an unflattering impression of me. I’m portrayed as a vain, ambitious and superficial person, who only thinks about herself. Otherwise journalists have always treated me well, and I wonder what I could have done to Karl Bjarnhof. Then I remember that he’s one of Viggo F.’s friends, so maybe he’s angry because I left Viggo F.
This winter is very cold, and there’s a layer of ice on the streets. I feel impatient, waiting for the contractions to start, so to bring them on I run, arm in arm with Ebbe, panting around the house after dark. The buttons on my coat spring open; nothing else happens. Finally one morning I have a stomachache and I ask Mrs Hansen if it could be contractions. She thinks it probably is, and it gets worse as the day progresses. Ebbe holds my hand as the contractions come. That evening we go to the clinic and he says goodbye with a sad, helpless expression.
She’s so ugly, I say, surprised, looking down at the little bundle of a baby in my arms. Her face is pear-shaped, with two dark marks on her temples from the forceps. There’s not a hair on her head. The doctor laughs. That’s just because you’ve never seen a newborn baby before, he says. They’re never cute, but the mother usually thinks so anyway. I’ll call your husband now. Ebbe arrives with a bouquet of roses in his hand. He’s carrying them awkwardly, and I realize that he’s never given me a gift before. Then he sits down next to me and looks into the cradle, where they’ve put the baby. She’s pretty chubby, he says, and I feel offended. I say, Is that all you have to say? The birth took twenty-four hours, and I swore I would never have a baby again. I yelled and screamed in pain, and all you have to say is that she’s chubby? Ebbe looks ashamed and makes it even worse by saying that maybe she’ll get prettier as she grows. Then he asks when I’m coming home, because he misses me. I bend over the cradle and touch the tiny fingers. I say, Now we are a father, mother and child – a normal, regular family. Ebbe asks, Why do you want to be normal and regular? Everyone knows you’re not. I don’t know how to answer him, but I have wanted that as far back as I can remember.
7
Something terrible has happened. Ever since Helle was born I’ve lost all desire to go to bed with Ebbe, and when I do it anyway I feel absolutely nothing. I tell Dr Aagaard about it, and he says that it’s not unusual – I’m just drained from nursing, child-rearing and working like a madwoman, so there’s nothing left over for Ebbe. But it makes Ebbe unhappy, because he thinks it’s his fault. He talks it over with Ole, who advises him to buy van de Velde’s Ideal Marriage. He buys it and reads it blushing, because this book is the present-day pornographic bible. He reads about all the positions and we try a new one every night. In the morning we’re both sore from attempting to be acrobats, and it doesn’t help in the least. I talk about it with Lise, who tells me confidentially that she never got anything out of sex before she had Kim. She looks at me thoughtfully with her gentle madonna-eyes: How about taking a lover? she asks. Sometimes it brings a couple together if one of them has someone else. She has a lover herself – a lawyer. He works at the police station, and they walk around together every day for hours, while she tells Ole that she’s working overtime. Ole knows, but then doesn’t know at the same time. Ole has had a child by another woman, and before the child was born Lise thought seriously about adopting it. Then it turned out the baby was deaf and dumb, so now she’s glad she didn’t do it. I tell her I don’t want a lover, because I won’t be able to work if my life becomes all messy and complicated again. And I realize more and more that the only thing I’m good for, the only thing that truly captivates me, is forming sentences and word combinations, or writing simple, four-line poetry. And in order to do this I have to be able to observe people in a certain way, almost as if I needed to store them in a file somewhere for later use. And to be able to do this I have to be able to read in a certain way too, so I can absorb through all my pores everything I need, if not for now, then for later use. That’s why I can’t interact with too many people; and I can’t go out too much and drink alcohol, because then I can’t work the next day. And since I’m always forming sentences in my head, I’m often distant and distracted when Ebbe starts talking to me, and that makes him feel dejected. This, together with all the attention I give to Helle, makes him feel like he’s being abandoned, outside my world, where he used to be included. When he comes home in the afternoon he still likes reading what I’ve written, but now his comments have become meaningless and unfair, as if he’s trying to hit me in my sorest spot. One day we start arguing, because in my book The Street of Childhood, there’s a character named Mr Mulvad who likes to solve mathematical equations, and Ebbe is furious. That’s me, he says. All my friends will recognize it and laugh at me. He demands that I remove Mr Mulvad from the book. It’s true that Mr Mulvad is a strange fish, because I’m not that skilled at characterizing men yet. But I don’t want to delete him. I don’t understand, says Ebbe. Why can’t you make your characters like Dickens did, for example. You take yours from real life. That’s not art. I ask him to stop reading what I write, since he doesn’t understand it anyway. He says he’s sick and tired of being married to a writer, who’s frigid on top of everything. I gasp for air and break down in tears. I’ve never fought with anyone since I fought with my brother back when we were children, and I can’t stand being at odds with Ebbe. Helle wakes up crying, and I pick her up. Can’t he solve equations, I say pitifully. Otherwise I don’t know what a guy like that would do in his free time. Ebbe puts his arms around me and Helle together and says, I’m sorry, Tove. Please stop crying. He can solve equations, and I didn’t mean what I said. It’s just bothering me, that’s all.
One afternoon, not long after that fight, Ebbe doesn’t come home at the usual time, and I realize how dependent I am on him. I pace the floor and I’m unable to do anything productive. Ebbe goes out often in the evenings, but he always comes home first. As it gets later, I nurse Helle, get her dressed and go over to see Lise, who has just come home from work. She says Ole isn’t home either, and that they’re probably out together. Then they probably met some other friends and lost their way home. It wouldn’t be the first time that had happened. You’re so conventional, she says, smiling. Maybe you should have married the kind of man who always comes right home with his paycheck and never drinks. Then I tell her about our fight and I say that our marriage isn’t going so well anymore. I confide in her that I’m afraid he’s going to find someone else; someone who isn’t a writer and isn’t frigid. He might do that for one night, she says, but Ebbe would never dream of leaving you and Helle. He is really proud of you; it’s obvious when he talks about you. You just have to understand that it’s so easy for him to feel inferior. You’re famous, you earn money, you love your work. Ebbe’s just a poor student who’s being more or less supported by his wife. He’s studying for a degree he doesn’t fit, and he has to get drunk to cope with life. But it will be a relief when your sex life gets going again. And it will; you’re just exhausted from nursing. She picks Kim up onto her lap and starts playing with him. When Ole graduates, she says
, I want to become a child psychologist. I can’t stand working in an office. Lise loves other people’s children as well as her own. She loves other people in general, and friends are always coming by and confiding things in her they wouldn’t tell even the people closest to them. When do you think he’ll come home? I ask. I don’t know, she says. Once Ole was gone for eight days, but then I started to get nervous. After putting Kim to bed, Lise sits with her legs pulled up and her chin on one knee. Her entire person radiates peace and friendship, and I feel a bit better. Sometimes, I say, I don’t think I can deal with other people at all. It’s as if all I can see in the whole world is myself. That’s nonsense, says Lise. You really do love Ebbe. I say, Yes, I do, but not in the right way. If he forgets his scarf, I don’t remind him. I don’t go out of my way to make nice food for him or anything like that. I think I can only like other people if they’re interested in me; that’s why I’ll never suffer from unrequited love. That might be so, she says, but Ebbe is interested in you. I tell her about Mr Mulvad and the equations, and she starts laughing. I didn’t know Ebbe solved equations; that’s funny. I say, No, that’s not what I mean. When I’m writing I don’t care about anyone. I can’t. Lise says that artists have to be self-centered, and that I shouldn’t think about it so much. I walk home through the pitch-black streets, which the stars don’t have the power to brighten. I’m glad I have the baby carriage to lean on. It’s not quite eight o’clock, and I’m hurrying because that’s the curfew. Everyone is supposed to be home by eight. That means Ebbe won’t be coming home tonight, wherever he is. I change Helle, put her in pajamas and tuck her into bed. She’s four months old and she gives me a toothless smile, while clutching my finger with her whole hand. It’s a good thing that, for now, she doesn’t care if her father is home or not.
Dependency Page 4