by Dorthe Nors
“Your buttocks are hard,” Ellen says. “That’s because, if you’ll pardon a vulgar phrase, you’re a tight-ass with your feelings. An emotional tight-ass, a tight-fisted tightwad. Can’t you hear how everything’s right there in the words?”
With the job Sonja has, that’s something she knows quite well. Language is powerful, almost magic, and the smallest alteration can elevate a sentence or be its undoing.
“I think you should ask for more calm when you’re in the car.”
Driving school problems are a recurring theme at the clinic, and Ellen’s advice is always confrontation. But Sonja gave up on asking for calm long ago. There’s no way it would pay off. If Sonja requested calm, Jytte might try, all right, but it wouldn’t last long. Just being dictated to by a student like that would play havoc with Jytte’s mind. With Jytte, all bad things stem from quiet. Just like Kate, Jytte senses danger in blank expanses, so the thing is to abrade them with tedious speech, cake recipes, dog hair.
Ellen’s hands have a good grip on Sonja, and it’s far too seldom that Sonja puts herself in someone else’s hands. She imagines that Ellen’s hands are stronger than most. Ellen carries a lot of stuff around, and it’s not likely that all her clients can get up on the table by themselves. “Everyone needs to be met in their body,” Ellen likes to say, and Kate has strong hands too. At the nursing home where she works, they have hoists for the elderly and infirm. Yet she still can’t avoid lifting people, and both she and Ellen are strong that way, and now Ellen’s moved from Sonja’s buttocks to the back of her heart.
The back of the heart is the spot between the shoulder blades. Ellen calls it the back of the heart because that’s where you get stabbed when you get stabbed in the back. The spot is tender in Sonja. So tender that she stares hard at a knot on the floor while Ellen rubs. The knot resembles Mickey Mouse with his ears a bit too large, and he’s standing with his hands at his side. He’s got gloves on his hands and yellow buttons on his pants, he’s calling for Pluto and the dog’s supposed to come, he’s supposed to come now. It’s painful, and her upper arms hurt too; they feel like big bruises.
“Oh jeez,” Sonja says, “there too.”
“Why do you think your arms are so sore?”
Sonja says it might be because she was in this brawl in an intersection by Western Cemetery. She thought she’d told Ellen already during her other lament about Jytte, but apparently she hadn’t. It feels good to say it now, and she also tells Ellen about how it had been on the drive back to Folke’s Driving School. How Jytte had gotten rather huffy. At one point, Sonja tried to shift gears herself, and she shouldn’t have done that, because then Jytte accused her of trying to destroy the car.
“I was ready to cry,” Sonja says.
Ellen places her warm hands on Sonja’s upper arms.
“That was pretty unfair.”
Sonja can feel the muscles in her right upper arm relax a little. It’s Ellen’s hands, they’re patting her, and the fingers are massaging a spot behind her ear, and Sonja’s a woman in the middle of her life, she’s an adult now. She no longer needs for people to always get along, and she can’t make them either. They’re not very accepting, they won’t open up. Kate, for instance, doesn’t answer the phone anymore.
“Ready for the other side?” Ellen asks, and Sonja tries to nod.
It isn’t easy with her head in the bathing ring, and flipping over can be tricky besides; certain angles trigger the positional vertigo. Having her head in the so-called dentist position is awful. According to Ellen, Sonja’s dizziness is an expression of a spiritual condition, and Sonja’s explained that in that case, it’s a spiritual condition that most of the women in her family are subject to, though she doesn’t like to discuss her family with strangers. There’s also something in Ellen’s way of parsing other people’s bodies that reminds her of her university classes in textual analysis. Everything’s supposed to mean something else, everything’s supposed to be rising, tearing itself free of its wrappings, climbing up to some higher meaning; it’s supposed to get away from where it’s been. Reality will not suffice. Ellen cannot hide this yearning, and to judge by the many angels she’s placed around the room, she doesn’t want to either. There are small angelic figures on the desk and in the window, even on a chain around her neck, and now she’s on the way over to the other side of the table. She wants to start in on Sonja’s feet, which have a defective arch. “They don’t want to grab the earth,” Ellen has said. It said “Massage Therapist” on Ellen’s website, and Sonja thought it would be a form of physiotherapy, but at Ellen’s, her shoulder is not a shoulder; it’s a feeling. Sonja’s hands aren’t hands, but expressions of spiritual states. As a massage therapist, Ellen sees it as her job to decode Sonja, and Sonja’s only countermove is to decode Ellen. It’s a circus of mutual interpretation. If Sonja’s wrists are hurting, Ellen says, “Perhaps you’re holding the reins too hard.” When Sonja says it might also be because the Gösta Svensson novel has her hands toiling at the keyboard, Ellen says, “Then it must be some resistance to Gösta Svensson that’s sitting in your hands.”
That’s not at all out of the question, but now it isn’t her hands that Ellen’s working on but Sonja’s feet, which stick out well past the end of the massage table. Kate’s husband Frank calls her “the Masai,” because he had once been to Africa. He was down there to tell the Africans about wind turbines, and Sonja imagines him standing in the middle of the savannah. He stands there gazing at a Masai’s kneecaps. He’s small and clad in a T-shirt next to a man who towers over his head, so now he thinks it’s funny to tease Sonja about being a Masai because she’s so tall. She’s so tall that Ellen’s had to scoot her little stool back a few inches in order to really get at her feet. Ellen’s good at massage, there’s no doubt about that. But with the body analysis, Sonja’s gotten more than she bargained for.
“That’s a nice pendant by the way,” Sonja says, glancing at the angel on the chain.
Ellen fumbles with the pendant and says she bought it at a seminar.
She doesn’t say any more, but Sonja’s known for a long time that there are some things that Ellen doesn’t like to talk about, some additional data. She’s partial to the supernatural, and Sonja’s friend Molly is partial to that sort of thing too. For as far back as Sonja can recall, Molly’s been governed by a geographic and cosmic restlessness. Throughout their years in high school, they laid plans about how they would get away. And it wasn’t that Sonja wasn’t game. It was more that Molly was the one expanding on the idea, putting it into words. It had been a time of fevered dreams of the future, and that’s how they found themselves in a moving van that day in 1992. Dad behind the wheel with his lower lip jutting out, Sonja and Molly with an insistent eastward orientation. First the shared flat, then life in Copenhagen, and then, years later, Sonja found herself at a party at Molly’s up in Hørsholm, north of the city. And there there was a fortune teller. Sonja stood and drank a beer up against the fridge while the fortune teller, wearing a curry-colored tunic and drinking just water, was able to see things in Sonja’s future. Even though Dad had always advised Sonja to steer clear of anything that reeked of belief, she stood there thinking mostly about how the woman must have some illness, and Dad had also taught her that it was a sin to turn away the sick. So she allowed the fortune teller to let rip. And in hindsight, the fortune teller had certainly been right that she’d be unhappy in love. First she met Paul. Then she fell in love. Then he chose a twenty-something girl who still wore French braids, and the rest of the fortune she repressed. How are you supposed to survive otherwise? she wonders, trying to remember the whole thing. But her memory won’t yield.
“Does this hurt?” asks Ellen.
Yes, it hurts, but she doesn’t say that to Ellen, because Sonja doesn’t want the soles of her feet interpreted, and once in Jutland she also met someone who could see ghosts. She’d applied for a translation residency, because sitting at home with Gösta Svensson had gotten too lones
ome. The translation center lay in an old convent, and before long there was rustling under the eaves. There was creaking in the floorboards and doors opening when no one was there. At night, the owls took flight over the main building, and from signs such as these the translators—there were a number of them there—concocted a ghost. The evenings passed with wine and chatter, and in their conversation the ghost walked again. To join in, Sonja gave the ghost some of Gösta Svensson’s attributes—the hipster goatee, the tweed jacket, the squeaky shoes. It was easy enough, as she’d translated all his crime novels into Danish and met him several times. What happened then was that she ran into one of the staff members, a chambermaid. Sonja ran into her in the staircase tower; Sonja was going down and the maid was on her way up. “Oh,” Sonja said when the woman suddenly appeared, “I thought you were the ghost.”
She’d said it to be funny, but the maid didn’t laugh. She told Sonja that she could see ghosts. She put her hand up to her left eye; Sonja remembers that clearly, how she fluttered her fingers before her left eye. She said, “I can see the ghosts with this eye.” She stood that way, her oddness underscored by the gesture. She didn’t seem to want to let Sonja pass; there was so much she wanted to tell her. Among other things, she claimed that the convent was situated in an area endowed with extraordinary energies. Over the centuries, cosmic forces had been pelting down upon the landscape there. In the hills to the west of the convent, there was a place that served as a sacred telephone. She went into a lot of detail, the chambermaid, also mentioning that Copenhagen was the spiritual cesspool of Denmark. The nation’s dark energies all flowed to Copenhagen.
“You know, I live in Copenhagen,” Sonja said.
“Yes, well,” said the chambermaid.
“Have you ever driven through Balling?” Sonja asked.
“No,” the maid said.
“According to lots of folks, it too is a lovely Danish cesspool,” Sonja said, and then they didn’t speak to each other again for the rest of the residency.
Sonja looks at Ellen’s left eye, which is ash gray. There’s a melancholy line around her mouth, and she’s stopped tinting her hair. Her hands are powerful, but she’s got something dark in the corners of her eyes, and long ago she revealed that she could see Sonja’s aura. She also illustrated, with her hand stretched rigid over Sonja on the table, just how far the aura extended into space. “Your energy field is impaired,” Ellen said with a quick up-and-down dip of the hand. “You have to let energy in through the crown of your head,” she added, and showed Sonja how to use her hands to form a funnel over her head. The energy was supposed to drip down into Sonja like boiling water through a coffee filter.
“On Sunday, actually”—here Ellen squeezes Sonja’s feet extra hard, so they’ll understand that she’s finished with them—“there’s this group of women who are going for a little hike.”
Sonja nods.
“We’re meeting at Klampenborg Station, and then we’re hiking to a clearing in Jægersborg Deer Park, where we’ll meditate. On the walk in, the idea is to train our senses. Isn’t that something that would appeal to you? Wouldn’t you like to join us?”
It’s because I said her angel was nice, Sonja thinks, not wanting to join them, though she isn’t doing anything Sunday. Which is also what she finds herself saying.
“You can ride with me,” Ellen says.
“I could also take the train,” Sonja says.
“Oh nonsense, it’s just as easy for you to ride with me. I leave at ten.”
Sonja sits up on the massage table. She fastens her bra behind her back and looks at the cat, which is sitting in the open chink of the doorway. The cat’s flat in the face, old as the hills, and regarding Sonja’s feet reproachfully. It has no right to look at them that way: her feet may be twisted, but she has inserts to compensate. Then she pays Ellen, who gives her a receipt and assures her that she can deduct the massage from her taxes.
“You’re self-employed, after all. Independent.”
Independent?
Sonja’s standing upright now and can feel that something in her mouth wants to escape. She stands there and chews on it; it feels dry and sticky and adheres to her gums. Home-baked white bread with brown sugar, that’s what it feels like, but whatever it is, it blocks the flow of speech.
3.
SONJA’S COME TO A STANDSTILL in front of her mirror. A short while before, she was on her way through the bedroom, sandal in hand, when she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror on the inside of her wardrobe. It looked as if Kate were standing in the wardrobe. That’s weird, she thought. Kate and I have never resembled each other. So she stepped over to the mirror to have a proper look.
Kate’s got two sons, and her husband Frank. When they’re in Copenhagen, they make a beeline for Tivoli, but otherwise they go around trying to disguise the fact that they’re from Jutland. Taking Kate out to eat is a trial. It doesn’t take anything for Kate to find the food pretentious, and if Sonja asks whether they shouldn’t all do the city together, Kate says she just wants to go to a Georg Jensen store, while Frank would rather head to the planetarium.
But it’s been a few years since they visited me, Sonja thinks. And we don’t look like each other anyway.
She moves a little closer, because there might be something in the eyes. There is something in the cheekbones and the mouth, though Kate’s not as tall of frame. And she looks nicer, more feminine. Back when they were kids, Kate made a big deal out of being the eldest. At the same time, she also was indulgent with Sonja, since Kate was one of those girls who bloomed early. She was so approachable. Mom always said so, before stroking Sonja on the cheek so she wouldn’t feel bad about being complicated. Her complications would amount to something, her mother wanted her to know, if she’d simply put her shoulder to the wheel.
Kate’s still simple and approachable, puttering around her front yard. She’s simple in the neurotic way, but at least she’s simple, and Sonja would also be simple that way if only, like Kate, she were able to chase the demons from her body. But because Sonja hides her feelings inside herself—instead of, like Kate, behind the garage, on the sun porch, and under the eaves—she goes to Ellen’s for massage. Ellen will lay her warm hands on Sonja, loosen the knots, and get her to notice that her body’s there, alive, touchable. It’s the sort of thing that others would have a boyfriend for, the sort of thing that men visit prostitutes for; Sonja’s just chosen a masseuse in Valby. One with warm hands and a certain predilection for surrogate worlds. That’s how she interprets Ellen, since Ellen interprets her, and she feels vulnerable being in a relationship where whatever she is is always supposed to mean something else. And yet she keeps going back. It’s wonderful being delved into, Sonja thinks, and Kate can’t even manage a proper hug anymore. It’s become such a boneless embrace, at most the brush of a damp cheek. It’s as if Kate can tell that there’s something wrong with Sonja; those evasive glances. Now and then they exchange texts, but there isn’t really any content in Kate’s. Smileys, mostly, and if Sonja calls the landline, it’s Frank who answers. If she decides to call Kate’s cell, her sister’s always standing in the middle of the supermarket, dramatically tapping her foot. She doesn’t have time. She’s headed somewhere. She’s squeezing the avocados, checking expiration dates, flagging down a clerk. It’s as if Kate’s afraid of something in Sonja, though Sonja doesn’t think of herself as a person to fear. And if there’s someone who scares me, it’s Gösta, Sonja thinks, regarding the manuscript on the desk. His rapes and his sales numbers scare me. Yet Kate’s not afraid of Gösta. That sex criminal who might lurk behind the front door when she comes back from a late shift at the nursing home? Kate tackles him lustily in the pages of Gösta’s books. If there’s one place the two sisters can meet, it’s in Gösta Svensson, because Sonja’s in fact the reason that Kate can now disappear, in Danish, into an ordered universe of evil. With Gösta, Kate can sniff death without it actually concerning her, and the hatred she must feel for herself
can find an outlet in the killings that always form the prologue of Gösta’s stories. She’s also told their mother that she feels proud that Sonja knows Gösta. “Kate is fond of you,” Mom’s told her on the phone. “She thinks it’s great about that crime writer fellow.”
Yet Sonja seldom speaks on the phone with Kate herself.
She tears herself away from the mirror. It’s Sunday, and it’s time to leave. She wishes she could find some emergency excuse, but what else is she going to do when it’s so hot? There will be trees in the deer park, trees and ordinary folks having fun, and so Sonja walks out into the still heat with a water bottle in her backpack.
Ellen lives in a residential neighborhood in Valby. It’s not that far from where Sonja lives, and she can see that the people there have means. One day they’re building tree forts for their kids, the next, architect-designed sun porches for themselves. Without Paul the Ex—i.e. a man—or a lottery win, Sonja will never end up living in such a place. It may be sour grapes, she knows, but the area makes her queasy: the outsized carports, the extensions, the way otherwise decent single-family houses have sprouted extra rooms and grown into middle-class mansions. Sonja notes with a touch of relief that Ellen doesn’t have a carport. She’s parked out on the street, waiting.
Ellen’s car is silver, and she’s wearing hiking clothes and shoes.
“So great that you wanted to join us.”
Car interiors often smell a bit stale, but not Ellen’s. And it looks like it’s been vacuumed.
“Is this new?” asks Sonja.
“Depends how you define new.”
Sonja glances quickly in the back to size it up. There’s a blanket and pillow, and then Ellen pulls out from the curb without checking her blind spot. They’re underway, and it’s muggy out. Ellen says that the weather made it hard to pick what to wear. It’s mild in that way that might mean rain, and there’s a crucifix dangling from the rearview mirror. It’s studded with imitation jewels and swings rather frenetically compared to the motion of the automobile.