by Dorthe Nors
“How long have you had a driver’s license?” Sonja asks.
“Oh, since I was about thirty,” Ellen replies.
“Did you find it easy to get?”
“Well, it wasn’t that hard.”
The car picks up speed and they head down a combination exit and entrance ramp, and in theory Folke had said that they’re the most dangerous, so Sonja keeps still. She observes Ellen’s feet down by the pedals, her diligent hands, and there’s nothing to be afraid of. Ellen has a practical bent, Sonja reminds herself; she’s the type that has a grasp of the tangible. She also thinks I should form my hands like a funnel over my head so the universe can dribble energy into me, which means she’s got a grasp of the intangible too.
“I think it’s hard learning to drive. But you know that,” says Sonja. “For instance, I can’t shift gears.”
Ellen’s obligated to maintain confidentiality, and Sonja feels naked and nervous. In actuality, Ellen’s not supposed to say anything outside the clinic about what she’s heard inside, and now they sit here and have to establish the bounds between professional intimacy and what people ordinarily talk about. Ellen’s sworn an oath of confidentiality, something that someone like Jytte could learn a thing or two from, but the borders are ill defined. Sonja doesn’t know what to say. She takes the water bottle from her bag while Ellen makes small talk and passes eighteen-wheelers. It’s not easy being a patient in your private relationships. Sonja’s never liked being someone who has to be taken in hand and assisted. In fact, she’s always shied away from others demanding she adapt. Kate was especially meddlesome when they were younger. “Quit your whining,” she’d say as she plucked Sonja’s eyebrows, for brows ought to sit high, near the hairline, and the hair in front ought to be permed, and shoes and trousers ought to match the rest of the class’s, and then here would come Sonja in her yellow clogs. Or worse yet: she and her yellow clogs would disappear into places they should not be. “She’s been sitting out in the rye again, Dad,” Kate would say, hauling her tall sister into the kitchen. Then Sonja would get an earful, because one shouldn’t in God’s good name be sitting out in the rye. The rye isn’t a playground, it’s there to be harvested, and it could be perilous as well if she fell asleep and the combine were to suddenly come upon her. “But I really don’t sleep out there,” she’d protest. “What do you do, then?” Kate would ask.
Sonja was never able to explain. Not to Dad, not to Kate, and she’s always had a feeling that that was what reduced her to an oddball.
Sonja sucks on her bottle, Ellen jabbers away, and the freeway rushes off behind them. Darkness is gathering in the south and it looks like thunder. “Thunder in the south, bring in the cow,” Dad would say, and he was right. Sonja doesn’t get the logic behind it, but of course it’s something meteorological. These days, what she knows most about is how to cast bodies in ditches. Bodies thrown in ditches, the deep woods, lime pits, landfills. Mutilated women and children lying and rotting everywhere on Scandinavian public land. Now and then Sonja takes the train over Øresund strait to traipse around in Sweden, but she’s never stumbled across a corpse over there. It’s curious, when you think about how many people die a violent death in Ystad alone.
“You read crime novels too?” asks Sonja during a nervous pause.
Ellen does, she must confess. She loves a good crime story. She’s read all the novels by Stieg Larsson, and she’s also read one by Gösta Svensson.
“Now, I do prefer Stieg Larsson,” she says, but that must only be because, during her last massage, Sonja blamed Gösta for wrecking her wrists. For naturally, Ellen must be wild about Gösta. A big reason for Gösta’s success is his tight grip on women. The tweed jacket and the way he’s always photographed in the rain.
Sonja’s jaw tenses. It’s especially the right side, which is having a hard time relaxing. Ellen’s also talking too much, and it’s mostly about what she had for dinner yesterday and which greengrocers in Valby to steer clear of. She also says that the wrong-way drivers you sometimes hear about on the freeway are in fact suicides. They’re just like the people who ram into viaducts and concrete pillars without wearing seatbelts. Wrong-way drivers belong to the tribe who don’t want to take responsibility, who don’t want anyone to think they did it on purpose. That’s the way they think, and Sonja massages the hinge of her jaw a bit. It usually helps with a little water and a menthol drop, but she doesn’t have any more of the latter, so she makes do with sloshing some water around her mouth. It eases the ache, and the trip’s been a quick one because before she knows it, Ellen’s turning into the parking lot by Klampenborg Station.
“Well, here we are, then,” Ellen says, and she gets out and stands on the pavement. “The others are waiting by the café.”
Ellen doesn’t need to point; Sonja knows Klampenborg Station well. She has a secret affection for Bakken, the old amusement park that lies adjacent to the deer park. There’s a bakery there where you can eat big wedges of cake at a very reasonable price. It reeks a bit of urine from the bathrooms in the back, but that’s all right, because Bakken has a homey air. It’s not something that Sonja would be able to explain to Ellen, who was born in Vesterbro before it got hip, and whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were all born well within Copenhagen’s tangle of streets and buildings.
Ellen’s the one who came up with the idea of meditative hikes. She and a girlfriend figured out the choreography and agreed to activate their network. Now she looks like she’s heading into an oral exam, thinks Sonja, who has an urge to take Ellen’s hand and stroke it a couple of times. And to tell her to not be scared, of suicidal drivers or other women, but they settle for cutting across the parking lot together, backpacks swinging, and besides, who is Sonja to advise anyone? She’s got butterflies herself. And restless legs, poised for flight. She also feels a little like crying. Ellen’s insecurity is making everything wobble. A person who has her hand on the back of your heart shouldn’t be unsure.
4.
AFTER SONJA HAD LIVED in Copenhagen for a year, she discovered something. During a weekend trip back to Balling, she borrowed her mother’s bike. She wanted to go out to where the red deer were, the sky, the horizon. Out into the farthest part. But when she got there, the landscape felt empty. It was as if she were standing naked in a swim hall with the pool drained—an echo chamber, and not just any old echo chamber. It dawned on her that it must be her brain playing tricks on her, since back when she’d moved to Copenhagen, the city was overpowering. The sounds, the faces, the odors all seemed chaotic, and she remembered how she’d lain in bed with earplugs and a blindfold. Molly lay in the next room and blossomed, but Sonja had to switch off. She turned down that knob in her brain that let her take in the world at full blast, and once the knob had been turned almost all the way down, the heath, the tree plantation, and the sky overhead seemed empty of content. So she had biked home to her mother with her loss, and a hope: that a knob she could turn down was a knob she could also turn up again.
Could she?
Can she?
Now they stand here, Sonja and the other women. They stand and wait by the café at Klampenborg Station. Each one of them wears light summer clothing and sensible shoes. Somewhere behind them, the sky has started to close up. Sonja glances at the tall trees stretching across a large expanse of north Zealandic countryside. Lightning rods, as far as the eye can see. Dry grass, too many people, and no public taps. Sonja drains her water bottle. Someplace in the distance, she can hear the loud shrieks of someone being swept high in the air.
“And here we have Sonja, who’s new.”
Ellen’s decidedly nervous, and Sonja doesn’t like it.
“We’ll go up to the deer park first,” Ellen says, “and I’ll give you instructions once we’re up there. Anita will be helping me today.”
A small blond woman with round cheeks raises her hand. She’s placed herself behind the flock, ready to drive them forward.
“Let’s go!”
And so they do. They walk chattering and laughing from the station to where the deer park starts. Ellen waves them in and out among the horse droppings, and after a couple of hundred yards she guides them onto a small path. There they halt.
“What we’re going to do now is hike in silence,” Ellen begins. “Anita will walk behind you, so you don’t get lost in the back. While we’re walking, we’re going to open our senses to nature. Touch the moss. Pluck the grass, smell the bark, and so on. I think you should also try to make yourself heavy in the pelvis. Shift all your body weight down into your pelvis and let it bear you. It should be as if you’re seated within yourself and walking at the same time.”
The women seat themselves in their pelvises and move their arms in big circles that Ellen sketches in the air. The women’s arms swoop and caper and look like the necks of whooper swans when Sonja would sit out in the farthest part. They’d raise their beaks, the swans, and the organ pipes in their throats would sound so mournful. Not like the call of the bittern, which was more like when the wind sang in the green bottles Sonja had hung in the bird cherry. That sound was as if it came from an unknown place beneath the bird, beneath Sonja, while the whooper swans lifted the landscape up. Oh, those long necks, Sonja thinks, rotating her wrists, which is as much as she can manage. She’d weep a little if she were alone, but she isn’t, of course. She’s captive in the situation, and now Ellen shakes out her arms to indicate the exercise is over.
“Anita and I have been out to reconnoiter,” she says. “We’ve found a suitable clearing, deeper in the park. When we get there, I’ll guide you through a meditation. I hope you’ve brought something for your behinds?”
The women point at their backpacks.
“Questions?”
There are several things Sonja would like to know, but first she needs to get a grip on herself, and then they start walking. The women all walk into the deer park. Ellen foremost, Anita at the rear, and between them seven women plus Sonja. She tries to draw a bit to the side, but it’s hard to be part of a group without appearing to be part of a group. And the women are off to a strong start. The first ones have bent over to gather twigs. A short-haired woman has peeled some bark from a tree and is sniffing it. The women begin to inspire each other. The ways one can experience nature through the senses spread. They’ve walked two hundred yards and the earth has been scratched, fingers have been sniffed, bush and berry squeezed.
Even Sonja’s found a cushion of moss. She walks around with cushion in hand so that it looks as if she’s taking part. The moss feels wet underneath, she can feel the dampness on her palm, and she sniffs the cushion too; it smells of sex, she thinks. Yes, it smells of composting toilets, school camps, secret forts. It smells of the upholstery in scrapped automobiles, the sour tops of fruit juice bottles, and children in grungy undies. She recalls how the old gravel road led in among the firs. Moss grew in the middle, while in the wheel ruts, the stones floundered round in the sand. It wasn’t easy to walk in the ruts without losing your footing. But you could walk in the middle, among the dry stalks and tufts of heather—that she remembers. So that’s where you walked, and perhaps it was winter, say. First through the tree plantation, then out onto the large section where the sky took hold. Overhead, the universe opened up, and she was traipsing through the landscape in her yellow clogs. Dad had bought them for her at the clog maker in Balling. Actually, she would have rather had some red clogs, but everyone else had bought red ones, so the clog maker only had yellow ones left. At the clog maker in Balling, kids got toffees stuck between their fingers. “Put your hand on the counter,” the clog maker would say, and then you were supposed to spread your fingers. The clog maker would stuff toffees between your fingers, toffees that he’d bought cheap down in Germany. The webs of your fingers tensed taut and white. Toffees green, yellow, red, jammed there between your fingers; but there were different kinds of grown-ups. And different kinds of kids. Sonja, for instance, would often sit on a tussock out in the middle of nowhere. Or else she’d sit out in the rye. There was something out there. Something she can’t explain to a living soul in Copenhagen, and she can’t explain it to Kate either. For Kate, Balling isn’t a reason to disappear but a good argument to never leave, and out in the farthest part there were whooper swans. In the winter they’d gather to sing. They might fly out across the plantation but they always came back, and when they came back, the birds that had stayed there on the ground sang to them, and Sonja made her mouth into an O because she wanted to sing along too.
But now she’s a grown-up, and it is memory that opens for her. For the landscape won’t.
Sonja casts aside the cushion of moss; she has to pee. The bottle of water from the car has run right through her, and she lets herself sift back through the flock. Normally, she’d prefer to squat behind a trunk, a bush. But Anita doesn’t know, does she, if Sonja’s the type who can only pee in a toilet. Sonja signals that she needs to relieve herself and Anita points into the nearest thicket. Sonja shakes her head; she cannot pee outdoors.
“Just try,” Anita whispers.
“It’s no use,” Sonja whispers back, and she suggests running up to Bakken instead.
Anita says they really can’t wait for her. Sonja says that’s not a problem, she can just catch up with them.
“But we’ve found a secret clearing.”
“I know the deer park like the back of my hand.”
Anita’s at a loss, but Sonja can’t wait.
“I’ve really got to go!” she whispers, and feints around Anita.
Sonja runs then, runs in the direction of Bakken. She’s got long limbs; her legs are thin, her arms ditto. She’s just shy of five eleven. Her hair’s cut short, her breasts are small, her eyes big and blue. “You’re such a fighter,” her mother always said, as if it were some comfort. And it is, for Sonja can keep up the pace, and she keeps it up now. She keeps it up all the way into Bakken. There’s actually a toilet by the entrance, but Sonja continues right on into the amusement park. The smell of popcorn descends upon her. Soft ice cream hangs sticky in the air, and she sets her course for The Blue Coffeepot, running a gauntlet of happy Sunday visitors. Tattoos are being aired on shoulders, ankles, and patches of lower back. There are balloons, burgers and papier-mâché façades. The visitors catapult into the air, shrieking, the sky squeaks and squeals. It’s one big popular cliché. “A horrible hodgepodge,” Molly calls it. “The only reason to go to Bakken is to laugh at the riffraff,” she says, since now she’s raised herself so far above the losers that she lives in Hørsholm, but it isn’t true; Sonja doesn’t go to Bakken to distance herself from anyone. She goes there to feel at home, and now she enters the bakery with the giant blue coffeepot and leans over the counter.
“I’m going to order, but first I have to use the restroom—if that’s okay?”
It is, and Sonja walks over to the rear of the eating area. She ducks under festoons of plastic beech leaves and steps into the laminated restroom. Here she finds a cubicle with a working lock. They had similar ones at Central Grammar in Balling, where she often went to the girls’ bathroom with Marie. There they would sit, each in her own stall, and pee. Sometimes Sonja would try to be funny, and she would sing, “There burbles a spring, there babbles a brook,” until Marie giggled over on her side of the divider. Once, when they were all supposed to see the nurse, Marie had forgotten to bring her urine sample from home. She was given a used foil container that had held liver pâté and told to pee in it. Sonja went with her out to the restroom. She distinctly remembers how Marie grimaced with the foil container between her legs. Marie was mortified that her mother had forgotten she was supposed to bring pee from home.
There was usually no shortage of pee in Balling, Sonja recalls as she sits there in the stall. There was pee on the fields, in the kids’ beds, behind the clubhouse and in the shrubbery behind the picnic area. And whenever a dog peed on the floor, the owner went over and made sure to rub its nose in it. That’s what you
did. It was a kind of pedagogy, thinks Sonja, and there was probably something to learn from it. She certainly learned something, she thinks as she wipes herself and remembers the women out in the deer park. Their bodies are rocking from side to side on the gravel paths, but Sonja’s escaped. Ellen’s finding a clearing away from the crowds—Sonja’s not there—and now they sit cross-legged, yes, Ellen’s sitting there perched on a piece of fleece; the gray hair at her temples damp with sweat, her eyes probing. She’s explained to the others that they’re to breathe with their abdomens. They’re all to close their eyes and focus on their breathing. Silence does them good. Conscious presence opens the now. Yet it’s difficult to be present in the now. There’s always something tugging you away. A spot itches, or you’re afraid of ticks. Or the red deer. The stags will soon come into rut. Then they’ll stalk around by the Hermitage Palace and bellow and stink. They’ll roll in wallows and prowl about for hinds to mount. They can be violent—no, not violent, brutal. No, aggressive. No, territorial.
Stags are territorial.
Sonja washes her hands and pushes the door open with her foot. She crosses the bakery. At the display with slices of layer cake, she picks the piece with the most whipped cream. She’ll have some coffee too, thanks, and then she seats herself in a corner. She digs out her phone and starts texting: Hi Ellen. Had to use the bathroom. Couldn’t find you guys again—I’m such a bumblehead. I’m taking the train back, it’s no problem. Sorry!
The cake tastes better once she’s sent the text. In front of the bakery, people gather with their water bottles, sweating. The sky’s taken on a sulfurous sheen, and on the other side of the small alley between the bakery and the carrousel, a kid’s lucked out. She’s been allowed to take a helicopter ride. The helicopter’s small and blue and it plunges, up and down, up and down, up and down.