by Dorthe Nors
“Done!” says Frank.
So she must be sitting next to him on the couch, Sonja thinks. Kate must be sitting on the couch, not knowing what to say to me.
The conversation’s over, but it persists in Sonja like a downpour. A feeling of sorrow percolates down through her, seeping in and out of her internal organs, picking up pebble and gravel on its way. She doesn’t cry, she can’t let it get that far, but within her there seems to be a rattling; from little stones, from stalks, from days where it never quits. Inside her the sky empties itself in slow, unresolving fashion, and there isn’t anything worth naming in the fridge. Then she looks out into the backyard. There isn’t anything worth naming in the backyard either, except for the owls. The owls are there to keep the pigeons off the balconies, and they’re plastic, the owls are, but the pigeons don’t know that, and besides: who told the neighbors that owls are prophylactic? After all, the neighbors have fled nature to sit and drink beer on their balconies. They’ve all got a plastic owl on the balustrade, and the owls are supposed to frighten, intimidate. She supposes they got the idea from the exterminator brochures. Most people have forgotten what it was like, thinks Sonja, remembering the color of the moss among the ranks of fir. The dry stones, the grass, the gravel roads. The bald tires and silage. The sweet smell of silage, yes, and the dead piglets on the manure pile. Chickens with gizzards full of grit. Round bales in the rain, and there were hideouts everywhere and with them kids, and down at Super Aage’s you’d often find his wife behind the counter. She’d stand there and snoop in people’s purchases. She interpreted what was in the shopping carts according to signs and counsel, and she knew who was having their period. She knew who’d stopped having periods. Who drank. Who put too much gelatin in the lemon mousse. Smoking habits, crossword preferences. The woman knew everything, and she wouldn’t give kids credit on sweets. You could have any piece of candy in the world for just 5 øre, but she didn’t do charity, and Sonja remembers Kate standing outside the store, waiting for the bus. Kate, standing over by the bus stop in new jeans. Her ass has always looked good in tight pants. She’s standing with Bacon Bjarne, even though he wouldn’t be called that till later. She sleeps with him twice a week. She’s said so herself, and Sonja believes it, for she’s heard them in the attic. Now they’re standing at the bus stop with fingers interlaced. Kate can’t be more than fifteen, but she doesn’t have time to waste, and Sonja’s standing there with her bike. Perhaps it’s Saturday. They have no plans. Or rather, Sonja’s got no plans, and then the bus comes. Bjarne and Kate vanish on board, and Sonja bikes out of Balling, heading home. She bikes the route she usually bikes after school. It’s a boring route to bike. Sonja pretends that she can’t look anywhere except right in front of the wheel. She rides along with her gaze drilling down into the pavement. It’s fascinating how long she dares to. The bike tire whirrs, the spokes flash. Sonja can hear the clatter of the chain. There are birds chirping, and farm machinery. Sonja’s eyes are shackled to the point in front of the wheel. She wants to bike like this the entire way home. It’s a kind of bravery, but then suddenly it’s there, by the viaduct: the car, parked on the shoulder. Sonja slams bang into it. She strikes the rear of the car and flies over her handlebars. She lands halfway across the trunk. The first thing she thinks is that you should never destroy other people’s property. The second thing she thinks is that it hurts. Then she hears someone laughing. Two men and a woman are standing on the shoulder. It’s the couple who live in the house by the viaduct and a man Sonja doesn’t know. They laugh and say funny things while they lift up Sonja’s bike. There’s blood on her hand, and the wife asks about it briefly, but shame propels Sonja back up on her bike. She rides home with one hand on the handlebars, down the gravel driveway, into the farmyard, into the hallway, nobody home, outside again and into the rye, deep into the rye, and there she lays herself down with her hand raised. Cries.
Sonja’s crying now. She’s sitting in the window and looking at the manufactured owls. She doesn’t understand the weeping, but a vision of Kate’s ass by the bus clings doggedly to it. A kind of happiness in passing, Sonja thinks, and she tears off a paper towel. Kate got everything she wanted, Sonja thinks, and in the order she wanted it. Kate’s never colored outside the lines, she thinks, for now she feels sorry for herself. The weeping feels like concern, and the concern reaches her belly. It loosens her jaw, and it’s nice in a way, so it’s welcome to continue. But then it can’t continue anyway. Sonja runs dry, and now she’s sitting there in the window and weighing whether to go over and lie in the cemetery. A pair of sunglasses, a blanket, then just head over to the cemetery and lie down. But over there it’s the same old grind, thinks Sonja, and she looks at her hand. An ordinary hand, a woman’s hand. You can’t tell by looking at it that it had once been broken.
11.
Dear Kate,
So I’m going to try a letter anyway. Don’t let that confuse you. I’ve got to spend the time doing something, ha-ha! The other day, I was out driving with my new instructor and we got to talking about Bjarne—you know, Bacon Bjarne. It’s weird that he bought the family farm. He slapped you, back when you broke up with him. I’m sure we all remember that, but I know—it’s so long ago now, and Bjarne always did have a sensitive ego. Yet to have to sniff the shite from the neighborhood asshole every day, Kate, and then put a brave face on it—that takes grit. For Frank too. That is, if he knows about the two of you. Over here, the big thing is to find your market segment and blend in, to not stand out, to become a chameleon and then flee all other social relations. I miss sticking by someone. Like a burr. I want to be as unshakable as kin, for over here it’s all teflon, and I’m sorry I said that about the dead landscape up at Bjarne’s. It’s just that you’re my sister …
Sonja fills both sides of the paper. Now she has to decide if it’s worth bending down and fishing a fresh sheet out of the printer. She could have written a postcard. That would have created a natural limit. There were four postcards of heather in the discount pack. But maybe it doesn’t matter; Sonja won’t ever send what she’s written, so there’s no reason to waste postcards. Suddenly I might have to attend a party, she thinks, and then of course I’ll stand there needing a card. Even if no one throws parties anymore. In Copenhagen, the parties have turned into receptions. People in stilettos and loafers, with wine and toothpicked hors d’oeuvres, stumbling around and having negligible conversations with each other. Their mouths pointing one way while their eyes are already sidling over to the next little group. And though the guests all belong to the same segment, which makes conversation cookie cutter, there’s hierarchy in that hooey, and Kate wouldn’t understand how that kind of thing grinds a person down.
The window’s open. It’s hot, much too hot. Something lies smoldering on the horizon, not really aspiring to anything. In a little while, the letter to Kate will be lying in the wastepaper basket. Mostly it’s a question of flushing things from your system. As long as they remain in your body, they generate confusion. Ellen would understand that, and maybe Molly too.
Sonja writes some more on the letter. She takes a new sheet of paper and adds a couple of scenes from her daily life, a couple of comments about Mom and Dad, then ends by repeating that it makes her sad that she and Kate don’t talk anymore. Hugs & affection, your sister.
Sonja regards the letter and wonders how well Kate remembers that she broke up with Bjarne during a country fair, or that he was pickled, which led to her getting that slap behind the clubhouse. That was it, a limp slap. Not enough to give her a shiner or anything, just the sort of thing that Sonja supposes any love life brings in its train. Only the gods know what people put up with over the years, but when Kate’s home alone, there are too many such things haunting the crawl space. They’re not easy to live with, day in, day out, and her irrational fears drive Frank up into the turbines. It drives him into planes bound for Africa, and then he stands there feeling lonely. He could sit down among the baobabs with his canteen, yes,
he could sit down and sing. He could find himself, there on the savannah, but Kate’s packed his bags with clean underwear and a dread of Ebola. Ebola, malaria, avian flu. So fear dwells cheek by jowl with Frank in his safari tent, though Kate wouldn’t have it any other way. That the past contains stones we can use to build a bridge to a better future—Kate doesn’t buy it. And that’s probably just fine, Sonja thinks, since the compulsion of ordinary people to remember every detail didn’t really catch on until Ellen and Molly turned up. Then it was all supposed to come out: the bloody hangnails, the botched intimate shave. The gingivitis, the cramps, the fear of insufficiency, the limp beery slaps and concomitant shiners—the whole kit and caboodle. Out into the light with that dreck! Out with it!
But who is Sonja to preach? Sonja, who can’t recall what the woman in the curry tunic promised her in the way of misfortune as she stood leaning against the fridge. If you don’t believe in the occult, you can’t guard against it, Sonja realizes. And if you do believe, you’re in deep shit, and how could Mom and Dad actually let him buy the farm, Bacon Bjarne? How pragmatic are people allowed to be? For if you swallow it all you’re going to explode in the end, and she recalls the piglets that broke out of their sty once and got into the feed concentrate: how they lay out there on the walkway in the barn like dead little time bombs. But those days are gone. The piglets no longer escape from their sties, and apartment blocks are sprouting up in Sonja’s vista like Lego bricks. The S-train croons underground, and she feels pain in her hip, her neck, the joint of her shoulder.
What I need is action, Sonja thinks. I need something that pokes up from the horizontal. Some buoyancy, some catastrophe.
Sonja opens the drawer. In it nestles the dust jacket from Gösta’s last book, and under the dust jacket lie the envelopes. Sonja takes one and writes Kate and Frank’s address on it. She has the address in her head, and then it’s into the envelope with the letter she’s written. On with the postage. It moves quickly from A4 sheet to potential catastrophe. Buoyancy, thinks Sonja. Action!
It’s only when she’s standing in the shopping center a short while later, pondering what to have for supper, that she comes to her senses. She can’t send that letter. And it’s not because of the business with Bjarne. It’s the way Sonja expresses herself—indeed, the letter’s very tone will interpose new distances between her and Kate. Like the time with the dead landscape between the equipment shed and the piggery. The time with the Devil and the absent chickens, and that’s the problem: the things Sonja says and the way she says them.
Sonja can’t stop smiling. The sizzle in her words frees up her jaw, and out in front of the clothing store for plus-size women, someone’s parked a child. The child’s sitting in a stroller, and its mother’s begun to look at big clothes. The kid, who can’t be more than three, has a bag of raisin buns that it’s been plowing through. It’s got bun sticking to its face and especially its fingers. Bun clings to the small creature, and some sort of cold is present as well. The kid’s been commixing crumbs and raisin gook with oronasal secretions. It sounds as if it can’t breathe on account of snot and pastry. Somewhere over by the store entrance, the mom’s stuck her head down into a bin with king-size lingerie, and somewhere in Sonja’s vicinity, the child freezes with a bun at mouth level. It has caught sight of Sonja and is staring at her, just like Sonja’s staring at it. There’s no sense in claiming it’s a pretty child. But Sonja can’t shake the memory of the piglets on the walkway in the barn. How they lay toppled there with their white distended bellies. How they were dead; how Sonja couldn’t make them alive again. She asked her father if they couldn’t find a way to bring them back to life. Since death was frightening, and she didn’t understand the meaning of forever. She was begging him to cover up the truth, but Dad said there was nothing they could do. Time only moved forward. “They’ll just have to go into the ground,” he said. But it wasn’t true; they didn’t go into the ground. They were just dumped onto the manure pile, and over a long period of time Sonja witnessed how white turned to black, and how a couple of them ended up in fact exploding, and it was fascinating, unbearable. The piglets had done something stupid by gorging on concentrate. But the consequences of this minor mistake were terrible, and it was a short time later that she wheedled her way into Indre Mission, but that didn’t help, thinks Sonja, and now she walks over to the child. She squats down beside it. The two of them are screened by a rack of clothing, sizes L to XXXXL, and the child’s bun hesitates at its mouth.
“Did someone get some raisin buns?”
The child’s eyes skitter around for its mother.
“That’s a mighty big bag anyway.”
The child flings itself backward to catch a glimpse of its mother.
Sonja whispers, “Watch out you don’t eat too many,” and then she stands upright and glances over at the mother.
“Quite the little sweetheart you have here,” she tells her.
The mother smiles and says thank you.
“Pretty too,” Sonja says.
12.
SONJA’S LYING DOWN, her feet sticking out over the end of the table. She’s naked except for her panties, and she gives herself props for actually turning up. After the business out in the deer park, she could have easily chosen to play ostrich. It would have been much simpler to change masseuses than to show up today with that knot in her right shoulder. But take away the interpretive zeal and Ellen’s a brilliant masseuse.
“I simply couldn’t find you guys again,” says Sonja.
“Couldn’t you just have peed behind a tree?” asks Ellen.
“I suppose so. But then it started to thunder and I’ve got a problem with peeing outside. I can’t do it anymore, I’m too scared of being caught.”
Sonja sends a thought to Balling’s dogs, to its dogs and their owners. If your dog had an accident, you would normally rub its nose in it. You wanted to teach it a lesson and keep it from a repeat offense. But the teaching method also rubbed off on those who witnessed it, and Sonja’s noticed of late how she checks the lock twice when using a strange bathroom. From fear of someone suddenly opening the door. Of them seeing her squatting there, in the middle of her accident. Truth be told, she prefers trees and bushes, but she can’t tell Ellen that. Not now.
“Once I was in Jutland on the edge of a lake,” Sonja tells her. “I was at this convent, working on something of Gösta’s, but most of the time I lay on a dock and read poems on the sly. But then this one time I had to pee, and it was a long way up to the restrooms. There’s this path that runs along the shore, where people take their Sunday strolls, but there wasn’t anyone on it just then. So I decided to squat behind this little boat shed and pee with my back to the path. Then I squatted there, and boy did I have to pee. I couldn’t finish, and Jutlanders are stealthy when they’re on a stroll. Especially if they’re golden oldies, and that’s who came along then. I wasn’t able to stop peeing, but there was nothing wrong with my reflexes, I pulled up my panties and took a step forward and nearly fell into the lake, which happened to be one of Denmark’s deepest. It was just like a Norwegian fjord, it got ice cold a mere inch under the surface before going on down for another hundred feet of murk and mire.”
Sonja can’t see Ellen, but she can hear that she’s smiling.
“So you could say I have a pee trauma,” Sonja adds, and then Ellen laughs.
Finally. That’s good, that’s dandy. Now they’re on the same side again—the side of laughter and massage. Sonja flatters herself that she can feel it in the way Ellen’s hands stroke her back, and how they go down into the shoulder joint. Which is tense.
“Any clue how you got so stiff in the shoulder?” Ellen asks.
“Probably because I changed driving instructors.”
Ellen’s over the moon. She squeezes both Sonja’s shoulders and says she considers the change of instructors a breakthrough in Sonja’s treatment.
Her treatment?
“Actually, I’ve been thinking that it’
s a step forward too,” Sonja says. “Even though Jytte’s still at the school, you know, and my new driving instructor …”
It seems to Sonja that, in the floor’s knotty landscape, Mickey Mouse is moving. It’s that dog again. He’s supposed to come when called, but he won’t.
“Yes? What’s up with the new instructor?”
“Nothing, except that of course he’s supposed to teach me how to shift gears, and when he taught me last time, he had to hold my hand.”
Even though you’re usually supposed to read something into everything at Ellen’s, Ellen tells her that she shouldn’t read anything into it.
“But I’m confused about my role as student,” Sonja says. “Apart from the sexual subtext, Folke’s not quite your run-of-the-mill driving instructor.”
“Do you like him?” asks Ellen, rubbing vigorously.
“I like that he’s his own man,” says Sonja. “The rest of him interests me very little.”
“But what about your love life? If I may be so bold.”
In fact, that’s something Ellen may not be. Besides, Sonja thinks, you’re one to talk. You don’t look like someone who’s being waited on hand and foot. That gaze of yours, those cosmic escape attempts—it’s obvious you’re hungry, and there’s nothing you’d like better than to be bedazzled and swept away. And people in glass houses … That’s what Sonja thinks, and Molly’s another one who’s always on about other people’s love lives. They ought to be like hers, ideally. But Molly’s love life is chaotic, it’s anxious and busy throwing a monkey wrench into the status quo, without letting the status quo get suspicious. There are periods when she has workers coming over all the time. The house belonging to Molly and the lawyer is always being overrun by workers—to say nothing of shamans and fortune tellers. These types let Molly cut corners in her life, while Molly’s clients at the clinic are supposed to take the hard way. “To hell and back is good for the soul,” Molly says, but she won’t have any of it herself. Each time her existential angst threatens to suck her down into a childhood pool of sour whey, Molly gets carpenters to go over all the windows in Hørsholm. Plumbers, painters, and chimneysweeps for the practical bits, New Age drummers for the rest. Then the shadow theater’s under control, but at night the curtain rises on a second act. Then Molly lies there, unable to remember her lines. She’s sweating, and maybe it’s anxiety, maybe it’s menopause. In any case it’s unpleasant, and so in the morning, when the lawyer’s driven off to the office, she rings for a plumber, because then the faucet will work. It mustn’t drip, no, and the heart-shaped face mustn’t be spoiled, and now she’s ready for clinic. The clinic’s located in the basement of the Hørsholm house. The moment Molly steps over the threshold, she’s filled with perspective and compassionate insight. She needn’t go any farther than the driveway, where her rhododendrons lack the acidic soil they require for growth, for the madness to take hold, but in the clinic she has colored chalk, scented candles, and power over someone she thinks knows less.