by Dorthe Nors
“Thank you!” Sonja shouts after him, but there’s no telling if he hears it as he rounds the corner.
She focuses on a bay window in the building across the street. In the window is a potted plant, and next to the plant is a birdcage. In the cage sits a bird, and the bird is yellow. It hangs by its beak, and maybe it isn’t a bird. You can buy birds made of kapok that are stone dead from the get-go. And now I’ve got a potential conflict with Folke, Sonja thinks, for now she’s late. She can’t make the excuse that she got dizzy.
She can never ever tell Folke that she gets dizzy.
16.
JYTTE’S DRIVEN OFF, the coast is clear, and Sonja’s seated herself cautiously in Folke’s car. While Folke fusses with her driving school papers, she places her hand on the gearstick. She wants to be certain of where it is, for it’s important not to look down too much while driving. She squeezes the head of the gearstick in her palm and goes over the gears’ H-pattern. No diagonals, no diagonals. Then she feels Folke’s hand on top of hers; it’s warm, and he squeezes gently.
“In this shop, we show up on time.”
A mild warmth flows from Folke’s hand, but she’s not sure she likes it. It makes her feel weak about the throat and no, she doesn’t like it. In another context, perhaps, but she’s paying to learn to drive, not to sit here and be intimate.
“Yes, I’m sorry about that,” Sonja says while her hand scoots away from under Folke’s like a flatfish beneath a flip-flop. “But I brought a few books for you. They’re on the backseat. They’re for your wife—you told me she likes to read.”
Folke flips down his sunglasses and goes through Sonja’s papers again. He also fishes a bag of gummy bears out of the passenger door. They’re from a student who forgot their papers for a lesson. That’s the rule: it costs a bag of Haribos if you forget. Sonja declines a bear, and it’s only now with his mouth full of them that Folke twists around for the books. His bald pate’s had some sun this weekend. It also looks like he’s trimmed his beard. So they must have been at the cottage, thinks Sonja. The foot doctor sitting there with Gösta, while Folke sat and gazed out across the ocean. He’s the type who can sit and stare across an ocean for a long time, Sonja thinks, as Folke pokes a finger into the book bag.
“You’re looking a bit stiff,” he says, and he leaves the books lying on the backseat.
“Crick in the neck.”
Sonja’s pushed back her seat. She’s got her head in an upright position. The next hour’s all about not killing anyone, she thinks. She just has to drive as quietly as possible. Turn your entire body when you look back at your blind spot, she tells herself, while Folke tells her that Thai massage is supposed to help. He’s got that on Jytte’s authority, because she drives with a Thai woman named Pakpao, and Pakpao’s good at Thai massage. Sometimes Jytte gets this incredible pain in a spot right between her shoulder blades, and Pakpao doesn’t always have enough money for lessons, so sometimes they turn off onto a side street.
“It might not be legal,” Folke says, “but out here in the real world, we solve problems where they crop up.”
Sonja focuses on a fixed point, an Aldi sign a bit farther down the street. If her world hadn’t been reduced to the one commandment not to kill, perhaps she’d tell Folke that it can’t be fair that Pakpao’s always forced to pay in kind, but Sonja shall not kill, she shall not kill, and what business of hers is the back of Jytte’s heart anyway?
“Today we’re going to hit the highway,” says Folke.
Sonja stares at the Aldi sign. Then her gaze drifts with a blue patch of sky across the roofs of Frederiksberg’s buildings.
“We’re going to go out and give it some oats,” says Folke.
Sonja’s tried driving on the freeway before, that’s not the problem. She likes the fact that freeways are straight, and that’s especially good news today. But she also knows that they’re full of blind spots. She and Jytte once drove the stretch between Folehaven and Vallensbæk, and Sonja hasn’t forgotten the feeling of suicide every time Jytte yelled, “Change lanes goddammit, turleff, TURLEFF!”
“But I’ve only gotten to fourth gear,” says Sonja.
“And today we’ll get to fifth, maybe even sixth,” says Folke, rubbing his hands together.
As if he wished to warm them up.
Sonja starts the car, and she looks back in her blind spot by twisting her entire upper body. Her head for God’s sake must not rotate on its own.
“A smaller turn would do the trick just fine,” says Folke.
“Yes, but there’s no harm in being thorough,” says Sonja, who’s feeling anxious.
No, it’s fear. It sings in her ears. The tiny stones have torn free inside. They scud about in dingy fluid like the snow in a globe from Himmelbjerget, and once Sonja bought just such a snow globe. It was on a trip to Himmelbjerget in third grade. Dad didn’t think she should have any money along on the trip. “Surely not at that age,” he said, but when he wasn’t looking, Mom put some money in Sonja’s pocket. “Buy something on Himmelbjerget,” she said, and then Sonja bought a snow globe with the paddleboat Hjejlen inside. It stood inside a cabinet so that Kate couldn’t see it. Or Dad. But sometimes before she fell asleep, Sonja would take out the snow globe and give it a good shake. Then the tiny white flakes fluttered around in the viscous liquid. Hjejlen was moored in Lake Jul, and around Lake Jul the beeches were always in leaf. But then the snow squall would come, and a storm of dandruff would settle over the landscape. It was nothing special, yet still there was something in the metamorphosis that Sonja loved, and then last winter she was in Stockholm. A Gösta seminar, where Gösta was supposed to tell people how his books should be translated. And as if that wasn’t enough, he’d also wanted to tell them how the books should be written, and at one point he told them that the crime commissioner ought to have a quirk. Kvørk is how Gösta said it. The commissioner ought to have a kvørk, an idiosyncratic penchant for chewing matchsticks or collecting toy cars. On top of his kvørk, the commissioner ought to drink and have family problems, preferably with a daughter. And like a good father, Gösta was sharing this sort of thing with his translators, translators who covered large swaths of Europe. Most of these translators had been educated at venerable universities, but the knowledge they’d acquired there was of no use anymore. During their lunches, Gösta told them about the house on Gotland, the picture windows, and the prospect out onto the real Sweden. They were long days, so in the evenings, Sonja would walk around the old city center. There in a window she saw a display of snow globes, big ones. Inside the globes there were castles, and landscapes of majesty such as you would only encounter in America. Sonja stood arrested before the shop window. She laid her forehead against the glass. How her hands yearned to touch the spheres, to take them home, keep them secret in her cabinet. To shake them. Yes, to shake them and ascertain that reality could turn into fairy tale with just a little jiggling.
Or into nightmare, thinks Sonja at the stoplight she’s pulled up to. The light is red, and in a moment she’ll proceed. Out onto the freeway with her absence of body, and Folke’s hands.
“Nope, it’s no picnic having a crick in your neck like that,” he says.
“It comes and goes,” says Sonja. “It’s the deskwork,” she says, and the light turns green.
Sonja drives slowly in the direction of the nearest on ramp. She says again that the stiffness in her neck is due to her work posture. Then she hasn’t said too much, hasn’t said too little. It’s best that Folke knows to be extra attentive on her behalf, now when they’re about to head out into southbound traffic.
“I’m not very good at Thai massage,” says Folke, “but if you’d like me to rub anywhere, just say the word.”
No doubt this is just the way he is, but it makes Sonja press down on the accelerator, because now they’re going to drive toward Køge. It has to be gotten over with, and she’s scared, and Folke senses that and tells her she shouldn’t be. They’ve been spared the worst of t
he morning traffic, and besides, rush hour doesn’t really pose a problem anyhow. You just have to drive against the traffic. Going with rush hour traffic is hell on wheels. Going against rush hour traffic is no trouble. “The drivers are like salmon in a river,” Folke says. Køge lies someplace on the horizon of a wild fauna, and now they’re on the entrance ramp. Now’s when it starts, the great journey. Sonja doesn’t want to think like that, but it’s tough in traffic not to think of death.
“Would you change gears for me please?” Sonja hears herself asking.
“Fiddlesticks,” says Folke, taking her hand again. “Clutch in, fourth … Fifth … And voilà, sixth. And you’re going to just stay in this lane. No passing any eighteen-wheelers. Just stay here and keep it at sixty.”
Folke raises his pelvis in his seat. His legs shoot out in the footwell of the passenger side, up rises his crotch, and then one hand works its way with difficulty into his sweatpants. While Sonja’s defying death in the right lane, Folke rummages around for something down in his sweats. It’s hard to concentrate, but then Folke pulls out a pack of licorice lozenges.
“Give me your hand,” he says.
Sonja’s staring at the rusty back doors of a white van.
“Out with your paw, Sonja,” says Folke.
She sticks out her paw.
“You’re doing great,” he says, and then she feels the lozenge on her palm at the same time that Folke flips on the stereo.
It’s Rammstein on cd. Not that Sonja can tell the difference between Rammstein and so much else, but then Folke asks her if she doesn’t love Rammstein, and what’s she supposed to say? Sonja’s into classical music, she’s into jazz and American troubadours, and there are vehicles in many lanes. Rammstein and Folke sing in unison, and the cars whizz like arrows through the morning. Cars of every color on their way south, and she’s driving through the gateway to Denmark. The road home, Sonja thinks. The road to Jutland, Europe, and Møns Klint. Oh, I’m scared.
“I really don’t know anything about music,” Sonja lies, but there are too many big trucks and junctions, there’s a licorice-chewing man riding shotgun, there are gummy bears and the speed encasing the car and all that insecurity, and then, with a lozenge in her mouth, Rammstein, sixth gear, schnell, schnell!
“Over there’s a church for the deaf,” Folke says, turning down the music a notch.
Sonja avoids looking in the direction Folke’s pointing.
“I’ve often wondered how they run their services. I mean, I understand that the minister preaches in sign language. But what about when they’re going to sing? How do you get a sanctuary full of deaf people to start the hymn at the same time?”
Sonja hangs behind the rusty van. In her rearview mirror, she can see the cab of an eighteen-wheeler. It looks like Ellen’s cat, flat and evil in the face, and it’s not good to be packed in like this. She has to get past the big vehicles. She shouldn’t just sit there and let herself get squeezed.
“Does the minister stand down in front of them and shout, ONE, TWO, THREE, AND SING?”
Sonja’s stopped breathing with her abdomen. Her breathing sits at the top of her ribcage. It’s pistoning up and down, her fingers buzzing, her nose too. The eighteen-wheeler behind her is glossy and green. The van in front of her looks as if it’s ready to have its plates confiscated. She herself is hyperventilating. She could get into a situation that she simply can’t get out of. If the lane to the left closes off. If the trucks box her in. I could find myself in a situation where the only way out is up, thinks Sonja, but there’s no escape route above the freeway. There’s only a heavy August sky, and she’s nauseous, and Folke’s slid his sunglasses up on top of his head.
“You’d imagine that a church like that full of singing deaf people would sound like hell, but it’s fascinating, and if you’d just glance back into your blind spot to the right you’ll be fine. We’re ready for the launch ramp.”
Driving instructor lingo again. Sonja doesn’t understand, and it’s dangerous not to understand.
“We’re going to look behind us,” Folke says, and he looks behind them. “Signal, signal,” he says, and he reaches across Sonja and sees to it that Sonja gets her right blinker on. “And now you can move to the right.”
Sonja blindly enters the exit ramp that drops them into a suburb of Copenhagen. She doesn’t know which suburb, and she doesn’t know where she should go. She thought they were going to Køge, but now she feels like throwing up, if only it wouldn’t make such a mess in the car. A person can also be too mellow, she thinks, and she looks carefully over at Folke. Being too mellow can be an expression of anxiety, she knows, and there sits Folke with his beard newly trimmed, phlegmatic and almost lazily slung against the side of the car. Is he stoned? she wonders. He might well be stoned.
“That went just fine,” he says.
“I was scared of being boxed in.”
“Aren’t we all?” he says, and claps her on her gear hand.
“I don’t think I’ll ever learn to drive a car,” she says, and now she can feel its onset again, the crying.
It sticks in her throat like a teasel. It’s on the point of shooting up and out of her face. Her face is a sieve that would let water trickle right out, and she has to focus to shut it off. It must not happen, but that it very nearly does is all Folke’s fault. Or is it also the fault of his small touchings, the lozenges in her palm, the scent of Magic Tree and is it suntan lotion?
“I’ve never had to give up on a student,” Folke says. “And the students I did consider dropping were almost blind.”
“I feel a bit blind too,” says Sonja.
“Afraid,” says Folke. “But that’s only natural. You have to learn to be practical in the car.”
“But I don’t have any practical intelligence.”
“You are intelligent, though. Just think about all the stuff you told me about the deer. That stuff with the exclosures, give me a break.”
Sonja’s eyes are burning, and it’s good that they’ve turned onto a quiet road with abundant greenery on both sides. It almost looks like a piece of wilderness, but it isn’t, it’s Valby Park, and Folke wants to teach her to park here. They’re also going to try backing around a corner. She could also just let the tears come, for she has the sense that Folke’s seen a bit of everything in the car, but he compliments her for her parallel parking. He says that women are good at parking. He says that women listen too much to men who claim that women can’t park. Women should stop listening to those kinds of men.
“The world’s full of dickless men,” says Folke.
But he shouldn’t say dick in the car, thinks Sonja, backing tidily around a corner. Folke claps her on the gear hand. He says that she’s driving just fine.
Yeah, I do it just fine backward, thinks Sonja. I’m best in the wrong direction, and he shouldn’t say dick in the car.
“I miss nature in Copenhagen,” she says aloud.
Folke points out at Valby Park.
“That’s not nature,” she says.
“If you keep going, on through Valby Park in the direction of South Harbor, you’ll come to Tippen. Haven’t you ever been to Tippen?”
“Don’t know what it is.”
“It’s nature, Sonja, and that’s all you’re getting for your nickel today. Time’s up.”
They’re suddenly done with practicing backing up. Now they’re in traffic again, through Copenhagen and back to headquarters. It goes well, considering. Sonja thinks she can tell she’s gotten better. She signals and twists her body in all the blind spots, mirror, shoulder, signal. The gears work, and it may be a game with Death, but it’s all done and dusted for this time, the game, and Sonja reduces her speed to turn right. A couple of cyclists whip past, and then the road’s clear. She turns into the narrow street to Folke’s Driving School.
And then there are the steps, and who have we here?
We’ve got Jytte, solid as a tank. Jytte with her heart of gold and her disappointment. Jyt
te with her kvørks.
17.
SONJA FOLLOWS THE TRACK in through the firs. It’s winter, she imagines. She’s got hiking boots on so her socks won’t get wet. The air is thick with moisture, the soil smells acidic. The needles droop dolefully on the firs, for darkness descends early in the day. Before it reaches the inland dunes the sun drops, and Sonja traipses onward. Her feet know the path they want to take. Sometimes it’s best to let her boots sweep through the tough scrub; other times it’s best to stand still. The stars are dim in the winter twilight, but visible, and the whooper swans have settled in for the winter by a small pond, farther out. She’s brought the binoculars along, she imagines, and she’s walking out to see the swans. She just has to follow the track in through the clearing, out onto the open heath, and then out past that. When she stands out on the heath, she can’t see anything. Or she can see a lot, but there are no wires here, no brick transformer towers, no silos or deer stands. She’s out beyond the reality of others, and the landscape’s welcome to start moving. Sonja’s been thinking of joining in. Now the swans are singing too. They float on their little pond and look so white in the twilight. They hymn and wheel in great arcs up across the landscape. Somewhere on the periphery, herds of deer are drifting in. She sits down on a tussock of grass and gazes down at her yellow clogs.
“And you could have fucking said you were too delicate to drive with me,” Jytte says.
Whooper swans with white flight feathers, clogs with yellow snouts, Sonja’s absence dissipating.
“How old exactly are we now? Couldn’t manage to tell me yourself, had to get Folke to do it for you? Can’t do anything on your own without getting Dad to jump in?”