by Dorthe Nors
The whooper swans gliding around on the water; the yellow clogs chafing carefully against each other.
“Know what we used to call someone like you in Djursland?”
“Chicken,” says Sonja.
“Chicken and snitch,” says Jytte.
She’s lit another cigarette, her gaze rheumy, while Sonja’s over forty and in two places at once. She’s standing on a side street in a capital city that won’t have anything to do with her, yet she’s also far away in the landscape. She’s grown up and playing the part, but she’s also a child who doesn’t want to learn her lesson, who won’t adapt, won’t be like the others and think what the others think, whatever that might be. She wants to get free, utterly free, and so she has to take flight, and it’s as if, the moment she saw Jytte approaching, Sonja pressed an elevator button in her mind. The doors opened, then Sonja stepped in and departed skyward. While Jytte was grinding out her first butt under her shoe, Sonja disappeared from the picture unnoticed. Up and away with her, into the unknown like in that film Contact with Jodie Foster, where Jodie whooshes through the universe’s wormholes all alone. She’s shaking in the driver’s seat of the spaceship, takes off her seatbelt, floats around the capsule and screams in terror until everything goes quiet and she’s staring at a distant galaxy “no words can describe,” she says. “They should have sent a poet,” Jodie says, and then she’s mentally transported to a memory: a Florida beach with the swash of waves and her dead father calmly plodding over to the beleaguered actress. “I missed you,” her father says. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be there for you, sweetheart,” and then they stand there speaking intimately, the alien disguised as her father, and Jodie Foster disguised as Sonja. “You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone,” her father says, and what he’s talking about is humanity’s sense of isolation in the universe, and Jodie asks, “What happens now?” And her father, who’s also an alien, says, “Now you go home,” and Sonja whizzes through the universe in a bubble of sheet metal and aluminum back to the sidewalk, where Folke has left her to stand alone and make a spectacle of herself with the goddess of vengeance.
“I’ve actually never seen the like,” says Jytte. “But now you can content yourself with Folke and see how you like them apples. Just don’t expect to come crawling back to me. That is, if you’re even capable of learning to drive. It’s not like it was very easy driving around with you.”
Sonja’s sinking down. Now she lands on both legs. They’re long, and there’s something storky about them. Atop the legs, the pelvis sits a touch askew. The hip sockets, the spine, and the neck, which she’s holding rigid. At the pinnacle is the short hair in a pleasant do, but the do doesn’t diminish the blows that Jytte dishes out. And the mouth with its queer shape cannot get said what it ought to. And it’s ugly to boot, Sonja thinks, for Jytte’s fury strikes inward, and Sonja has to fumble with her bag. Inside there’s a chapstick, a phone and a bottle of water.
“I don’t think there’s any way I can learn to drive,” Sonja whispers.
“Then you should maybe consider saving your pennies,” says Jytte.
“But I’d like to be allowed to make the attempt,” says Sonja. “That’s all.”
“And what, I didn’t let you?” asks Jytte, for she’s grown up among farmers and knows the drill with muzzles, with pee, with dogs and driving students who are a little too old. Jytte’s living proof, Sonja thinks, of how far you can move without getting anywhere, and she looks at the door to Folke’s Driving School. Folke’s sitting somewhere inside, having abandoned her to this.
“No, you didn’t really let me do the driving myself,” says Sonja. “How am I supposed to learn? I thought, and so …”
She risks a glance down at Jytte. She’s about the same height as Kate and Paul, because he was pretty short too. That meant he could stand there and look at her young-girl’s breasts, for they never did get any larger, which was something that no doubt attracted him, while she stood there and regarded his expanding bald spot. And from this altitude, thinks Sonja, you shouldn’t reckon on anything but disappointment. Jytte’s no exception. Her livid face. The smoker’s wrinkles. The gold earrings dragging her earlobes down to her shoulder pads. The whole package looks exactly like what it is: a bingo night wreck. And yet in the end, thinks Sonja, no—for once Jytte was sitting in a Djursland kitchen that was much too large. She’d been eating her brown-sugar sandwich. She was waiting for the bell to ring, for life to get rolling with its escape attempts, its broad boulevards, its lunches with men in uniform. That had been the sort of thing that wagged its tail in Jytte’s dreams, and to get what she wanted, she had to act the part she thought would fit the theater piece.
Now the role hangs on Jytte like old rags.
“You didn’t really let me do the driving myself,” Sonja says again. “I wasn’t allowed to take any responsibility in the car.”
Jytte’s mouth grows white and pursed.
“You know, don’t you, that Folke snagged his last wife while teaching her to drive?”
Sonja didn’t know, but there’s something to the picture.
“No skin off my nose,” says Sonja.
“Says you!”
Says me, thinks Sonja, and she turns on her heel, yes, she turns her back on Jytte and sets a course up the street. She walks away from the confrontation without saying goodbye. Not saying goodbye isn’t something Sonja learned at home. In Balling, you always said a polite farewell, but Sonja feels she’s got a right to leave the scene of the crime. You’re allowed to flee the blows you’re being dealt, thinks Sonja, and someplace high above the scene, in the skies above San Diego, Ellen would nod approvingly if she had the slightest clue.
Small insurrections count too, Sonja says to herself as she walks around Frederiksberg, unseeing. Small refusals and choices can make the difference between life and death. If Jodie hadn’t entered that bar with the pinball machine; if Jodie hadn’t taken her seatbelt off in the spaceship. It’s the small margins that decide the outcome, and there’s got to be struggle if your life’s going to grow, and your life should grow, thinks Sonja, though ideally not inward. On the other hand, it’s dangerous to become addicted to your life’s little dramas. The city’s full of drama junkies, and I’m not one of them. I’m satiated, she thinks, and she turns up Gammel Kongevej at high speed. Her legs feel wobbly, but the local city hall is a short distance ahead, and back behind the city hall lies Frederiksberg Gardens, with all its hiding places and benches. She wants to walk back in there and over to a bench. She hurries up the street and then crosses at the big intersection by Falkoner Boulevard, and then it’s on into the park. Long strides past the lawn of bulbs that have long since withered, long strides down the path past the Chinese Pavilion, and then she cuts her speed. Her legs don’t want to move so fast anymore, or else it’s just Sonja who doesn’t, because adrenaline functions fine as long as you have to survive. It’s only later that you pay the piper.
She sits down on a bench with a view of the herons’ little island. The herons roost on the guano-bespattered branches like spindly candleholders on a Christmas tree. It looks as if they could tumble down at any moment and set fire to the entire thing. Their throats are noisy too, when they’re not standing still in the water with their fixed stares. In flight, they resemble vultures on the lookout for a corpse, but when they stand still in the water, they look more like the man with the scythe.
Now I’m here, thinks Sonja, and it’s just birds—somewhat tame birds, but birds.
Sonja feels ashamed, yet also quite satisfied. In Balling, you certainly learned never to oppose a teacher. No, you weren’t ever supposed to oppose anyone who’d shinnied up the pecking order, though it wasn’t as if Dad held himself back. One minute the two of them would be tiptoeing into the grain, hunting down wild oats. The next, Dad would be walking around down by the property line, scattering foxglove seed. He made sure to throw some across the line, onto the property of Marie’s father. Marie’s father hated anything
that wasn’t useful to agriculture, and foxglove had absolutely no utility. Dad’s sweetbriars, dog roses, jewelweeds and other such folderol were a thorn in the eye of any real farmer. But Dad scattered foxglove seed across the line. He sowed poppies, cornflowers and other trumpery. Then he waited till the next summer, when Marie’s father would be standing down by the transformer tower, froth at the corners of his mouth. He would stand there in a sea of flowers, and Sonja’s father loved the sight of flowers, while Sonja loved the sight of her father. His warm smile, her small supporting role as daughter, and when harvest approached he’d send her out into the barley. She was supposed to hunt down the wild oats, and Sonja would slither happily through the surface of the grain and point the weeds out to Dad. One two three snap! and afterward the scrap of love from Dad’s palm when she called herself field mouse.
But that was eons ago, thinks Sonja, and there’s not much of that I can claim to have harvested, the love of men that is, and now here we are. In Frederiksberg Gardens, with filthy birds and happy people, and I’m not one of them. No, I’m not one of them.
18.
THERE ARE THREE THINGS on Sonja’s desk. The Gösta manuscript, the connective-tissue letter to Kate, and Sonja’s lease. She pulled out the last item just after she came back from her driving lesson. No, correction: she pulled it out just after she walked into the bedroom and shoved her double bed over into the corner. She’d found herself by the door to the bedroom, her jaw muscles aching, and there stood the bed, ostentatiously placed in the middle of the floor so that Sonja and a given lover could approach it from either side. A waste of floor space, she thought, and it was simply a question of voting against its placement with the balls of her feet and pushing it into a corner. Into the corner with it. Single-side access should suffice.
Now she sits at the desk and considers the manuscript. No matter what Sonja does with her life, she’s sure that Gösta will be just fine. He won’t even miss her. Right behind Sonja stands the next person who can fill the role of Gösta’s voice in Danish, so if she ignored the financial void, she could easily choose to be free. Sonja’s dispensable, hardly a beneficial species, and next to it’s the letter to Kate. Sonja’s peeled the stamps off because it’s better to use them for letters that will actually be sent. She’s opened the envelope too, and it’s a good thing she didn’t send it, the gum was sticking so poorly. The letter might have slipped out at a postal facility, fallen into the hands of some sorting machine operator, and ended up on a staff room bulletin board as an example of family friction.
I’m angry, thinks Sonja. I’m angry but mustn’t show it. If I show it, I’ll lose Kate, and Frank will follow, their kids too, and someday Mom and Dad will die, and if I look to my future, I can’t remember jack, but now in any case I’m done with yearning for the big prize, and still I must not get angry. Anger brings loneliness, and then they’d sit and giggle about it at the West Jutland Sorting Facility while Kate never got the letter.
No, Kate’ll never get the letter, because Sonja has slid it out of the envelope. She’s reread it and determined that it actually doesn’t say anything worth mentioning. A bit about Bacon Bjarne, and good riddance to him. Good riddance to all of it, Sonja thinks, and she looks at the lease. It’s with the apartment co-op that Sonja by some miracle became a member of, back in the day. In fact it’s been very practical. Living conditions have been orderly, without any direct contact with the landlord. But the stiff owls on the other balconies haunt her every time she looks out of the window. It should really be barnacle geese or other migratory fowl. Not pigeons and plastic owls and herons. Whooper swans! Bitterns! Graylags and other living creatures that cross the sky in magnificent V-formations. Yearning, buoyancy.
As if Sonja’s conjured it, a helicopter drifts by above the backyard, stoic in gray metal. While she sits there following it with her gaze, she can barely recall what it was that brought her to Copenhagen. It was her friendship with Molly, yes, and the longing to make something out of her complications. To take what was dragging her down in the one place and transform it into something that raised her up in the other. It was a choice—for what would have become of her in Balling? For an entire year of primary school, the girls in her class dreamed of becoming dog groomers, but how many dog groomers was there room for in western Jutland, their teacher asked, and most of the girls ended up working in nursery schools or home care. What would Sonja have done with the local kids? She who thought there was more to life. Something bigger, perhaps. I can always have kids later, Sonja said, and Mom said as much too, but it was just a way to say that Sonja didn’t really want kids. In Copenhagen you could have something else, and her first years there were a success. She learned the city’s movements, its dialog, its form. But bit by bit it stopped making sense.
Her jaw’s tensing up again, and she gets up from the desk. She finds her phone and lies down on the bed. It works just fine, crawling in from one side, and then she makes a call. She wants to grasp at something in the other direction: backward. There’s nothing in Copenhagen but people who are like people of every shape and size anywhere. Nothing more, nothing less, just people, and besides, they rarely meet anyone outside their segment anyway. They’re like the big landholders who show up at a national congress and only want to hang out with each other, they reek of Old Spice, they have the same opinions, the same interests, and when they want to stick out from the crowd they stick out in the same way. In the Jutlandic hinterlands, it’s 4x4s and gleaming herbicide sprayers; in Copenhagen, it’s Christiania cargo bikes, bushy beards, and lockstep diversity. Everything she’d thought she’d grow into turned out to be just as fallibly human as what Molly thought they were getting away from. But the place you come from is a place you can never return to. It no longer exists, Sonja thinks, trying to swallow the lump in her throat, and you yourself have become a stranger.
It’s Mom and Dad she’s calling. It’s been a long time since she last spoke to them. The phone rings in Jutland, but it rings in vain. Mom’s probably out in the yard, and Dad often takes out his ears. Then he stands and converses loudly with a neighbor, while his hearing aids lie on the kitchen counter and whine, but as long as they’re both well, thinks Sonja, hanging up as yet another helicopter approaches. And another. It’s an entire swarm. They must be conducting exercises, thinks Sonja, or else the anarchists have regrouped. Maybe they’re milling around at the end of some street, throwing cobblestones. Could be terrorism too, she thinks, and sits up halfway. The choppers are circling over something, it could be Vesterbro, and Sonja’s getting agitated. Then she calls Kate. It happens of its own accord, instinctive, spontaneous. There should have been barnacle geese! she thinks. Curlews! Fence posts! She ought to drop out, slip into the stillness and then just lie there, watching for sparrow hawks over by the firs. I’ve done my service! I’ve learned my lesson!
There’s a soft beep in her ear each time the phone rings in Jutland. It rings again and again without going over to the answering machine. Now Kate’s standing somewhere exposed, staring at the screen. She’s standing and thinking so hard her head creaks. Poor excuses don’t make themselves, and there’s a limit to how many times you can claim you’ve run out of battery.
“Hello?” sounds suddenly from the other end of the line.
To Sonja it’s a kick in the gut.
“Is that you, Kate?” she asks.
“Yes?” Kate’s saying, and it sounds like she’s fumbling with something. “Sonja, is that you? I hope nothing’s wrong …”
“It is me, and why would anything be wrong? Nothing’s wrong, I was just thinking I’d call and hear how things are going over there with you guys.”
“They’re going fine here,” says Kate. “But you know what, I’m in the garden center now.”
Sonja glances up at her small corner of late August sky. The window’s open a crack, and she can hear the choppers swarming.
“Well good grief, over here the storm clouds are piling up. Have you been having a lot
of thunderstorms there too?”
She’s able to gather from Kate that it hasn’t been so bad, but Sonja can tell her that here on the thickly peopled side of Denmark, a violent storm is raging.
“Probably from some of that climate stuff,” she says, even though Kate once told her that she doesn’t believe in that climate stuff because climate change is a question of faith, like joining the Jehovah’s Witnesses, even though her husband travels the world over in the service of wind energy. That’s how it is with so many things, and just to say climate stuff is to open a rift between the sisters Hansen.
“That doesn’t sound so good,” says Kate, “but I’m standing here in the garden center. We ran out of potting soil, so we can’t—”
“Speaking of potting soil,” Sonja hears herself say, “you know who crossed my mind the other day? Bjarne, weirdly enough—Bacon Bjarne. He wasn’t particularly nice to you, back when you broke up with him, and I think it’s strange that Dad sold the farm to him. There ought to really be some sort of limit to what a person is forced to swallow.”
“Ohhh … I don’t know about that now,” says Kate. “He did have the money.”
Sonja strains to catch the sound of other garden center customers in the background, but it sounds more like Kate’s standing in her back passage at home. Out by the dryer.
“But he really wasn’t very nice to you, Kate. He slapped you—but let’s let bygones be bygones. You see anything of Tonny these days?”
“Not so much now. Tonny and Marie moved to Funen, you know.”
“What’s Marie doing with such a dope anyway?”
“Tonny’s all right,” says Kate, her voice taking on a note of forced cheeriness. “And we do miss Marie. She was the salad girl at our potlucks.”
“He showed me his prick out by your dryer once, Tonny did, and it wasn’t much to write home about, his prick that is, and you remember that kid from the special ed class who every so often would pull out his tool and walk around with it saying bang bang down by the bike shed? And then men go claiming there isn’t any connection between their dicks and New Year’s fireworks, to say nothing of the rifle club in Balling. I imagine they’re looking forward to neutralizing some stags when the season starts. Dad says the herds are getting more and more unruly.”