by Dorthe Nors
She feels the way a toddler must feel when it rocks back on its heels and stands still. I want to go home, she repeats to herself, and that’s pretty good: she’s a toddler, and she’s standing still. Afraid that the feeling will evaporate, she stops picking at it. She shelves it and squints down at her feet. They’re encased in sensible driving shoes, and they dangle undisturbed far beneath her. She knocks them lightly against each other; they seem to suit her.
“This hour’s a freebie,” says Folke. “I just wanted to show you how the grass has grown over everything here. That you no longer can tell it was a war zone, can you?”
There’s a buzzing behind them, an angry sound rising from the grass back in Tippen. From the bushes step a couple of young guys with long limbs. One’s got a joystick in his hand, and both their faces are turned skyward. They’re flying a miniature remote-controlled thingamajig. The thingamajig sounds like a riled-up mosquito, but its form is more that of a dragonfly, a large gleaming one. The electronic dragonfly loops in broad figure eights above the boys and swerves out over Folke and Sonja as they sit there, dangling their legs over the edge of what once was Shell House.
20.
THERE WAS A PERIOD when Sonja wanted to learn the recorder. She wanted to do it on her own, though, it had to happen alone. She would have nothing to do with instruction; she refused. She could walk out into the rye, or it could also be in the farthest part. But out there there were whooper swans, and sometimes there were hunters in the area. They had long rifles and didn’t care for nature lovers who roamed about and startled the game. But it could also be in one of the jagged windbreaks. She loved watching them as she sat in the backseat of Dad’s car en route from one place to another. There was something about the way the trees materialized against the sky—especially when there was rime on the needles. But the curious thing was that though she loved looking at windbreaks, she didn’t like to be in them.
Marie and Sonja had once made a fort in the windbreak along the property line. They were going to have bug juice, crackers, and secret exercise books there. But it was a lame fort, and Marie wasn’t much help at making it cozy. The rough Sitka spruce tore holes in their clothes, and the floor of the windbreak was barren and littered with needles. Sitka needles were lovely from a distance, but close up they pricked you cruelly. When the two girls sat there being secret in their exercise books, Sonja would write about homesickness and pain, and it was the windbreak’s fault. Windbreaks were practical for farming, and they had a certain visual effect, but they were lifeless inside, and Sonja didn’t want to play the recorder there. It was out of the question.
But behind the myrobalan plums and the other fruiting bushes in Mom’s garden, there hid a bird cherry. The tree had grown huge and reminded you of nothing so much as an enormous shrub. If you plucked the flowers and brought them into the house, they stank of cat piss, but outdoors the scent was almost delightful. Sonja got ahold of an old lawn chair. Your butt would slip through the seat if you sat in it, so Mom had let her have it. With persistence, Sonja had succeeded in dragging the chair partway up the bird cherry. She wedged the chair legs down in a couple of forks of the tree, and then she would sit there in the middle of the branches. When she blew on the recorder, she sounded like a blackbird. That’s what she imagined; that people walking by on the gravel road would take her for a bird. And when the wind blew through the crown, the green bottles she’d hung from one of the branches sang along. They sounded like a bittern out in the reeds, and the bittern out in the reeds sounded like a ship that hooted in the fog, and the sound drew Sonja to other realms.
Even though Kate knew perfectly well where Sonja was hiding, she left her in peace. Besides, she’d once had an animal cemetery under the bird cherry. When Sonja peered down through the branches, she could still see Kate’s cemetery down there. Small crosses bound neatly together with wire, the plots laid with gravel fetched from the farmyard. It was all washing away now, because then Kate had been confirmed, and her head only had room for boys and pop music. It was strange how she’d changed, for at one point, Kate had been so desperate to find animals to inter that she buried a live earthworm. But that came to an end, and once it did, Sonja would sit up on a branch where no one could reach her. She’d peer up at the sky through the tangle of limbs. Every so often, she’d carve away at the trunk a bit with a dull breadknife from the kitchen drawer. Then it would smell sourly of sap.
One day she pretended that she had visions in the tree. That the light filtered down through the crown and fluttered about her face in such a way that it might well have been an angel. The angel wanted everything good to happen to Sonja, and it specifically told Sonja how good her life would become. It caressed her cheek. That’s how Sonja imagined it—the angel fondling her the way she fondled their kitten. She let herself be petted until Kate called her to come and eat. They were having red wieners with potatoes and white sauce, Kate shouted, for she always stuck to the pull of gravity like that, and Sonja wishes she were sitting in the bird cherry right now. Far up in the tree with her face tilted to the sky, but she’s not. She’s sitting next to Molly in a subway carriage. They’re deep in the bowels of the earth, and they’re on their way to the Danmarks Radio concert hall.
“Great that you could take time off on such short notice,” says Molly.
“Gösta’s not going anywhere,” says Sonja.
Molly’s been given free tickets to Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1 by a client, and she’s also had her hair done. Her heart-shaped face is glowing, and there’s something electric about her. Sonja’s familiar with this state of Molly’s. She’s seen it before. It’s infatuation, and it can hardly be the lawyer who’s inspiring it. She looks like a child, Sonja thinks, and yet there’s something about her face, something closed off, that Sonja can’t get a handle on. A hardening, which might originate from within Molly herself, but which could also very well stem from without. From injections. Molly wouldn’t tell her if that were the case. To do that would be to expose herself, for Sonja’s not the type to believe in the body as cosmetic project. For her own part, Sonja doesn’t imagine telling Molly about the hike with Folke. It’s the one thing Sonja promised herself before she left home: to never tell Molly about the outing to Tippen. For Molly, tales without a climax don’t have any appeal.
“Tell me a little about what we’re going to hear,” says Molly. “I don’t have a clue about classical music.”
It’s true. When Sonja’s ridden in Molly’s car, they’ve listened to Top 40 all the way to the house in Hørsholm. Yet Molly does play popular classical works—“Elvira Madigan,” Carl Nielsen, the Moonlight Sonata—in her clinic waiting room. Day in, day out, the same pieces, deviously designed to create trust between an apprehensive client and psychologist Molly Schmidt, whom Sonja must confess she doesn’t really know. No, Molly Schmidt hardly ever talks to Molly Pedersen of Skjern anymore, and Molly Pedersen never talks to Lone, which is Molly’s real name, for the Molly business is something she came up with herself when she turned eighteen. “I’m a free individual,” she’d said. “I can choose to be called whatever I want,” she’d said, but on paper she’s still Lone.
Sonja lets her eyes fall upon the far end of the train. It’s clear that they’re zipping through the subsoil without a driver like moles on speed. Kids are standing with their noses pressed flat against the panoramic front window, while an older woman is sitting a couple of seats up from Molly and Sonja. She’s shriveled and short haired and doesn’t look like she’s from Copenhagen. In fact, she looks like a married woman from Jutland, with pleasant glasses and tidy hair. Her eyes are light blue, and she’s keeping a firm grip on her handbag and her roll-along suitcase. A country mouse, thinks Sonja. She must have come over to see a family member who fled the provinces, doubtless a daughter.
“So tell me something about the music,” Molly says.
Sonja wishes Molly had invited someone else to the concert, or that she’d been quicker on the trigger with an ex
cuse, because now she’s got to spend the entire journey from Nørreport to DR Byen acquainting Molly with the music.
“In Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1, you should take special note of the adagio,” Sonja begins.
Molly roots around in her bag, and the older woman farther up the car is rooting around in hers too. Sonja has a hard time holding the attention of her audience, but she soldiers on undaunted.
“Generally speaking, it seems to me that in classical music you should always keep an eye on the adagio, but in any case you must keep an eye on it in Brahms’s piano concerto.”
The gray woman takes a map of the city from her bag. She unfolds it neatly and holds it close to her face. Sonja doesn’t feel she’s being discreet enough about being from out of town. She’d like to tell the woman that it can be dangerous to advertise you’re a tourist, but they’d gotten to the adagio, even though Molly’s lost interest and is now busy texting someone.
“The adagio is the slow movement. The movement that’s full of intimate emotion, tender and melancholy. Brahms was unhappily in love, and you can really hear it in his music. The interesting thing is that when Schumann’s wife, Clara—for she was the one Brahms was hopelessly in love with—when Clara lost Schumann and Brahms was able to have her, he was no longer interested. He composed out of his painful distance from her. She was his muse, and of course there’s nothing new in that, women as muses. The interesting thing is, I think that men function as muses for women just as often. Man as muse is an area of research that the Psychological Association should really challenge its members to study.”
Molly says nothing. She’s smiling absently at a text, and her smile smolders with things she wants to do but mustn’t and then does anyway, for that’s the kind of thing that makes the world go round.
It’s not the lawyer, thinks Sonja, and a bit farther up in the passenger tribe, the gray woman sits with worry in her eyes. Her roll-along is squeezed between her legs, while the city map’s up in her face. Beyond her, a couple of lanky pale hooligans are lounging idly about, the sort of kids who aren’t going anywhere but just ride the train back and forth, back and forth. Molly’s tapping away on her phone, the train’s shooting through the underground, and then Sonja rises and takes a couple of steps up the aisle.
“Can you find where you’re going?” asks Sonja, and the woman looks up.
Her face is wrinkled, but delicate and kind. Once her hair had been dark, but now it’s silver. Her teeth are her own, though, and when she smiles they’re clearly visible.
“I’m supposed to get out at Islands Brygge. My niece and her boyfriend have a flat there, but I’m not sure how to get from the station to where they live.”
Sonja reaches for the map, and the train pulls into Kongens Nytorv. She asks the woman the name of the street, and the woman says it’s called Jens Otto Krags Gade.
“That makes sense,” says Sonja. “All the streets out there are named after dead prime ministers. She could also live on Erik Eriksen or Hans Hedtoft or someone even worse. The funny thing is that the same prime ministers are lying shoulder to shoulder out in Western Cemetery, stone cold dead. I’m rather fond of lying out there myself and reading. We don’t do that in Jutland, but in Jutland there’s plenty of room to lie down in places that aren’t graveyards. Have you ever been to Western Cemetery?”
The woman hasn’t.
“Your niece should take you. It’s peaceful and quiet and quite lovely. Have you been traveling a long time?”
The woman has. She’s been in transit most of the day, for there were technical problems in the Great Belt Tunnel, and Sonja asks her where she lives, and she lives in Vinkel, in western Jutland. She’s lived there most of her life, so it’s nothing special, and Sonja says small world, because she comes from Balling herself.
“You don’t say!” says the woman, and a look of relief dawns in her face. “My sister and brother-in-law lived in Balling, but now she’s dead. Her name was Esther, and his was Einar. Did you know them?”
Of course Sonja knows Esther and Einar—they were the ones who had the post office before it was closed down, and Sonja remembers their kids too, and now they’ve reached Christianshavn Station, and out of the corner of her eye, Sonja can see that Molly’s flung herself in the corner of her seat. She slouches there with her phone up in her little face, tapping.
Maybe it’s the shaman, thinks Sonja. Stranger things have happened in Molly’s life, but it could also be a client. Even if Molly’s not supposed to fuck them, but then there’s so much you’re not supposed to do, “And life is brief, so brief, and it could turn out / That you came too late to the end of your life,” and Sonja has to admit that Molly’s gradually become just like one of the windbreaks.
“What’s your name?” Sonja asks.
The woman looks a little bashful, but she says her name’s Martha.
“Martha?”
“Yes, there aren’t so many of us with that name anymore. My parents belonged to Indre Mission. I don’t, but one doesn’t change one’s name on that account.”
“My name’s Sonja. My parents were farmers and didn’t know any better. Their taste in names was sort of like their taste in curtains. But one can be a good person all the same.”
The woman grasps Sonja’s arm by the elbow and gives it a small squeeze. She whispers that she’s a tiny bit nervous. And tired. Copenhagen seems so big.
“It is big,” Sonja says, and she glances at the woman’s hand.
The hand has been accustomed to grabbing hold. It’s been capable of shoveling everything from grain to muck and never complained, and then it hits Sonja that it’s odd Martha’s going to visit a niece. The gray ladies from Jutland usually visit their own kids and grandkids, but perhaps Martha has no kids; perhaps she’s never been married. Though it didn’t have a singles culture in any way, Balling did have plenty of single people. But they didn’t raise a fuss about it, and to Sonja that seems right and fitting, for you’d have to look long and hard to find something more hideous than a singles culture. The hordes of people on maneuvers that are supposed to help auction them off like cattle, going in and out of restaurants with their heads full of dating services. Always alone, always between trysts, always headed somewhere else with sales narratives about who they think they should be in order to be a palatable version of themselves.
The old maids I knew as a child were good at gardening, thinks Sonja. And good at reading, and folks enjoyed talking with them. They talked about them, sure, but they also talked to them, yes, and just then the train pulls into Islands Brygge Station.
A quiet panic goes through Martha.
“Oh, it’s here I get off, no?”
She’s grabbed ahold of her heather-hued suitcase, and she doesn’t want to let go of Sonja’s arm, and that’s all right. Sonja follows the woman over to the sliding door, and then they stand there faltering, especially Martha, who’s trying to maintain decorum, to not stick out, to not look as if she doesn’t have Copenhagen—which is chaos, just chaos—under control. She’s crumpled the map around the handle of her roll-along, and Sonja thinks that Martha’s niece could at least have met her at the station. But what does Sonja know about the kind of burden that the rest of the family thinks Martha might be? Nothing, and now the doors slide open. Molly looks over the top of her phone at Sonja. It seems as if she wants to say something, but she never gets round to it, because now Sonja’s exited the carriage with Martha. She’s off the train and on her way toward the stairs. It has to happen quick, for now Molly’s risen in the middle of the passenger tribe. She stands with her small face turned toward the window, full of questions and caught between functions. She flutters the phone and her free hand. But Sonja’s got no time to respond, and then Lone in the guise of Molly zooms under Amager while Sonja and Martha drift off toward the stairs. They’re heading up to the light.
“I’ll help you get over to Jens Otto Krag,” says Sonja. “I’m going your way anyhow,” she says.
�
�I thought you were going to hear Brahms,” says Martha.
“No no, that was that other woman,” Sonja lies, and she offers to take Martha’s suitcase. “That’s too heavy for you—here, let me take it.”
Confusion ensues. Martha’s right hand, the one crumpling the city map, lets go before Sonja’s gotten a proper grip on the handle. The map flies away from them, it dances off, and the roll-along smacks against the tiles like a pistol shot. Martha gives a start. She’s got some height to her, thinks Sonja. A little collapsed now, but when she was young she must have been decidedly tall.
“Allow me,” says Sonja, quickly bending over.
And it’s there in an instant: the positional vertigo.
21.
A VAST EXCHANGE IS COMMENCING. Sonja can’t claim otherwise; nobody can. It’s barely visible yet, but it will be, and when it comes, it’ll be vast.
“My sister had that too,” Martha says.
They’ve found themselves a bench in Islands Brygge. The bench is handsomely designed and conceived for urban space, and the sun’s sinking into thunderheads west of South Harbor. A darkness lies and lurks in the direction of Køge, but in the glow of sunset, Martha looks lovely and ancient. There are two of her, for Sonja’s dizzy, but Martha’s beauty isn’t any the less for being twinned.
“She couldn’t look up without everything going haywire. It started when she was about forty, and I don’t know what triggered it, but I don’t think she was very happy in her marriage. Not that she complained about it, but when we were at parties, she’d suddenly be sitting there strangely still, with her hands on her neck. It was those little stones.”
“They have to settle into place,” Sonja whispers. “They swirl around inside the ear, as if they’re in flight and can’t find their way out, and then you have to sit still till they come to terms with their situation. What did she do about it, your sister?”