by Dorthe Nors
Martha squints a little at the declining sun. Then she sighs and says she supposes her sister just learned to live with it.
“That’s what one does, of course,” Martha says. “You live with it, and you find your ways. I can recall one late summer when there was a huge meteor shower, and of course she wanted to see it. So we lay down in the grass and propped her up with pillows. She had an attack anyway, but I think we counted more than a hundred shooting stars that night.”
She sits and flutters her fingertips against Sonja’s hand, just like the clairvoyant chambermaid fluttered her fingers before her eye. The light touches feel like birds’ feet on the back of Sonja’s hand.
Then Sonja says, “But it doesn’t matter. I manage, of course. It’s mostly because I’m taking my driving test.”
“In Copenhagen?” Martha asks, puzzled.
Where else? thinks Sonja, but she doesn’t say that, because Martha’s much too far from home to be able to handle Copenhagen irony.
“I took my test in Vinkel in 1965,” Martha says. “There weren’t any stoplights back then, so it was manageable.”
“Are there stoplights there now?”
“Yes, one.”
The heavy evening sun hangs over Valby Park like an orange. The late light lends the water a salmon cast, and the water plashes quietly as it laps against the quay wall. Now and then someone dashes by in tights, and there are tired bags under Martha’s eyes. She’s been a long time in transit, and it’s a muggy evening, viscous and sticky, and everything that’s supposed to get easier in life persists in being complicated; Sonja can see that. What kind of help am I going to be? she thinks. Me and my deficient sense of direction.
“I’m going to sit here for a bit,” Sonja says. “But the prime minister neighborhood is right in back of us if you’re not afraid to strike out on your own. It’s not that hard to find.”
“Let’s just sit here,” says Martha.
“It’s going to storm,” says Sonja.
“It’ll work out,” says Martha, and then Sonja’s no longer able to hold back the tears.
They well up from below, they force her mouth open and scrape the scales from her eyes, and now she is leaking, Martha fluttering, there’s one stoplight in Vinkel, just one, and Sonja’s mother would always say, “It’ll all work out, it’ll all work out.”
“But sometimes,” whispers Sonja, “things really don’t work out. You see it all the time; how things don’t work out at all. People suddenly maimed, broken, dead, and then things really didn’t work out—or they did, they worked out terribly. And it’s not supposed to happen that way, is it, that things work out terribly? Or that nothing you ever dreamed of comes to anything? The continents you wanted to explore turn out to be stripped of resources, drained and desolate. Stuntedness as far as the eye can see, and you know perfectly well that you should make the journey back to where you came from. That you have to change course and scrape yourself together, but how do you fool yourself that it was better in the place you left? The place you came from no longer exists, and I think I’ve lost the right to imagine my future.”
Martha’s hand flutters.
“I think you’re just a little lonely.”
“You better believe I am, and don’t be ashamed about not being able to find Jens Otto Krag, for really it’s me who’s gotten lost,” says Sonja, and she bends all the way forward while she weeps, yes, she’s weeping, and the stones whirl round like a murmuration of starlings in her inner ears, they surge about and cast themselves quick here, quick there, they look like a fingerprint against the late summer sky. Then they swoop down over the rushes, swoop up over the rushes, they whoosh in across town and away from it again. They ought to land on the rooflines and form a black border against the sky, they ought to be singing with joy, yet for now they flit every which way, and Sonja flits with them in a silty blackness, a viscid underworld of sorrow and hands and then she’s toppling off the bench, her face plunging toward the pavement except that Martha grabs her, she grabs hold of the back of Sonja’s heart, or rather, she’s grabbed hold of Sonja’s bra strap and heaves her back up against the back of the bench.
“Goodness!” Martha says, but Sonja doesn’t hear her because she’s fainted.
In the realm she now haunts, they’ve seated themselves around the table. They’re sitting in a large kitchen with home-baked bread. Mom goes around with brown sugar, maintaining equilibrium. Outside, the world is being subjected to violent transformation, and Sonja’s happiness depends upon being able to adapt. “You’re such a fighter,” Mom says. “Kate can’t cope, but you can,” she says, and then a figure in a curry-colored tunic steps through the kitchen door. She walks discreetly over to the fridge and takes up a position there. “I can see a man with thinning hair,” she says. “I can see that you will fall unhappily in love,” and Sonja, who has lost her way out in the raging world and acquired jargons and behaviors to match, finds the situation comic—no, ironic, she finds it ironic. She isn’t parrying the blows, and then the fortune teller says …
“Yes, what did the fortune teller say?” Sonja asks aloud.
She’s raised her head upright, and Martha has her hand on Sonja’s neck.
“You went all higgledy-piggledy there, didn’t you?” Martha says, and now she’s coming in clearer.
She takes on outline and contour; she wears a crinkly smile. The manner in which her hand supports Sonja’s neck testifies to a kind of professionalism. She has midwife’s hands, thinks Sonja. She has hands that can gently and firmly bear baby to basin. Her eyes have peered into that which no one else knows. They’re marked by a special form of insight. And loneliness.
Somewhere in the distance, a blackbird sings in a solitary tree. Sonja can see the slats of the bench and the way Copenhagen keeps going nonstop on the other side of the canal. The attack is over. Sonja feels queasy, but no matter, for when the breeze touches it, she can feel that her face is moist.
“I think I’m going to give notice on my flat. One’s always free to move, after all.”
“Where will you go then?” asks Martha.
“Home.”
“And your driver’s license?”
“There is one stoplight in Vinkel,” says Sonja. “But let’s just sit here.”
“Let’s just sit here,” says Martha.
“I hope you’re not in a hurry,” Sonja whispers.
“We’re not going anywhere.”
“The sun’ll set soon.”
“We’ve world enough and time,” says Martha, and Sonja knows that, technically speaking, love requires more than a hand on the neck, but in the state she finds herself in, she loves Martha.
Yes, Sonja loves Martha.
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Copyright
Pushkin Press
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London WC2H 9JQ
Original text © 2016 Dorthe Nors. Published by agreement with Ahlander Agency
Mirror, Shoulder, Signal was first published as Spejl, skulder, blink in Denmark in 2016
English translation © 2017 Misha Hoekstra
First published by Pushkin Press in 2017
ISBN 978 1 782273 13 4
DANISH ARTS FOUNDATION
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Danish Arts Foundation for supporting the writing and translation of this book. Thank you also to Copydan for additional translation support awarded through Autorkontoen by the Danish Authors’ Society, and to Hald Hovedgaard for a translation residency.
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. If you are aware of any errors or omissions! the publisher will endeavour to incorporate amendments in future reprints.
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“You take the straight way from Earth to Heaven” translated from the Danish “Velkommen, Lærkelil!” (“Welcome, Little Lark!”) by Christian Richardt, in Texter og Toner, Bind I: Blandede Digte, 1868. Various lines of dialog from the film Contact, 1997. “And life is brief, so brief…” translated from the Danish “Heksedansen”, 1960, itself a translation by Peter Mynte of the Norwegian song of the same title and same year by Vidar Sandbeck.
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