I replied that people weren’t to blame if they were part of the upper classes, or if they had opportunities to do good work. ‘You’re not so badly off, Jens.’
‘No one escapes privilege, it runs too deep,’ agreed Jens. ‘It’s why we wait. We expect something will come.’ I thought of Dad. He’d been waiting for twenty years, satisfied with reading and writing until he could join my mother. Jens added, ‘By the way you shouldn’t expect Claire to wait for you, either. You should write. Or call her.’
The truth was that I didn’t know what to say. At night, after class and the obligatory beers with Jens, I began to draft letters that seemed to say nothing unless they could say it all, and I wasn’t sure that either of us wanted everything said. What had been our part in Anthony’s death? I went to sleep with the question, and woke with the certainty that I dreamt of Anthony and Claire, but I couldn’t remember – only that dreams of them kept returning, followed by the same untidy feeling, as though I’d forgotten to do something important, a promise I’d made before coming to Denmark.
I left my college room and took to the city as I’d once taken to the sea: a space where I searched for things I believed in but didn’t fully comprehend. Darkness brought it into relief, the white x-ray lines between the black spaces. At least, I felt more present in the shadows between the lamplights and the odd corner bar that remained open. I walked in the early hours, and stopped on my way back, drawn in by music. I found different international laws: mainly, the laws of loneliness – you can always talk to someone who’s working; you should always find something to read, even if you don’t plan to do any reading, no matter the time; sit by the window, even if it means you’re on show, because the quiet spots in the corners are, by natural law, reserved for couples.
Dad wrote regularly by email, and sometimes I sat with my laptop and read over our correspondence. He asked how I was doing on my own. I said I was keeping busy and that I loved Copenhagen. I didn’t really know what else to say, but I wanted him to feel that coming away had been the right decision.
Jens has been taking good care of me since I arrived. We haven’t talked much about Anthony, except when I first arrived, and I’m sure that’s for the best at the moment. There isn’t much class time, but the reading is intensive, and I like the routine of sitting in the library or in the coffee shops reading articles.
I bought a bike the other day. It isn’t far to ride from the student apartments down to the water. The sea’s grey and some days very dark, always very different from the colour of the sea at home.
On cold days, the wind comes in from the north. But even then there are people out walking and riding along the shoreline, and tourists following the signs out to the statue of the Little Mermaid.
I feel close to Mum here. I have her picture on my bedside table. And I’ve been thinking about Whitby, and maybe visiting while I’m here. What do you think? There are cheap flights from here to Manchester, and I’m sure I have the time to get away for a week. I could visit Lillie. I know she’s wanted us to come back.
Dad replied that he hoped we’d go back together one day, but that he understood if I took the chance to go now. I was so close, after all.
Jens never mentioned or visited his family, but I knew they were barely part of his life. He lived apart from them in a rebel suburb, Christiania. I didn’t ever meet a girlfriend, or friends outside the reading group. If he wasn’t with us readers, or at one of the rallies that he helped to organise, he was at a café drinking and smoking, seemingly waiting for me to round the corner so we could argue.
The reading group valorised argument above all else. In this, our conversations were led by a middle-aged literary scholar called Peter Jorgensen. Peter was a star among the radical community, and rather good at being an enigmatic one. He’d interrupt discussions of Dante with questions that didn’t appear to have anything to do with hell, but somehow might reveal our understanding of the text nonetheless. Early in spring, when we sat outdoors at a café in one of the narrowing corners of Studiestræde, he asked us to describe the colour of the evening sky.
I gave a bland response; something like, the sky was nectarine. The others ignored it. Then Jens said it was that dull colour between leaving something good and arriving somewhere worse – and that true damnation lay with the faint hope that remains even once a good thing is lost. The others all had a go at improving on that. After that night, I was less regular. I told Jens that I didn’t like the reading group.
‘What do you like, then?’ he asked. ‘Just the people you already know?’
It seemed it was finally time for us to talk about Anthony and Claire again. ‘I’m confused, Jens. You know that. But I know there’s no finding something new, something clean. You don’t get to start again.’
‘You can’t put it behind you, either.’
‘Exactly.’
Jens asked, ‘Do you hate him?’
‘Sometimes,’ I replied. ‘When I go to bed, the last thing at night. I’ve prayed for him. I’ve told him I hate him. Sometimes it’s the last thing I say. Isn’t that awful? To go to sleep with that thought.’
‘He gave you a lot. He made you a better person.’
‘I don’t believe that. He showed me that I’m weak. Is that an improvement?’
‘You didn’t fail him.’
‘I feel so sick about it,’ I said.
‘Is it guilt?’
‘Yes. Maybe. Or disbelief. I can’t believe that it’s happened. I want there to be something to do, some way of taking it away. I want to turn around and find that I’m wrong. He isn’t dead at all.’
Jens lit a cigarette. He offered me one, too, and I took it. ‘I don’t like smoking in the wind,’ I said.
‘Have one anyway.’
‘I can’t accept that he’s gone. Even though the pain is there. Even though I was the one who found him. I expect to be able to stop it.’
‘He shouldn’t have let you find him.’
‘I don’t know. What difference does that make? I left him. It’s only right that I found him.’
‘That’s probably true,’ said Jens. We finished our cigarettes; they burnt away quickly. He added, ‘I’m sorry if I’m pushing you too hard.’
I could see that Jens didn’t think we’d spoken enough. He could make his point, that the mistake now was leaving Claire. But I knew that already. He said, ‘I’ll tell you what’s obvious. You’ll wait forever. You’ll spend the rest of your life halfway between Anthony and Claire.’ He paused, and then concluded, ‘I think that’s why you’re in Copenhagen. This is a good place to drift.’
In summer, when the reading group took a break, Jens disappeared, too; none of us saw him around town. Copenhagen felt empty, for he was such a regular at the bars, and my new friends – the ones I’d made for myself – only ever appeared in the last hours before dawn, when even Peter and the reading-group regulars were at home in their studio apartments.
When Jens finally returned a fortnight later, he phoned to tell me he was back. Could we meet at the university? It sounded urgent; he wanted me to come downtown straight away. I rushed out the door, and found him leaning against a spare section of steel rail – the only part unclaimed by chains and bicycle handlebars.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked him.
‘I need a drink.’
For a while, I thought he meant he needed a drink before he could tell me what was on his mind. But gradually I realised that he just wanted a drink; that was the emergency. We followed the slow bends of Strøget and found a bar. ‘I’ve been ill,’ he said. ‘Don’t tell the others, but I had to pass gallstones. It was terrible. Jesus.’
I couldn’t help but laugh. ‘Did you go home?’
‘Go home? Why would I go home? You think that’s a better place to shit gallstones?’
‘Some people like to have family around when they’re unwell.’
>
‘Yes, that’s right.’ He sipped his beer. ‘Thank God for beer. My doctor asked, “How much coffee do you drink?” I told her, “Hey, I’m Danish.”’ Jens held his hands up. ‘Anyway, I’ve been around the whole time, hiding from you and the others.’
There was a pause. ‘Is this what you wanted to tell me, Jens? About your gallstones? Is that why we had to come out for a beer?’
‘You don’t care?’
‘I care about you. Your gallstones, I don’t know.’
‘Why do we bother, you and me?’ he said. ‘Eh?’ I wasn’t sure why we wouldn’t bother – we liked each other and we shared a past. But Jens was impatient, and something in me made him notice all our differences.
At last he gave me what was on his mind. He said he’d used his time away to think about my defining weakness.
‘Thanks, Jens.’
‘Alright. Here’s what I’ve got for you. If you want something, you have to push. You have to push someone else out of the way. Do you know how to do that? Here, I’ll show you.’
Jens reached forward and pushed me off my chair.
‘Jens!’ I shouted at him.
A group at the next table stood up, to help me or to get out of the way. Jens persuaded them that it was alright, we were friends. He reached down to help me up. ‘I’ve wanted to do that for some time,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘The three of you made such a fucking mess of it.’ He said it sympathetically, as though the push and this conversation had been all for me, and also for Anthony and Claire. I didn’t know how to respond. We still had the attention of the next table. I tried to imitate Jens’s manner of making the moment seem natural, but I half-expected another assault.
‘Is this your way of telling me to leave?’ I said.
A waiter came over, a belated reaction to what was almost a fight. Jens laughed, and told him, ‘I’ve been sober for two weeks. I need beer.’ He ordered a round. When the drinks came to the table, he turned to me and asked, as though we’d just met, ‘Are you enjoying life in Copenhagen?’
‘Jesus, Jens, are you high on something?’
‘I asked you a simple question. Are you enjoying my city?’
‘It’s a great place.’
‘You feel like you’re learning something?’
‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘I’m learning about Danish manners.’
He looked tired now. When he stared out of the front window, I noticed that he’d lost some weight in the face. He turned back to me. ‘When you came to the door that morning, and asked me to fetch Anthony, I guess I found out for sure that you were in love with Claire. I thought that was okay. But you were asking all the wrong questions. You were thinking about Anthony. You have to push him out of the way now, and ask the question you wanted to ask that night.’
‘What was that?’ I said.
‘You don’t know? Of course you do. You wanted to ask Anthony if Claire was in love with you.’
‘Why couldn’t I ask her?’ I wondered aloud.
‘Right. Same reason you’re here,’ said Jens. ‘You don’t believe she’s yours. And now there’s no Anthony to tell you. Only me.’
‘And who’d believe you?’
But I did believe most of what Jens had to say. Perhaps watching my father settling for a life of books and the patched light of the study had convinced me that eventually you had to go out and see what was there. At the same time, I knew how to delay. I loved Dad’s stillness, and I trusted it. That’s what Jens saw and what he wanted to push out of me.
I had decided not to go to Whitby. However close it was – a ferry ride across the North Sea – most of all I wanted to go with Dad. It seemed almost an impossible journey without him. For I knew that I wanted to go there in order to understand him, and our life in Australia, as much as to find Mum.
Jens had found a job – he would be joining the Danish foreign office. Our last night together started at the reading group, which I’d rejoined in earnest after Jens told me I was being too precious about Peter and his enigmatic questions. Afterwards Jens and I walked out together. Instead of returning to college, we took our regular diversion along Strøget to the end, and then stepped down into Ernst Hviid’s, a tourist bar that was quiet that night. I liked it down there in the basement rooms. The windows were at eye level, and we watched the street pass by from the knee down. It snowed, and then rained. A line of brown slush against the bottom window panes.
He ordered food and beer, and when our drinks arrived declared a toast. ‘I doubt we’ll see each other again,’ he said, smiling fondly. It was said with his usual goodwill. ‘People drift apart.’
‘Maybe that’s true,’ I replied.
‘She’s yours if you want her. Your future is with her.’
‘Have you ever written to her?’
‘Yes. I wrote her by email a couple of times.’
‘Did she write back?’
‘No.’
‘Never mind,’ I said. There was no point writing to Claire. She never replied.
Jens had saved a last attempt at drawing me in. ‘Don’t you want to ask me what I wrote to her?’
‘I’m sure it was very sensitive, Jens,’ I said. ‘You’ve got such a way with words. I just hope you didn’t lecture her as much as you do me.’
‘Well, here it is. My sensitivity. I wrote: Don’t think you could have stopped him. You didn’t know what he would do. That’s right, isn’t it, Ted? You didn’t think he would go ahead with it.’
I admitted to Jens that on the night of the dinner party I’d felt Anthony had wanted me to stay. That some part of me heard an unspoken request. He’d needed me there to stop him.
Jens kept eating and didn’t look at me. At last he spoke. ‘You shouldn’t have left, then,’ he said, ‘not if you knew. He might have made it through the night.’
‘He said he’d changed his mind. I believed him. Or part of me believed him. And then – I couldn’t sit there any longer. I hated them. I hated the performance, what he was doing for them.’
Jens pushed his food away. ‘Did you let them decide?’
‘No.’
‘Remember, Ted, you don’t have a cold heart.’
I’d never heard Jens mention the heart before. It sounded strange spoken by someone as warm-hearted as him. ‘I wish I hadn’t left him.’
‘Go home, then.’
23
It was late October. With Jens gone I felt stuck in that early-winter month, in a Copenhagen with a left-behind feeling. I ran out of money and emailed Dad, asking for help. He replied that he’d lend me as much as I needed, but added that he thought he’d have a better chance of getting his money back if it went into setting me up in Sydney, rather than towards another month in Europe. He knew I was applying for jobs in international firms. In fact, I was down to my last interview before giving up and phoning home.
Dad said it’d be a week before he could get me on an earlier flight home. I had only a couple of hundred dollars left in my account, so he organised some extra money and bought me a train pass as an early birthday present. If I wasn’t going to Whitby, I should see some of the countryside nearby. There was no point just waiting.
I started with the night train to Stockholm. I shared a cabin with an engineer who wanted to hear all I could tell him about Australia – he’d always wanted to live there, go somewhere you could be outside every day of the year. I told him about the sea, and how in Australia it completely absorbed the colour of the sky. I told him that in Sydney you felt it everywhere you went: it was a town where the sea and the sky seemed to meet at the end of every road.
‘You miss it?’ he asked.
‘Yes. I’m on my way back now.’
We kept talking for a couple of hours, until I couldn’t stay awake any longer. It was past one. When we drew into Stockholm terminus at
five, my companion translated an announcement on the intercom telling passengers they could stay on board until seven. I slept for another hour, and then walked with my pack through the station and out into a morning that was colder than Copenhagen’s. The train had arrived in an off-centre, gloomy part of the city shaded by overpasses. But I found the water and then the cafés that opened for the morning commuters.
I sat at a window seat and took measured sips of coffee. I didn’t want my cup taken away. Efficient girls in black aprons were a bit of a curse in such moments; they were unremitting in their tidying up. Outside, the self-possession and swift purpose of the Swedes made the time I had seem indulgent. You should get up and work, it said. Do something. So I tore a page from my journal and began writing to Claire, even if there was no point, and even if she never answered letters. I gave her my thoughts about Copenhagen and some of Jens’s news. I told her that I knew he’d written and what he’d said, and that she should write to congratulate him on a job he’d managed to get, despite himself.
Half an hour later, I moved coffee shops and tried to continue the letter; I remember a line about seeing her the last time before Anthony died, and how heavy and vacant of any real meaning the line was. What could I tell her about losing him? What did it matter how she’d seemed to me those last weeks before he left, or during the night she and I had had together?
So I tore up the letter and began again. This time, I wrote that I hadn’t wanted to leave her. I was thinking about her sketches, and how this year apart had been my way of finding something, the way she did in leaving things unfinished and never to be framed. Life wasn’t a statement, just a few lines between pages and pages of notes and drawings. But again I failed to catch the mood, the hope of a homecoming; no matter what I wrote, the year as I described it sounded most clearly as a kind of failure. I hadn’t managed to do anything on my own. None of it was real yet. I hadn’t accepted that Anthony was gone and always would be gone.
I walked to the History Museum, read about rune stones and swords, and then left at closing time with aching legs and a mind filled with Viking commemorations, boasts, family trees. Outside, the rest of the world moved more quickly from finishing work to dinner. I threw away the letter, and crossed the bridge into the old part of town and trailed the last of the tourists as they cast their shadows against souvenir shops closing for the day. By seven, the wind numbed the back of my legs. I settled on an Italian restaurant I couldn’t afford. I scanned the menu and calculated that I could manage a small margherita pizza and two glasses of red wine. It was still five hours until my next train, a night service to Trondheim, left.
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