Falling Sideways

  “Mainly it’s the discomfort,” she said.

  “And the risk of immunity?” Jaeger asked.

  “That too.”

  “Well, I’m sure you don’t want us squandering your tax money,” the doctor said briskly into Jaeger’s face as the nurse dipped one of the swabs into each of the three canisters and placed it beneath the edge of his split, swollen, blackened nail. Then she shoved.

  Jaeger yelled. With her free hand she patted his knee. Then she twisted the stick. He yelled again.

  “I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. We’re almost done.”

  “Almost all done,” said the doctor.

  “Except for the clamp and the bandage.”

  “That’s a nasty finger all right,” the doctor said as the nurse applied the clamp and padded the cut with gauze, wrapping it several times around the finger, securing it with bits of white tape she had cut in advance and stuck along the edge of the metal table. Then she began to pack the whole thing in some kind of perforated condom-looking thing of black latex.

  “How’d it happen?” the doctor asked.

  “Ex-wife.”

  The doctor looked startled. “Did she bite you?”

  “No, actually, it was her father.”

  “Her father bit you?”

  “No no no, he slammed the door on my finger. Twice.”

  “Did he do it on purpose?” the nurse asked, and there was such a willing eagerness to condemn such barbarism evident in her pale blue eyes that Jaeger nearly lied to her. Instead, he said, “On purpose or not, he did it. Twice.” He thought they might suggest a police report, but they were finished with him.

  In the hall outside the treatment room, he heard the nurse laugh at something the doctor said to her, and indignation flared in his heart. He fished out his cell phone with his unbandaged hand and awkwardly dialed 112 with his left thumb.

  “I’m calling from the emergency room at Gentofte,” he said. “I’d like to report an act of violence.”

  “Is someone in danger now?” asked the policeman or whatever he was.

  “No, but someone, my father-in-law, slammed the door on my finger. Twice.”

  “Has it been treated?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you ambulatory?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I suggest you come into the station if you think you want to report that, sir. This is the alarm central. It’s for emergencies.”

  The line went dead.

  Jaeger didn’t know if he was more ashamed or furious. He recognized, though, that the pain in his finger was buoying him. As long as his finger hurt, he was angry, and as long as he was angry, he could keep afloat. He didn’t dare begin to speculate about what might be waiting for him when the anger abandoned him to his feeble intellectual devices. I’m not stupid! Why am I so stupid? And he could not bear to think about what Vita had implied—no, accused him of!

  Being in Gentofte, he suddenly remembered a man he knew named Elsnab who had a legal practice on Gentofte Street. He got the number from information and called. Elsnab agreed to see him if he could be there by four thirty.

  The offices were on the second floor of a low, broad building complex, a minimall that included two small supermarkets, a uniplex cinema, two toy stores, a candy shop, and a butcher. Elsnab’s office was above the candy shop and butcher. The reception desk was not manned, or womanned, and Elsnab sat in the empty waiting area with him. Elsnab had a whiskered, receding chin, bulbous nose, and protruding eyes.

  “Ever been to the movies in that cinema down there?” he asked. “Ingenious. They weren’t doing so well, so they tore out every other row—you know, to give everyone lots of legroom. Doubled their business. By halving their seats. Ingenious. Very pleasant. What the hell’d you do to your finger?” he asked.

  Jaeger told him the story.

  “So you want to sue your ex’s old man?”

  “I want to assert my right to see my little girls.”

  Elsnab touched the sparse salt-and-pepper whiskers on his inward-slanting chin. “How old’re they?”

  “Four and six.”

  “You love ’em, huh?”

  “Love ’em to death.”

  “How’s that?”

  “It’s an expression. It means I love them a lot.”

  “I’d drop that expression if I was you. You love them enough to leave them in peace?”

  “What! You mean just give them up?”

  “They’re young enough to forget you.”

  “I could never do that, never. My father left me and my mother alone when I was thirteen, and I swore I’d never do that to my children.”

  “But that’s it. You were thirteen, so you remember him still. If you were four or six, you’d have forgotten him. His face would just disappear from your memory. There’ve been studies. You’d have forgotten him and he’d have forgotten you. And probably when you were four or six, he wanted to leave anyway, but he couldn’t get himself to do it, thought he could make it work, tried but just kept sinking deeper in hell until finally it was so hot he had to escape clean. He should’ve done it earlier. You could learn from your father’s mistakes. Let everyone forget everyone. Let the mother get on with a new life, let the kids have a new father. Let the father start again.”

  “I could never do that.”

  “Because you think you’re afraid of hurting them, but what you’re really afraid of is hurting yourself. Look, you feel terrible right now, right? And you’re afraid that it’s always gonna be this way, that it’ll get even worse. But it will only get worse if you keep tramping around in it. You got the door slammed on your finger. What do you think that did to your little girls? They’re not getting better off by you staying around to get doors slammed on your fingers. They’ll get worse, and the ones who suffer most are the little girls. In ten years’ time you’ll be dealing with drug problems, alcohol problems, pregnancies, abortions, piercings. Who knows? Even sex films—who knows? Prostitution! You want to see your little girls in sex films? I mean, when they’re older. Leave them in peace now, and you avoid all that. They forget you, you forget them, their mom meets a new guy, and inside of two years they’ll be calling him Daddy, and you’re free to make a new life for yourself. Kindest thing all around. Believe me. I been there.”

  “Never could,” Jaeger said.

  “Think about it, Harald. Give yourself a break.”

  “You left your kids?”

  “Hard choices. Man’s got to rise to them. Think about it.”

  Now, in the dark of his apartment, what Jaeger thought about were the little faces of his little girls lying in their beds with the blankets up to their chins, smiling up at him as he sang them to sleep at night.

  “Sing the onliest girls one, Daddy!”

  “Yeah, sing the onliest girls one!”

  And Jaeger sang the makeshift song he had stitched together for them over the years, sung more or less to the tune of “If You Were the Only Girl in the World”:

  You are the onliest girls in my world.

  And I am your only dad.

  We’ll swim in an ocean of glittering pearls,

  Where nothing that happens is bad.

  And there while the sun shines with gentlest rays,

  I will care for you all of my days.

  He could not stand it. He tried the phone again but only got the message service. If she looked at her call register, she would see that he’d called ten, fifteen times. Why didn’t she at least phone back? It was nine P.M. She should have been here three hours ago. He’d called her after he’d seen Elsnab. She’d promised.

  Abruptly he rose and flicked on the light, paced the wood floor. Seven steps from end to end. Five steps from wall to wall. He put his good hand over his eyes and turned his head from side to side, leaned on the window ledge, and gazed down at the windows of the building across the narrow street. There were three stories of windows down beneath him, studded with light. He could see a man and woman seated at a
table by one window. The woman raised a coffee cup to her lips. The man was smoking a cigarette. He could not see the man’s face, but the woman was smiling, and an agony of loss opened and grew within him. That no woman was here to smile at him, to want him to want her.

  “Oh, Birgitte,” he whispered, “Birgitte, Birgitte, Birgitte,” and spun from the window. Their cups and snifters still littered the coffee table from the evening before. Abandoned debris of a lost evening, a lost night of passion, of now lost happiness and joy.

  One of the snifters had a lipstick smudge on the rim. He poured the rest of the cognac from the split into the glass and sipped from it, placing his lips over the lipstick smudge, closing them on it as the cognac burned his throat.

  Then, on the floor beneath the coffee table, he saw her scarf, gray and white and red. He seized it, silk, buried his nose and mouth into it, and inhaled. He could smell her perfume, the flesh of her slender neck, the tang of her hair spray. He managed to tie it around his nose and mouth like the bandanna of a bandito and, closing his eyes, breathed in its perfumed scent; and imagining her gaze, her eyes, beneath him, above him, imagining her cuntful smile, he did the only thing that remained for him to do now.

  With his left hand.

  31. Adam Kampman; Harald Jaeger

  The North Bodega seemed different to Adam at night when sunlight didn’t slant in the window from Solitude Way. It seemed more closed off. And none of Jes’s friends were here now, either. At least the bartender was the same, a tall, sorrowful-looking man with skinny legs and a big belly. His name was Erik. Jes had made a point of introducing Adam to him, and Erik had shaken hands with sorrowful formality, blue eyes peering out over the elaboration of pouches beneath his eyes.

  Adam ordered a bottle of Carlsberg Hof and sat at the corner table with it. From there he could observe the entire barroom. He took a newspaper from one of the empty tables and pretended to read it while he watched the room surreptitiously. It seemed to him he had made great progress in the past few days. Here he was—a boy who had hardly ever even drunk a beer before—in a serving house, on his own, on a first-name basis with the bartender, pockets full of money. He had quit school, thrown away his schoolbooks to seal the bargain, made some new friends, even invited a girl out.

  That, however, had not been much of a triumph. In some way, it seemed his new friend and the romantic interest canceled each other out, considering that Jytte was in bed with Jes at this very moment and they were no doubt fucking. Adam felt the heat of a blush crawl up the back of his neck. Did Jes think of him as some kind of dupe, that he could just snatch his girlfriend away from him like that? On the other hand, he couldn’t very well claim she was his girlfriend. He had never even kissed her. He had no claim on her at all. Still, he felt miserable about it, even if that misery was not as bad as his previous misery of nothingness. At least now he could sit here over a beer and nurse a broken heart. At least he wasn’t hiding under the covers of his bed, sinking into the annihilation of sleep, being taunted by his father. Here he was out in the middle of life itself.

  The door jingled open and a short, stocky man came in, smoking a cigarette. He glanced around the room, and Adam had a sense that the man’s eyes rested on him for a moment too long before he took a place at the corner of the bar. Adam looked up, and their eyes met before he turned quickly back to his newspaper. Still, he watched the man secretly, saw him twist out his cigarette in the ashtray and immediately light another as Erik the bartender served him.

  “Triple house vodka,” the man said. His voice sounded at once husky and effeminate.

  The only other customers in the room were an older woman with painted red lips sitting alone in a window niche and two men with tattooed arms drinking strong gold beer from the bottle at a table by the wall. They seemed to be friends but were muttering angrily to each other, cursing, as if sharing anger at a common outrage. The woman chatted with the bartender from time to time in a mix of heavily accented Danish and heavily accented English. She was tall and very thin and moved her hands when she spoke, in a slow, dreamy manner. Adam thought she looked old and used and sad, but when she smiled, her face brightened attractively. Her blouse was open three buttons so Adam could see the fleshy curve of her small breasts.

  There was some mystery here, it seemed to him. He was being admitted to the mystery of a hidden part of life away in the north of the city. He felt more alive than he could remember feeling for a long time.

  He glanced again toward the man seated at the bar with his triple vodka and cigarette. His clothes were messy, lumpy, pale blue jeans and a cheap, dark rain jacket. The man glanced over at Adam and seemed to stare for a moment before looking away. Adam felt as though he were remembering an old and faded nightmare. Was he going nuts?

  Again the door jingled—there was some kind of metal wind chimes it struck when it opened—and a man leaned in, glancing quickly around the room, holding the door from closing as though deciding whether or not to enter. A neatly trimmed red beard and mustache circled his mouth, and he wore a rumpled gray suit and red tie. Adam noticed the man’s eyes were chafed and the little finger of his right hand was wrapped in a thick dark bandage.

  The woman in the window niche gestured dreamily with her long fingers. “Here is Danish chantleman,” she said.

  One of the angry men at the table across from Adam shot a quick look at the man in the doorway and grumbled, “You plan to close that door or what?” He wore a sleeveless shirt that showed his thick, tattooed arms and shoulders.

  “Excuse me,” the man said, shutting the door carefully. “Excuse me.” He sat just beside the window niche and ordered a draft. “And please give the lady what she might like.”

  “I know you was chantleman,” she said, and lifted an empty stem glass to the bartender. “I am Tatyana,” she said, and extended a long hand in a slow, dreamy reach.

  “Harald.”

  Their fingers touched, and she said, “You have cigarette for me?”

  Jaeger asked the bartender for a pack of ten.

  “With the filter,” said Tatyana.

  The one angry man—the one with the thick bald head—muttered to the other, “Tatyana’s found a purse for herself,” and the two chuckled and coughed. The bartender delivered the cigarette pack and tore it open for her, then poured peppermint schnapps into Tatyana’s glass.

  “To chantleman,” she said, raising the stem glass.

  Jaeger was fascinated by the movement of her hands. She looked like some kind of fallen Eastern European nobility. He willed his gaze away from her slender cleavage, up to her thin poppy red lips.

  “But you are vounded,” she said, and touched his hand lightly with the tips of her long fingers.

  “It’s nothing,” he said.

  “Hero,” muttered the bare-armed angry man.

  “Are you Russian?” Jaeger asked the woman.

  “Never Russian,” she said. “I am on way to Stockholm but am stopped here by love. Since three years I am stopped here. He was wery kind to me.”

  “Was? Did you leave him?”

  “I could never to leave his kindness. He is dead since eight months. Now I wait to come me over him until I continue my journeys. He leave to me his domicile. Little apartaments beneath the level of the sidewalks. I sell this and move on when I am strong again.”

  Jaeger nodded, looked into his beer. Sorrow everywhere he turned.

  She touched his hand again. “You wanted I should be Russian?” she asked. “Then you do not spit upon me, perhaps?”

  “Why in the world would I spit on you?”

  “The Danish peoples they spit upon me two times. They spit upon me because I am Polack. And they spit upon me because I am Jew.”

  “I’m a Jew myself,” said Jaeger.

  “No surprise there,” muttered the angry man.

  She stared at Jaeger. Then she reached up to the green-glass shade of the lamp hanging over his table and tilted it back so it shone into his face. “Let me to
see your eyes,” she said, and studied him. Then, “You are not Jew.”

  The angry tattooed man muttered, “Can see clear down to his foreskin.”

  She made a little sign to Jaeger to disregard them, shaking her head. Jaeger looked at her cleavage, her thin red lips, her tea brown eyes. Her smile registered and approved his inspection of her.

  “Jewish women are best,” he said.

  “Perhaps you wife is Jew.”

  “I have no wife.”

  “You have been with Jewish woman?”

  “No.”

  She laughed huskily and only now reached for a cigarette from the open pack he had bought her. Jaeger fished a lighter from his pocket, thumbed it clumsily in his left hand, and she drew the hand to her with a gentle touch.

  “You do not take cigarette, too?”

  “Don’t smoke.”

  “Do not smoke but carry lighter to light cigarettes of women. I am right. You are chantleman.”

  Adam carried his empty bottle to the bar and ordered another Hof, turning his back to the man who had been watching him. Or had he? He wanted to take a good look at the man’s face, to remember it if he showed up again, but he was afraid to provoke him. What did he want? Was he the same man from before, following him? Or was he just going nuts?

  As he sat again with a fresh Hof, he glanced up. The man was trimming his cigarette along the edge of a large black plastic ashtray, and it seemed to Adam he was watching him sidewise. He wanted to get away now. Something bad seemed about to happen. But he thought if he left his beer unfinished, it would look queer. And what if someone came after him? All that money in his pocket. But where could he go? Not back to Jes, not with Jytte still there. Picture walking in on them fucking. The thought both excited and depressed him. He could rent a hotel room, but where? And how much would it cost? How old did you have to be? What if he left and the man at the bar followed him? He would run. He was younger, surely he could run faster.

  With a jangle of the metal chimes, the door popped open again and Jes leaned in, spotted Adam, and headed straight for him. “Hey, man, what’d you leave for? I been looking all over for you.”