Am I Cold

by Martin Kongstad

  She drew my cock inside her, and began to rub her clit again.

  Mies got on top of Diana and she let out an intense sigh as he slid his knob inside her.

  ‘Stick it right up,’ said Mille. Diana’s hands gripped Mies’ firm buttocks.

  ‘Hit me!’ said Mille.

  I slapped her bum and made its cheeks quiver.

  Diana was immersed in her own breathing, drawing him ever deeper, and I watched the wave of her orgasm like a store detective staring at a surveillance monitor.

  My only feeling was one of increasing annoyance at Mille’s soundtrack: all the smacking and self-conscious grunting.

  She pushed me away and turned her arse towards Mies.

  ‘Fuck me with your big cock!’

  He thrust it all the way up and she moaned and wailed and buried her nose in Diana’s pussy. I was at a loss as to how I might join in. I could work his arsehole, but that seemed rather extreme, or else I could position myself in the vicinity of Diana’s hand in the hope of getting a tug. I was beginning to feel like an insurance salesman, so I put a pair of jogging pants on and blew Diana a kiss on my way out.

  There were people kissing by the fire, others sprawled half naked in the grass, and from the tents came the sounds of sex. I stared into the embers.

  A knot in one of the logs exploded with a crack.

  A Sister of Mercy appeared beside me.

  ‘Do you fancy a snuggle?’ she said.

  I followed her into the tent where the other Sister lay reading a book, Kritik der sogenannten praktischen Erkenntnis by Alf Ross.

  ‘What’s it about?’ I asked.

  ‘He contests the notion of a fundamental, valid morality.’

  ‘You mean a God? Good and evil?’ I said.

  ‘He believes in a morality of the moment,’ she said.

  ‘Like we’re doing here,’ said the first Sister.

  ‘Are we moral?’ I said.

  ‘Certainly,’ said the other one.

  ‘I’m glad.’ I said.

  ‘Lie down and be quiet,’ said the first.

  I lay with my tongue in a Sister’s pussy when Andreas Møller poked his head through the tent opening.

  ‘You weren’t thinking of letting me down, were you? I’m about to deliver my sermon. Come on.’

  His sermon was about our duty to immerse ourselves in community, and it took as its point of departure a passage from Matthew. Andreas fulminated against false communities and argued for spirituality. ‘We are all of us involved in many kinds of community, but more often than not we are part of those communities for our own gain. What do I get out of lying around meditating with others? What do people think of me when I write about myself on Facebook? These are vain delights! Jesus let his hands be nailed to the cross in order that he might show us the way. It is our duty to serve others, and such duty is no tedious obligation. One might word it thus: that we are all of us obliged to give ourselves up to community, and this is at once both true and misleading, for by putting others before us we lose nothing and yet gain ourselves. We become happy.’

  Most applauded when he was finished, but Mille beckoned to me from the kitchen and locked the door behind us. Nikolaj Krogh sat at the little tiled table drinking tea.

  ‘What we’ve got going here is fabulous,’ she said. ‘But duty? Obligation? I do not wish to be bloody sermonised in my own garden. It stops, right now!’

  ‘Duty is such a provocative word,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t you play the honorary citizen with me, Mikkel Vallin,’ said Mille.

  ‘No one’s forcing you to attend his sermons,’ said Nikolaj Krogh.

  ‘Sermons?’ said Mille. ‘You mean there’ll be more?’

  ‘It can be quite uplifting to be given a moral kick in the pants,’ he said.

  A sleepy Lisa appeared with a duvet wrapped around her. She sat down on Nikolaj Krogh’s lap. Three initials were embroidered on the slip: E.H.K. Edvard Heinrich Krogh, Nikolaj Krogh’s grandfather.

  Andreas was at the breakfast buffet, engulfed by twittering culture babes.

  ‘Is there a problem?’ he asked.

  ‘It was a good sermon,’ I said.

  He sized me up.

  ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ I said. People were coming from the train in their beach get-ups, a chatter of voices as they ambled their way down to the sea, and outside Stina’s others were lounging around on Indian cushions, talking about the night before. We continued past them and turned right along the shore.

  ‘You’re a good man, Mikkel. Weak, but good,’ said Andreas Møller.

  ‘Why weak?’

  ‘You know perfectly well.’

  We had reached the nudist dunes. Men dawdled with their eyes peeled.

  ‘Why are you celibate?’ I asked.

  ‘My expectations were too high.’

  ‘You can go a long way without any, you know,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, that’s an opinion I hear voiced a lot,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t disagree more. It’s pseudo-Buddhist hocus-pocus, if you ask me. A reflection of sloth and cowardice. We should expect something of each other.’

  We walked through the dunes and into the woods of Troldeskoven where the trees were weathered by the wind. Gnarled, inky trunks and long, twisted branches reaching out like tentacles.

  ‘Tell me about your book,’ he said.

  I told him how it had changed direction and was now about the dissolution of coupledom and forging a new path for human relationships.

  ‘You’re very much in love with Diana, aren’t you?’ he said.

  I nodded, and a twig snapped under my foot.

  ‘Isn’t Mille complicating things a bit?’

  ‘I’ve decided it’s got to be viable,’ I said.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Otherwise your book will fall apart.’

  ‘It’s not about the book. It’s about my life,’ I said.

  ‘Does it distress you, having to share her?’ he said.

  ‘Sometimes,’ I said.

  ‘Do you think her being so unattainable is what made you fall in love with her?’

  ‘Are you in love with Diana?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know her.’

  ‘Since when did that matter?’

  ‘She’s with you,’ he said.

  ‘She’s her own person,’ I said. ‘But I do love her.’

  I didn’t see much of Diana in the days that followed. She was on the phone a lot, walking round and round in little circles at the far end of the garden, or else she was with Mille. They went riding together, dyed their clothes, or else went to flea markets in the surrounding area, and at night they lay naked together upstairs in the main house in grandmother Krogh’s old linen. But otherwise our love for each other was seemingly unchanged. We hugged after breakfast, gazed into each other’s eyes and parted feeling happy and secure. Naturally, I refrained from telling her how much I missed her.

  New tents had been arriving and the camp was full of activity: there was a chess tournament at the campfire site, a yoga group, and a choir for the experienced singers. Most got up for the morning sermons, and Andreas and I spent a lot of time discussing and planning them.

  We were sitting by the pond beyond the Horsekærlinien when he told me about his mother’s suicide. She was a doctor’s daughter and had grown up in an endlessly spacious apartment on Sankt Thomas Plads. She played Chopin, was fond of modern German theatre and had dreamt of one day seeing Matisse’s garden.

  She met his father at a Stan Getz concert at the former Montmartre jazz club and fell for his repartee and solid physical appearance. He was from Hedebygade, but had got stuck in at school and was reading law. He was devoted to his wife, but he both admired her classical upbringing and resented her for it. By the time Andreas was a year old, his father’s law firm was doing good business, and when he wasn’t working he frequented his clients’ strip bars and various Vesterbro brothels. His drinking took over, he would throw his dinner in the bin if it wasn’t
to his liking, and bring girls home with him from the Kakadu Bar. He decided to move the family away from it all to Hørsholm and begin a new life. But Andreas’ mother loved the city life, the theatre and the concerts, and she wilted in their new environment. Moreover, his father had sold the firm and conducted his business from home, and when he wasn’t bossing the gardener about in his French Baroque gardens he terrorised his wife. She began to lose weight, became addicted to tranquillisers and stopped playing the piano. Having spent his entire childhood witnessing this brutal campaign against his mother, one day when he was a teenager Andreas finally lost it and went for him with a poker. His father lost his sight in one eye, and Andreas was sent to board at Herlufsholm.

  Andreas’ story was a horrendous lesson in how damaging it can be to grow up within the framework of a dysfunctional relationship. He had only ever had one serious romantic relationship, and although we talked without inhibition and could ask each other almost anything, I could sense it still pained him dreadfully.

  They had moved in with each other when they were eighteen, and it lasted eight years. She was good looking and her name was Nathalie. That was all I got out of him.

  We went to the Strandhotel and discovered an unoaked white South African Chardonnay, and it was the first time we had got drunk together. Andreas cursed the lounge DJ and wanted to hear the waves instead.

  He became intense during the cognac.

  ‘John Noyes was one man,’ he said. ‘We are two, Mikkel.’

  ‘That’s it!’ I said. ‘We’ll have communal meetings before dinner.’

  ‘Cadeau to Noyes!’ he said. ‘What shall we call them?’

  ‘Assembly,’ I said.

  ‘Assembly’s good,’ he said. ‘That’s what we’ll do. We’ll assemble.’

  He had begun to slur his speech rather affectedly and to bark out abrupt orders to the waiter.

  ‘We’ll take this a notch further, Mikkel. Are you in?’

  ‘That depends.’

  He was distracted for a moment by a pair of seventeen-year-old boobs walking by.

  ‘How many people have we got in the camp now, Vallin?’

  ‘About a hundred and twenty,’ I said.

  ‘Two hundred more and we buy a property!’

  ‘You mean it, don’t you?’ I said.

  He took his eyes off the boobs.

  ‘Why did you phone me?’

  ‘Because I wanted to progress.’

  He put his hand on mine.

  ‘It’s all well and good people shagging left, right and centre, but we don’t want to make do with just an exciting little holiday pushing the limits, do we?’

  Mille and Diana walked in arm in arm. Mille was about to do a U-turn when she saw us, but then realised I’d already seen them. It was odd to see Diana in a dress. It was royal blue with a dazzling white collar, and reached about halfway down her thighs. She looked amazing, her legs were tanned and gorgeous, but at the same time it made her look like an expensive Tisvilde girl, and they were ten a penny. Mille had borrowed one of her ties, and that was even worse.

  ‘We wanted to go dancing,’ said Mille. ‘But this lounge mood’s going to drive me mad. How about the Bistro, Diana?’

  ‘I don’t see you at the sermons, Mille,’ said Andreas.

  ‘I don’t see you either,’ she said.

  ‘Should we bike over to Hundested tomorrow?’ said Diana.

  ‘I’d love to,’ I said.

  ‘I thought we were going to the market at Græsted?’ said Mille.

  ‘We’re not anymore,’ said Diana.

  Andreas fell into a hedge on the way home and went straight to bed.

  The Sisters of Mercy were sitting by the fire with a group of slobbering young men. I got them both into Skotte Olsen and stuck my dick into every conceivable hole until eventually I was exhausted enough to sleep.

  Diana and I biked off before the sermon. We went through Hegnet, passing the castle ruin and continuing on to Asserbo, before sweeping down on to the saturated fat of Liseleje’s croisette, past the big white church at Melby, through Hald with all its little parcelled-out plots and standard houses of impregnated wood from the sixties, and eventually Kikhavn, a sanctuary of hollyhocks and the pastoral idyll of the intellectual left. We ended up with fishcakes on the quay at Hundested, and I sat swinging my legs like a little kid.

  ‘I miss you,’ she said.

  ‘Should we kiss?’ I said.

  It wasn’t the kind of quay you kissed on.

  ‘Are you in love with Mille?’ I asked.

  She looked at me for a long time.

  ‘What’s the score with the Sisters of Mercy?’

  ‘I feel like I know them,’ I said.

  ‘Do you know me?’

  ‘You know I don’t.’

  She laughed and leaned into me. ‘I’m meeting Moritz at the Tisvilde Café. He made it sound like it was important. Will you come with me?’

  Moritz had at least made some sartorial concession to the fact that it was summer, and was wearing shorts and a straw hat. His opening gambit was studiously light hearted; they’d been having a terrible time with stones on their little beach at Rågeleje. He ordered mineral water and a machiatto, and just to spite him I asked for two safari suits. Fortunately, the young waiter didn’t know what it meant, which allowed me to add the words Elephant and Jägermeister to the long series of cultural markers the guests on the teeming terrace from then on would associate with Moritz.

  ‘I hear you’re staying with Nikolaj Krogh and Mille?’

  ‘We’re all bonking each other’s brains out over there,’ I said.

  A twitch passed across his face, sheer disgust.

  ‘Anyway, Diana,’ said Moritz. ‘I got this call from Stig Nissen.’

  ‘He’s so cute, don’t you think?’ she said.

  ‘I haven’t actually formed an opinion about that yet, but he was wanting to clear the rights issue.’

  ‘Was it okay?’

  ‘No, far from it, in my opinion. But he showed me a contract with your signature on it. Stig Nissen has no taste, Diana. But he does have money, and the drawings to which he now owns the rights are going to be plastered on to T-shirts and carrier bags and giant inflatables inside the shop.’

  ‘At least it means people are going to see them,’ she said.

  ‘You’re previewing your new work with a shopkeeper from the sticks.’

  ‘Is that too vulgar?’ she said.

  ‘Stig Nissen made his fortune pissing on all notion of design and quality. Being associated with him is poison. All we can hope is for the journalists not to get wind of a story.’

  I pictured the advertising.

  ‘Our friend Kreuzmann claims there’s a financial crisis on its way,’ I said. ‘Will that affect the market for art?’

  Moritz found his expert voice.

  ‘The abnormal prices for Warhols and Picassos might take a downward turn, but it won’t affect contemporary art in general.’

  ‘Jeff Koons’ Balloon Flower Magenta just fetched thirteen million pounds at Christie’s in London!’ I said.

  ‘Koons keeps his value,’ he said. ‘In a way, he has transcended himself out of the art sphere. What you’re buying there is a piece of our age.’

  I kept him going with this distraction from Diana’s work, and he started talking about how pop art couldn’t be judged in terms of isolated works, you had to take into account the way they engaged with contemporary society.

  Diana waited until the Alfa Romeo had disappeared from view.

  ‘Thanks for your help,’ she said.

  The following morning Clara called and invited herself and Kathrine to lunch. She sounded fine, though you never could tell.

  I forced myself not to feel guilty, but it was a struggle: I’d known Clara since I was seven, and yet I had facilitated Erik Brinch’s fling. Clara brought homemade chicken salad in a Tupperware bowl and mentioned three times that she’d used fresh asparagus.

 
‘Kathrine’s left Mosbeck now,’ she said.

  ‘Are you unhappy?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Kathrine.

  ‘We’ll look after you,’ said Clara, and almost fell over at the sight of the portable showers and loos, the great tent camp, the laundry waving from the washing lines, and the well-organised lunch buffet.

  ‘This is brilliant!’ said Kathrine, converting her r into a w in the eighties style.

  ‘Everyone pays two hundred kroner a day,’ I said.

  ‘Is it like the old communes?’ said Clara.

  ‘They had the gender battle to deal with. We have fun.’

  ‘Why don’t we put a tent up too?’ said Kathrine.

  ‘Do you know the package-tour couple?’ said Clara. ‘They’re the ones in the room next door when you go to Samos. They scrape their plastic chairs about on their balcony and you can hear them pour their retsina and inhale when they’re smoking their fags, but they never actually say a word. All they do is clear their throats. Well, that’s me. I’m the package-tour couple.’

  I laid a table for us by the end wall. The chicken salad was bland.

  ‘Of course, it’s never nice when you’re husband’s unfaithful,’ said Clara, reaching out for a piece of toasted bread. ‘But I feel a lot better already.’

  I was about to get up and give her a big hug when I noticed the look she gave me and stayed put.

  ‘He told me everything,’ she said.

  I said nothing for a while. Clara went on:

  ‘Who is she? I know he fucked some bimbo. Who is she?’

  ‘You can’t expect Mikkel to answer that,’ said Kathrine.

  ‘I’ve known him ever since he was in short trousers and had long hair. We were everything to one another. Who else could give me an honest answer!’

  ‘Shall I toast some more bread?’ I asked.

  Kathrine put her arm around Clara.

  ‘I lose my man. I lose my best friend.’ Clara thumped the table and knocked the white wine over.

  ‘This project of yours, it’s sick, Mikkel. It’s making people upset.’

  I remained standing by the toaster. I thought of Clara in a mohair sweater and harlequin pants. Going halves on a chicken sandwich after the Survivors gig at the Montmartre, Clara in a tizz about the bass player with the curly hair. Gefilte fish balls at that Jewish restaurant in the Marais, Goya’s black series at the Prado, En Vogue at the Hammersmith Odeon. All the telling looks behind the backs of successive girlfriends and boyfriends, the sense of having a person you needn’t bother lying to. The toast popped up and as I returned to the table I resolved to stand my ground.