by Dorthe Nors
Walked first thing into a house from Fanø, and something’s missing in this Zealandic heath—the local dances, the wading birds, or perhaps just Aunt Margrethe and a coffee machine.
Went from house to house.
Inhaled the smell of a lost hay cutting and the sight of that feathered wing hanging above it all, and I know I’m doing the right thing, and I know that it hurts (but just like birth, such things can be endured), I know that, just like I know that houses no one lives in no longer exist, and I want to exist.
Used a toilet in the section on early industrialization.
Moved so slowly that I nearly stood still
and thought of the future, for you have to believe in it, thought of the past, because I could see it, thought of my memory and sat with it under an elderberry tree:
and taciturnity’s a form of protection, I decided,
pinching off the heads of the wild chives that dangled about in the grass.
Watched a child crying after a run-in with a nettle bush by the double farmstead from southern Sweden,
felt pain in my tooth,
but as we’ve seen, everything’s just a transition phase, I thought
and took Kongevejen home.
Woke knowing I would enjoy the surgical intervention, the painkillers, the cotton wads, the simplicity of scalpels, the body’s transitory nature as the soul’s lacerations persist and flap forever in the wind.
Had my last wisdom tooth extracted,
had my mouth stitched up with needle and thread by a man who said I would heal slowly because my age was against me,
as if I didn’t know that, I thought, as if it isn’t such things that make me stop midmotion in plotting out the future, and if you’ve got something for aching of the heart, Dr. Lars, if you’ve got something for emptiness and loss of voice, if you’ve got something for time’s tooth, then be sure to add it to my bill, but otherwise I think you should hold your tongue, unless you want to hear my philosophy of teeth—would you like to hear it? Would you?
Didn’t get the tooth to bring home.
Had to dismount several times from my bike to spit blood, and I don’t give a hoot, for in the midst of melancholy I am Kali, and Kali spits blood where she lists.
Bought large quantities of ice cream.
Was knocked out by the painkillers.
Didn’t waken till evening, when I sat up with a start: Is this still the summer that would never end? and then I felt my tooth, just because it’d disappeared.
Went for an evening stroll in the cemetery.
Decided to cast away the things that have plagued me for a long time, like my fridge, the failed effort, and, now that I was on a roll, the bleeding gums and inviolability,
but I can’t cast away the human being, I thought, gazing at Snebjørn Gudmundson’s gravestone with its doves and its birthdate in Reykjavik.
Cannot cast away recollection,
cannot cast away Brahms and those parts,
cannot cast away the memory and feeling and loss of my voice,
cannot cast away life, cannot cast it away.
Ran my tongue over the wound, and it was still there.
Sorted laundry, two piles, Tuesday.
Managed to exchange the wrecked sunglasses but could not exchange them for winter, no matter how much I wished to.
Concluded that what from my vantage appears to be the cold could well be something else,
but on days when I fear disappointment, I prefer to look on the dark side of things, it pulls me together and keeps me one step ahead of suffering
(and I shouldn’t think that it won’t continue either, for it does continue, day in and day out it continues, this hesitation that has taken me hostage, and it’s going to be the longest summer ever, it’ll be a summer that never lets go, and I’ll end up being unable to distinguish it from last summer, which was precisely the same and kept on being so until the roses closed up from frost in the end of November, when I got the flu and a measure of peace).
Washed the floor and rinsed with chlorhexidine
and stood stock-still at the tail end of the afternoon and issued a sound that made all the dogs in Valby howl,
made the wound spring a leak, made me want to sing along, though I could not.
Went to yoga and assumed boat pose,
and something must continue, though it cannot keep going, I thought. There must be an end to it. What we know and what we see before our eyes must merge and become one image. I want what I hold to be true and the magnets on the fridge to resemble each other, I thought as I lay and pitched in the surf.
Biked home, called Mom to tell her,
I want to have what’s promised and what’s living to make sense,
and then she fell silent on the other end of the line,
as if she were stroking me indulgently on the cheek.
Woke to the throbbing in my mouth.
Sat up, thinking, I can no longer remember a thing.
Managed Stormgade on my bike,
found a place at the Royal Library and worked with the water behind me
and then discovered that the young man to my right in the reading room (as if in a piece of fiction) was busy reading a book about dental X-rays,
and if it weren’t because one’s supposed to be quiet, I’d lean over and show him what I’ve lost, and I’d tell him how much it hurts, and then he could say something about the enamel and the cotton wads, whereupon we’d both have gone to lunch at Café Øieblikket that much the wiser.
Drank my coffee in small sips with the view of Lange Bridge and recalled last winter,
recalled the gray light over Christianshavn, the way the mitten had gotten snagged on the banister, and I walked with my stollen back to my place, which vanished before me:
I don’t want to, I cannot, and you mustn’t write me anymore, he’d written,
nothing else,
and the time since had passed with knowing the difference between wanting and being able to.
Biked home with my dictionary and manuscript
to the small scraps of paper on my desk.
Went for a run in Frederiksberg Gardens and for a moment assumed that the ladder-to-heaven flowers were snowberries,
grew uneasy,
grew insecure,
but then I remember the light in the kitchen, how the doors opened and the faces lifted, the dive of the bats, and that moment on the bench when the words in my mouth sat fast like that wisdom tooth, which until Monday sat fast in me and now is gone, and that was after America and before the birds settled in the grass, and I should have said that, I should have spit it out on the flagstones, like I’ve been spitting blood at present, but that’s the sort of thing you always know afterward, and I’m a woman, not an oral surgeon.
Tied my laces by the elephants.
Tied them again by the crematorium
and looked up and walked home
and could not forget a single thing.
Cut to the bone had it not been for the duvet.
Tried to work but was the whole time up on tenterhooks, down on my knees, back and forth on the floor.
Scribbled down my memoirs: I couldn’t help it.
Scribbled them down again: I was fragile, I was bone china,
and I was Kali with a touch of Pippi and Pippi with a touch of the little match girl,
and it isn’t that I’ve got to contain them all in me, master and miniature alike, it’s more that I shouldn’t lose face during.
Told Mom that it was unbearable, now that I’ve sat and waited so long in this waiting room: So it’s finally your turn, Miss Delicate, think you can still stand on those legs? and when I called her up, it was because she was always the one who took me to the doctor when I was little, the one who asked, Could you listen to the child’s heart? Just to be on the safe side
(and so I felt the cold metal against my skin, and the doctor moved the stethoscope across my chest in small hops as if my heart were in flight, for t
here isn’t anything the heart fears more than people who listen to it of their own free will).
There’s a goodness besides the one you’re waiting for, said my mother. So be patient, she said,
and then I opened the windows to hear the Vietnamese neighbors’ party in the backyard, for happiness may well occur in ways we don’t understand, I thought, looking at the love I have and safeguarding it against enemy forces the way an Inuit guards his whale-oil lamp,
his mukluks,
and his laughter.
Grabbed the egg the second before it hit the floor,
went to the grocery store and dragged my little basket along
and took my place at the end of the line.
Fell into a reverie at the sight of the corpulent woman who is the supermarket’s star cashier because the only thing she can do is move her arms, and they guide other people’s everyday lives past the bar code reader so fast, you can hardly see the gold ring that shines on her finger, but it’s there, and inside it says Your eternal beloved.
Bought new bulbs, since everything burns out anyway.
Decided that despite it all, I would stick to the truth as I knew it
and walked over to the cemetery,
and the pigeons rose into the air.
Discovered a gravestone of a person whom I knew to be utterly alive, and I’d walked down that path countless times but never seen the stone before, or in any case never noticed the name, so perhaps it wasn’t there yesterday, or there’s another person buried there, or I just see my truths gradually as they unfold before me,
I thought, and noticed that the person in question had died in 1934, and that it could therefore in no way be the same one, but other than that there was an absolute convergence of things that didn’t make sense
and I felt humbled,
I felt listened to
and loved beneath the surface,
and bore in mind the thought that for God, a gravestone is just a scrap to make notes upon, the way the rest of us write our small concerns on the papers on the desk,
and one thing is inescapable: I write,
I write
centifolia, multiflora, and Astrid Lindgren.
That cannot be changed, I thought
and skirted the high-piled Midsummer Night bonfires, smiling (demented)
across the hay-scented lawns home.
Acknowledgments
I could not have written this book without the inspiration of those who came before me. Minna Needs Rehearsal Space was in particular inspired by the work of others. Above all I have to thank Ingmar Bergman. His books Images: My Life in Film and Magic Lantern live on in Minna. So do Jens Peter Jacobsen’s 1874 poem “Arabesk: Til en Haandtegning af Michel Angelo” [“Arabesque: For a Drawing by Michelangelo”]; Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s “Sangen Har Lysning” [“The Song Has Light”], also known as #159 in Højskolesangbogen [The Danish Folk High School Songbook]; and Carl Orff’s “In Trutina” [“In the Balance”]. So grateful for your writing, dead guys. It was such an honor to sing duet with you on these pages.
Now to the living! I wish to express my gratitude to the Danish Arts Council and the Danish Arts Agency for supporting this book with grants. Thanks to my Danish editor Julie Paludan-Müller, and to my American editors Brigid Hughes and Fiona McCrae—and I can’t forget the amazing Graywolf team and all the other great book people I work with in the US. A warm thank-you as well to Astri von Arbin Ahlander and Christine Edhäll in Stockholm (you rock!) and to the many writers and friends who have helped me find my way. A special thanks to translator Misha Hoekstra for his enthusiasm and extraordinary skill; it’s been fun working with you. And last but not least: thank you to my family.
DORTHE NORS is the author of five books in her native Denmark, including the story collection Karate Chop, for which she received the 2014 Per Olov Enquist Literary Prize. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, A Public Space, and Harper’s. She lives in Jutland.
MISHA HOEKSTRA taught creative writing and literature at Deep Springs College before moving to Denmark in 1997. He writes and performs songs as Minka Hoist.
Book design by Ann Sudmeier. Composition by Bookmobile Design & Digital Publisher Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free, 30 percent postconsumer wastepaper.