Mrs. Thorkildsen stared at me with bulging eyes and an open mouth. Her spindly, bright white legs protruded from her nightgown, her hair stood on end, and between those two points was mostly chaos. An skinny old workhorse on its way to the glue factory. For free.
I heard someone cry hello from the hallway.
‘It’s the Puppy and the Bitch,’ I whispered. The whispering that was meant to calm the whole situation down only made it feel more urgent. Mrs. Thorkildsen’s panic had already transferred itself to me. Just then I recalled something the Major used to say:
‘Panic and paralysis are two sides of the same coin. It’s better to make a wrong decision than to make no decision at all.’
And just as the Major had promised, the panic disappeared the moment my decision was made. From fear to action in two heartbeats.
‘Go back to bed,’ I sneered. ‘I’ve got this.’
I chose to go out offensively, to harness the element of surprise, the trump card in every battle.
The swine in the hallway stood waiting for sweet little Tassen with the wagging tail, eager as ever to see a familiar face, but that’s just how they know me. Makes you realize what’s in a name. A name can hide a lot of things, no matter what they say.
My name isn’t really Tassen, ‘the small one’. Tassen is my slave name, given to me by the Master who bought me. Actually, when I first came to this house, covered in my own puke, the Major said my name was Helmer. But Mrs. Thorkildsen called me Tassen from day two, and no one has called me otherwise since. Tassen Thorkildsen. Doesn’t matter, really, because underneath it all I’m Satan Snarl of the Hounds of Hell.
It was Satan Snarl whose hair stood on end as he flashed his teeth this morning. He growled softly and bared his gums as he planted his feet deep into the carpet. Where that sound came from, I have no idea. I was almost a little frightened by it myself.
After a moment when it seemed like the Puppy simply didn’t believe his own eyes, I could smell him getting anxious. Really anxious. Not ‘Ohhhh, look how fierce you are, Tassen!’ in a silly voice. He went silent and his heart rate skyrocketed. Pulled his hands back, the coward. Seems the Puppy was a little afraid of dogs, too. Instead of continuing his path into the house, he pulled his leg back. Good boy. Take your bitch and make a quiet exit, and no one gets hurt. Slowly and quietly, I said.
The Bitch got the point right away, and turned her entrance into an exit without saying a word. The Puppy stood there alone, paralyzed by fear now, so afraid he cried out for his mother.
‘Moooom!’ he cried.
Mrs. Thorkildsen did not respond.
‘Moooo-ooom!’ the Puppy cried again then. I turned my head towards the bedroom and he immediately smacked me with the newspaper, rolled up and fresh from the mailbox. It sounds so innocent, giving the dog a smack with the paper, but it’s more than enough to conjure up stars and moons and planets if the combination of accuracy and power is just right. The Puppy has that combination down, which I’ve known for a while, so I was finished on the spot. No more growling from me—but in its place, I absurdly enough felt shame.
Whining, I darted into Mrs. Thorkildsen’s room with my tail between my legs, and the Puppy followed. Mrs. Thorkildsen struggled to put on her blue bathrobe and seemed even more confused at the sight of the Puppy:
‘What in the world is happening?’ she asked, and the Puppy chimed in:
‘Tassen attacked us.’
‘What nonsense,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen snorted as she tied the belt around her bathrobe. ‘Tassen doesn’t attack anyone.’
‘Oh, no? He was baring his teeth at us when we came in.’
‘Hear that?’ I said. ‘That wasn’t an attack, it was a warning.’
‘That wasn’t an attack, it was a warning,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen said. ‘Tassen looks out for me. If you’d warned me you were coming, he wouldn’t have reacted that way. But what do you expect when you come trampling in here like the Gestapo?’
Mrs. Thorkildsen had been completely blindsided, but she knew the tactics of war as well as him. And now the Puppy was the one put on the defensive.
‘Put the kettle on and let me get ready!’ she said. Emphatically. The Puppy backed out of the bedroom before Mrs. Thorkildsen had reached the word ‘kettle.’ I followed to make sure he obeyed her orders.
While Mrs. Thorkildsen took her time getting dressed, the Puppy and the Bitch rummaged through all the drawers and cabinets they could as they exchanged short messages through clenched teeth.
‘She must have them somewhere,’ the Puppy said. ‘I just don’t know where. She used to hide them in the linen closet, but now I have no idea. Have you looked in the laundry?’
‘There’s not a single empty bottle there.’
‘God knows where she gets rid of them.’
God knows. Mrs. Thorkildsen knows. I know. The nice-smelling man in the fluorescent uniform knows. Why the Puppy and the Bitch needed to know, I’m honestly not sure, especially since they once again were here to talk about houses.
‘I understand them all too well,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says, finally secured in her chair with a glass in the pitch dark after a long day.
‘Her, that is. As for Junior, I don’t think he cares that much about living here. Why else would he spend most of his adult life overseas? But she has obviously decided this is where she wants to live and, like I said, I understand her all too well—this is still a nice place to live. A fantastic place to grow up, but can’t they just be patient during the little bit of time I have left? I’m going to stay here until they carry me out cold, and I’ve never given them a reason to think otherwise. But what happens when I do my part to keep up the rate of decay? Then it’s suddenly a problem that I’m not taking care of myself or something!’
The last words are spoken in a voice I think is meant to imitate the Bitch. She utters the words with a grimace. Stays quiet long enough to make me think we’re done with the subject, but then comes:
‘Take care of myself! That’s what I’m doing. Taking care of my life. I’m living the way I want to live. I’m no child who doesn’t understand the consequences. I understand. It’s the ones who for the life of them can’t understand that I don’t necessarily just want to live as long as possible. Why should I? Live a gray boring life in hope of an even grayer and more boring life at the old folks’ home? Why in the world should I take care of myself?’
‘Well, for one thing, you’ve got a dog,’ I weigh in. ‘And that’s a big responsibility.’
Mrs. Thorkildsen smiles. ‘You’re my constant comfort, Tassen. You know that? And I hope you know I’ll always make sure you’re happy.’
‘Always?’
‘Always!’
‘With cinnamon rolls?’
‘With cinnamon rolls.’
20
Mrs. Thorkildsen’s cutting again. I’m glad to see her on her feet and active but, to tell you the truth, she seems a little feeble. She should eat more and maybe drink less Dragon Water. And she knows it. I’ve even heard her say it. But she has no appetite and barely any food. We should have gone hunting today, although we have plenty of Dragon Water in stock, but it’s getting dark now, and Mrs. Thorkildsen never goes hunting at night.
She cuts in silence and a hush spreads through the house, other than the sound of paper being folded and scissors slicing through it. Then the phone rings, and Mrs. Thorkildsen jumps, quietly gets to her feet, and staggers out to the hallway to answer it.
‘Twenty-eight oh-six oh-seven?’ she says, and I bet it’s one of her friends calling, maybe a cousin. I can hear it in the way Mrs. Thorkildsen is talking. Not relaxed, exactly, but as relaxed as she ever gets with the phone pressed to her ear.
‘Well, I’m just sitting here,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says, and gives yet another brief summary of how her life looks since her husband went away. She describes a life with many empty hours, with no appetite and terrible prices and useless shit on TV that she never watches anyway. Overall, she paints a pretty tra
gic picture, but she never fails to deliver the final point:
‘I don’t know how I would manage without Tassen,’ she tells whoever is on the other end of the line, and I think to myself that I don’t know either. Or how I would manage without her. We need each other. I’d starve without Mrs. Thorkildsen, and she’d drink herself to death without me.
She doesn’t mention the Puppy or the Bitch at all. Nor does she mention the fact that we were at the Library and the Tavern today (Janis was there as well, but today she was suddenly both uninteresting and uninterested. She was pregnant, too), or the fact that she’s sitting at the dining table cutting. Instead, she repeats:
‘Nothing ever happens.’
A strange thing to say. Here we are caught in the middle of an ice-cold drama between life and death, honor and humiliation, dogs and men, and she says nothing is happening? The Puppy and the Bitch barging in with fistfuls of papers that make Mrs. Thorkildsen overwhelmed and scared, isn’t that something happening? Isn’t the Home Help happening? The patty melts at the Tavern?
I know what Mrs. Thorkildsen is doing. Mrs. Thorkildsen is not complaining. This, you see, is how Mrs. Thorkildsen complains. For Mrs. Thorkildsen, complaining isn’t just a skill, it’s an art form at the highest level.
‘The best place to hide a tree is in the forest,’ the Major told me once, and since most of what he told me were things he’d already said to Mrs. Thorkildsen, I think she must have heard it, too. She’s living by his advice, anyway. She disguises her lack of complaining with complaining. On the phone, she doesn’t complain about missing other people, other times. Instead, she talks up a painful foot I’ve never heard a peep about. And then there’s all that talk about those who have it worse than her, all the time. And the Home Help. And all the useless shit on TV.
Afterwards she goes over to the dining table, but she doesn’t cut anymore. Just sits there quietly, staring through her glasses, not responding when I talk to her. Even her smell is barely there. Then Mrs. Thorkildsen goes to bed without so much as saying goodnight.
21
It takes three nights. On the third night Mrs. Thorkildsen gets up from the dining table, cleans up the paper scraps, puts the scissors back in the kitchen drawer, goes out into the hallway, and calls my name. Always happy to go for a walk, I am ready at the front door before Mrs. Thorkildsen can grab her coat—but then the old hag tricks me. I hear the door to the living room shut behind me, and Mrs. Thorkildsen is already on the other side. It takes me so completely by surprise that I don’t really have a reaction. I choose to believe it is a misunderstanding, which will soon be cleared up.
I wait for so long, taking into consideration both Mrs. Thorkildsen’s flighty spirit and her rickety physique, but there are limits. I bark. Nothing happens. I bark again. And again. Mrs. Thorkildsen doesn’t answer. It’s not in my nature to bark for my own sake; I’ve been programmed—by people!—to warn them about threats that lie in wait. And, naturally, I am concerned about what Mrs. Thorkildsen might do when left unsupervised. Older people do, as the Bitch has pointed out, have an unfortunate tendency to burn down the houses they live in. Or break their hips. What if Mrs. Thorkildsen goes senile in there behind the closed door, I think, or forgets that I’m standing here in the hallway? Alone. I’ll starve to death. Or, more likely, die of thirst. There are enough shoes here to sustain me for a while, but there’s no drinking water. The drinking water is at the South Pole.
Then, in the middle of my stream of thoughts, the living room door slides open. I have such a good start with the barking, it is becoming nearly as automatic as a Chihuahua’s, so a few barks slip out even after Mrs. Thorkildsen opens the door. There is a brief and slightly dumb pause. I fear the worst, but Mrs. Thorkildsen isn’t mad at my barking.
‘There, there, Tassen,’ she says. ‘It wasn’t that bad, was it?’
I am about to respond that, yes, it was that bad, but Mrs. Thorkildsen has already proceeded to her ‘Come on, now,’ and I come. You never know when there might be a treat in store.
On the floor by the fireplace, the results of three nights’ hard work with scissors and paper stand on display. The lone paper wolf has become a giant pack.
‘A hundred dogs,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says. ‘That’s how many there were.’
A hundred dogs is far more dogs than I ever could have imagined, it turns out. More dogs than I’ve ever seen at one time in my whole life. I didn’t know there were that many dogs in the world. It is a sight that explodes all boundaries in a simple dog’s brain. The floor is filled with small paper wolves in neat rows, all of them different, all of them alike but, most of all, they are many.
‘That’s how many dogs the Chief bought in Greenland,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says, gazing down at her creation.
‘And that’s how many—’ she snatches one paper wolf up from its place on the floor ‘—died on the voyage from Greenland to Norway. A single one.’
She stands frozen with the paper wolf in her hand, thoughtful rather than confused, I’ve learned to smell the difference by now. Mrs. Thorkildsen, who otherwise is a true master at predicting the future, is constantly wandering into little pockets of time where she simply can’t make head nor tail of what’s just happened, or what’s about to happen. Sometimes Mrs. Thorkildsen doesn’t have a clue what Mrs. Thorkildsen has done or is about to do.
A decision is taking shape in her head, and she walks over to the fireplace and sets the paper wolf she is holding in her hand up on the mantle. White paper against white plaster, the only proof it is there is its shadow. A dead wolf on the mantle. The army of dogs stretches almost the whole way from the fireplace to the coffee table. The pack fills the whole space between the basket of firewood and the Major’s chair, which is now my chair. We both end up with our gaze fixed on the lone wolf on the mantle.
‘Where is it?’ I ask.
Mrs. Thorkildsen thinks for a while before responding:
‘Well, who knows? It’s certainly not at the South Pole. But if it was a good dog, and I have every reason to think it was, I’m sure it went to a good place.’
‘Good dogs don’t make it to the South Pole?’
‘Unlikely.’
Of course I am pining for Mrs. Thorkildsen to call me a good dog, but you don’t ask for these things. That’s like asking for respect. The moment you ask for respect, you’ve lost all respect. If Mrs. Thorkildsen, based on our joint daily life, concludes that I’m a good dog, it’ll have to be up to her to tell me on her own terms. So I ask:
‘How did it die?’
‘Hmmm, not sure,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says.
‘It’s strange, actually, that there weren’t more of them who perished on the journey. The Chief had hired two Eskimoes to watch the pack, but it was easier for a dog than for a native person to leave Greenland. The dogs’ fates were left up to chance, crammed together in a dark cargo hold with no supervision.’
‘That whole giant pack was crammed together in a ship’s cargo hold?’
I was speechless.
‘None of the crew knew anything about dogs. Men at sea typically don’t have to. They stayed away from the cargo hold. They threw food down the loading chute, and it was up to the dogs to share it among themselves.’
‘Uh-oh,’ I say.
The survival of the fittest is brutal enough in the wild, but if you’re fast enough, you might be able to escape any immediate threat. To hide. How the survival of the fittest might play out among Greenland Dogs scared shitless in the crowded cargo hold of an old hulk wobbling its way through the North Atlantic is unimaginable. To put it mildly, it’s a miracle that only one of them perished on the journey. On the other hand, it may have been the luckiest dog in this whole tragic story.
22
The sickness has a name. Mrs. Thorkildsen suffers from loneliness. It’s a chronic ailment that Mrs. Thorkildsen bears silently and bravely, but sometimes, once in a rare while, usually when the day has been a long one, she confides in me:
‘I’m so lonely, Tassen,’ she says. It makes me feel terrible, because I don’t feel lonely. I have Mrs. Thorkildsen, and that’s more than enough for me. Mrs. Thorkildsen, on the other hand, only has me, and that’s obviously not enough for her.
Mrs. Thorkildsen would have been happier as a dog, I think. (I think most humans would, for that matter.) As a dog, she’d be able to thoroughly greet everyone who crossed her path, whether she knew them or not. Every chance encounter on the street would smell like zesty information and tasty stories. Not to mention how much more exciting it is to sniff each other’s groins than it is to vaguely nod as you pass one another, as people usually do—that is, if they greet each other at all.
Yesterday, Dr. Pill ran a show called: ‘My mother-in-law is sabotaging our marriage with false accusations.’ For once, Mrs. Thorkildsen couldn’t bear to finish the program. Mid-sentence, mid-scream, she grabbed the magic wand and cut both the mother-in-law and Dr. Pill off with her mighty thumb. I lifted my head from my lying position, awoken from my daily dose of Dr. Pill by the massive silence that followed the human cackling. Mrs. Thorkildsen sat still, glaring at the dead TV screen. She stared into the darkness and listened to the silence too long. Far too long, I thought, so I asked:
‘Do you want to talk about it?’
‘No,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen said. ‘There’s nothing to talk about.’
‘It feels better if you talk about what’s bothering you. You’ve said that yourself.’
‘Who says I want to feel better?’
Mrs. Thorkildsen sucks nutrients out of the letters on books’ pages like my intestine sucks nutrients out of pork fat, but the reading causes problems, too. What goes in—whether in brain or intestine—must come out. Mrs. Thorkildsen gets constipated in the head if she doesn’t also have an outlet for whatever it is books are putting in her head. The words from books flow through Mrs. Thorkildsen like a river that turns the country it runs through fertile and fruitful, but what happens if the water can’t find an outlet?
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