‘Has he ever looked after a dog in his life?’
‘I have no idea,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says, ‘but I should think so.’
‘Think so?’ I ask, but that was all she had to say on the subject.
So here I am, alone and abandoned on a bed of dead man’s boots and shoes. Of course I feel sorry for myself, would you expect otherwise? I mean, who else is going to feel sorry for me when I’m all by myself? I miss Mrs. Thorkildsen and I wonder if she’ll ever come back, but I don’t miss her worries. Thankfully, she’s taken those with her on board.
25
I hate to admit it, but Neighbor Jack turned out to be a perfectly adequate dogsitter. More than that. I’d claim that the man has potential—undeveloped, but still—to be a first-rate dog owner. He didn’t quite stick to Mrs. Thorkildsen’s planned regime of regular feeding and walking, but I’m not complaining.
After a long morning with icy tension between us, Mrs. Thorkildsen disappeared, headed for Copenhagen in a taxi with all her odds and ends, fueled by three glasses of Dragon Water. She tried until the last minute to make me accept the injustice I was about to face, flattered me and filled my bowl until it ran over. It took all my self-control not to dive headfirst into the meal until she was out the door, dragging her suitcase behind her.
‘I’ll be back before you even notice I’m gone,’ was the last thing she said before leaving. What a strange thing to say. And it turned out to be false. I took her at her word, and earnestly sniffed through the house with a degree of optimism as soon as she left, but she wasn’t there. Either the claim had been a lie, or something had occurred to Mrs. Thorkildsen along the way. Both devilish alternatives. The thought of Mrs. Thorkildsen being able to lie was always the worst.
In short, I was in a gloomy mood as I lay on the shoe pile in the hallway. It’s embarrassing to admit, and I tried with all my might not to explode, but then I gave in and found a moccasin to console myself with. This was not meant as revenge against Mrs. Thorkildsen. If I wanted to take revenge on her, I would have chewed her favorite slippers to pieces. I know it’s wrong to nibble on shoes, it’s almost embedded in my instinct after a few unlucky episodes early in my career that aren’t worth revisiting here.
Shamefully, I must admit that chewing on shoes brings its own special kind of peace. It works about the same way Dragon Water does for Mrs. Thorkildsen, I think, just without the wobbling and slurring of words. If Neighbor Jack had stuck to the plan, I could easily have made my way through a whole pair while Mrs. Thorkildsen was out sailing. But instead of coming by to refill my food while I did my business in the yard, he took me by surprise.
The key in the front door told me it wasn’t Mrs. Thorkildsen outside. She always fiddles with the key before she slots it into place and twists it around gently when she arrives, but the person now arriving attacked the lock quickly, decisively, and powerfully. In that moment I forgot all the instructions about walking and feeding. Time to panic!
Still, I couldn’t get a bark out. The job description is clear on this point: when strangers break into the house, you’re supposed to bark at full volume. But when this nightmare scenario was actually happening, I was paralyzed. Is there any point? Barking to scare off intruders and simultaneously warn everyone in the house—of course I see the point in that. But barking to defend an empty house—is there really a point in that? I’m man’s best friend, not the house’s.
The door swung open and the smell of Neighbor Jack reached me before he had time to open his mouth, although he was not dressed in fake beaver.
‘Come on now, boy. We got a party to git to,’ he said.
Party. Turns out I’d never been to a party before. This is how a party works: you gather four grown men plus another guy around a salon table in a house where a cat used to live. You can never get rid of that stench. Of the cat, that is. You put out Dragon Water, nuts, and potatoes that chip (heavenly!) on the table. The salon table. And at this salon table, you eat hot food. If only Mrs. Thorkildsen knew!
There are voices and laughter and smoke and music in the air, and I feel so heavy and light all at once that I don’t know whether I’m sinking into the ground or flying up to the heavens. I’m hungry as a dog, too, no matter how many sausage bites the gentlemen sneak me. I don’t know why, but the word ‘fat’ keeps churning around in my dog’s brain like a mantra, and I’m a wolf, the last in a long line that can be traced back to the very first wolf. I’m awake, but dreaming the dream of life. I wish Mrs. Thorkildsen was here. For her own sake. So she could drink and smoke and laugh and yell, too. She could have sung along with the choruses. A guitar and another guitar and suddenly the whole congregation is singing, singing with rusty voices, and drinking even more Dragon Water and smoking more spices, while they misunderstand and love each other at a furious pace.
A lot of it is hazy in retrospect, but at one point I remember one of the humans thought I’d turned into a statue.
‘Tassen’s stoned!’ the bald one said, and as if that statement wasn’t absurd enough, he added for good measure: ‘Stoned as a monkey!’
Humans speak in strange ways when it comes to animals. ‘Pearls before swine.’ ‘Quiet as a mouse.’ ‘The elephant in the room.’ ‘Free as a bird.’ ‘Happy as a clam.’ ‘Loan shark.’ ‘Slippery as an eel.’ The whole damn language is a menagerie. (By far the dumbest use of animal as metaphor? Not surprisingly, it involves the infamous cat: ‘Kitty cat.’ Kitty cat? What the hell is a kitty if not a cat, and vice versa? I mean, you don’t exactly go around saying ‘Doggy dog,’ do you? Stupid felines.
As I lay in a haze on the floor, rolling around in a cow’s hide jacket someone had been kind enough to leave right there, I thought of all the animals on earth, one by one. Of the blue whale in the oceans and the fleas in my fur, and all the creatures in between. Of how we’re all connected, and connected to all those who came before. The whale is the flea and the flea is the whale and I am Mrs. Thorkildsen. Mrs. Thorkildsen wouldn’t have been lonely here. Maybe she’s not lonely where she is, either. Right now there may be no place that’s lonely.
That would be sweet.
I woke up and didn’t know where I was at first. The important thing is that you wake up at all, no matter how strange you might feel. Perhaps especially if you feel strange. Take a moment to appreciate that.
The hairless one was asleep on the couch, and I could hear snoring sounds from a room further into the house. A soft calming hum emanated from the loudspeakers, a distant electronic echo of the ventilation system in the Home, back in the day. Maybe I should have worried, but I was just thirsty. Incredibly thirsty. I thought I remembered a water bowl in the kitchen, and got to my feet. Stretched my legs, back, tail, and tongue, plodded calmly into the kitchen—and who did I meet there, if it wasn’t Neighbor Jack. He’d changed his hair, looked more like a poorly groomed schnauzer waiting for a new home.
‘So, the gentleman is out walking?’
‘I could say the same to you,’ I said and located the water bowl.
After lighting his good old cigarette, which had been resting on top of the overflowing ashtray, Neighbor Jack said:
‘Let’s go for a walk, Tassen.’
I thought he’d never ask.
Go for a walk we did, and the walk was long. Longer than any walk I’ve ever taken with Mrs. Thorkildsen, or the Major for that matter. Through morning-dazed villa roads, across frozen grass lawns, and through forests, we walked as dog and master. God bless Mrs. Thorkildsen, but she can’t tire me out walking, I see that now. I need to move more, and she needs to get out more. Two conclusions upon which we can keep building. This brief separation, which I resisted so fiercely, may have done us both good. We’ve had a few new impulses, a fresh breath of air in a life together that, let’s be honest, is often stuck in a rut. ‘Well, here we are,’ as Mrs. Thorkildsen says, and we have to rely on other people’s stories to feed our conversation. I mean, what the hell do Mrs. Thorkildsen and I have to do with Antarcti
ca? I can only hope her expedition has been as fruitful as mine. And I’ll know soon, now that the boat to Denmark has docked, and Neighbor Jack has gone to help Mrs. Thorkildsen with her bags while I protect the car from strange humans. It’s a never-ending hell.
There’s Neighbor Jack. And Mrs. Thorkildsen. Not walking, but sitting in a chair with wheels that Neighbor Jack pushes with one hand while he rolls Mrs. Thorkildsen’s plaid suitcase behind him with the other. Mrs. Thorkildsen, poor thing, is completely exhausted and more or less lying flat in the wheelchair. It must have been a rough journey. A hurricane, I think to myself. At least.
‘Mom is shitfaced,’ Neighbor Jack says as he opens the door. He says it in a half-irritated, half-exasperated way, and maybe it’s this lack of engagement that provokes me.
‘No, she’s not. She’s seasick,’ I say. Neighbor Jack doesn’t respond. With one yanking motion he lifts Mrs. Thorkildsen out of her chair and plops her into the front seat of the car. It doesn’t look like a heavy lift. I whine and moan, trying to get close so I can give her a little lick on the cheek, but Mrs. Thorkildsen doesn’t respond. Neighbor Jack gets behind the wheel and straps Mrs. Thorkildsen in, and now she finally speaks up.
‘Guuuehhhhhh,’ says Mrs. Thorkildsen, and vomits all over her pretty green coat.
Definitely seasick.
26
Penguins are not the nice animals they’ve made the world believe they are. There’s a reason they live on their own somewhere no one else wants to live. They live there because no other continent will have them. Penguins, it turns out, are dubious creatures with a far better reputation than they deserve. Humans think the penguin is among the animal kingdom’s most charming beasts, a sweet little thing in a tuxedo that’s literally neither fish nor fowl.
The penguin has accomplished the impressive feat of becoming one of the world’s most famous and revered animals, despite the fact that the truth about its nature would disgust most decent people who have ceramic penguins sitting in their windowsills. If you have such a penguin, it might be best to put it in the trash before we go on. Or if the stupid penguin is that important to you, you can skip the next page. But in that case you’re living a lie, just so you know.
It is Mrs. Thorkildsen who breaks the ice. It happens with the help of her preferred tool: a book. The books are back, and that means Mrs. Thorkildsen is back, but I couldn’t tell you which one came first.
She tells me about George Murray Levick, a poor guy whom Captain Scott ordered to spend a season among the penguins in the middle of the Antarctic winter. The stay was itself an inhuman hell of frost and bad weather, with lard as the only firewood and food. Black with soot, with runny eyes and lungs searing after breathing in lard-fumes for months, Levick scratched out his observations about la vie pingouin.
Homosexuality. Pedophilia. Necrophilia. Rape. Murder and assault. Levick was deeply disturbed by what he called ‘depraved’ conditions in the penguin colony. Horny young male penguins mated with whomever—and whatever!—it might be. When they couldn’t find a female penguin to rape, after the corpse of the last gang rape had started to freeze so it was no longer possible to fuck it, well, then they sodomized each other. They sodomized chickens. They did it all with a bestiality that would make Genghis Khan’s most bloodthirsty generals turn away in shame.
The frightful conditions in the colony were of a sort that later, to prevent the contents of the report leaking out to the public, the material was translated into Greek and the English version destroyed. And so the penguin was allowed to roam freely on the world stage. It’s one of the greatest deceptions in world history, and like all the most successful acts of deceit, it took place through silencing. It wasn’t until a hundred years later that Levick’s notes were found and translated back into English. The truth will come out one day.
My point is that nothing has changed. Penguins are still the same perverse creatures, susceptible to all the vile behaviour listed above and more, but they face no consequences! When they finally published Levick’s report, you might have expected it to cause a paradigm shift in humans’ relationship to the bird-fish/fish-bird, that the ceramic penguin in the windowsill would be silently removed, like a swastika on the lapel the day before the War ended, but that’s not what happened. The penguin is so cute and charming in the eyes of man, that all sorts of explanations and excuses for the penguin’s horrorocracy suddenly popped up. But as for Mrs. Thorkildsen, the cup runneth over. She hates penguins now, at least to the degree that Mrs. Thorkildsen is capable of hating anything. But Mrs. Thorkildsen’s found a new hero—a dark-haired feisty little guy with a funny moustache. His name is Adolf.
Mrs. Thorkildsen’s had many and often strange heroes throughout her life. It might have something to do with her father leaving but, as I mentioned earlier, I’m no expert in those kinds of things. I’m under the impression that most of Mrs. Thorkildsen’s heroes are somewhat sad small gentlemen who are most comfortable behind rolled-down curtains in sad small rooms where they scratch out sad thick books. In that sense, the Major was on the opposite end of the spectrum. He was never timid, not even with bullet holes in his body, and although he loved to read, he loved not writing books even more.
In Mrs. Thorkildsen’s eyes, the Major was first and foremost a master in the art of survival. The bullets and the airplane crashes might have been good motivation to believe that. And he knew what hunger was. That was the most important thing. The Major had lived like a dog: in a cage, at the mercy of strangers and unable to hunt for his own food. That left its mark.
‘I fell for him the first time I went home with him and discovered he had a whole cured and salted leg of lamb hanging in a kitchen cabinet in his apartment,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says. She tells me this so I’ll be able to better understand her fascination with her new idol.
Adolf Henrik Lindstrøm is the full and complete name of Mrs. Thorkildsen’s new hero, but she just calls him Lindstrøm. Tenderly. According to Mrs. Thorkildsen, he’s the biggest hero in this whole story. Perhaps the only one. That’s how it often is with Mrs. Thorkildsen’s heroes. They’re the biggest of all, and unlike anyone else. Her villains too.
Naturally, my curiosity is piqued when I hear Lindstrøm’s job description during the South Pole expedition: jack-of-all-trades. But I suspect that Mrs. Thorkildsen’s enthusiasm about Mr. Lindstrøm is indelibly linked to the fact that he was also the South Pole expedition’s chef.
Lindstrøm was the kind of man who got pleasure from seeing others enjoy things, especially when the outlook for enjoyment looked poor. With modest means and lots of energy, Lindstrøm managed to create small pockets of pleasure wherever he went. The worse it got, the better he did. Not unlike Mrs. Thorkildsen at her best.
Whether Lindstrøm understood other people I’m not so certain—raise your hand if you understand people!—but he did have the rare ability to get along with everyone. Because he understood what they needed.
With his stout, round body, he was the only one in the party who went ashore in Antarctica with no ambitions of setting foot on the South Pole. He stood apart from the hierarchy and observed it with deep solemnity and a lopsided grin. People like that become a natural rallying point. In extreme circumstances, such as in a small, snowed-in cabin a little north of the South Pole, they’re the key to surviving with dignity.
One time, a young guy who smelled like tobacco, sperm, and bacon came to ask the Major a bunch of questions about the War, the kind of questions Mrs. Thorkildsen never asked him.
‘What would you say is the main reason you survived?’ he asked.
The Major responded so quickly you’d think he’d been sitting there waiting for the question since Peace broke loose:
‘I kept my ass clean.’
The bacon man laughed, but stopped laughing when he realized he was the only one. The Major continued:
‘If I had water, the first thing I did was to wash my private parts. If there was any left over, I drank it. Many of those who r
an aground did so in their own shit. Once you start slacking on your hygiene, it all goes to hell. You get sick, and that makes you even more apathetic. That’s what captivity is all about, to turn you into an animal. The guards would pass pornographic pictures around to the prisoners as part of their psychological methods. When you’re in that situation, the thought of sex can only bring you sorrow. The guys who rubbed one out after the porno pictures slowly lost all their willpower and resistance. Self-respect. Plus, you can’t afford to lose the protein in your semen.’
When it rains, as the common old saying goes, it tends to pour. Books are that way, too. One leads to another; the last one leads to the next one. Apparently there’s no such thing as a book that just tells it all like it is, once and for all, period, full stop. There’s a book about everything and everyone. About Lindstrøm, too, and it surprises me a little how deep of an impression he’s left on Mrs. Thorkildsen through that book. But, like I said, it’s a book about a chef, possibly the only book about a chef from northern Norway Mrs. Thorkildsen has ever read, so I give her a bit of a long leash.
‘Lindstrøm’s recipes were refined and thorough,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen muses, ‘but his recipe for keeping a calm disposition was simple: always be observant, ready to serve, and patient, with a sense of humor … he may have been a bit … simple.’
‘Simple?’ I ask. ‘Is there really such a thing as a “simple” man?’
‘Most men are simple,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen replies, ‘but many of them make even that complicated. Lindstrøm, on the other hand, simplified what was complicated. And do you know why he did that, Tassen?’
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