Companions

by Christina Hesselholdt

  Kristian was feeling no better the next morning; I forced a little yoghurt and juice between his dry lips. He managed a smile before he drifted away again. I decided that if he was not better later that day, I would fetch a doctor. And then I went down to meet Tony and M. I thought his initial encompassed him better than his full name. Maybe initials are always sexy. They hint at something more. Something that might come. Might not.

  I was afraid, but I pretended I was fine and climbed into the back seat of Tony’s car with a smile. M sat in the front seat. I sat right behind his curly head. And then we drove off. Faster than I have ever driven in my life. Into the mountains. With the music at full blast, with the tyres screeching. I was in love. I didn’t care. We could die in this car as far as I was concerned. I don’t know why such powerful feelings of being alive make people indifferent to losing their life. Because you’re on top of the world? And you would prefer to go out on a high? Once in a while M turned and said something to me. I was shy and had a hard time coming up with an answer.

  Half an hour later when I was hanging halfway between heaven and earth there was only one thing I could think of: survival. And of reaching our goal quickly, so I could get my feet back on the ground as soon as possible. I was hooked up to a rope, so that if I fell, I would just dangle from it. But I was still terrified. They had supplied me with a pair of soft-tipped shoes that were created to dig in and find footholds in the tiniest cracks. And it was incredible how many cracks and crevices there were in the cliff, which had looked perfectly smooth from the ground. So I burrowed my fingers and toes into the holes and cracks and pulled myself up. The first couple of metres were relatively painless. But about five metres up the terror and fear struck me. I pressed my body against the cliff while I searched for cracks. And suddenly it was like I had never seen a rock before in my life. The wall felt like the most implacable and brutal thing I had ever faced. I clung to it for a moment, breathing heavily. Tony had advised me not to look up or down. Now I looked up at the plateau, my terminus, took a deep breath and practically darted upwards. Afterwards they told me that they had never before seen anyone climb that quickly. I did not tell them that it was to get it over and done with.

  My recollection has furnished the plateau, where I sat soon after, with yellow flowers; like they signified life and happiness itself; but how could they have grown there?

  I climbed the wall once more. And again, and in the end I enjoyed it and started to think – maybe the rock face had not outright invited me – but… ‘I want to fall. Just to try it,’ I shouted down to the two men on the ground. Hanging and dangling from the rope, I meant. I looked up. I looked down. The sky did not make me dizzy. The ground did not make me afraid to fall. Not in that moment.

  ‘She wants to fall. Just to try it,’ M said to Tony in admiration.

  And it occurred to me that it was just like in school – when we used to play catch and kiss. I thought for a long time it was a matter of running fast. Not about getting caught. Twenty-five years later, I was hanging from a rope and again it was my speed I wanted to be admired for. It was foolish and narcissistic. Maybe not when you were ten, eleven or twelve years old. But at the age of thirty-five? And then it was time to return to the hotel and try to force a teaspoon between Kristian’s lips again. M craned his neck back and looked me in the eyes, and something sprung forth inside me, my heart twisted and nearly stopped, it was the blood of love.

  ANIMALS

  [Edward]

  I have started to spend a lot of time at the pet shop, even though it smells wild and foul, and the birds make an infernal racket, whistling and chatter, ‘hello’ and ‘good day-good day,’ the parrots say with resounding voices that sound like speakers from the early days of radio, a long since antiquated technique. Apart from that, it only takes a moment to get used to the smell.

  I do not stand there thinking that to a certain extent we are all in cages, animals as well as people, I do not stand there looking at the animals because I feel like a prisoner in my own existence, I know all the modernistic pitfalls & platitudes ad nauseam. There is by no means any sense of identification. I don’t feel bad for the animals, I don’t even feel sympathy for them. Nor do I think that these feathered and scaly creatures are the building blocks my species was founded on, so to speak. But as the thought emerges, I realize that I could think that.

  I stand in contemplation in front of the cages and aquariums. I seek out the eyes of the animals and like to imagine that they seek out mine. They can’t remember me later, they can’t remember me even a second later. They don’t recognize me when I return five minutes later. Likewise it is impossible for me to distinguish between one goldfish and the next. Our eyes meet, and zilch. Am I the kind of person who says ‘zilch’… Our eyes meet across the battlefield of evolution, across millions of years.

  I have learnt to grow accustomed to mice, I would not have thought that possible, what with their scurrying, their tails, etc. The birds’ eyes shine with intelligence, do not stick your fingers into the fish tanks to pet them, they can get fungal infections. One day there was a rabbit that (possibly) sensed me watching it, in any case it turned its head and looked me in the eyes, lingering and lazy. Would it have done the same with any old object, dead or alive? Is there life on Mars? It was grey and probably soft as silk, as they say.

  There are sharks there, and now I am getting to the point. I come for the sharks in particular. My frequent returns are down to the sharks. I had not noticed them at first, and I thought I had misheard when the trainee asked: ‘Are there any sick fish to feed to the sharks today?’ And the owner must have nodded, because he continued: ‘I want to feed them, I want to feed them.’

  At first I thought it was a metaphor, that shark meant something else. And I looked around suspiciously. I was afraid of being ridiculed. I was afraid to ask: ‘Do you have sharks?’ Slowly I scanned all the aquariums. I dress sharply, I’m not the type who wears clogs and has a snake around my neck while I walk down Strøget, (or worse still, and here is a story I was told once: a man who was in the habit, when there was a knock at the door, of opening the door, shouting ‘catch’ and throwing his snake into the arms of his visitor!) not the overweight kind that keeps stick insects or millipedes – oh, millipedes! Once on a dusty road in Africa I saw three monstrous millipedes come sweeping along, their legs made the most cheerful turn, black as old-fashioned locomotives they far outnumbered sightings of cheetahs and lions, and every time a couple wearing pith helmets stopped their four-wheel drive and asked us: ‘Have you seen any game today?’ I said yes and told them about the millipedes, ‘There, over there, that way, be careful you don’t run them over.’

  Not the poor, lonely, sad type. Not perverted, not even introverted. I don’t keep pets. My love life is rather ordinary, like that of a country bumpkin (strictly speaking I did not need to share that with you). I have a degree, I’m slim and light on my feet, the rambling type. Does that sound like a personal ad? It is.

  The aquariums are stacked three high at a length of ten metres, it’s a large pet shop, and the sharks are placed at the very top, almost at the end of the row, that is, deep inside the dark heart of the shop, where the room curves and opens into a warm side wing with glass doors where the birds and rodents are kept.

  There are five small, eager devils side by side, they stay close to the glass and bump into it aggressively, like a team of horses stuck in a rut.

  ‘Nothing but mouths,’ the pet shop owner says; menacing mouths. The sharks can grow up to one metre in length, and I don’t know what people do with them then. Maybe they butcher them. In Iceland I was served shark with gravy and fried onions. It was disgusting. But Björk was sitting only a few tables away, wearing something that resembled rompers. I had just landed, went into the first restaurant I came across, and who should be sitting there but Björk! That would be like… no, there is no comparing. Not because they are cuter when they are small (the sharks), because they are not the least bi
t cute, but at least they can be kept in a normal-sized aquarium.

  ‘Maybe,’ the pet shop owner says, ‘people keep them (when they are fully grown), but I guess they would not have much room to move.’

  They are grey and look like ferocious anchors. I have an urge to buy them and leave them on the windowsill at my office. Every time I would look up, I would meet their gaze, they would keep close to the glass and stare at me, consumed by a single thought: to escape and take me. In the end I might relent to all of the excited, concentrated will and stick my arm in. When somebody wants something from me, I am not very good at saying no, that was how my ex-girlfriend Alwilda got me, that is how my students take up all my time. I picture the sharks, one hanging from each finger; as long as the fingers remain. Now I picture myself pulling my hand out of the aquarium with a shark (about ten centimetres long) hanging from each finger, and masterfully continue typing on my computer, striking the sharks against the keys, typing with them until they expire on a keyboard ruined by blood and water.

  I only have one animal at my office at the moment. A teddy bear that I bought at the Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg; one of these museums where you have to walk through the gift shop in order to reach the exhibitions. And in a display case in the shop, there were three bears, one large, one medium and one small, designed by Malevich. Bing-bang-boom. Father-mother-child. Oh, how I wanted to buy all three. But it was too much. I could only justify buying the smallest one, the baby. Buying all three – it made me imagine an old spinster, her bed covered in porcelain dolls, her liver-spotted hands pressing their yellowed backs and yellowed dresses against the wall every morning, dumb as rabbits. I knew someone like that as a child. Her name was Gerda. At night, when the bed was Gerda’s, what did she do with all those dolls? The task of removing them and putting them back is what concerned me. I do not want to go there.

  In the beginning, my heart would race every time I was going to show the bear to someone. Now the object has been normalized, displayed on my desk, on most days I pay no attention to it. But originally, in the very beginning, I felt a need to display my conquest.

  It is neither soft nor adorable. It is like the Russian peasantry that Malevich stole it from and returned it to, now Malevich-coloured, clear red, clear blue, white, black, yellow. It is tough and proud, it works until it drops. It goes to bed with the chickens, rises with the sun, and once in a while, it gets to eat a little millet.

  I kept it in my bag, god knows why. I was waiting for the right moment to pull it out, waiting for a lull in the conversation. When it arrived, I struck.

  One time when I was in a restaurant with two of my best friends… it was seething in my bag throughout the main course and dessert, the bag was behind my chair. Under the pretext of having to grab my cigarettes, I loosened the flap a little and looked at it, it was sizzling. We were having a conversation about our likes and dislikes – they are both painters – and we jogged through the history of art, through a series of exhibitions. Should an explanation to my exaggerated state of excitability be sought in the past: I had a toy dog as a child, it was just as firmly stuffed as the Malevich bear, you sang about it while it danced: ‘Look, here comes the chequered dog, it has a rattle in its nose, it wants to sing you a song, it is a curious creature.’

  And now I really wanted to display my curious new creature. I finally managed to do it after we had paid and were putting our coats on: ‘I’m not usually the type to collect dolls and stuffed animals, you know that,’ I said, ‘but look!’

  ‘Ooo,’ one friend said and stepped forward.

  But my other friend made a small noise and stumbled back, as if he had seen a ghost or an aesthetic phenomenon in the flesh.

  Which track would you prefer to follow, the beautiful one that leads you into the arms of a piece of handicraft that makes your heart race, or the one that leads back to ‘Once upon a time’, hearing the legs of a stuffed dog as your hands make it waltz on the edge of a cot?

  DEATH HOUSE

  [Edward]

  People with the need for order and perhaps also a belief in progress have invented the concept of stages of grief; here I imagine a system of locks. As though the person in mourning was a boat on a river, the river of sorrow, you might say, full of locks that ease the person ahead, and further ahead, towards the open sea, the reconciliation with death and loss where a new future is possible.

  I am the kind of man who lives in a death house. Literally. I moved into my parents’ home when they passed away. Joint suicide. They loved to demonstrate their rock-hard realism whenever possible. Their realist and Socratic position, I would say. Life as an illness. Goodbye and thank you, we’re slipping away now. While we can still do it ourselves. Very considerate. Nonetheless a shock. For a long time. Death by hanging. Whoever had to kick out the chair from the other then had to kick out their own chair. It was probably my mum. I was a child of older parents. I am now the same age as my mum was when she gave birth to me. Forty-five. I was ashamed of their sagging faces when they turned up at school among the crowd of athletic activist parents, primarily young parents. There were a few with potbellies. I did not change the house much. Once in a while I go down to the rec room, a monument to the seventies; if you put your ear to the wall, you can hear the faint echo of Abba; I take a seat by the dark, wooden bar and grab a glass (I suppose I am lonely), or I continue my losing battle with the billiard table, just a couple of shots. Thirty years ago, we used to kiss down here. With the old folks pacing nervously back and forth in the room above. And once in a while they would poke their heads down to make sure nobody got pregnant. I remember seeing my dad standing in the doorway once when I was crawling on the floor drinking Bacardi from the bottle; he pretended not to see me and shut the door behind him. Then everyone drove off on their mopeds and it was over. Someone had thrown up in the hedge. It is a terraced house, meaning the neighbour woke up to find white garlands hanging from their side of the hedge.

  The house is filled with unusually large, low-flying flies. Filled might be going too far. There are four or five in each room. I get them with the hoover. It’s easier than swatting them. A little later there are just as many again. I don’t know if they are the same flies from before; did they really crawl out of the pipe? Or have new ones already hatched? They should be tagged so I can follow their routes.

  The tube of the hoover is like a pistol (only something will soon shoot in, not out of it), the black opening approaches the black fly where it sits calmly, until the moment of perdition arrives and flight is no longer an option, the air it had previously travelled through so comfortably has become evil, a whirlwind that can lift a man on a donkey high in the air and a fly off a wall, tipping it into a noisy black tunnel – which it might be able to crawl out of when the machine is switched off.

  Things have been rather gloomy since Alwilda left me. Almost a year ago. Maybe I should just sell the house. Put the past behind me.

  There is only one kind of man worse than me. The kind who never leaves home, but spends his entire adult life sleeping on a sofa in the sitting room or in his former childhood room with old posters on the walls and a collection of crumbling crab shells on the windowsill. I moved out though, at the normal age of nineteen. But as soon as I spotted my chance, I moved back in.

  I want to abandon the castle of my old folks, my childhood palace, their arena of death. I want to move forward in time instead of constantly being whirled back through the black tube of the past.

  I moved into my parents’ bedroom without considering whether it was healthy or not. I could say that I was sleepwalking, and that would fit in nicely with what comes next. In the same bed where they tossed and turned, sweaty and sleepless, decade after decade, I lay down to sleep each night. Insomnia was their great common theme, and their addiction to sleeping pills, they even gave me sleeping pills when I was a child; I struggled through my childhood dizzy and drowsy, until one night at the age of ten I gave a definitive no to the white pill held
between the two fingers of my father’s outstretched hand, the little almond he was about to pop into my mouth. It equated to violence: ‘Are you turning against your own father?’ he asked. He might just as well have said: ‘Are you laying a hand on your own father?’ It sounded biblical.

  In the bed where I had been conceived and where they had lain sleepless, I voluntarily settled down to sleep after they died. In the very room they had chosen as the setting for their death. The place where I arrived one day to find two chairs tipped over, two old people dangling from hooks in the ceiling. And when Alwilda used to visit, she would lie down next to me. I never told her that it happened in there. I don’t think she would have wanted to sleep there. On the rare occasion when she couldn’t sleep because she had drunk too much tea, pleasantly and without complaint, she would count the flowers on the brown, floral wallpaper until the pattern blurred before her eyes. We had some crazy times; I hope she looks back on them with rapture, or rather: with moisture.

  It happened on the same trip I saw millipedes come cheerfully sweeping down a dusty African road. We found ourselves in a reserve for large wild cats in the Kalahari Desert. For security reasons it was forbidden to get out of the car. But Alwilda considered it an invitation. She stopped the car in the middle of the plain, pulled her knickers down to her knobbly knees, climbed out of the car and pressed her face against the hot chassis of the car; she bared her arse and urged me to sink my teeth into her neck, ‘just like the cats,’ she said. And standing there, rocking and swaying, it was an enormous turn-on for her that at any moment we could be attacked from behind by a leopard, a cheetah, a panther or a lion. I had a harder time giving in to it. I listened attentively for soft paws, rustling in the grass. I thought more about the distance to the car door than her body. During one of these hot, rocking, anxious bouts of intercourse, the millipede, long and black like an endless set of carriages (it turned out there were three in a row) came sweeping around the turn on the dusty road; it made me think that a situation similar to the Tom Kristensen poem with the beetle and the condemned man – where in the lengthy moment before the executioner’s sword falls, the condemned man spots a beetle and focuses all of his attention on it – might be about to develop; with one of the great cats serving as executioner.