‘Slower, Camilla, slower,’ Charles says, but it is probably too late, my mind is already galloping – ahead, across the kingdom. Edward is talking dog-talk, and I place my watch on the table and say ‘okay, Edward, you have ten minutes, and then I don’t want to hear another word about dogs.’
‘You’re so cynical, Camilla,’ Edward says.
I crank up Sexy Back in order to avoid hearing him tell how dogs are such sensible creatures yet again, then Edward asks Alma what kind of music she prefers, and she says: ‘Gloria Gaynor and Shostakovich,’ Edward can appreciate that, and they both get up and browse the shelves of music, I notice that Kristian is in the mood for a fight, and I go and fetch the boxing gloves, ‘I’ve thrown down the gauntlet,’ I shout and drop them on the table in front of my companions, one pair brown and the other lacquer red, a promise that blood is going to be spilt – when good manners crack. Charles is talking about the dog’s long legs, it has jumped down from the bed, its lofty legs, and I am on the verge of being jealous, but isn’t it a he, I check under the belly, yes, no.
‘Charles, give Edward some more morphine,’ I shout, because he has brought the lovely dog with the lofty legs into the living room.
‘I had decided not to speak to it,’ Edward says to Alma, and I can see that she is already bored, ‘at least not outdoors, but I was unable to follow through on that, as it is well known that language cannot be blocked, it trickles or crashes out of you. A gaze that meets your gaze, and a will that can be guided in the right direction, or can’t – that is sufficient. Language takes hold. It enquires, it persuades, it threatens and reasons. But I try to curb it and do not use the conjunctive, subordinate clauses or irony. Not like the lady with the black labrador. When it finally comes to her, she forces its head up, it looks at her sluggishly and she hits it: “What’s wrong with you? Didn’t you hear me? There’s no way you didn’t hear me. I’m not falling for that, my friend. You know that when Mummy calls, you have to come to Mummy.” I tried to tell her that the dog does not want to come to her when it associates that with being hit. “It understands,” she answered. Towards me, she is rather curt.’
‘Your ten minutes is up, Edward,’ I shout, because now I can only express myself by shouting and only move by running, and he nods and falls silent, maybe he has nothing else to talk about today. In any case Alma can probably hear how bright he is. Edward was the last friend to arrive. It feels like someone is missing, ‘where has Kristian got to?’
‘He has probably got his head in the fridge,’ Alma says, and he probably has, because he always fancies something other than what is being served, and he is always hungry, even though the table is groaning with sausages and cheese, but he is most at ease when he can slink around on his own in the kitchen and open cupboards and drawers and nibble a little here and there. ‘Should we take a look?’ I ask, because then I can have Alma to myself for a moment, (I am a possessive and jealous person) and she takes me by the arm, and we slip through the rooms and down the long corridor, and then Alma jumps into the kitchen with a howl, and just as we suspected: the fridge door is open, and Kristian has one hand on his chest, ‘jeez,’ he says.
‘Can I help?’ I ask, ‘or can you find what you’re looking for on your own?’
Kristian nods, a sandwich in the other hand, a scrap here and a scrap there, his nose is running. Kristian is a doctor. ‘Hoping that he won’t become a patient,’ Alma says. He is terrified of illness. The patients’ eyes meet the shifty gaze of the doctor, shake his sweaty hand, receive their diagnosis from a cracking voice. I know nothing about all of that. But he looks nice in his white coat, I have seen him, stern and slender. ‘Since our time here is so brief…,’ is how he often starts his sentences. It sounds beautiful and it is sad and true. Just as, according to Alma, in the final moment of abandonment, near the conclusion of the seething, pounding finish, he shows the whites of his eyes – so she is forced to close her eyes and to think: Here it is, the death you fear so much. And now it arrives, now, now, now.
I sit down at the kitchen table, ‘Doctor, doctor, I think I’m ill,’ I say. Alma sits down next to me and swings her legs, ‘Doctor, doctor, I’ve broken a bone,’ she says.
Without resembling each other one iota, Alma and I are often mistaken for sisters, because after having known each other for so long, we are like two sides of the same coin, Alma is the queen and I am the ship or the throne or the tower or the statesman.
‘Doctor, doctor, I have appendicitis,’ I say.
‘I’m leaving the scene of the scandal,’ he says and exits the kitchen, his face contorted as though he has smelt something awful; the scene of the scandal is the intoxication, we realize, he is right and never gets intoxicated.
Nobody says no within me. Everything within me agrees.
‘Doctor, doctor, I have flat feet,’ I shout after him.
It might be appropriate to reveal a little about my friends here, just a little:
1. Alma is my number one. When I was fourteen and had known Alma for seven of my fourteen years, it struck me like a bolt of lightning when I was standing in the shower: ‘Oh no, I’ve fallen in love with Alma.’ I caught my gaze in the mirror and soothingly repeated my mum’s words (said in an entirely different context) in my mum’s deep voice: ‘It’s easy to mix up one kind of love with another.’ Why did I think of her round breasts back then? But it passed. Maybe even by the time I climbed out of the shower a moment later.
2. Charles has large features, a seductive mouth, Kristian is sophisticated, and Edward is handsome, in good shape and has well-developed calves. He spends the majority of his life walking. Such men, such times.
3. Alwilda. But she couldn’t come.
Back to my companions. The living room has become a boxing ring; Charles, who can hardly walk, but is the only one who can box, is bouncing around on the floor, along with Edward; the combination of champagne & morphine gives them wings. Until he receives a sudden blow that makes him collapse. He deprecatingly raises both arms in the air, the gloves quickly resemble bandaging. A moment later he is lying on the bed again, now with the dog at his side, and Alma is extricating him from the gloves, ‘Doctor, doctor,’ I say, because now the pain is shooting up through the champagne and through the morphine, ‘where’s the brown pill bottle?’ Finally I can be still.
And now Edward leans towards Alma and tells her about the ducks dozing in the sun by the lakeshore, about how the dog races after them, sends them splashing across the water; if one of the ducks is too slow, it swipes at the air with its paw, because not for a moment does it consider killing them, it merely enjoys the pleasure of forcing them into the water – this takes place off the island with the rhododendron, in Østre Anlæg, where at the moment a long pink reflection drags the flower down into the lake, and there are also white, crimson and purple rhododendrons. The flower bushes are close together, practically a thicket, white stretches up and peers over the shoulder of red, but they jostle all the same. There is a denseness resembling a tropical forest.
When Edward begins to talk about the reflection, Alma wakes up. He has nudged her with his eloquence. Now they look at each other. Edward imagines a life with Alma and Alma imagines secret meetings with Edward, on Rhododendron Island, for example, where she will lie with her head in his lap while he raises her limp hand and speaks about her simultaneously pointy and round fingers.
‘Oh,’ Alma says, ‘I’m in love with the spring. I can’t sit still. I can’t stay indoors.’
‘But most of all, I love the lilacs,’ Edward says.
‘That’s not even an island,’ Kristian says.
‘Kristian,’ I say and reach for the gloves, ‘now it’s our turn.’
CAMILLA’S GPS
[Camilla]
I had to go to Belgrade to give a couple of lectures, and Charles was unable to travel with me. I am a literary figure, but might have preferred to be an architect. I have a strong sense of space, I am touching my heart at this very moment. My
hotel was red on the inside, Twin Peaks red; the receptionist was a legal practitioner. His life had not turned out as he had imagined. Unlike mine, he commented, referring to my visit to the institute as evidence. Though his current position, working as a receptionist for his younger brother – this was his brother’s hotel – did give him the opportunity to put his law degree to use on occasion. For instance when he had to communicate with and show around the supervisory health authorities, ‘because it demands an understanding of the law’. I wondered what it might be comparable to. Perhaps, for example, if a qualified house painter only used his qualification to buy paint for his own house, no, consider the opposite instead, how when her daughter lay dying in hospital, the author Joan Didion purchased surgical clothing and walked around the hospital ward wearing it, all the while offering sound advice to the doctors, until finally they told her that if she did not stop interfering with their treatment, they would have nothing more to do with her case, she would have to take over herself. That would be equivalent to a person, while a painter is working on their home, wearing white paint-stained clothes and standing on a ladder next to him. Welcome to my labyrinth.
I had no desire to commit my usual blunder of isolating myself in the hotel room. At one time I enjoyed staying in hotels; staying in a room that was not mine and which I had no responsibility for, where I could quickly make my peace with any possible aesthetic qualms, and where unseen hands swept away the dust. Now I regard them as waiting rooms where it is impossible to sleep, all night long the unfamiliar objects change shape every time I blink; everything solid becomes fluid. During the day I am lightheaded and dizzy, it’s like I’m breathing thin air. My feet are heavy. I drag myself along. The minibar. No, no alcohol. Chocolate. Salted nuts. Lonely, a veritable waste of my life, munching in bed, albeit in safety. And exempt from having to find my way home-out-and-home-again. I mean: find my way around the city and attempt to find my hotel again. My sense of direction is terrible. Non-existent. Better to stay home. (Of course I did not neglect my lectures, that was the entire reason I had come, but I allowed myself to be picked up and dropped off so as not to disappear somewhere in between the two destinations, I’m talking about the rest of the time, my spare time.) But as Eliot has taught us:
We shall not cease from exploration
and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time.
(Which does sound reassuring: as though you can be confident of returning home, automatically, so to speak.)
As a compromise, I spent quite a lot of time in the reception (not out, not entirely in) hovering on a barstool, I drank one espresso after the other. It was a small hotel, with only six rooms. And at one point I was the only guest. The staff, on the other hand – if anything they were overrepresented. I have no idea how many thin, dark chambermaids in red dresses walked aimlessly around, blending in with the walls. They weren’t prostitutes, were they? If that were the case, they might just as well have been leaning against the sunset in a deserted landscape. Nevertheless when breakfast was served in the basement, all six tables were laid. To keep up the illusion. It was called Hotel City Code, a name I was not quite sure how to interpret. Was this hotel the code to the city? When I said the name, code quickly became coat.
Before leaving, I had decided to spend every waking hour exploring the city. I wanted to be a tourist. I wanted to get to know Belgrade. And then I lost my courage. The reception, as mentioned, was my compromise.
But the receptionist talked incessantly. In a rather mumbling and unintelligible English that meant I had to strain every nerve to understand him. He had plenty of time for his only guest. As soon as I stepped out of my room, he moved towards me as though carried by a gust of wind. He was dark, slender, nimble, indefatigable, with surprisingly kind eyes hidden behind his glasses, but he kept going on and on until my mouth went dry, the room blurred and I nearly fainted. I knew the names of his siblings, I knew his cholesterol level and I knew his doctor’s instructions: ‘fifty grams of almonds, four squares of dark chocolate and a glass of red wine every day,’ he said, his small friendly face beaming, ‘and obviously eat plenty of fruit and vegetables and walk at least three kilometres.’ He bent forward and drew a curve in the air to indicate the progress of his blood pressure. I also knew that his grandfather had written an account of his experiences in World War Two, but unfortunately the manuscript had gone missing. I knew more or less what it contained. And I was starting to get the idea that it was hidden in a barn somewhere in Croatia. I was also starting to suspect that he was encouraging me to go in search of it. He considered me to be an unusually kind person – with a lot of spare time. Ear, vagina, a mirror that makes you look twice as big; you little devil, I suddenly thought, not a chance in hell. And with that I grabbed my coat and left the reception with barely a nod. I had chosen a good time to leave. He had just stated that no matter how much money society poured into the Roma community, all they did was spend it on beer and cigarettes, and on chocolate for their many children. That was what drove me out into the world. Though I was afraid of encountering a Roma who behaved like the one I met in St Petersburg. I had given her what corresponds to a hundred kroner, and in gratitude she lay down in the middle of the street and started to kiss my shoe. ‘No, no,’ I said, ‘please get up.’ ‘Not until you give me another hundred,’ she said, and only then did she release my shoe, allowing me to continue walking towards the Spilled Blood Church, the one with the candy-coloured cupolas, which even up close did not look real.
As soon as I walked out the door, a sense of loss swept over me. With absolutely no desire to do so, I took my first steps in Belgrade. Like I was learning to walk. I knew nobody, nobody knew me. I was nobody. I did not understand the language. I understood nothing. I might as well have stopped looking where I was going, because when it came down to finding my way back, maybe I would have a vague recollection of what met my gaze, but I would not be able to remember where on my journey it had occurred. The order of the elements is not arbitrary when it comes to finding your way. Instead of trying to find my way back to the hotel later, I should have checked out and taken my luggage with me. Then, exhausted from exploring and lugging everything about, when I could manage no more, I could have dragged myself to some new, unknown hotel – and then when I absolutely had to, I could set off again. I am not that helpless. I had the address of the hotel in my pocket, and when I grew tired of walking, I hailed a taxi and rode back. An unfortunate experience in my youth had taught me to always carry the address of the hotel or guest house on my person. Greece, half a lifetime ago. Me, young, wearing a gauze Iphigenia dress, light as a feather, so white that I had had to cover my nipples with toothpaste. It was before the time of strapless bras. In any case, I had been out dancing, night-time, the flowers falling from the flowering trees. Alma, my faithless friend, continued to dance with her Greek. I could not find our pension. The longer I searched, the smaller I became. A man had been observing me for some time. In the end he cut across the street and kindly asked me what I was looking for. He had a hard time believing that I could not so much as remember the name of the pension. That which you do not understand, you simply have to accept. So at the first hotel we came across he rented a room for me and promised to return the next morning to help me. He left. He had a moustache, but he was not without some charm. Had he been less chivalrous, it might have led to a slightly lengthier encounter. The next morning he returned, paid the bill, swung onto the saddle of his moped, and with me behind him, headed for the local office of the Tourist Police. There they had a copy of my passport, which the owner of the pension had dutifully submitted upon check-in – with the name and address of my temporary residence attached! Such efficiency, and in Greece, at that. Back at the pension, I found my beloved friend Alma wringing her hands, half-dead from dread, certain that I (my head) was lying somewhere, detached from my body, under a sprinkling of browning flowers, e
ven though we were used to ditching each other whenever some handsome mutt crossed our path. Ah, adolescence, one long mating season, a parade of brilliant memories, an entire repository of bright young passion for tougher times – did I really have a piece of red glass (grenade-like) attached to my navel and did I really display it to my temporary chosen one in a tunnel by simply lifting my dress? Yes, you bet I did! It was me, to give one final little toot. Now I use the word ‘toot’, which is Beckett’s expression for drawing out the text as much as possible, not to tie bows, but to make curls, and earlier today, duly escorted by a lecturer from the institute, on my way back from a lecture, I came across some graffiti. Sprayed on the wall were the words:
Books, brothers, books
Not bells
The lecturer translated for me and said something about bells and Santa Claus – when he arrived in his sleigh.
‘Santa Claus, you know, on a creaking carpet of cotton wool, jingle bells jingle bells, until we all hygge our arses off. Even his beard is creaking.’
Companions Page 8