Companions

by Christina Hesselholdt

  ‘Don’t you want to tell me some more?’ Alma asked a little later.

  ‘Alright. On the trip, Edward obstructed my access to every person we met. I would ask a passer-by for directions, and immediately he leapt in front of me to be the one to receive the answer. Then he displayed all his charm and cleverness – towards a stranger he was going to be separated from a minute later and in all likelihood would never meet again.’

  ‘More,’ Alma said.

  ‘The rest of the trip, I remember only in points, such as – you know, I’ve dyed my grey hair since I was eighteen – several times I kneeled by the shore of rivers or lakes and washed the hair dye out, risking being taken by a crocodile.’

  ‘Fearful, greedy and now vain as well,’

  ‘Do you want to hear more?’

  ‘Is there more?’

  More honey, more words, she is stuck with me, and just like A. A. Milne’s tough Rabbit I consider whether there is anything I can use her for now that she is here; something hushed, which demands no movement on her part, no mental activity.

  I love the sight of her on the sofa in the morning, but by noon I feel like her slave. I think she must have had servants growing up.

  ‘I’ll let you have a couple more points.’

  ‘Then I will connect the dots myself, and they will be connected.’

  ‘When we landed in Cape Town, there was still some of the colossal packed lunch that Edward had made and brought with us from Copenhagen remaining. “First we have to finish with Denmark,” Edward said punctiliously, “then we can get started on Africa,” and it was his punctiliousness that I was so sick and tired of. We found a park and began to eat, the tropical climbers climbed above us, or else they were brown and tired, withered, listless from the heat – I thought something was hanging down over the bench. A woman stopped in front of us and held out her palm. Edward offered her a piece of rye bread. She stared at it and shook her head. “I guess you’re not hungry then,” Edward said and shooed her away. A couple of weeks later. Mozambique. Way out in the country. The bus stopped at a station. Street vendors came running up and displayed their wares to the passengers who were hanging out of the windows (if it was possible to open them.) It turned out that everyone sold the same thing: whole roast mouse, fastened to a kind of frame. Edward shook his head, “I guess you’re not hungry then,” I said – and the stiff little fellows were even the same colour of brown as rye bread. All around the bus people were crunching on the crispy rodents, the tails were tossed onto the floor. I got out to stretch my legs, since there was time. A white coating had fallen over a number of the residents’ eyes (the residents of the bus station); and those for whom the world was not entirely switched off led those who were completely blind, but led them where? Just back and forth a ways, along the row of sheet metal shanties that had been erected by the bus station, then to the right into nothingness and then back again, to the smell of roast mice and overheated tyres and diesel, there was nowhere to go, there was nothing to see, other than cracked earth and dried scrub. But I had them to look at. And it makes me shudder – the whitish eyes directed at the heavens and the click-clacking of canes on the earth. And then the women’s breasts dangled under their dresses and did not seem to end until they reached the waist, children clinging to their apron strings. A large white eye and below it a long breast.’

  ‘On TV I saw Africans making burgers out of mosquitoes,’ Alma said, ‘the air was dense with mosquitoes, it was a veritable invasion, they caught them in nets around nightfall and received a much welcomed nutritious meal out of it. Black mosquito burgers. Pest turned to protein. Boy, I fancy some prawns now. I don’t think I can stand staying on this princely furniture any more, it makes me feel lordly, should I change to a straight-backed chair?’

  ‘I’ll look in the freezer. But first, another point …’

  ‘Paddle out in your kayak and catch us some prawns.’

  ‘I want to talk more about the poverty in the country, in the African provinces.’

  ‘But you have to go fishing.’

  ‘Sit in your straight chair.’

  ‘Thou who professes knowledge of sport, knows humility – towards godly body. You, Alwilda.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  [Alma]

  Pale grey at six o’clock, bright red at seven o’clock, light blue at eight o’clock, nine o’clock like a red flash, a warning, this is it! Brown at ten o’clock, yellow at eleven o’clock and black at twelve o’clock. White at one o’clock and white at two o’clock like a ticklish childminder, paid for mildness, three o’clock green and with folds: now the afternoon is drawing to a close. Four o’clock: yellowish as a dough packed with butter: perdition. (If I read magazines, I would reach out for one on the shelf under Alwilda’s round girlish coffee table.) There is nothing to be done but postpone all activity until tomorrow at seven o’clock. Tomorrow is another day, for my part, to pull my finger out. Does anyone want to take charge of me? Where is Camilla? Is she lost?

  [Alwilda]

  ‘I’ll continue. Now I want to talk about fear.’

  ‘But you’ve already done that.’

  ‘Fear II. Location: the African provinces. The heat, the poverty, incessantly we felt the need to bond, inside the car, or up against the car, easy prey for wild animals.’

  ‘You’re sending me straight into Edward’s arms.’

  ‘Take him, he’s yours, you won’t be able to put up with him for very long.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear any more about fear. I want to hear about beauty.’

  ‘At that wretched place such as the bus station was, a rose suddenly shot up – I was back in the bus when the petrol attendant emerged from the hut. He was beautiful. He was healthy. He was seventeen years old, or eighteen. He looked like he had just stepped out of a Benetton advert, with his beauty and his white teeth. There must have been a small green cap resting on his curls, and it must have been sitting to one side? And he was surrounded by blind people. But he did not realize that he was in the forecourt of hell, because he did nothing other than smile and laugh. He was wearing dungarees, with no T-shirt underneath. The straps were fastened over his bare skin. He had strong arms. He was a boy. I could see how soft his skin must have been, and how taut it was, stretched over hard muscles. I wanted to be a girl again and once again have a boy who smelled of fresh salt and had skin like fine upholstery over rock-hard pecs.’

  ‘And something-or-other like dashing waves.’

  ‘Dashing waves! That reminds me of the beach at Dar es Salaam where a Coca-Cola advert had just been filmed…’

  ‘I have to get up early tomorrow, Alwilda.’

  ‘The beach was a quagmire of fish guts and rusting ship’s hulls with their noses buried in the sand, big as houses and polluting like blazes, everywhere the beach functioned as a kitchen, with small, crackling orange fires, and as a public toilet, expressed by people squatting & squeezing, one person even folded his hands all the while. And there Coca-Cola had chosen to summon a flock of doughty fishermen, provide them with torn red shirts and toothless mouths, and have them pretend they were dragging a fishing boat out to sea, all the while clinking glasses and drinking.’

  ‘Good night, Alwilda. No prawns tonight then.’

  ‘Good night dear Alma, adorner of my sofa. Good night.’

  IF ASHES HAD EYES

  [Edward]

  It might be a kind of defiance that makes me walk the dog to the grave each day. My mother, even though I am a grown man and have long since made the decisions that had to be made, did not think I should get a dog. Once, in her final year, when I aired the idea to her on the phone, the line went quiet, finally she spoke: ‘Don’t do it!’ she said, and it had come from deep inside her, ominous and emphatic.

  ‘No, of course not,’ I said, ‘I’m building castles in the air.’

  The purchase of the dog, on the safe side of her death, so to speak, was almost an act of liberation. So now we stand by the grave fo
r a little while each day so that if she were able to see me from wherever she is (if ashes had eyes), she could see who makes the decisions; and that I have company, you might add; that I, single and an only child, was not going to wander alone in the cemetery and alone through life for ever, but I have found myself a companion. That must make both of them happy.

  ‘It’s hard to be a person, little dog,’ I say.

  I happen to put my hand in my pocket by chance, where the dog biscuits are, causing the dog to lick his mouth.

  Note to Mourning Diary: My mother’s being. It’s so clear to me I feel like I could reach out and touch it. Like a substance. Maybe that’s what it means when someone says they sense the existence of the dead, ‘a presence’. I have a hard time dealing with my longing. She is so clear to me, and I am never going to speak to her again, never going to embrace her again. Am I going to miss her this much for the rest of my life? My grief has stagnated; no growth; no development. It happened almost two years ago; it feels like it happened last week. I keep tabs on the date. I count the months and regard them as shovelfuls of dirt. But the dirt does not keep the mind at bay. I don’t feel like working. I feel like walking and walking and walking. I have purchased an opportunity for myself: the dog. My feet are horned. The dog is thin.

  On 1 August 2007 I saw her for the last time. I had bought five plaice and a bunch of yellow roses. I also had some books with me. She let me in, and I put the bags down on the kitchen counter. She had some potatoes on the stove. She walked back to the bed, I wanted to start on the fish and put the roses in water, but she said: ‘Come sit with me. And let me look at you. I’ve really been looking forward to seeing you.’

  A little later we went into the kitchen, she sorted out the plaice and I placed them in freezer bags (three of them) wrapped rubber bands around them and put them in the freezer. Then I had to cut up the parsley. In the living room, her on the sofa (Dad was not home, he had an appointment), me with the parsley (complaining about how dull the scissors were), we talked about Granddad’s grindstone, about a book called Gården, about all the phenomena she knew from the country, for example how raindrops on a dusty road can turn into small balls of dust. We talked about Granddad and Grandma. About the time they had briefly lodged with some Danish Nazis, how the wife shouted to Grandma: ‘Our friends are coming, Mrs Poulsen,’ when Denmark was being occupied. How they quickly moved out to then live with a farmer named Stampe who was cruel to his animals and refused to acknowledge European Summer Time, so that the boys and girls working the farm arrived late to their appointments (physical education, for example). Granddad had written a verse about him and the sun in Jutlandic. She recited it. I thought it was fantastic and wanted to write it down. But I never managed to do that. She told of a trip to Copenhagen, her and Grandma were going to visit Granddad who was somewhere on Amager (with the ship). There was a funfair, and they convinced her that it was Tivoli. (She had been promised that she would be taken to Tivoli when she made it to Copenhagen.)

  She talked about a barge (gravel hoover?) that Granddad had worked on (maybe it was called Hektor), he was earning more money than at any other point in his life. Later they lived in a house with another family, and the husband had also worked on Hektor. They had agreed that if they saw Hektor out in the sound, they would get hold of the crew and then they would throw a party. One day Granddad wanted to tease Grandma and came home and announced: ‘Hektor is coming.’ That made Grandma race up the stairs to the wife upstairs and shout: ‘Hektor is here.’ She was in such a hurry – because it was time for a party after all – that she strained a tendon and was bedridden for several weeks.

  About how the calves (at Stampe’s) came running up to the fence to be scratched on the forehead – when they saw Granddad coming down the road in the evening, on his way home from a job at the sugar mill. He was so exhausted after having lugged sacks around all day that he lay down on the kitchen floor and remained lying there for a good while before he had the strength to clean himself up and get changed.

  After she had eaten, she was tired and went back to bed. I told her about a conversation I had had with Dad earlier that week, he told me that in parts of the animal kingdom, there was a demand to share the prey, ‘share-demanding’; and it made her think of the time she had gone out to buy a pack of biscuits for Grandma, and all the children on the street came running over and wanted some, in the end she stood with her back against the wall, the pack was empty, ‘And you know who didn’t get any, me. All I got was a telling-off.’

  When I left, I saluted her (in jest) wearing my bike helmet.

  The burial plot has started to resemble her. Before Christmas it had appeared neglected, the heather and the lavender had withered; and I recalled the dull and worn appearance the house sometimes had, the walls yellowed with cigarette smoke, as well as the bed and herself. I decorated it with spruce, catkin branches and red berries and now envisaged a more comfortable her, one with a healthy, bronzed face. The grave, that’s her. A stone, a granite stool that I still had not sat on, but which I had placed at the grave because I seem to think better when I’m sitting down – and because there is such a transience in standing up; and then a few various plants or flowers, all framed by a low hedge.

  I have had comforting dreams, and destructive dreams. The latter have dealt with what takes place in the grave, the putrification; for my own sake I refer to them (in my mind, as well as here in my Mourning Diary) as ‘dreams of decomposition’, without getting into any details, but nevertheless the details stuck with me over the days that followed. My mum had been cremated, which in itself was no reason to dream about the unmentionable things that happen in the grave, the decomposition. All right, one dream had a natural explanation. Her ashes had been divided into two urns. One urn was lowered into the grave, I scattered the ashes from the other one into the sea, at a place my mum used to enjoy swimming. For that reason it was a rather logical dream, that when the lid fell off the coffin, lying inside was half of her, practically split lengthwise.

  In another dream I saw her from a slight distance, beautifully made up, wearing a red hat, but it was clear that she was dead, a made-up cadaver – she had returned for my sake. She had always gone to great lengths for me.

  In one dream we spoke together. She told me she was not dead, but had gone to another place. A place where I could not visit her. The following day I was slightly intoxicated with peacefulness.

  It struck me, on one of my perpetual walks through Østre Anlæg, that I myself had already set out on my departure from this world, a departure that would hopefully last a very long time. I am heading towards fifty and have long since begun greying.

  I have begun ‘to thwack’ – in the mornings I cross the large lawn in Fælledparken and walk over to the lake with the fountain, then I bang the lead against a particular bench a couple of times and say: ‘To a day without bitterness and dispiritedness.’ But I seldom manage to keep my spirits up for very long.

  The one thing that would give my life a tremendous boost is love, and I have not found any since Alwilda. I wanted it all. But I was weighed and found wanting. Of one thing and another.

  It is the small dog that makes the women’s voices go all shrill and languishing. That is what they look at. I am invisible at the end of the lead. On the odd occasion we exchange a couple of words about when the dogs are in heat. I have begun to view him as my forward operating base on the love market, just like in 101 Dalmatians. But he is a little restrained.

  ‘It’s down to the breeding,’ a man said to me.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Danish men wouldn’t harm a fly,’ he said.

  And I think he would have preferred to see us Danish men performing rape in droves.

  ‘But we are in Afghanistan now,’ I said, ‘and we were in Iraq, as well.’

  (The other day when I came home from the shop holding an ice cream, the small dog got an erection; everything is slightly blurring into one for him,
but on the other hand: all the various pleasure centres in the brain et cetera.) In San Francisco I saw a gay man come strutting towards me with a poodle that he had sprayed royal blue. If he had done that in order to be seen, I have to say, I was unable to see the man for the poodle. It was majestic in its blueness. I did not turn to look: what kind of person would think of doing that? Still, I can remember that he was wearing shorts. So he did reach my retina, my memory.

  If I get told off, it can stick with me for an entire day. Those incessant workplace assessments have not made it any easier. And now in my spare time as well. If I am just a little too slow getting the bag out of my pocket when I have to pick up after the small dog, cyclists will sometimes brake suddenly and motorists will roll down their windows and shout. The bags have a tendency to stick together, that can delay me, but I counter with friendliness. ‘Good thing you’re keeping an eye on things,’ I say, or: ‘Sorry, I’m such a clumsy clod.’ It’s the shit war. The other war is a matter of space, too many rats in the same place and so on, obviously down by the lakes is only for champions, and they do not stray from their path, ‘If it doesn’t move, I’ll kick it,’ people shout. It’s wrong if it is on the loose, and it is wrong if it is on its lead – particularly when it’s dark. I have one of these leads that acts like a fishing line; you can cast off (eight metres) and reel it in with a ticking sound. In the darkness the long lead functions as a snare, ‘sorry’ I say to the runner as he stumbles, ‘I didn’t get a chance to haul the cod to shore,’ (obviously the cod is the small dog).