Companions

by Christina Hesselholdt

  I was almost more frightened the time my mum took a tumble in the garden than the time I found her and my father dead in the bedroom. The garden is made up of a cultivated section and a wild section that we called (and I still call) the wilderness. This is at the house that I have taken over. My childhood home. Down in the wilderness there is a toppled willow tree that has still not died, and in its crown wild honeysuckles grow. There is also a hollow from an artificial lake that my dad emptied when I was with Alwilda, back when they hoped to have a grandchild; out of fear that the child would fall into the lake and drown. The previous owner had covered the hollow with thick black plastic to retain the water; with great pains my dad managed to tear this plastic off, and now there are ferns growing in the hollow; there is also an area with yellow flowers which I don’t know the name of, and there are several areas with tall stinging nettles, and there are piles of garden refuse and a lot of trees. I have no idea why, one day at Easter, my mum decided to enter the wilderness.

  The terrace itself resembles a wild ocean. It is due to the ants digging passages under the flagstones, causing them to shift, they either sink or slope. In some places the terrace is simply dangerous, at least for old people who walk unsteadily and fall heavily. Old people who fall like they have no hands to ease the blow. As though they have lost all volition and so leave their arms hanging feebly; people who have lost faith in their arms. The fact that first they and now I have not had the flagstones relaid in order to have a new and completely level terrace is due to the wild strawberries and the poppies and the thyme that grow between the flagstones, which would then be lost. For that reason we walk around on rolling ground warning one another to be careful.

  At any rate we got up from the terrace that Easter and walked down towards the wilderness. A couple years earlier my father had built some round brick flowerbeds and planted wild strawberries and decorative pumpkins in them; but these beds had long since been swallowed up by the wilderness and now lay like traps somewhere beneath the tall grass. When we approached them, I took my mother by the arm, and we made it past them safely. She leaned on me heavily. We walked around a little at the bottom of the garden and looked at the strange shape that the prostrate willow tree had taken on, and we talked about the stinging nettles and about her long, bitter battle with them, and how for a long time she had actually succeeded in keeping them at bay. She did not have much of a head for gardening, and in her great naïvety (that was how she put it) she initially began – because she could not really solve the problem of how to get rid of the garden refuse – to stuff the stinging nettles into black bin bags. But she stopped when she began to realize how much refuse there was, and how many filled bags it would amount to.

  While we walked around down there and talked about how tall the trees had grown – the rowan tree, for example, which I had found in the woods and planted. ‘As a child, you were mad about rowan trees,’ she said, and I nodded – we also recalled an afternoon where we had sat here in the wilderness, which back then was not a wilderness, but a lawn with two imposing weeping willows, in garden chairs, waiting for some sort of builder to arrive. We sat drinking Noilly Prat. She was irritable and restless. It must have been in March or April, there was an air of weariness and neglect, not just to the garden, but to nature as such, it had been brown and decaying for a long time and was in need of some greenery; the black, waterlogged earth, the fallen branches and the yellow tubes that poked up and were left lying on the ground as part of last year’s stinging nettles and last year’s ground elder – it was a hopeless mess. I told her about an essay I was working on. When I outlined the contents, she looked away in annoyance. She thought it sounded foolish, but refrained from saying so. Nor was that necessary, the impetuous shrug of her shoulders said it all.

  Maybe we both remembered that conversation we had in the garden chairs nearly ten years earlier because we were having a drink in the middle of the day, something we almost never did, and because we were sitting somewhere in the garden where we normally never sat. We had sat with a view of the road so that we could see when the builder arrived, ‘sorry,’ she now said, ‘I thought it sounded completely irrelevant and it turned out to be the best thing you have ever written. Don’t you think so?’ (Obviously that did not make me happy, annoyed before all else, because she preferred that dusty old piece to everything I have written since.)

  When we had wandered through the wilderness that Easter day and enjoyed what there was to enjoy, we set out in the direction of the more or less civilized section of the garden – the terraces and the lawn. Suddenly my mum spotted a large preserving jar in the tall grass. I have no idea how it ended up there. As she bent down to pick it up, she fell to the ground heavily without using her hands to ease the fall at all. I let out a cry. She remained on the ground for a moment, checking to see if anything was broken, then rolled onto her stomach and got up on her knees. She had tripped on one of the treacherous bricks and had a superficial cut on her temple and had hurt her arm. I must confess that I gave in to tears and was powerless to stop. I cried (though noiselessly) while I helped her onto the sofa and cleaned the wound with chlorhexidine. I cried, even though she had been very lucky and was virtually uninjured. My dad was not there. He never was. And ten minutes later I was still crying. While inwardly berating myself: ‘Mummy’s boy. In your late forties. You blubbering idiot. Grow up.’

  ‘You really love me,’ she said from the sofa. The words came from somewhere deep within her, and were spoken with deep and raspy marvel.

  A moment later she said: ‘Perhaps you should try to love me a little less so it won’t be so hard on you when I … oh, fiddlesticks, we can’t control these things.’

  ‘It’s going to be difficult when you’re no longer here,’ I said, ‘but I’ll manage.’

  And difficult it was. We had talked about death so much – or in any case openly considered the possibility – but when it arrived, it did not do me one bit of good. But I manage. And furthermore, I have not cried since that day. But once in a while, when the small dog attempts to grab an object with its paws and fumbles with it, it pains me that he does not have hands. Now don’t misunderstand me – it’s not because I want to have my hand held (in any case not by a dog); the fumbling is just so pitiful. So I step in, with my superior set of hands.

  At night we spoon, and I wrap my arms around its lean loins; fur is much different than skin. And the body of a dog is hard and angular, you can’t sink into it. The species are indeed different. The fur has a strong odour. And when we wake up, the bed is covered in white hair. Perhaps the canine body is more like that of a man than a woman – so hard and streamlined. If it was a man I was longing for, it probably would not have felt so wrong. The small dog is a restless partner. It gets too warm and extricates itself from my embrace. A moment later it wants to return to the warmth – it positions itself by my head and practically knocks on the duvet, with a scratching and a brief bark. And so on, all night long.

  The other day the neighbour leaned across the hedge and looked across the wilderness. Then he said: ‘Tell me, do you not have any vision.’

  I simply replied ‘no’ and remembered the song we used to sing in the old dinghy when we were bailing or jigging for cod. ‘Put on an old sweater oh, and let your beard go,’ and I added for my own account: ‘and let the hedges grow, and stop staring over my row.’

  Finally he withdrew from my wasteland and continued back to his own, you have to believe: visionary plot of land.

  I was left overwhelmed by the memory about fishing. I still did not have a beard, granddad’s stubble was grey. I think he only shaved on Sundays, so he was in the habit of letting his beard go, not just when we were at sea. The dinghy was named after me, the name Edward danced on the bow. I was sucking on a piece of brown barley sugar while making regular small tugs on the line to make the silver-coloured jig on the seabed move like a herring.

  ‘You’re not crunching, are you, Edward? Let me see.’ I opened my mo
uth and showed him the sweet, and if we had not been jigging and were quiet so as not to scare off the cod at that precise moment, he would sing or call me ‘Good Edward,’ it would be nice to hear those words here in the garden. It makes me remember what one of my psychologists once said to me (I had just decided against buying one of the semi-transparent rock crystals she sold at her desk, and which resembled, and perhaps were, the frozen tears of her clients.)

  She said: ‘You have to love yourself. There is no guarantee that there will always be other people to do that.’

  Back then I shook my head. But now she would be able to boast that she had been right.

  ‘I love you, Edward, I love you so much. Don’t leave me behind, baby,’ I say.

  ‘My neighbour doesn’t love my garden / but he sure likes me,’ I say.

  I would rather think about what it was like coming out of the harbour, current wind surging against us, and for that reason the outboard motor was put to use, it was difficult to start and made in Sweden, so we called it ‘the Surly Swede’; the prow rammed the waves in short, hard skips and with a hard thud – that’s how we arrived, in short hard skips. I sat with the wind in my face, it was fresh and salty too, the wind and the salt made my skin soft. If I turned around, the barked fist, as they say, was on the tiller, his large shoulders and a face that, back then, was what I imagined when someone mentioned the Heavenly Father. When we had the harbour behind us, I got the sense that it was not merely the sea that was spread out before us, but the world itself, the wide open world, there you have it good Edward, there you have it, divine granddad, there are already twenty metres of greenish-black water beneath you, filled with cod, and ‘if you don’t crunch, but eat them in moderation, you can have another one, awright.’

  Note: I asked my mum to appear in my dreams and give me some advice – when I speak to her, the gravestone serves as her face, I looked at it earnestly as I quietly lodged my prayer. But she has not appeared. Which is why I no longer feel like going to the cemetery. But maybe she didn’t come because I no longer need her; because something is happening – within me. It is getting brighter. A weight is lifted. I feel incredibly alive in the wind. A ways behind me walks an old lady. I feel like, no, I need to address her, I slow down and let her catch me up. Then I say: ‘We better be careful we don’t take off.’

  ‘Yes,’ she replies, ‘it’s a matter of standing your ground.’

  And then we look at each other with unadulterated delight.

  NATURE AS A SERIES OF BACKDROPS

  [Camilla]

  There is a veil of mist above the lake. Five heavy swans go to take off, their wings snapping against the water, and although René, who belongs to my first period of youth – which has sprung a leak, on the chair, next to Charles’s bed – even though René did not resemble a swan wearing his white head waiter uniform, on the contrary he was a small meticulous man, his voice would snap out like a gunshot, like wings against water, when late in the afternoon, before the evening’s great invasion, he went over the menu with us and subsequently tested us on it. Restaurant Peder Oxe, ten minutes to five. When we (the waiters) stood outside the kitchen and he inspected our uniforms, that they were clean and ironed, he would sometimes grab someone’s hand and check their nails. He would sometimes bend over and sweep a lock of hair under the virginal white cap that was part of our uniform, ‘don’t touch me,’ I screamed inwardly. Then he went through the menu in Danish and in English – and then the shelling began. He snapped out the name of a dish, pointed at a girl who then had to describe the dish, accompaniments et cetera. The only word I remember from back then is ‘watercress’, followed by the inevitable ‘sauce’, pronounced with a rounded vowel.

  ‘Brøndkarse. Engelsk,’ René shouted.

  ‘Watercress (sir, yes sir)!’ I shouted back, that’s the closest I’ve ever come to being a soldier.

  Gråbrødre Torv, where the restaurant still lies, and where René probably still wreaks havoc, was always filled with people sitting talking drinking. One night when I had finished work, I too sat down, on the square, to rest my aching waiter’s legs. A car approached, driving down a side street. Suddenly the driver hit the gas and screeched towards us, the people sitting there – we flew back like poultry, he slammed on the brakes and leapt out of the car. He was a small meticulous man, with black hair that stuck to his head like he had combed it with his saliva, wearing black clothes and black driving gloves. He rained down abuse on us that indicated a certain education, ‘plebs’, he shouted and spat on the ground, ‘I despise you, the common herd,’ and jumped back into the car and reversed, screeching away. Someone shouted ‘psycho’ and a little later everything was as before – sitting drinking talking. Perhaps it was white René’s dark brother who would have preferred to have smashed his car into the walls of Peder Oxe.

  Nature, I have that. I have learnt to.

  ‘Look, look, look,’ someone has said to me, conversations were interrupted with pointing and unnatural silence at the sight. And now I see it, I see the red tree, all autumn, as if I have never seen it before. But can I take nature with me into the living room when I come home (to the sick bed), can I retain it inside of me as a comfort and a strength, can I meet with it as though it were a series of backdrops my gaze can lift into my memory? Today I cut across the cemetery – and there was Edward, walking. He did not see me, and frankly I was in such a bad mood that I did not feel like talking. He looked like someone moving from one secret to the next. I mean he looked triumphant, in a sympathetic way. I reckoned he was on his way to the family grave. A little ways off three gardeners were working. Even though they were only a couple of metres from one another, they did not utter a single word. The sound of their tools could be heard, chopping and tearing. Think about how builders always holler to each other all the way through the building, up and down the scaffolding, with the radio playing.

  There is a mountain of swept-up yellow leaves, a tree with yellow leaves rises above it, is the mountain the corpse and are the quivering leaves on the tree the soul that is standing firm? I ask dutifully, since I stand at a churchyard. The certainty of soon lying flat and trampled down, in the pile with the rest, is dismal and dreary, as with the leaf, as with me. And Edward has come here every day for several years. Break free from the grave, Prince Edward.

  But he is whistling. He has cast off the sorrow – and a whistling forces its way out.

  The dog is limping. Edward has inflicted a hip injury on it by exercising it too much. For two years he has marched his grief away, for hours at a time. Now the dog is paying the price. He has bought a lamb’s wool coat so the dog does not get cold while he speaks to the gravestone; it (the dog) looks like a decadent sheep, with its collar turned up.

  Now the dog is wagging its tail, because who is that coming? Wearing red gloves, my heart stops, it’s Alma, my Alma. What a place to arrange a rendezvous with a woman, or maybe it’s not that crazy, maybe all that boxwood reminds a person that it is a matter of taking life by the scruff of the neck. They embrace. Alma holds Edward’s head in her red gloves and observes him closely. I don’t know what she is looking for – the final remnants of an illness, a rash. It’s gone, he’s lucky. I beat a hasty retreat down the tree-lined avenue. Could there be anything better than seeing your best friends falling in love? Then why do I feel so bitter and lifeless inside, as though I were a pile of compost? Because all I have is my youth to reflect on: when something actually happened. And I am not even forty. Nothing happens now. For me.

  ‘I almost hope something extraordinary will happen,’ I said to Alma, ‘If life is going to be like this for ever, I won’t be able to endure it.’

  ‘Don’t wish to be in my shoes,’ she said, ‘it’s a right mess.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking about a man.’

  ‘But I’m always thinking about that.’

  Don’t be bitter now – and with pursed lips. Smile, with bared teeth. Ready to take a bite out of the world. And then remember, fo
r those of you who are interested in yellow, the tulips have arrived. And yellow tulips are the thoroughbred of yellow, the best of the best.

  THE FACE OF RUBBISH

  [Kristian]

  3 May. Two days after the great party, Fælledparken still looks like a rubbish tip. I can see small figures walking around the field with nippers and rakes, I feel a stab of jealousy at how manageable it appears, I would prefer to be nipping rubbish than have to go home and write the article I can no longer put off writing; knowing exactly what I have to do all the time, nip nip rubbish, free the green carpet bit by bit as I drag the waves of paper into the bag. I walk over to a member of the clean-up crew and ask if she is a volunteer. She’s a communist, and if she doesn’t help clear up the park, the police will fine the party. That’s what happened last year. So it is not because she fancies it. But I do, I feel like taking the implement from her hands. Her face is red with burst capillaries, her eyes are watery, her hair is drooping, she’s wearing a boiler suit. The communist encourages me to check out the memorial for the battle on the common, ‘at the spot where the police trampled the workers, there are sushi boxes lying there, and it is littered with expensive wine bottles.’ (She has apparently scrutinized the labels and knows a little about wine.)

  I ask her if she knew that back then, B&W paid Louis Pio ten thousand kroner to emigrate to America. She did not know that. But she takes note of it.

  At that very moment her nipper seizes a party brochure, and she passes it to me, it’s a little stained, but I dutifully stuff it in my pocket, were I to join, one year to this day, I could be standing with a rake in my hand. I walk in the direction of the memorial. For the sake of courage and fighting spirit. To make it through yet another day. That is how my situation appears, I realize I need something greater.