Companions

by Christina Hesselholdt

  And then I think what I have so often thought. I think: I am choking with despondency over perfectly ordinary existential grief – Alma left me; but in all likelihood, everyone has been abandoned once or twice. On the other hand, society and the course of history and nature are with me for the time being – I am not subjected to catastrophes from these quarters, above, like so many others, a torture regime, drought or flood. It is not because it comforts me. I’m just saying it. Imagine if I also had to endure that. But then my Western grief might be swept away by The Great Big Disaster, ‘hey, hey, grief is not a layer cake,’ Camilla says inside my head, ‘feel free to cry, Kristian, feel free to be dispirited.’ But I am not merely dispirited or despondent. I am also disillusioned and disengaged, and for that reason I have no great cause. I note with a ‘well’ that the North Pole is melting; I cannot even expect to be dead by the time the more serious consequences take effect. I am indifferent. However I have considered taking a flight to Darfur and trying to make a difference, as they say. A dull life concluded with a dramatic death – which in all likelihood would occur immediately after I have left the confines of the airport. What a life I could lead, I thought, and serve my country to boot, even though I don’t know if my country is worth it, when I saw an advertisement that the security services were looking for agents. I spent an entire evening revelling in the thought; me in a ‘safe house’ in Kabul, me crossing a desert or setting out to acquire contacts at a teahouse. But the one time I was in a desert, all I wanted to do was get out of there. It was grey, rocky, undifferentiated. And besides, I don’t have a driving licence and only speak Western languages.

  I wish someone would arrive and hand me a cause and say, ‘there you go, Kristian, now you have something to pursue,’ and with those words, turn me in the right direction and send me off with a gentle nudge. In my mind the cause is practically swaddled in white. Oh, in reality it will be a tiny successor that is placed in my hands, but for that a woman is required, and then I am back to where I started.

  Still May, still rubbish. I am developing an unhealthy preoccupation for rubbish, or is it a passion? In the morning – spread out across the large field (still Fælledparken) – there are magpies and crows and gulls; because the grass is so flat it resembles the sea. And the birds get so big. They are feasting on the rubbish from the evening’s festivities and it unleashes morbid thoughts. Big city experience, it echoes inside me, and then I picture a dead duck upside down, buried in a slimy sickly gruel of rotten chestnuts and rubbish, down in Sortedams Sø; and a bottle with a wreath of feathers. Incidentally it is not called a nipper, but a snapper or a grabber. Both. The lawn cleaners are becoming my friends; I position myself in front of them and they patiently remove their headphones; each time I begin in more or less the same way: ‘What a sty. Isn’t it odd that people simply walk away from all of this? It’s one of the first things you learn as a child, don’t drop your ice cream wrapper…’ And one of them says to me: ‘With that attitude I’m sure your children won’t be leaving their rubbish on the grass, unless they are very drunk.’ And I don’t know if I should say that they aren’t born yet, the little Kristians who always take their disposable grills and empty bottles with them when they leave.

  THE HOUSES AND THEIR BRILLIANT SUICIDE VICTIMS

  [Alma]

  When the clouds drift across the range of hills, their shadows transform the land below: then the darkness runs through the grass.

  We walk around up there for an entire day, at one point the path disappears, and Camilla walks in one direction in search of it, and I walk in the other. A moment later she is out of sight, and I sense how easily the enormous hills and the wind could swallow me up and do away with me; I am superfluous here, in this great landscape, a blot that the wind attempts to rub out.

  This range of hills is called the South Downs, and they could be seen by Virginia Woolf from The Lodge, the small summerhouse where she wrote. Now the view is obstructed by trees.

  ‘As for the beauty, as I always say when I walk the terrace after breakfast, too much for one pair of eyes. Enough to float a whole population in happiness, if only they would look.’

  — Virginia Woolf

  ‘Why,’ I ask the lodger at the house, whose task it is to tend the garden, ‘were trees planted at the end of the garden, so that you can no longer see what Virginia Woolf saw?’

  (That is why I am here. To see what she saw. Camilla is meant to have come with Charles. But he is ill. So I am here in his place. Camilla does not have a driving licence, and she cannot find her own way around.)

  ‘Because the view is no longer the same,’ the lodger says, ‘it’s not attractive. It’s marred by limestone quarries and the work that takes place around the quarries.’

  She is immensely overweight. And I think about the discrimination overweight people are meant to be subjected to on the labour market; but is it really wise to have chosen such a heavy lodger? Doesn’t she place unnecessary wear and tear on the place, shouldn’t someone skinnier have been chosen? She and her husband live on the first floor of Monk’s House. Meaning there is no access to it. Leonard Woolf had his bedroom on that floor. Now this giant walks around up there, perhaps the ceiling is cracking under her weight. The entire ground floor is a museum. Volunteers sit on a chair in each room and keep watch. A sign invites people to sign up for this task, knowledge of Woolf’s works is not a prerequisite. I speak to the ageing custodian of the sitting room, he thinks that her books are lacking in plot, that nothing happens in them. I feel compelled to enlighten him and say that is how modern novels are, generally nothing much happens. He laughs and says something along the lines of ‘well done’. He believes that first and foremost she was of significance to ‘feminism’. Again I feel compelled to enlighten him and say that he is mistaken, she is one of the foremost literary innovators of the twentieth century.

  ‘How so?’ he asks, suddenly stern.

  ‘By means,’ I reply, ‘of her…’ I hesitate, should I mention how she condenses time so that a day becomes a lifetime? Should I mention the emphasis she places on the life of the consciousness and the exchange between the consciousness and the world, or how easy she makes time move both forward and backward? But it is her ability to compress and saturate that makes me happy. Where is Camilla? She would be able to answer.

  ‘She liked to smoke cigars, at any rate,’ he says pointing at a box on the mantelpiece.

  The lodger has come down from the first floor to treat the custodians to coffee and cake. She stands holding an empty plate.

  And it is true that there are some white surfaces visible, and a crane and maybe a couple of other machines operating in what was once Virginia Woolf’s view, but are we not used to that these days, everywhere being so built up (back home in Denmark, at any rate), overlooking a windmill or a concrete pigsty whilst enjoying nature?

  At a petrol station, in the newspaper rack, I saw something unforgettable. On the front page of what was probably The Sun, a young woman posing in suspenders and high heels. She stood with her backside in the air and was looking out between her legs. On each buttock was a rather large black beauty mark. Did the marks emphasize her buttocks? In that case, do the lime quarries not emphasize the hill? The lodger was still standing there, I could have mentioned it to her. (As time passes, and my trench coat gets increasingly tatty, I feel more and more like Columbo, seemingly naïve, but in reality with the upper hand.) Instead I said that it must be an enormous task to tend the large garden. And ‘yes,’ the lodger said, you really have to love gardening to take on such an assignment, and in addition both she and her husband had full-time jobs.

  She must get incredibly winded when she has to bend down to do the weeding or reach for the pears.

  In 1934 the Woolfs visited Shakespeare’s house:

  That was where his study windows looked out when he wrote The Tempest,’ said the man. And perhaps it was true. Anyhow it was a great big house, looking straight at the large windows and the
grey stone of the school chapel, and when the clock struck, that was the sound Shakespeare heard. I cannot without more labour than my roadrunning mind can compass describe the queer impression of sunny impersonality. Yes, everything seemed to say, this was Shakespeare’s, had he sat and walked; but you won’t find me, not exactly in the flesh. He is serenely absent-present; both at once; radiating round one; yes; in the flowers, in the old hall, in the garden; but never to be pinned down. And we went to the church and there was the florid foolish bust, but what I had not reckoned for was the worn simple slab, turned the wrong way. Kind friend for Jesus’ sake forbear – again he seemed to be all air and sun smiling serenely; and yet down there one foot from me lay the little bones that had spread over the world this vast illumination. Yes, and then we walked round the church and all is simple and a little worn; the river slipping past the stone wall, with a red breadth from some flowering tree, and the edge of the turf unspoilt, soft and green and muddy and two casual nonchalant swans. The church and the school and the house are all roomy spacious places, resonant, sunny today, and in and out [illegible word] – yes, an impressive place; still living, and then the little bones lying there, which have created: to think of writing The Tempest looking out on that garden: what a rage and storm of thought to have gone over any mind.

  There is a church here as well, St Peter’s Church; it is visible from the garden, old and grey, the fence surrounding it adjoins The Lodge; which would later turn out to be a source of great pleasure. Still I have not considered whether I could sense Virginia Woolf in the house and the garden – just as she senses Shakespeare. To believe that possible one would probably have to suppose that some kind of authorial spirit could be drawn from her works; an essence from her works that can be transferred to the house and retrieved there. At least when it comes to Shakespeare, whose biography is mere guesswork. For Virginia Woolf there are diaries, letters, photographs to construct a person out of – in addition to the spirit of these works.

  More than anything, I have felt intrusive, an infringement on someone’s privacy. I keep thinking of a spot in one of her diaries where a man stops his car outside the house and gets out and stares, and Leonard Woolf goes outside and says to him… something along the lines of: ‘Kindly get in your car and leave. Mrs Woolf has no interest in this sort of attention.’ And Virginia Woolf takes the opportunity to air her disdain for people intruding on her life like that man.

  I am afraid she won’t care for my kind of attention either, and that makes me feel ashamed. I was already beginning to be ashamed when we arrived at Rodmell (her village). We took up lodgings at a bed & breakfast ‘a stone’s throw from Monk’s House’. And as soon as we had parked and dragged the luggage into the house, we set off in search of it. The village consists primarily of stone houses. But this one is made of wood and painted white. It has no front garden to speak of, but is smack up against the road (like a story without an introduction). It offers a feeling of intransigence, of not being welcome. I stood for a moment and pictured her slim figure (I could only conjure up a silhouette) hurrying down the narrow village street where she went for many a walk, and moved at a fast tempo.

  Since I started to read her diaries, I have dreamt about her on two occasions. Dreams are seldom exciting, myself I always skip them in novels et cetera, where as a rule they function as some kind of symbolic bonus material, but they don’t do that here, they are sheer curios, and I will keep it brief:

  Dream 1: Virginia Woolf, ageing, naked, she presses a moist sponge over her body and stands with one foot up on a stool.

  Dream 2: Virginia Woolf and I are at a social gathering and we both agree to jump out the window. She does it straight away. I dare not. I run out the door and find her in a puddle. She is near death. I am told not to attempt to save her, because that would cause her limbs to dart about madly in the water, as if she had been subjected to an electric shock.

  2 x water plus death. It probably points towards her death in water, in the River Ouse. I’ll get to that.

  The garden is large and consists of several sections, there is a large flower garden, ponds, a kitchen garden, an orchard, and a large lawn for bowling, something Virginia Woolf was obsessed with and used to play late into the afternoon. She was bad at losing. The large, wonderful garden makes me wistful. I’m only here for today. From her bedroom she stepped outside into that. She walked through it to reach The Lodge. It surrounded her when she wrote. She looked beyond it to the range of hills. Such a profusion of beauty to have access to, ‘what a rage and storm of thought to have gone over any mind.’

  The view from my desk (at home) is of the rubbish bins in the courtyard and, thank heavens, a rather attractive yellow wall. That is the backdrop to my thoughts. Camilla urges me to nick a poppy head, ‘because it would be funny to have a poppy from her garden back home.’ (It would have to be kept in a flowerpot.) I do so, clandestinely, but a little later I realize that I have nicked the wrong part, I mean it was not a seed capsule.

  There is no admittance to The Lodge. You can only look in through the window. Her desk is there, facing the range of hills, now hidden behind trees. Lying there are three portfolios in which she used to store loose sheets of paper, and writing implements, and her glasses. Organization and nakedness. I am not really content with merely looking inside, because the literature I hold most dear has come into existence there. For example, The Waves. And in there she made an entry in her diary only ten minutes before lunch:

  The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea. Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that don’t belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional. Why admit anything to literature that is not poetry – by which I mean saturated. Is that not my grudge against novelists? That they select nothing? The poets succeeding by simplifying: practically everything is left out. I want to put practically everything in: yet to saturate. That is what I want to do in The Moths. It must include nonsense, fact, sordidity: but made transparent.

  Monk’s House is only open to the public on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons. We have to continue our journey Saturday morning. But I have to see The Lodge one more time. First I decide to ring the bell at the lodger’s and in my capacity as a writer who is contemplating writing about my visit, ask permission to gain access outside of opening hours, just to the garden. Earlier that day I spoke to a taxi driver who told me about a Japanese writer who succeeded (in gaining access outside of opening hours). Writers from around the world, join the queue. It is not that I somehow imagine that the spirit of Virginia Woolf will be more noticeable if there are no other visitors. I just have to see The Lodge again. It is the heart of this place, literature emerged from it. The Lodge moves me, just as the thought of Shakespeare’s small bones moved Virginia Woolf. However there is a sign at Monk’s House requesting that people respect the personal lives of the lodgers. Meaning I can’t open the gate and ring the bell, I can’t even see a door anywhere. Instead I would prefer to climb over the wall of the garden when it gets dark. I start to feel my way around the wall, it is, as mentioned, a large garden, a decent walk, which takes me across a field of cows, a cricket pitch and through the courtyard of the village school. All the while I see the range of hills (the view) out of the corner of my eye. My endeavours lead me to the churchyard, and from there I can stare across the stone wall and into the kitchen garden where earlier that day I nicked the wrong part of a poppy. I feel my way along the wall to the corner and walk under a large tree: From here I can look directly into The Lodge. It’s night. I’ve brought Camilla.

  She spends most of her time on the phone with Charles, first they argue, then they coo. It is going to be expensive. Camilla has got a terrible cough, at times she is cl
ose to choking, maybe it’s false croup. When we are dining out, people move away from her, they are worried about swine flu, and Camilla coughs and waves her arms and coughs out: ‘It’s not the flu, it’s not the flu.’ I have suggested she get that printed on her T-shirt. She suggests to me that she might be coughing instead of crying (over Charles) however she does cry at times too. She is someone from whom there comes a lot of sound.

  Someone (most likely the lodger) has lit a green bag-like lamp in The Lodge. It illuminates the desk and its objects. How should I (prosaic spirit) put it – yes, there is something magical about this green-lit room, seen from the corner of a churchyard at night, with my face pressed against the branches of the large fig tree that stands on the terrace in front of The Lodge, and which also stood there in Virginia Woolf’s time. The absence of someone sitting in the chair behind the desk, the near awe-inspiring absence, evokes a kind of presence. (The soul, mine, requires deliverance, I cannot live with this suspense.) Virginia Woolf is not missing from the room. She is there. Finally she is there, an X-ray-like spirit emitting concentrates or saturation. Columbo discovered her even though the chair was empty.

  Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s urns are buried in the garden, beneath the elm trees that they named Leonard and Virginia, both of which have fallen. There is a plaque on a stone wall where each urn is buried. Leonard Woolf’s speaks of justice and tolerance; hers bear the closing words from The Waves: ‘Death is the enemy. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death! The waves broke on the shore.’